At Stanthorpe, Queensland’s fruit-growing centre he said: “Australians, wake up, we are on a dangerous course with these people. The Shah of Iran told me when he was here he was disturbed that we were going to communism. Australians keep coming to me saying to do everything I can do to fight Canberra. They say […]
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Tags:communism·Queensland·Sir Joh
For forty years he had lived strictly in accordance with the vows of his order, the Party. He had held to the rules of logical calculation. He had burnt the remains of the old, illogical morality from his consciousness with the acid of reason. He had turned away from the temptations of the silent partner, […]
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‘A page Satanas!’ repeated Ivanov and poured himself out another glass. ‘In old days, temptation was of carnal nature. Now it takes the form of pure reason. The values change. I would like to write a Passion play in which God and the Devil dispute for the soul of Saint Rubashov. After a life of […]
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FUNNY – THAT YOU FELT IT AT ONCE… . FELT WHAT? EXPLAIN! tapped Rubashov, sitting up on the bunk. No. 402 seemed to think it over. After a short hesitation he tapped: TONIGHT POLITICAL DIFFERENCES ARE BEING SETTLED… . Rubashov understood. He sat leaning against the wall, in the dark, waiting to hear more. But […]
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Tags:communism·executions·extremism·Politics·Quotes·totalitarianism
‘In your pamphlets,’ continued Rubashov in the same dry tone of voice, ‘of which you admit to be the author, there frequently appear phrases such as this: that we have suffered a defeat, that a catastrophe has befallen the Party, and that we must start afresh and change our policy fundamentally. That is defeatism. It […]
Rubashov stood stiffly between the bed and the bucket, held his breath, and waited for the first scream. He remembered that the first scream, in which terror still predominated over physical pain, was usually the worst; what followed was already more bearable, one got used to it and after a time one could even draw […]
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Tags:communism·Human Nature·Human Rights·Pain·prison·Torture
Koestler’s decision to abandon Communism almost as soon as he had been freed from Spain—because of the hysterical faking of the Moscow purge trials in 1938—was expressed in such brilliantly diagnostic and dialectical terms that it bears quoting: It is a logical contradiction when with uncanny regularity the leadership sees itself obliged to undertake more […]
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Tags:communism·leadership·Politics
If you are looking for an irony of history, you will find it not in the fact that Marx was underpaid by an American newspaper, but in the fact that he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort […]
Tags:communism·Democracy·History·Marx·Politics·progressive politics·USA
Rosa Luxemburg’s warning to Lenin that revolution can move swiftly from the dictatorship of a class to the dictatorship of a party, to be followed by the dictatorship of a committee of that party and eventually by the rule of a single man who will soon enough dispense with that committee.
Tags:communism·Democracy·Dictatorship·Politics·Process·socialism
when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
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Tags:communism·Politics·progressive politics·socialism·Working Class