 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
Reviews |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
Reviews |
|
|
 . . . see: "CAPITALISM" see: "CHINA" see: "CLASS, CLASS WARFARE" see: "COLD WAR" see: "DEMOCRACY" see: "RONALD REAGAN" see: "RUSSIA" see: "SOCIALISM" see: "VIETNAM WAR" see: "THE HUMAN RACE" for other related links Better dead than Red. --Anti-Communist slogan. Now a man talks frankly only with his wife, at night, with the blanket over his head. --Isaac Babel (18941940) Russian short-story writer. Remark, c.1937, quoted in Solomon Volkov _St Petersburg_ [1996]. - Capitalism, it is said, is a system wherein man exploits man. And communism is vice versa. --Daniel Bell (19192011) American journalist and sociologist. Quoting 'a Polish intellectual' in _The End of Ideology_ [1960]. & see: Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won. --Robert Heilbroner (19192005) American economist. "Reflections: The Triumph of Capitalism" in _New Yorker_ [23 January 1989]. - Christian love, which applies to all, even to one's enemies, is the worst adversary of Communism. --Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (18881938) Russian Communist leader and theoretician. _Pravda_ [30 March 1934] When I give food to the poor, they call me a Saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist. --(Dom) Hιlder Cβmara (19091999) Brazilian Roman Catholic Archbishop. Quoted in "The Guardian" [21 January 1985]. - From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. --Winston Churchill (18741965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [19401945, 19511955]. Speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Mo. [5 March 1946]. & note: An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. --Churchill telegram to Truman [12 May 1945] & see: We were behind the 'iron curtain' at last! --Ethel Snowden (18811951) English reformer. _Through Bolshevik Russia_, ch. 2 [1920] & see: With a rumble and a roar, an iron curtain is descending on Russian history. --Vasilii Rozanov (18561919) Russian writer and philosopher. _Apocalypse of Our Time_ [1918] & finally: Between [Germany] and me there is now a bloody iron curtain which has descended forever! --Elisabeth of Bavaria (18761965) Queen consort of Albert I of Belgium. On the eve of World War I, quoted in Tom Burnam _The Dictionary of Misinformation_ [1975]. - My son is twenty-two years old. If he had not become a Communist at twenty-two I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at thirty, I will do it then. --Georges Clemenceau (18411929) French statesman. Attributed in Bennett Cerf _Try and Stop Me_ [1944]. Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist. --Alvin Dark (b. 1922) American Major League baseball player and manager. Quoted in Michael Benson _Winning Words: Classic Quotes from the World of Sports_ [2008]. One thing about Ronald Reagan that struck me time and again was his obvious, visceral loathing of communism. For him it wasn't just a difference of opinion about economics or governance: he saw through the whole thing to its essentially anti-human nature. And this was at a time, we all too easily forget, when plenty of people in the West I think a majority of the intellectual classes even as late as the 1980s didn't mind communism at all, thought in fact that it was just the ticket, if perhaps not for the USA, at least for poor counties like Nicaragua. Reagan had the firmest, clearest, truest moral compass of any modern President. May he rest in peace. --John Derbyshire (b. 1945) British-born American author. "National Review Online" [5 June 2004] I have studied communism long and carefully in lands where they are practiced and in conversation with their adherents, and with wide reading. I now state my conclusion frankly and clearly: I believe in communism. I shall therefore hereafter help the triumph of communism in every honest way that I can. ... I know well that the triumph of communism will be a slow and difficult task, involving mistakes of every sort. It will call for progressive change in human nature and a better type of manhood than is common today. I believe this possible, or otherwise we will continue to lie, steal and kill as we are doing today. --W. E. B. Dubois (18681963) American civil rights leader. _The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois_ [1968] ^ ...[A]sk almost anyone how many people died under communism in the 90 years since the Bolshevik Revolution. Few can provide anything close to an accurate answer. They don't know that Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and the other rulers of the Soviet Union murdered 20 million people through purges, famines, forced relocations and the infamous Gulag. They don't know that Mao Zedong and the other Chinese Communist leaders slaughtered 50 million to 60 million people during the "Great Leap Forward," the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre and in the Chinese version of the Gulag the Laogai. They don't know that Fidel Castro and the other Cuban Communist leaders have executed thousands of political dissidents since 1959 and continue to imprison those who dare to propose political reform. They don't know that the communist plague has exacted a death toll of more than 100 million men, women and children, a number documented in "The Black Book of Communism," published by the Harvard University Press. That number surpasses the death tolls of all the wars of the 20th century combined. --Lee Edwards "Communist regimes killed at least 100 million" [22 June 2007] ^ What is a Communist? One who hath yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings: Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing To fork out his penny, and pocket your shilling. --Ebenezer Elliott (17811849) English poet. Quoted in Joseph McCabe _Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake_, vol. I [1908]. When searching for examples of state-sponsored barbarities, intellectuals are quick to point to the Spanish Inquisition or its Protestant imitation, the Witchhunt. How could anyone, modern academics wonder, persecute another for their beliefs? These same intellectuals, ironically, are often the very people who served as cheerleaders for political persecution and mass murder on a scale unmatched in human history. The Spanish Inquisition claimed slightly more than 2,000 lives during its 25-year apex between 1480 and 1505. One would be hard pressed to find any 25-day period in Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, or Cambodia under Pol Pot in which the killing was that slight. Yet it is a Torquemada or Salem that is equated with homicidal intolerance. The crimes of Communism are ignored. Being generous, one might suppose that intellectuals are simply blinded by the prejudices of our age and are unable to detach themselves and see the killing that has occurred right under their noses. A more cynical perspective might view their amnesia as a self- induced condition brought on as a method to absolve themselves of their own role in supporting murder. --Daniel J Flynn "Ideas Have Consequences...Like Murder, Tyranny, and Repression" ^^ [T]here was McCarthyism before McCarthy. The House Un-American Activities Committee had been established in 1938. The Smith Act a strong anticommunist law was passed in 1940. The Second World War had hardly ended when the cold war began. Truman instituted a federal loyalty program in 1946, and strengthened it in 1947. [. . . ] Now an epidemic of witch-hunting, paranoia, and political grandstanding infected the whole country. States and local governments got into the act. Fifteen states passed laws in 1949 against subversive activities; forty-four jurisdictions had laws by 1955 to punish sedition, criminal anarchy, criminal syndicalism, advocating the overthrow of the government, and so on. Some of these laws were incredibly draconian: in Michigan subversives could be imprisoned for life; in Tennessee the death penalty was theoretically possible for anybody who dared advocate the violent overthrow of the United States government. Many states outlawed the Communist Party. New Hampshire's attorney general, Louis C. Wyman, was a particularly notorious zealot, out to get Marxists, fellow travelers, "dupes," and "apologists" for the communists. A number of states created committees and commissions to carry out investigations (essentially witch-hunts), searching for radicals secreted in the nodes of business, government, and academia. Washington State, Illinois, California, and Maryland had legislative committees especially keen on ferreting out reds. Ohio was another state with an Un-American Activities Commission. After all, as a congressman from Ohio warned, there were 1,300 actual Communists in Ohio; and consequently there "can be no real peace or security ... for Communism is the devil's own instrument of hatred, war, chaos and ruin." --Lawrence M. Friedman (b. 1930) _American Law in the 20th Century_ [2002] ch. 10 "Race Relations and Civil Rights" pp. 331-2. ^^ Communism possesses a language which every people can understand. Its elements are hunger, envy, death. --Heinrich Heine (17971856) German poet. Attributed in Maturin M. Ballou _Pearls of Thought_, p. 45 [1881]. In January 1952, [...] Mao ordered [a] campaign [...] called "the Five-Antis." The offences were bribery, tax evasion, pilfering state property, cheating and stealing economic information. It was aimed at private businessmen, whose property had not been confiscated, to force them to disgorge money, as well as to frighten them out of acts like bribery and tax evasion. One person involved at a high level put the number of suicides [...] as at least 200,000-300,000. In Shanghai so many people jumped from skyscrapers that they acquired the nickname "parachutes." One eyewitness wondered why people jumped into the street rather than into the river. The reason, he discovered, was that they wanted to safeguard their families: 'If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn't have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong, and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down to the street.' --Jung Chang and Dan Halliday _Mao: The Unknown Story_ [2005] I consider your crime worse than murder. ... I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Ruissia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack. --Judge Irving R. Kaufman (19101992) Presided over Rosenberg trial; sentencing the Rosenbergs to death for espionage [5 April 1951]. - If anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin, he deceives himself. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle. --Nikita Khrushchev (18941971) Soviet statesman, Premier [19581964]. On the likelihood of the Soviet Union rejecting communism; speech in Moscow [17 September 1955]. Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all. --Nikita Khrushchev (18941971) Soviet statesman, Premier [19581964]. Speech to Twentieth Congress of Communist Party [25 February 1956]. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you. --Nikita Khrushchev (18941971) Soviet statesman, Premier [19581964]. Speech to Western diplomats, Moscow [18 November 1956]. - There are only two great diseases in the world today Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul. --D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (18851930) English novelist and poet. _The Plumed Serpent_, ch. 2 [1926] - You must ... *instantly* introduce mass terror, *shoot and transport* hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex-officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted ... You must act at full stretch: mass searches. Executions for possession of weapons. Mass deportations of Mensheviks and unreliable elements. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (19171924). [Telegram of 9 August 1918.] All educational work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, in the field of political education in general and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of the aims of its dictatorship. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (19171924). [8 October 1920] Freedom is a bourgeois prejudice. ... We repudiate all morality which proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas which are outside the class conception. In our opinion, morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of the class war; everything is moral which is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat. Our morality consists solely in close discipline and conscious warfare against the exploiters. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (19171924). In Renι Fόlφp-Miller _Lenin and Gandhi_ [1927]. The guillotine only terrorized, it only broke down active resistance. But this is not enough for us. ... We have to break down passive resistance which doubtlessly is the most harmful and dangerous one. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (19171924). Attributed in G. P. Maximoff _The Guillotine at Work_ [1940]. They [capitalists] will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (19171924). Attributed in "Novyi Zhurnal" (The New Review) [September 1961]. - - Every Communist must grasp the truth: 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' --Mao Zedong (18931976) Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier and statesman who led his nation's communist revolution. Speech [6 November 1938], quoted in _Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung_, v. II [1961]. Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy. --Mao Zedong (18931976) Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier and statesman who led his nation's communist revolution. _Time_ [December 18, 1950], "United Nations: Petition to Peking" - The main difference between the Soviet camps and detention camps in the rest of the world is not their huge, unimaginable size or the murderous conditions found there, but something else altogether. It's the need to tell an endless series of lies to save your own life, to lie every day, to wear a mask for years and never say what you really think. In Soviet Russia, free citizens have to do the same thing. Dissembling and lies become the only means of defense. Public meetings, business meetings, encounters on the street, conversations, even posters on the wall all get wrapped up in an official language that doesn't contain a single word of truth. People in the West can't possibly understand what it is really like to lose the right to say what you think for years on end, and the way you have to repress the tiniest "illegal" thought you might have and stay silent as the tomb. The sort of pressure breaks something inside people. --Julius Margolin (19001971) Russian-born Jewish writer and political activist. _La Condition Inhumaine_ (Inhuman Condition) [1949] - In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. --Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels _The Communist Manifesto_ [1848] From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. --Karl Marx (18181883) German political philosopher. _Critique of the Gotha Program_, pt. I [1875] - I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. --Joseph McCarthy (19081957) American politician, Republican U.S. Senator [19471957]. Speech in Wheeling, West Virginia [9 February 1950]. - The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called Liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth on the fair-grounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents, too, but they always fall short of believing in the Liberals. --H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (18801956) American journalist and literary critic. _Prejudices: Third Series_ [1922] Communism will probably disappear altogether when the Russian experiment comes to a climax, and Bolshevism either converts itself into a sickly imitation of capitalism or blows itself up with a bang. The former issue seems much more likely. --H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (18801956) American journalist and literary critic. Baltimore _Evening Sun_ [14 July 1930] - In communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence. --Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (18091865) French social reformer. _What Is Property?_ [1840] ...Stalinism was thus aided, as Paul Johnson writes, "not only by superb public relations but by the naivete, gullibility and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals, especially their willingness to overlook what W.H. Auden called the necessary murder.' " --Ronald Radosh, "But Today The Struggle: Spain and the Intellectuals", _The New Criterion_ [October 1986] It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if you ever hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself that will be the man who's not after your soul. --Ayn Rand (19051982) Russian-born American writer. _The Fountainhead_ [1943] The economy of communism is an economy which grows in an atmosphere of misery and want. --Eleanor Roosevelt (18841962) American human rights activist, diplomat, and wife of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "My Day" (syndicated newspaper column) [12 February 1947] - Nearly 20 years ago, confined to an 8-by-10 cell in a prison on the border of Siberia, I was granted by my Soviet jailers the 'privilege' of reading the latest copy of Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the Communist regime. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, prisoners quickly spread the word of Reagan's 'provocation' throughout the prison. The dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us. --Natan Sharansky (b. 1948) Ukranian-born anti-Communist and Israeli politician and writer. "Afraid of the Truth", in _The Washington Post_ [12 October 2000]. - The small hall echoed with stormy applause, rising to an ovation! ... However, who would dare to be the *first* to stop? ... After eleven minutes the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat ... That same night the factory director was arrested [and] his interrogator reminded him: 'Don't ever be the first to stop applauding!' --Alexander Solzhenitsyn (19182008) Russian novelist. _The Gulag Archipelago_, pp.27-8. [1999 edn.] - The opening of Soviet archives in recent years has confirmed that the Communist Party in the United States was financed and controlled from Moscow. It was never about a set of beliefs or values for the benefit of Americans. It was an organization of traitors serving a foreign dictatorship that murdered millions. ... Would [Hollywood protestors against Elia Kazan] denounce an "informer" from inside the Ku Klux Klan who revealed the names of other KKK members? What about an informer from inside the right-wing militia movement? As in so many other areas, it is not the principle that the left is concerned about. It is the question of whose ox is gored. --Thomas Sowell (b. 1930) American economist and author. "Naming Names" [19 March 1999] - Class is a communist concept. It groups people in bundles, and sets them against one another. --Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925) British conservative stateswoman and Prime Minister [1979-1990]. In Brenda Maddox _Maggie: The First Lady_ [2003]. - No one has the intention of building a wall. --Walter Ulbricht (18931973) German Communist leader and after WW II head of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). [17 June 1961] & see: It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy (19171963) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19611963]. Commenting on the building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961; in Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers _Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye_, p. 350 [1972]. & note: As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: 'This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.' Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom. --Ronald Reagan (19112004) American President [19811989] and former Hollywood actor. "Tear Down This Wall" speech, West Berlin [12 June 1987]. - Practically no one is a 'communist' today. What happened? Fundamental attitudes don't disappear into thin air. People might die, but ideas rarely do, especially when the idea is one of only two major strains of political thought that excite the people, dominate the minds, and determine the affairs of man for centuries. It must count among the most amazing spectacles of history to be inundated with the rhetoric, theory, and practice of communism, and see not one communist around. We read and hear daily about class warfare, redistribution of wealth, the 'dispossessed' masses, the disadvantaged, universal health care, speech codes, sensitivity training, restrictions on parents' rights, school-to-work the list goes on and on. The agenda is with us, the Party is not. --Balint Vazsonyi (19362003) Hungarian-born American concert pianist and political philosopher. _America's 30 Years War_ [1998] - Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic .... The association will, after enough repetition, become "fact" in the public mind. --Communist Party, Moscow Central Committee [1943] Every culture has its distinctive and normal system of government. Yours is democracy, moderated by corruption. Ours is totalitarianism, moderated by assassination. --anon. Russian end page | CALAMITIES - CALM | CALUMNY - CANADA | CANCER - CAPITAL PUNISHMENT | CAPITALISM | CAREFREE - CARPE DIEM | CARTER (JIMMY) - CATS & DOGS | CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES - CENSORSHIP | CERTAINTY - CHANGE | CHANGING (ONE'S MIND) & CHANGING TIMES | CHARACTER | CHARACTER ASSASINATION - CHEERFULNESS | CHEER UP! - CHILDHOOD | CHILDREN | CHILDREN'S RHYME | CHINA | CHOCOLATE - CHRISTIANITY | CHRISTMAS | CHURCH - CIGARS | CIRCUMSTANCES & CITIES | CIVILITY - CIVIL RIGHTS | CLARITY - CLEVER | CLOTHES - COFFEE | COLD - COLORS | COMEDY | COMFORT - COMMON SENSE | COMMUNICATION | COMMUNISM | COMPANIONSHIP - COMPASSION | COMPETITION - COMPLIMENTS | COMPOSERS - CONDUCTORS | CONFESSION - CONQUEST | CONSCIENCE - CONTENTED | CONTEXT - CONVERSATION | CONVICTION & COOKING | COOLIDGE - CORPORATIONS | CORRUPTION - COURAGE | COURT - COWS | CREATIVITY - CRIME | CRIME & PUNISHMENT - CROOKS | CRITICISM & CRITICS | CROWD (THE) - CUBA | CULTURE - CYNICS | | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The Reviews | |
||
