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![]() . . . see: "CAPITALISM" see: "CHINA" 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, in Solomon Volkov _St Petersburg_ [1996]. - Capitalism, it is said, is a system wherein man exploits man. And communism is vice versa. --Daniel Bell (1919 ) 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]. - A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. . . . 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: 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] - 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 (1945 ) British-born American author. 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] (Mr. Edwards is a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.) ^ 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 copper and pocket a shilling. --Ebenezer Elliott (17811849) English poet. 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 (1930 ) _American Law in the 20th Century_ [2002] Ch. 10 "Race Relations and Civil Rights" pp. 331-332. ^^ ...you look at Soviet history and see the Gulag, the executions of the Terror, the pervasive oppression, and the economic failure. Psychologically, the leftists ... see little of that. They see a Communist state that articulated their vision of the future and which sought to destroy the societies and institutions they hated. They cannot see the horror that communism actually created. They look on that horror and see something else because they cannot admit to themselves that their vision is beyond human grasp. ... The idealized future that has not happened is more real and more important to them than the past that really did happen. ... You will get few mea culpas from hard left academics because they feel no guilt. You think they should regret getting the facts of history wrong. They care not at all about the facts of history, only about the politics of the future. They feel they got the politics right and so no mea culpa is due. --John Earl Haynes, interview, "In Denial", http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10932 Communism possesses a language which every people can understand. Its elements are hunger, envy, death. --Heinrich Heine (17971856) German poet. 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].) 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]. 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]. - 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] - 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 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). 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] 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.] 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). Quoted in "Novyi Zhurnal" (The New Review) [September 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" 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] "Problems of War and Strategy" in _Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung_, v. II [1961]. - - 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] 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] - 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]. 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] ...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] 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]. 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. - 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 (1948 ) Ukranian-born anti-Communist and Israeli politician and writer. "Afraid of the Truth", _The Washington Post_ [12 October 2000] - 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 (1930 ) American economist and author. - Class is a communist concept. It groups people in bundles, and sets them against one another. --Margaret Thatcher (1925 ) British conservative stateswoman and Prime Minister [1979-1990]. In Brenda Maddox _Maggie: The First Lady_ [2003]. - [On Lillian Hellman (19051984) American dramatist and Dashiell Hammett (18941961) American author of detective novels] In the end, Hellman was no more loyal to her art than she was to anything or anyone else, except for Stalin, whom she revered to the bitter end. Much the same could just as easily be said of Dashiell Hammett, of course; once he stopped writing, he became a spiritual corpse responsive only to the call of Johnny Walker Red, prostitutes, and Communism. Perhaps that is the best explanation of why these two coldhearted creatures cleaved to each other through thick and (mostly) thin: they had their love of power politics to keep them warm. --Terry Treachout (1956 ) American critic. _A Terry Treachout Reader_ [2004] - - 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 Aug. 1961, in Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers _Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye [1972] p.350. - 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] - --- "In Solidarity" By Lech Walesa (1943 ) [11 June 2004] _The Wall Street Journal_ GDANSK, Poland When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989. Poles fought for their freedom for so many years that they hold in special esteem those who backed them in their struggle. Support was the test of friendship. President Reagan was such a friend. His policy of aiding democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the dark days of the Cold War meant a lot to us. We knew he believed in a few simple principles such as human rights, democracy and civil society. He was someone who was convinced that the citizen is not for the state, but vice-versa, and that freedom is an innate right. I often wondered why Ronald Reagan did this, taking the risks he did, in supporting us at Solidarity, as well as dissident movements in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, while pushing a defense buildup that pushed the Soviet economy over the brink. Let's remember that it was a time of recession in the U.S. and a time when the American public was more interested in their own domestic affairs. It took a leader with a vision to convince them that there are greater things worth fighting for. Did he seek any profit in such a policy? Though our freedom movements were in line with the foreign policy of the United States, I doubt it. I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They're convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them. The 1980s were a curious time a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Communism was coming to an end. It had used up its means and possibilities. The ground was set for change. But this change needed the cooperation, or unspoken understanding, of different political players. Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War. In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented a vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. Mr. Reagan was no ostrich who hoped that problems might just go away. He thought that problems are there to be faced. This is exactly what he did. Every time I met President Reagan, at his private estate in California or at the Lenin shipyard here in Gdansk, I was amazed by his modesty and even temper. He didn't fit the stereotype of the world leader that he was. Privately, we were like opposite sides of a magnet: He was always composed; I was a raging tower of emotions eager to act. We were so different yet we never had a problem with understanding one another. I respected his honesty and good humor. It gave me confidence in his policies and his resolve. He supported my struggle, but what unified us, unmistakably, were our similar values and shared goals. * * * I have often been asked in the United States to sign the poster that many Americans consider very significant. Prepared for the first almost-free parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989, the poster shows Gary Cooper as the lonely sheriff in the American Western, "High Noon." Under the headline "At High Noon" runs the red Solidarity banner and the date June 4, 1989 of the poll. It was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the "Wild" West, especially the U.S. But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland. It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together. As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn't express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have. Mr. Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995 - 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] - The sad fact is that Edmund Wilson was a political simpleton who, in writing "To the Finland Station," produced a book that often degenerated into Stalinist apologetics. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he was for a time an eager convert to the Marxist faith, going so far as to laud Moscow as "the moral top of the world, where the light never really goes out" and describing Lenin as a kind of secular saint: "If he gravitated into the role of dictator, it was because the social physics of Russia made it inevitable that he should do so. In his drive toward personal domination there was nothing either of the egotism of genius or of the craving for honor of the statesman. Lenin was one of the most selfless of great men. He did not care about seeing his name in print, he did not want people to pay him homage; he did not care about how he looked, he had no pose of not caring about it. He regarded his political opponents not as competitors who had to be crushed, but as colleagues he had regrettably lost or collaborators he had failed to recruit. Unlike certain of the other great revolutionists, Marx or Bakunin, for example, he is imaginable as a statesman of the West, developing in a different tradition." --Hilton Kramer, in "The Wall Street Journal" [26 August 2005], reviewing _Edmund Wilson: A Life In Literature_ by Lewis M. Dabney end page | CALAMITIES - CALM | CALUMNY - CANADA | CANCER - CAN'T WIN | 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 | CHILE & CHINA | CHOCOLATE - CHRISTIANITY | CHRISTMAS | CHURCH - CIGARS | CIRCUMSTANCES & CITIES | CIVILITY - CIVIL RIGHTS | CLARITY - CLICHES | 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 | CORRECTING - 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 End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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