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Sections (Content) :
• 1
Stalin's leadership in Russia transformed that country into a vast prison camp and over mountains of dead and living bodies created the super-power which he bequeathed to his successors. The Chinese Communists seized power in China and yoked themselves to the Russian drive to win power in the world. Together they plunged on down the dark road of totalitarianism.
• 2
The Communists did not invent the concept of the states' precedence over the individual. The Communists lifted it lock, stock, and barrel from their predecessors, the czars, as they lifted so many other facets of czarist rulership -- the cry of foreign encirclement, political confessions of guilt, forced movements of people from their homes, exile to Siberia, adulation of a political father figure, and so forth.
• 3
...life under the Communist dictatorship is more terrible than death.
• 4
...the capitalists will soon realize that when the people are shot down by those who call themselves Revolutionists, the Revolution itself will become hateful in the eyes of the masses...
• 5
Civilized nations have suffered too much in the long, hard struggle for the emancipation of the individual, to disown their past work and to tolerate a Government that would make itself felt in the smallest details of a citizen's life, even if that Government had no other aim than the good of the community. Should an authoritarian Socialist society ever succeed in establishing itself, it could not last; general discontent would soon force it to break up, or to reorganize itself on principles of liberty.
• 6
The [Bolshevik] revolution which had loomed after the world-wide slaughter like the dawn of liberation for the international proletariat and the whole of mankind now appeared to us as one of the deadliest threats to the future of the peoples. The methodical police terror, the Party's tightening grip upon the whole of social life, the systematic annihilation of all non-Bolshevik currents, the no less systematic extermination of all revolutionaries who thought along lines different from those of the new masters, and indeed the eradication of every hint of dissent within the Party all proved that we were on the road to a new despotism that was not merely political but also intellectual, mental and moral, reminiscent of the darkest days of the Middle Ages.
• 7
Quoting a Central Committee statement, Mao contended that "only 30 percent of Stalin's decisions were bad, whereas 70 percent were good." Ironically, these terms would be used two decades later to characterize Mao's rule.
• 8
[Follower of Ho Chi Minh] "Respected Uncle, why do we allow this band of traitors and assassins to survive? At your order, we would eterminate them in the space of one night."
Uncle [Ho Chi Minh] smiled, and pointing to his office, asked us in turn: "Suppose that a mouse entered this room. Would you throw stones or try to trap it or evict it?"
"If we threw stones we would risk destroying precious objects in the room."
"It's the same with counterrevolutionary elements," said Uncle.
• 9
If one prefers the kind of images that Karl Marx was fond of, Lenin's strategy saw revolution as a Cesarean birth.
• 10
To be marching up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating slogans, and then to be bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger with a sub-machine-gun — that is not my idea of a useful way to die.
• 11
...it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different.
• 12
...by acquiescing to centralized state power, Marxist and other socialists become servants of the state and help to quash hope for genuine liberation.
• 13
Every major Marxist party has renounced Marxism for social democracy, acted as an apologist for a dictatorship, or headed a brutal dictatorship itself.
• 14
The communist slogan, "All for the people", inspired me with its nobility and beauty, and in February, 1920, I entered the Russian Communist Party as a candidate. But the "first shot" fired at the peaceful population, at my dearly beloved children of which there are about seven thousand in Kronstadt, fills me with horror that I may be considered as sharing responsibility for the blood of the innocents thus shed. I feel that I can no longer believe in and propagate that which has disgraced itself by fiendish act. Therefore with the first shot, I have ceased to regard myself as a member of the Communist Party.
• 15
The appeal to violence is the basic feature of the program we are opposing here. We have never believed in the wonder-working properties of violence. Since revolutions are frequently accompanied by acts of violence, the superficial observer is unable to discriminate between violence and revolution. It is, according to Plekhanov, as if it were enough to open an umbrella to cause rain to fall, simply because when it rains people open their umbrellas!
Chronology :
April 11, 2020 : Totalitarianism -- Added.
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