Socialists

"Today there is no communism in Europe, no Warsaw Pact, no balance of fear. We, Poles, have a great satisfaction that the cause of the construction of better, united and secure Europe of free people began in Poland and has achieved the present phase here, in Rome."

"The transformations in the Polish economy continue. We are slowly approaching the completion of the privatisation of enterprises and banks. We have built a securities and financial instruments market from scratch. The private sector, employing almost 70 per cent of the entire working population, is growing dynamically."

"The Cold War walls have come down. They have set free the spirits of freedom and democracy, but also unleashed the demons of new threats to security. Among those threats are unconventional capabilities of the so-called "states of concern.""

"I see a completely different China which is totally different from the China under the rule of Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek. This China is full of hope and free from starvation and defeatist sentiment."

"My basic ideas have not changed. I see no reason to change them."

"Looking back, and forward, many Hans and Tibetans today do not measure their relations by just when, in what ancient dynasty, their unity began or was formalized. Rather, they see as the common meaning of their overall and particular histories, all China's nationalities contributing, from the earliest times to the formation and stability of the historically formed multinational entity."

"Already before my teens, amidst the country's surrounding internecine wars and famines, I saw gaunt, ragged refugees flooding into Tianjin. Some begging tearfully for food, some offering to sell their children ... On a forever unforgotten winter morning, ... I came upon a boy of twelve or so, ... crouching stiff and dead in a doorway where he had tried vainly to seek shelter from the freezing night wind."

"We are indeed living through tremendous days, weeks and months that do indeed “shake the world” ― rejuvenating, revivifying, scraping all the barnacles off the mind and scraping off those who have themselves become barnacles on the cause."

"The absence of greed; faith in an ever-better future; the spirit of service to the people; the prevalence of mutual aid, rarity of theft, and readiness of all ranks of society, and particularly of the youth, to volunteer despite fatigue and peril."

"There are ... almost certainly more really active people. And these people are amply sure that they are China, China's future. Not that they say it. But it is apparent in every confident word and action, and smile. I became ever more convinced then that Yan'an was the shape of things to come in China, and the next decade would prove it."

"Different indeed from any colonial or semi-colonial path is the road of Tibet within socialist China. As we have seen from facts and figures, Tibet is massively assisted and in no way exploited by the majority nationality. Economic errors were made, involving waste of labor and funds, which was true in other areas of China as well, but nothing was taken away from the Region and its people for the material benefit of anywhere else."

"After we joined other work groups in transplanting rice, harvesting wheat, afforesting bare hills or digging a canal. All this made us, as nothing else could, forever a part of this land, shaped, tilled, and watered by the soil of so many generations, and now in a state of active rebirth. Whenever we saw new watercourses, roads, or tree-belts, we felt that we,too, had helped create them. Such a feeling is hard to describe by any who have not worked truly mutually, not formonetary wealth, but for a common aim."

"When Pedro Castillo won the presidency in Peru in July 2021, he was not permitted to pursue even a ; the coup machinations against him began before he was inaugurated. The civilised politics that would end hunger and illiteracy are simply not permitted by the billionaire class, who spend vast amounts of money on think tanks and media to undermine any project of decency and fund the dangerous forces of the , who shift the blame for social chaos away from the tax-free ultra-rich and the capitalist system and onto the poor and marginalised."

"...many of the provisions in force today only benefit large corporations so that they can take away our wealth in abundance. The state must be free to promote, to monitor and regulate according to the interest of the majority."

"Innovation will be a priority in schools and internet connectivity a right."

"All Peruvians have to know that the tasks that lie ahead are tough and that they require all of us. For this reason, we must put aside ideological differences, political positions and personal interests, in order to tear our country from the serious crises that overwhelm it."

"The US ambassador in Peru, a veteran CIA agent named Lisa Kenna, met with the country’s defense minister just one day before democratically elected left-wing President Pedro Castillo was overthrown in a coup d’etat and imprisoned without trial. Peru’s defense minister, a retired brigadier general, ordered the military to turn against Castillo."

"A country that is not capable of recognizing and incorporating its ancestral knowledge and generating new ones from research ... will never be able to reach the levels of development required to adequately distribute elementary public services among its population..."

"This time a government of the people has come to govern with the people and for the people, to build from the bottom up."

"For four and a half millennia, our ancestors found ways to solve their problems and to live in harmony with the rich nature that providence offered them. It was like this until the men of Castile arrived..."

"The three centuries in which this territory belonged to the Spanish crown allowed it to exploit the minerals that sustained the development of Europe, largely with the labor of the grandparents of many of us."

"I want you to know that the pride and pain of deep Peru runs through my veins. That I too am the son of this country founded on the sweat of my ancestors, built on the lack of opportunities of my parents and that despite that I also saw them resist. That my life was made in the cold of the early mornings in the field and that it was also these field hands that carried and rocked my children when they were little. That the history of that Peru, for so long silenced, is also my story. That I was that boy from Chota who studied at the rural school N10475 in the village of Chugur. That I am here today so that this story is no longer the exception."

"When you go out to ask for rights, they say that you are a terrorist, ... The terrorists are hunger and misery, abandonment, inequality, injustice."

"Health is a fundamental right that the State must guarantee. Physical and mental health will be the first priority in the government. We will establish a universal, unified, free, decentralized and participatory health system."

"Marielle was the kind of person who was extremely confrontational with the powerful but really respectful with people in weaker positions, like, for example, the cleaning people or service people. She was such a force of nature that when I first met her, I came away a bit shaken, a bit intimidated – and I’m not someone who’s easily intimidated."

"I think she was becoming a menace. She may have come from the bottom, but she was growing more and more influential. She defended minorities and spoke her mind fearlessly. They wanted to shut her up before she went further."

"They took Marielle from us, but they couldn't take away what Marielle means."

"From a young age, Marielle stood out from the crowd. She was a natural leader at school, at the church and in the projects she took part in. She was involved in community vegetable gardens, college preparatory courses for the underprivileged and movements against violence, always with the aim of helping others. She believed that collective organization based on solidarity could change the world. Doing things for others made her feel good."

"I didn't want her to be a flag, a slogan. She is missed and we really miss Mari's joy, strength, bravery, brilliance."

"Before Marielle was killed, not a lot of people knew of her. But now the whole world knows about her, and the truth is that, in death, Marielle was able to touch so many more people than she was when she was alive."

"I will not be interrupted. I will not put up with interruption from a citizen who comes here and does not know how to listen to the position of an elected woman!"

"It is not by chance that when arriving in the favelas … the police quickly hoist a [Brazilian] flag as a signal of territorial control. That is because these territories are seen … as the enemy’s territory."

"Eu sou porque nós somos (I am because we are)"

"How many more will have to die for this war against the poor to be over?"

"The roses of resistance bloom from asphalt. We receive roses, but we will be with a clenched fist talking about our place of existence against the commands and abuses that affect our lives."

"The major anti-Communist publicity extravaganza mounted by the State Department and the CIA in France in 1949 was the Kravchenko affair. The Russian defector’s account of his experiences during the Stalin years, titled I Chose Freedom, sold 400,000 copies in France."

"Books and written testimonies were not enough to discourage Western intellectuals. Victor Kravchenko was a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who defected to the United States during World War II… His was the first detailed exposé available to Western readers documenting the atrocities committed by Stalin and his henchmen. He depicted mass arrests and executions by the NKVD, the Gulag, the artificial famine in the Ukraine, and the atmosphere of total fear. Although a best seller, the book was met with ferocious attacks from European communist parties."

"Victor Kravchenko was a dissident, a defector and an unbelievably aggressive disputer. Breaking with the Soviet Union before the end of WWII, he was the first writer to blow the whistle on Stalin’s deceptive foreign policy, warning the West about the tyrant’s postwar plans. After the defeat of the Axis powers, he was the first to criticize the Soviet war effort, to record the human cost of Soviet heavy industry, to confirm first-hand the man-made famine in Ukraine, and, above all, to publicize the Soviet slave-labor|Soviet slave-labor state. He introduced the word ‘Gulag’ to the board Western public."

"An American in uniform, accompanied by another in mufti, came to our car. He looked at our passports, checked them casually, without a trace of decent suspicion, and returned them to us with a smile. Informed that the civilian was a customs inspector, we had all putted out our suitcases and opened them wide. He glanced negligently at one or two, as a matter of form… We felt actually embarrassed by such absurd inefficiency and wondered where was the catch. Personal freedom is one thing, but didn't such lack of vigilance smack of anarchy, chaos? The two men lingered a few minutes, pleased to meet Russians. Then they wished us good luck and departed smiling. Somehow I had imagined that entering the United States would be a long elaborate process, requiring extensive inspections and perhaps interrogations behind closed doors."

"As the world’s most prominent defector, [Kravchenko] inspired other defections, including that of the code clerk Igor Gouzenko, who exposed the Soviet atomic-bomb spy ring in Canada and, together with other exposed agents, shocked Washington to the extent that it authorized a hydrogen-bomb program… He lived up to the title that one newspaper gave him at the start of his American career—the ‘Stalin Blaster.’"

"The Soviet hierarchy does not need impressive arguments to line up Party opinion. An instinct for survival does the trick. To avoid trouble one not merely believes, but believes deeply, fervently, whatever absurdity is prescribed from on high. The great Stalin knows what he’s doing—ultimately that was the sum-total of the Party reaction."

"The theatres of the capital [Moscow] were developing a great interest in German drama. In fact, everything Germanic was the vogue. A brutal John Bull and an Uncle Sam enthroned on money bags figured in the propaganda, but the Nazis were exempt from such ridicule. Hundreds of German military men and trade officials were in evidence in Moscow hotels and shops. They were busy with the gigantic program of Soviet economic help to Hitler’s crusade against the ‘degenerate democracies.’"

"The theory that Stalin was merely ‘playing for time’ while feverishly arming against the Nazis was invented much later, to cover up the Kremlin’s tragic blunder in trusting Germany. It was such a transparent invention that little was said about it inside Russia during the Russo-German war; only after I emerged into the free world did I hear it seriously advanced and believed. It was a theory that ignored the most significant aspect of the Stalin-Hitler arrangement: the large-scale economic undertakings which drained the U.S.S.R. of the very products and materials and productive capacity necessary for its own defense preparations… I was close enough to the defense industries to know that there was a slackening of military effort after the pact."

"[H]atred of Nazism had been drummed into our minds year after year. We had seen our leading Army Generals, including Tukhachevsky, shot for supposed plotting with Hitler’s Reichswehr. The bit treason trials, in which Lenin’s most intimate associates perished, had rested on the premise that Nazi Germany and its Axis friends, Italy and Japan, were preparing to attack us. Those nations, indeed, were only the spearheads of a world coalition of capitalists sworn to destroy our socialist fatherland. The brutalities of the super-purge had been justified largely on the basis of that imminent Nazi-led assault against us."

"I considered the Kremlin capable of any outrage. Its methods by this time seemed to me little better than those of the Nazis, especially in its treatment of its own people and in the forms of organization of power. Reading or listening to anti-Hitler propaganda, I could not help asking myself inwardly, ‘But how does this differ from our Soviet atrocities?’ All the same, I refused to credit the news of a Soviet pact that freed Hitler to make war on Poland and on the rest of Europe. There must be some mistake, I thought, and everyone around me seemed equally incredulous."

"Hitlerism, we were instructed to believe, was thus merely the iron fist of the whole plutocratic, imperialistic world. A war between Nazi Germany and its capitalistic patrons was unthinkable, illogical. Now that just such a war had come, it seemed to us no less insane than the compact of friendship between the U.S.S.R. and Germany…"

"Every Soviet organization is a hotbed of personal feuds, competing cliques, festering jealousies. This is almost inevitable in an atmosphere where political skill and influence are the decisive values."

"Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter being sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see with my mind’s eye people eating butter stamped with a Soviet trademark. ‘They must be rich to be able to send out butter,’ I could hear them saying. ‘Here, friends, is the proof of socialism in action.’ Driving through the fields, I did not hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart. These people had forgotten how to sing. I could hear only the groans of the dying, and the lip-smacking of fat foreigners enjoying our butter…"

"The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon–like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless."

"I know, moreover, that millions who escaped the purge were maimed in their minds and wounded in their spirits by the fears and the brutalities amidst which they lived. For sheer scale, I know of nothing in all human history to compare with this purposeful and merciless persecution in which tens of million Russians suffered directly or indirectly."