Heads Of State

"Дошло вријеме да се Срби свете Све џамије у облаке лете Нема Анте, Азема и Тите Да те опет од Србина штите"

"But the West has now tipped the balance very heavily against Serbia, as if she is to blame for everything. But it's not the Serbs or Croats or Bosnians who are guilty. In Yugoslavia the problems began for the same reason as in the U.S.S.R. The communists--they had Tito, we had Lenin and Stalin--charted out arbitrary, ethnically nonsensical and historically unjustifiable internal administrative boundaries, and for years moved inhabitants from one region to another. And when--also in the period of a few days--Yugoslavia began to fall apart, the leading powers of the West, with inexplicable haste and irresponsibility, rushed to recognize these states within their artificial borders. Therefore, for the exhausting, bloody war which is today convulsing the unfortunate peoples of the former Yugoslavia, the leaders of the Western powers must share the blame with Tito."

"Since the recent events in Bosnia, Tito has sometimes been criticized for creating a Muslim nation. He had three reasons for doing so. It fitted in with his policy of checks and balances to strengthen the Muslims against the stronger power of the Serbs; it went well with his foreign policy of alliance with the Non-aligned Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa; and he hoped he could weaken Muslim fundamentalism if it became accepted that it was possible for a Muslim not to be a fundamentalist or indeed any kind of Muslim in religion, but a Communist atheist by doctrine and a Muslim by nationality. He knew that he would get no support from Muslim fundamentalism, even before the Ayatollah Khomeini denounced him as an atheist persecutor of Islam."

"Tito did not like Ceauşescu personally, because when they went hunting wild boars together, Ceauşescu cheated and broke the rules. He once took a shot at a boar, and having missed it, fired at it a second time after the boar had moved out of Ceauşescu's and into Tito's field of fire. Tito then killed the boar with his first shot, but Ceauşescu falsely claimed that he too had hit the boar with his shot. 'In that case, your shot must have gone up the hole under the boar's tail,' said Tito sarcastically. When they went hunting together again a few year later, Ceauşescu again claimed to have killed a boar when it was in fact Tito who had shot it."

"Tito had not enjoyed living in Moscow, with the constant prospect that he might be the next Yugoslav Communist to be arrested; but one aspect of life in the Soviet Union appealed to him. He had found that in the higher ranks of the party it was possible to combine loyal service to the Communist cause with good living. The leading party officials indulged in heavy eating and drinking and loud parties, though Djilas may well be right in thinking that they drank as much as they did in order to forget their fears of the NKVD. He was said that in Stalin's circle of friends they all enjoyed wine and song, but not women. Tito wanted women as well as wine and song."

"Yugoslavia is, along with Iran, the only nation which, under difficult circumstances... stood up to Joseph Stalin. It was not easy to unify the ethnic groups, to modernize a nation like Yugoslavia, and one must recognise that marshal Tito has fulfilled an extraordinary task. God willing, his successors will show themselves to be just as capable."

"It was from Tito that I drew inspiration while searching for the best road to take and when making crucial decisions during our liberation struggle. I often thought, what would Tito do at that moment?"

"Can a convict like Josip Broz, who is listed with the Zagreb police under No.10434, alias leader of the Communists under the name of Tito, be compared with the Yugoslav army as a national fighter? … The plunderer of churches and convict Josip Broz, a locksmith's assistant?"

"The emergence of the strong state went hand in hand with its increasing monopoly over the use of force and violence within its borders. If you refuse to pay taxes, set your neighbour’s house on fire or ignore the summons to do military service, a strong state will lay hands on you and often your property as well and you will be punished and even, sometimes, executed. The peoples of Yugoslavia lived together peacefully if not always happily under Tito’s firm rule because, as a Croat put it, ‘every hundred yards we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much’. When Tito died and his Communist Party fell to pieces, the different ethnicities in Yugoslavia, urged on by unscrupulous demagogues, turned on each other. We may see the state as oppression incarnate, but we should think for a moment what it is like to live where there is no state power. The Samoans and the New Guinea highlanders once knew that and the unfortunate people of the failed states of Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan know it today."

"I must really say that he is a veteran Communist, this Herr Josip Broz, a consistent man. Unfortunately he is our enemy. He really has earned his title of Marshal. When we catch him we shall do him in at once; you can be sure of that; he is our enemy. But I wish we had a dozen Titos in Germany... The man had nothing at all. He was between the Russians, the British and Americans for a ride and to shit on them in the most comical way. He is a Moscow man … He has never capitulated."

"The views of Tito and his associates showed from the very beginning that they were far from being “hard-line Marxists”, as the bourgeoisie calls the consistent Marxists, but “reasonable Marxists”, who would collaborate closely with all the old and new bourgeois and reactionary politicians of Yugoslavia."

"Not all communists, however, fell into that sphere. Yugoslavia had been one of the Soviet Union's most reliable allies since the end of World War II, but its leader, Josip Broz Tito, had come to power on his own. He and his partisans, not the Red Army, had driven the Nazis out; unlike any of his other East European counterparts, Tito did not depend upon Stalin's support to remain in power. Efforts to subject him to Cominform orthodoxy caused Tito to bristle, and by the end of June, 1948, he had openly broken with Moscow. Stalin professed not to be worried. "I will shake my little finger, and there will be no more Tito." Much more than a finger shook within the Soviet Union and the international communist movement over this first act of defiance by a communist against the Kremlin, but Tito survived—and was soon receiving economic assistance from the United States. The Yugoslav dictator might be a “son-of-a-bitch,” the new American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, acknowledged astringently in 1949, but he was now “our son-of-a-bitch.”"

"When Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito took over in 1945, he attempted to quash Serbian nationalism. He preached that there was no room for ethnic differences in the class struggle. But Serbs, suspicious of Tito's Croatian and Slovenian background, said he was giving them short shrift. To allay fears of anti-Serb chauvinism, Tito prohibited Albanian-language publications and gave Kosovo's most desirable jobs to Serbs. When Albanians staged protests in the late '60s, Tito attempted to pacify them by strengthening local government (largely dominated by Albanians) over local affairs and by restoring jobs. This satisfied no one: It was not enough to dent Albanian unemployment and just enough to rile Serbs. Following Tito's death in 1980, malcontents on both sides rioted."

"It is difficult to know whether an independent Macedonian state would have come into existence had Tito not recognised and supported the development of Macedonian ethnicity as part of his ethnically organised Yugoslavia. He did this as a counter to Bulgaria, which for centuries had a historical claim on the area as far west as Lake Ohrid and the present border of Albania."

"If you saw what I see for the future in Yugoslavia, it would scare you."

"Kosovo is now the biggest problem confronting Yugoslavia"

"To Joseph Stalin: Stop sending people to kill me! We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send a very fast working one to Moscow and I certainly won't have to send another."

"Comrade Khrushchev often repeats that Socialism cannot be built with American wheat. I think it can be done by anyone who knows how to do it, while a person who doesn't know how to do it cannot build Socialism even with his own wheat. Khrushchev says we live on charity received from the imperialist countries … What moral right have those who attack us to rebuke us about American aid or credits when Khruschev himself has just tried to conclude an economic agreement with America?"

"We have said, and we will always say again, that we are opposed to the intervention of foreign military forces. But which was the lesser evil? Chaos, civil war, counter-revolution, and a new world war, or an intervention by Soviet troops? … I say clearly that the first alternative was the worst thing that could have occurred, and the second, the intervention of Soviet troops, was a necessary evil."

"Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι."

"Μολὼν λαβέ [Molōn labe!]"

"ἀγαθὸν γαμεῖν καὶ ἀγαθὰ τίκτειν"

"This is the mound of Leonidas, with its dust and rank grass, its flowers and lizards, its stones, scruffy laurels and hot gusts of wind. I knew now that something real happened here. It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all argument to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must vibrate to the sound of the violin. It is also because, way back and at the hundredth remove, that company stood in the right line of history. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free."

"It is said that on the eve of battle, he was told by a native of Trachis that the Persian archers were so numerous that, when they fired their volleys the mass of arrows blocked out the sun. Dienekes, however, quite undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, "Good. Then we'll have our battle in the shade.""

"Ō xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tēide keimetha tois keinōn rhēmasi peithomenoi."

"To understand is difficult; to act is easy."

"The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit...they are just a heap of loose sand...Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat."

"In the construction of a country, it is not the practical workers but the idealists and planners that are difficult to find."

"It is only after mature deliberation and thorough preparation that I have decided upon the Program of Revolution and defined the procedure of the revolution in three stages. The first is the period of military government; the second, the period of political tutelage; and the third, the period of constitutional government."

"I am the one who will crush the Qing utterly. With the power of sun and moon I will smash through the boundaries of Helanshan pass. With fire and fury I shall come to the city of the Nanluo kings, and the might of the Yanhuang will rise again."

"China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable."

"The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and… installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world… Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime."

"Since his election as president of Iran in June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has caused something of a sensation by, among other things, questioning the reality of the Holocaust and suggesting that Israel be moved in Europe or Alaska. His outrageous speeches have been good theatre for both his supporters and for foreign opponents who want to demonize him. However, his power is actually quite limited. For example, even with the support of the Iranian legislature, he cannot make law, and he is not the commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces. Above the elected government in Iran is an unelected twelve-man Guardian Council of mullahs, headed by Ayatollah Khamenei, who has ruled the nation since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Khamenei is the leader of the military, and the Guardian Council has the right to veto any law passed by the elected government. Since 2001, Khamenei has undone the reforms that had been gradually changing the face of Iran."

"Want a trip into bizarroland? Take a look at the Twitter feed for Iran's 'Supreme Guide' Ayatollah Khamenei. No, his Twitter feed hasn't been hacked by Al Sharpton. Nor is this a spoof site. It's the real online megaphone for the Iranian dictator. This pasty old man doesn't give a flying fork about black people, especially those who live in the United States. When he and his underlings chant 'Death to America', they don't mean death to white America. They're talking about the whole country, from our black president at the top to undocumented immigrants on the bottom and everyone in between."

"Khamenei is certainly better educated than the late Khomeini. At least he can speak and write correct Persian and Arabic, something the late Ayatollah never managed. From available evidence Khamenei also has a better knowledge of Islam and its history than Khomeini did. Nevertheless, Khamenei has never been accepted as a theologian or Islamic scholar, but as a political leader, bestowing on him a degree of dangerous ambiguity. That ambiguity enables him to hit much higher than his weight by using his political position as long as the going is good. However, the slightest sign that his political power may be on the wane or seriously challenged could expose him as a prophet without armor. And that, in the context of Iran’s violent politics, created of the same substance as angels or not, is a dicey situation to be in, to say the least."

"Despite efforts to disguise his hatred of Israel in Islamic terms... Khamenei is more influenced by Western-style anti-Semitism than by classical Islam's checkered relations with Jews. His argument about territories becoming "irrevocably Islamic" does not wash, if only because of its inconsistency. He has nothing to say about vast chunks of former Islamic territory, including some that belonged to Iran for millennia, now under Russian rule. Nor is he ready to embark on Jihad to drive the Chinese out of Xinjiang, a Muslim khanate until the late 1940s. Israel, which in terms of territory accounts for one per cent of Saudi Arabia, is a very small fry. Khamenei's shedding of tears for "the sufferings of Palestinian Muslims" are also unconvincing. To start with, not all Palestinians are Muslims. And, if it were only Muslim sufferers who deserved sympathy, why doesn't the "Supreme Guide" beat his chest about the Burmese Rohingya and the Chechens massacred and enchained by Vladimir Putin, not to mention Muslims daily killed by fellow-Muslims across the globe?"

"US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on June 13, 2019, blamed Iran for attacks on ships in the Gulf of Oman. Iran had no motive for the recent attack on civilian vessels in the Gulf of Oman, but the US has motives to falsely blame Iran for it. It appears that Mike Pompeo has a hard time kicking his old habits. He appears to be as smug about lying as a CIA operative as he is as Secretary of State. Categorically blaming the Iranians for the recent oil attack tankers has left allies scratching their heads; and perhaps leaving foes thinking: “Thank God my enemy is so stupid”! On June 13, 2019, as Ayatollah Khamenei was holding talks in Tehran with Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, two oil tankers carrying oil to Japan were attacked. As investigations into the incident were just beginning, Pompeo had already concluded his assessment and had it ready for the press. Much to the audible surprise of the world, and without any proof or supporting documents, he laid the blame firmly at Iran’s feet citing “intelligence”..."

"We find ourselves in front of a great and exceptional personality who is criticized - even in Iran. Our responsibility is to introduce this great Imam to the nation, This is the very important and sensitive mission of this conference."

"[O]ne of God's great graces, alongside the Islamic Republic, is the presence of the leader – this great leader who enjoys the grace of God. I say this out of experience, not as a gesture of politeness. They should be aware of the value of this great leader, and know how to make the most of this grace, and thank God for this. They should preserve this. With God's help, they should benefit the most from this great personality."

"When Khomeini died in 1989, his nominated successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was duly chosen as supreme leader, though he lacked Khomeini’s unique authority. Nonetheless, the Iranian Islamic Republic has been highly successful in projecting Shiite and Iranian power, seeking nuclear weapons, using militias such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and involving itself in the wars in Iraq and Syria. It is an aggressive, oppressive theocracy yet its hybrid semi-democracy, with elected presidents and parliaments, has given it the flexibility to survive and to build power unprecedented since the days of the Persian empire."

"Khomeini was succeeded as Supreme Leader by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who stymied a weak 1990s 'reform' movement and backed the 2005 election of Iran's current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a radical demagogue and rabid anti-Semite who has denied the Holocaust, declared he wishes to exterminate Israel, and whose pursuit of an Iranian nuclear arsenal, in defiance of the West, may yet bring the world to nuclear catastrophe."

"Khamenei & Co. do not think we will respond, do not fear Western action, and believe this is a historic movement for the advance of their vision of clerical fascism."

"Hizbullah chose to be loyal to the regime in Iran, to the rule of the Jurisprudent, Hizbullah made a religious choice – and it is free to make such a choice... It chose to consider Ali Khamenei in Iran as their source of emulation. They turn to him to ask what is permitted and what is forbidden."

"I tell the Iranians that if they hear from people here or there that pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei are hung in Iraqi homes, it is a lie."

"Today, many of us picked up our newspapers, and we were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads. In that State of the Union, President Obama didn't so much as mention the 10 sailors that had been captured by Iran. President Obama's preparing to send $100 billion or more to the Ayatollah Khamenei. And I'll tell you, it was heartbreaking. But the good news is the next commander-in-chief is standing on this stage. And I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees, and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America."

"Even though there are physical differences between men and women in their appearance – one is taller and has a deeper voice – they both possess infinite potential in terms of their intellectual and spiritual capabilities and aren’t different from each other in this."

"The [Israel] regime has only two scenarios in front of it, namely the bad scenario and the worse scenario."

"Silence of the Muslim governments in the face of such an invasion, which is an invasion on them and on the Islamic ummah, and even supporting it, as some did recently, has weakened those countries and has subjugated them."

"Of course, today’s Mongols, that is, the West, have different appearances and forms of the onslaught. In addition to the dark history of their crimes during the colonial period, they have also been invasive during our era, by equipping rabid dogs like Saddam with all kinds of weapons."

"The presence of even one single American in Iraq is too much"