Anti Fascists

"Traitors to Marxism-Leninism, agents of imperialism and intriguers like Josif Broz Tito, try in a thousand ways, by hatching up diabolic schemes like the creation of a third force, to mislead these people and the newly-set up states [in Africa and Asia], to detach them from their natural allies, to hitch them up to U.S. imperialism. We should exert all our efforts to defeat the schemes of these lackeys of imperialism."

"Let us look facts straight in the eye. World imperialism headed by its aggressive detachment, U.S. imperialism, is directing the course of its economy towards preparations for war. It is arming itself to the teeth. U.S. imperialism is rearming Bonn's Germany, Japan, and all its allies and satellites with all kinds of weapons. It has set up and perfected aggressive military organizations, it has established and continues to establish military bases all around the socialist camp. It is accumulating stocks of nuclear weapons and refuses to disarm, to stop testing nuclear weapons, and is feverishly engaged in inventing new means of mass extermination. Why is it doing all this? To go to a wedding party? No, to go to war against us, to do away with socialism and communism, to put the peoples under bondage."

"Some one may pose the question: will China win her rights over the United States of America, by possessing and dropping the bomb? No, neither China nor the Soviet Union will ever use the bomb unless they are attacked by those who have aggression and war in their very blood. If the Soviet Union did not possess the bomb, the imperialists would speak in other terms with us. We will never attack with the bomb, we are opposed to war, we are ready to destroy the bomb but we keep it for defensive purposes. "It is fear that guards the vineyard," is a saying of our people. The imperialists should be afraid of us and terribly afraid at that."

"The canon of the Sharia and the Church, closely linked with the laws of the bourgeosie, treated women as a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold by the male... Just as the bourgeosie had made the worker into its proletarian, so had the savage ancient canons of the [shariah], the Church, feudalism and the bourgeosie, reduced woman to the proletariat of the man."

"Our people, small in numbers, have fought during their whole existence. [The British] have fought too, but the wars of our two people have been of different characters. Our country has been invaded many times, but we have always fought the enemies, we have driven them out and we have never mixed blood with them..."

"I know about your [British] system of democracy, but in that system the workers 'hold keys of straw', as an expression of ours puts it. It is democracy for the capitalists, for the lords, but not for the workers. When we win we shall establish democracy, but not like that democracy of yours. In our country there will be democracy only for the people, while the 'keys of straw' will be in the hands of the beys, aghas and the bajraktars who have always opressed and betrayed the people."

"The Spectator, 'TWO-FACED BUZZARDS', 12 December 1987"

"... possibly the most Aztec-like of all Europe's remaining Stalinists."

"In 1990 [Mother Teresa] made a trip to Albania, then the most oppressive of the Balkan Stalinist states, and laid a wreath on the grave of the dictator Enver Hoxha as well as on the irredentist monument to "Mother Albania". She was herself of Albanian descent (born in Skopje, Macedonia), but many Albanians were shocked by her embrace of Hoxha's widow and her silence on human rights."

"On the positive side, an objective analysis must conclude that Enver Hoxha's plan to mobilize all of Albania's resources under the regimentation of a central plan was effective and quite successful... Albania was a tribal society, not necessarily primitive but certainly less developed than most. It had no industrial or working class tradition and no experience using modern production techniques. Thus, the results achieved, especially during the phases of initial planning and construction of the economic base were both impressive and positive."

"Hoxha was often called a Stalinist. He was a Stalinist in two important ways. One was his advocacy of a very rigid form of centralised planning... The other was his use of brutal methods and often concocted evidence, compounded by his outspoken enthousiasm for harsh measures. But he was not 'Stalinist' in other important aspects. He was a cultured and well-read man. He was also in much closer contact with the population of his country than Stalin..."

"Hoxha is both unusually well read and intelligent on the one hand, and an out-and-out Stalinist, on the other. These two sides of his character coexist without any resolution or synthesis. For Hoxha, Stalin can do no wrong. The world is divided into black and white: Stalin and those who agreed with him are good; those against Stalin are bad. On these issues, Hoxha is entirely predictable and often boring. He manifestly distorts events and flatly refuses to confront the evidence, for example, on Stalin's purges and the show trials in Eastern Europe after the war... In effect, when in trouble he wheels out Marxism-Leninism and deploys it like magic, in an incantatory, ritualistic way. But it is a magic straitjacket."

"In a way, even more than Stalin, Hoxha had a vision of 'socialism in one country'- not for geo-strategic reasons, but out of alleged ideological purity, which served as a convenient cloak for nationalism. This is different from isolationism, with which Albania is usually taxed. Rather, Tirana's policy has been one of absentation- refusing, for example, to participate in the European Security Conference (which Hoxha termed 'a conference of insecurity')."

"Hoxha was not just 'quite' cultured, he was very cultured. In spite of coming from the most backward country in Europe, he was by far the best-read head of any Communist party in the bloc. On visits to the other countries in Eastern Europe, he often comments on the philistinism of his bloc colleagues. Hoxha knew fluent French and had a working knowledge (either verbal or written) of Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian and English. The range of references in his memoirs is not what one would expect from a Balkan ex-Muslim Stalinist."

"Albania's Enver Hoxha was unusual in being well read in the European literature classics - and Molotov thought his cosmopolitanism a reason for suspicion. But Hoxha was a conventional communist dictator in denying his people access to disapproved alien culture."

"Hoxha's picture is plastered on just about every wall in the land. His profile adorns Albania's monetary unit, the lek, and at meetings of the Communist Central Committee (most of whom are related to each other and to the boss by blood or marriage) Hoxha speaks from a podium decorated with a plaster bust of himself. Like his country, Hoxha is full of surprises. Instead of being a rough, tough mountain chieftain, he is a former schoolteacher and was the pampered son of a well-to-do Moslem merchant. Though he has the mentality of a brigand, his manners are those of a cultivated bourgeois and reflect his education at universities in France and Belgium."

"Hoxha seems to be well informed about literature, the theater, and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of education... He might well be pictured holding the sword of the dictatorship of the proletariat in one hand and the Western "lamp of learning" on the other."

"He is very handsome and leaves a good impression. He is quite cultured, but you sense Western influence on his upbringing."

""Heroj Tito, druže Tito, naš Tito!" [Hero Tito, Comrade Tito, our Tito!]. This impressed itself on me because we had heard this slogan from the Italian fascists when they shouted, "Duce a noi!" [The Duce is ours!]. I was astonished how they could permit it."

"Nevertheless, Marxism-Leninism has not disappeared, it is living and flourishing as an ideology and a reality, materialized in the socialist social system constructed according to its teachings. Exemplifying this is socialist Albania, the Marxist-Leninist parties, and those millions and millions of workers and peasants who are fighting every day for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, for democracy and national liberation. No force, no torture, no intrigue, no deception can eradicate Marxism-Leninism from the minds and hearts of men."

"Hoxha grew up in a world of blood feuds and skulduggery. His country was still part of the Ottoman Empire when he was born. It was a world of Islam, male chauvinism and cultural and philosophical backwardness. He fought his way out of this. He played a major role in building a Communist movement in extremely harsh and adverse conditions and held power longer than any non-hereditary leader in the world-more than forty years. He saw it all. This alone entitles him consideration, even if not respect."

"In Cambodia, the Cambodian people, communists and patriots, have risen against the barbarous government of Pol Pot, which was nothing but a group of provocateurs in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Chinese revisionists, in particular, which had as its aim to discredit the idea of socialism in the international arena... The anti-popular line of that regime is confirmed, also, by the fact that the Albanian embassy in the Cambodian capital, the embassy of a country which has given the people of Cambodia every possible aid, was kept isolated, indeed, encircled with barbed wire, as if it were in a concentration camp. The other embassies, too, were in a similar situation. The Albanian diplomats have seen with their own eyes that the Cambodian people were treated inhumanly by the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari. Pnom Pen was turned into a deserted city, empty of people, where food was difficult to secure even for the diplomats, where no doctors or even aspirins could be found. We think that the people and patriots of Cambodia waited too long before overthrowing this clique which was completely linked with Beijing and in its service."

"The Spectator contributor Peter Kemp, who was dropped into Albania during the second world war, was later asked what he thought of Albanians. 'What can you think of a nation,' he answered, 'whose emblem is a two-faced buzzard?' Three years ago, I was with Peter Kemp in Leon, Nicaragua, when one of us spotted the news of the death of Enver Hoxha, Albania's communist leader whom Peter had known in the war. Peter rose to his feet, lifted his beer-mug, and gave the toast: 'Stoke well the furnaces of Hell!' Since Hoxha's death, his long-time interpreter has gone into exile, where he reveals that his former boss indulged in sexual practices which, in the words of the Church of England, 'fall short of the Christian ideal'. He was a rampant and aggressive sodomite who murdered many of those he embraced as well as those who refused him. The late Enver Hoxha, after the second world war, conferred with his namesake Fadil Hoxha, a senior communist in Kosovo, on whether to form an alliance. The break between Tito and Stalin put paid to the notion. Recently Fadil Hoxha fell from grace for making what he later described as a joke. To someone who had complained of the numerous rapes of Serb women in Kosovo, Hoxha replied that if more Serb women were prostitutes, there would be less rape."

"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."

"on the one hand, the contemporary societal positioning of US Latinxs demonstrates the familiar always already overdetermined nature of race-perhaps most strikingly articulated by Fanon (1967) as "the fact of Blackness," the disorienting ontological experience of existing as a racialized Other in advance of one's being. On the other hand, Latinxs are positioned in relation to a distinctive social tense of always not yet, or perhaps, never quite yet. If you would just learn English; no, unaccented English; no, the right of English. If you would just enter the country the right way; no, get in verse a pathway to citizenship; no, act like a good citizen. This is a racialized social sense of the always already and never quite yet."

"A theorization of what it means to look like a language and sound like a race can be found in the opening chapter of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, titled "The Negro and Language": “The problem that we confront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately Whiter-that is, he will come closer to being a real human being-in direct ratio to his mastery of the French Language.... What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power.... The Black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation.” (1967:18-19) Fanon's evocative description of interactions in the French Caribbean context speaks to the powerful ways that categories of language and race become iconic of one another, such that linguistic practices can shape one's racial ontology."

"It is crucial to build from Fanon's account to rethink the construction and navigation of boundaries associated with categories of language and identity. The status of French in particular Caribbean contexts in the previous Fanonian example is not entirely unlike English language hegemony in the United States, which relies heavily on schools as flagship institutions for language standardization. This positions standardized English both as an institutional norm and aspiration. While school actors used different varieties of Spanish and English, standardized English was understood as the normative language variety for official business. Most school-wide announcements were made in English, and all formal staff meetings were conducted in English. Meanwhile, the majority of school employees perceived as Spanish-dominant occupied subordinate hierarchical positions as security guards, custodians, and lunchroom workers. This reflects the structural stigmatization of the Spanish language."

"There has never been a moment when reading Freire that I have not remained aware of not only the sexism of the language but the way he (like other progressive Third World political leaders, intellectuals, critical thinkers such as Fanon, Memmi, etc.) constructs a phallocentric paradigm of liberation-wherein freedom and the experience of patriarchal manhood are always linked as though they are one and the same. For me this is always a source of anguish for it represents a blind spot in the vision of men who have profound insight."

"Over cups of coffee in my home in Atlanta and my apartment in Chicago, I often talked late at night and over into the small hours of the morning with proponents of Black Power who argued passionately about the validity of violence and riots. They didn't quote Gandhi or Tolstoy. Their Bible was Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. This black psychiatrist from Martinique, who went to Algeria to work with the National Liberation Front in its fight against the French, argued in his book-a well-written book, incidentally, with many penetrating insights-that violence is a psychologically healthy and tactically sound method for the oppressed. And so, realizing that they are a part of that vast company of the "wretched of the earth," young American Negroes, who were involved in the Black Power movement, often quoted Fanon's belief that violence is the only thing that will bring about liberation. The plain, inexorable fact was that any attempt of the American Negro to overthrow his oppressor with violence would not work. We did not need President Johnson to tell us this by reminding Negro rioters that they were outnumbered ten to one. The courageous efforts of our own insurrectionist brothers, such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, should be eternal reminders to us that violent rebellion is doomed from the start. Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be willing to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women, and children."

""The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance," Frantz Fanon wrote in his 1961 masterwork, The Wretched of the Earth. "What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be." Climate change is our chance to right those festering wrongs at last-the unfinished business of liberation."

"It is difficult for a French Caribbean individual to be the brother, the friend, or simply the associate or fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas…to take full responsibility for a complete break."

"A Martinique-born psychiatrist named Frantz Fanon became an international figure after he wrote a book in 1961 called Les damnés de la terre. Translated into twenty-five languages, the book was read by U.S. college students under the title The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon had finished his French medical studies in Algeria in 1953, where he joined the Algerian National Front and became a leader in the fight for Algerian independence. This alone was credentials enough in the French youth movement that began in the late fifties by opposing French policy in Algeria. Independent Algeria, like Cuba, came to be regarded as a symbol of resistance to the established order of the world. Not a predictable anticolonialist tirade, Wretched of the Earth examines the psychology not only of colonialism, but of overthrowing colonialism and the kind of new man that is required to build a postcolonial society. By explaining the complexity of the inner struggle to break with colonialism, Wretched of the Earth wielded an important influence in the United States on the American civil rights movement, where it helped make the connection between oppressed American blacks trying to rise up from white rule and oppressed African Muslims trying to free themselves from Europeans. This was the theme of the Black Muslim movement, especially under Malcolm X, who like Fanon was born in 1925, but in 1965 had been murdered, it appeared, by fellow Black Muslims, though this was never proven. Black Muslim boxer Muhammad Ali, as he defied the white establishment, was often seen as a standard-bearer for emerging poor nations. Eldridge Cleaver called Ali “the black Fidel Castro of boxing.”"

"Fanon argued that culture was dynamic and could be transformed by struggles in which people individually and collectively assumed full responsibility for their destiny."

"To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist's sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory."

"The Church in the colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor."

"The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be."

"The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist."

"The serf is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is needed to justify this difference in status."

"The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people."

"When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with such violence, the victorious confrontation of these values with the lifestyle and beliefs of the colonized is so impregnated with aggressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized rightly make a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned."

"This has recently been stressed by Barbara Deming in her plea for nonviolent action-"On Revolution and Equilibrium," in Revolution: Violent and Nonviolent, reprinted from Liberation, February, 1968. She says about Fanon, on p. 3: "It is my conviction that he can be quoted as well to plead for nonviolence.... Every time you find the word 'violence' in his pages, substitute for it the phrase 'radical and uncompromising action.' I contend that with the exception of a very few passages this substitution can be made, and that the action he calls for could just as well be nonviolent action.""

"Frantz Fanon pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks, that the anti-Semitic was eventually the anti-negro. I want to say that eventually both are antifeminist and even further, I want to indicate that all discrimination is essentially the same thing – anti-humanism. That is my charge to those of you in the audience this morning, whether you are male or female."

"As soon as they are born it is obvious to them that their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence."

"At risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into real hell."

"The black is a black man;that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated."

"Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent."

"Why write this book? No one has asked me for it. Especially those to whom it is directed. Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it."

"The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level."

"Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer."

"By refusing to multiply our element, we take the risk of not setting a limit to our field ; for it is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone."