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, […]
[Read more →]
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 […]
[Read more →]
Tags:communism·executions·extremism·Politics·Quotes·totalitarianism
It was Albert Speer’s latest memorandum which had suddenly triggered Hitler’s insistence on a scorched-earth policy to the end. When Speer tried to persuade Hitler in the early hours of that morning that bridges should not be blown up unnecessarily, because their destruction meant ‘eliminating all further possibility for the German people to survive’, Hitler’s […]
In Auschwitz: People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prision, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way. What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply […]
[Read more →]
Tags:Death·Fascism·Genocide·Music·totalitarianism·WW2
There is divine judgement, there is the judgement of a State and the judgement of society, but there is one supreme judgement: the judgement of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian state and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of […]
[Read more →]
Tags:Free Choice·Freedom·Guilt·Liberty·morality·totalitarianism
A small surprise had been laid on for Eichmann and Liss during their tour of inspection. In the middle of the gas chamber, the engineers had laid a small table with hors-d’oeurves and wine. Reineke invited Eichmann and Liss to sit down. Eichmann laughed at this charming idea and said: ‘With the greatest of pleasure’.
[Read more →]
Tags:Genocide·totalitarianism·WW2
(Yershov’s Father) described their fifty-day journey, in winter, in a cattle-wagon with a leaking roof; day after day, the dead had travelled alongside the living. They had continued the journey on foot, the women carrying their children in their arms. Yershov’s mother had been delirious with fever. They had been taken to the middle of […]
[Read more →]
Tags:communism·Fate·government·totalitarianism
If Fascism should ever be fully assured of its final triumph, the world will choke in blood. If the day ever dawns when Fascism is without armed enemies, then its executioners will know no restraint: the greatest enemy of Fascism is man.
[Read more →]
Tags:Fascism·Freedom·pacifism·totalitarianism·war
A conversation between two Bolsheviks in a Siberian gulag: ‘Listen now,’ he said, sitting up in bed. ‘Listen, my friend. This will be the last time I call you like this.’ ‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Abarchuk. ‘You’re going to live!’ ‘I’d sooner undergo torture, but I have to say this… You listen too,’ he […]
Tags:communism·extremism·Freedom·Ideology·liberalism·totalitarianism
At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he […]
[Read more →]
Tags:extremism·non-violence·pacifism·totalitarianism