Bloc Party Quotes

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky.

We are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world. We are living in a very dangerous age in which insatiably greedy men are prepared to sacrifice anybody’s health and tranquility to satisfy their own insatiable greed for money and power. I am aghast at what selfishness, and the drive for power have done to our society. I worry as I find the world so increasingly horrible that I do not see how anything as wonderful as your life can escape. The best thing you can do is to keep some enclaves of satisfying decent life. I am fed up with everything but God and nature and human beings (whom I love and pity, as I always did). I feel glad I am a Christian, glad that I am without allegiance to any bloc, party, or groups, except to our Judeo-Christian tradition (modified by science and common sense). God keep you all and help you to grow.

The breakdown of the European party system occurred in a spectacular way with Hitler's rise to power. It is now often conveniently forgotten that at the moment of the outbreak of the second World War, the majority of European countries has already adopted some form of dictatorship and discarded the party system, and that this revolutionary change in government has been effected in most countries without revolutionary upheaval. Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power. After all, it did not make much difference if a few thousand almost unarmed people staged a march on Rome and took over the government of Italy, or whether in Poland (in 1934) a so-called "partyless bloc," with a program of support for a semifascist government and a membership drawn from the nobility and the poorest peasantry, workers and businessmen, Catholics and orthodox Jews, legally won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament.

I feel glad I am a Christian, glad I am without allegiance to any bloc, party, or groups, except to our Judeo-Christian tradition (modified by science and common sense). God keep you all and cause you to grow.

When the clowns of British politics - arch-Brexiteer cartoon characters 'Boorish Johnson' and 'JackOff Grease-Smug' advocate ad infinitum that Britain should leave the EU in order to be free to sign her own trade deals; they seem to have overlooked the towering elephant in the room, namely the current occupant of the White House (another clown) - who appears hell-bent on destabilising world trade via crude protectionist policies. Both Tories, despite receiving the best British education money can buy, would do well to revisit their post war history books and be reminded of one of the key objectives of the European Project and in due course the European Union - specifically to promote peace and prosperity amongst previously warring neighbours by forming a unified trading bloc which in time, due to its effective size, also acted as a useful counterweight to US hegemony. Go find another circus for your buffoonery and leave the deadly serious business of politics to principled individuals with the true national interest at heart !

When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.

The lessons of post-Communist states can help us to think through some of the difficulty of describing the corruption—or whatever it ought to be called—of the Trump administration. Soviet Bloc countries, with their one-party systems and command economies, fostered a symbiotic relationship between power and wealth (though wealth was not measured in money). In fact, the only way to accumulate wealth was to become a part of the party hierarchy—and at the top of the party pyramid, people could achieve fantastic wealth. These systems served as the foundations for the mafia states of Hungary and Russia, where the party was replaced with a political clan centered on a patron who distributes money and power.

The Soviets replaced him with a non-Jewish figure, Imre Nagy. Nagy was a Communist, but a reformer rather than a Stalinist. He had stood out from the beginning of his political career, when in the 1920s he had been sent to prison for his Communist beliefs and had arrived there wearing a bowler hat. “A Communist with bowler hat!” exclaimed the Hungarian journalist Tibor Méray. “He must be a different kind of Communist.”6 Later, he got into trouble with his party for refusing to stand at attention when “The Internationale” was played. It had been suggested in the press and in American State Department documents that he could be a Hungarian version of Josip Broz Tito, the charismatic president of Yugoslavia: unique among Eastern Bloc leaders for publicly splitting from Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Il sait quelque chose que je ne sais pas  : que je partirai. Que mon existence se jouera ailleurs. Loin, très loin de Barbezieux, de sa langueur, de ses ciels plombés, de son horizon bouché. Que je m'en échapperai comme on s'évade d'une prison, que moi, j'y réussirai. Que je voudrai la ville capitale, que je m'y épanouirai, que j'y trouverai ma place, que j'y ferai ma place. Qu'ensuite, je sillonnerai la planète, puisque je ne suis pas fait pour la sédentarité. Il imagine une ascension, une élévation, une épiphanie. Il me croit promis à un destin brillant. Il est convaincu qu'au sein de notre communauté presque oubliée des dieux, il ne peut exister qu'un nombre infime d'élus et que j'en fais partie. Il pense que bientôt je n'aurai plus rien à voir avec ce monde de mon enfance, que ce sera comme un bloc de glace détaché d'un continent.

By the 1950s, most Republicans had accommodated themselves to New Deal–era health and safety regulations, and the Northeast and the Midwest produced scores of Republicans who were on the liberal end of the spectrum when it came to issues like conservation and civil rights. Southerners, meanwhile, constituted one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful blocs, combining a deep-rooted cultural conservatism with an adamant refusal to recognize the rights of African Americans, who made up a big share of their constituency. With America’s global economic dominance unchallenged, its foreign policy defined by the unifying threat of communism, and its social policy marked by a bipartisan confidence that women and people of color knew their place, both Democrats and Republicans felt free to cross party lines when required to get a bill passed. They observed customary courtesies when it came time to offer amendments or bring nominations to a vote and kept partisan attacks and hardball tactics within tolerable bounds. The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

The Germans were eventually beaten only when the liberal countries allied themselves with the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the conflict and paid a much higher price: 25 million Soviet citizens died in the war, compared to half a million Britons and half a million Americans. Much of the credit for defeating Nazism should be given to communism. And at least in the short term, communism was also the great beneficiary of the war. The Soviet Union entered the war as an isolated communist pariah. It emerged as one of the two global superpowers, and the leader of an expanding international bloc. By 1949 eastern Europe became a Soviet satellite, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War, and the United States was gripped by anti-communist hysteria. Revolutionary and anti-colonial movements throughout the world looked longingly towards Moscow and Beijing, while liberalism became identified with the racist European empires. As these empires collapsed, they were usually replaced by either military dictatorships or socialist regimes, not liberal democracies. In 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, confidently told the liberal West that ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

The stars aligned for Justin Trudeau in the last few weeks of the campaign. "Ultimately, voters opted for a change of government. If the Liberals hadn't done all their work. the NDP would have won the election. Anyway, the strongest desire felt by voters was to get rid of the Conservatives," says pollster Jean-Marc Leger. In Quebec, Trudeau exceeded all expectations by winning 40 of the province's 78 seats. Vote-splitting by the NDP and the Bloc handed victory to the Liberals in several Quebec ridings. The last time the Liberals had made that many gains was in 1980 when Pierre Elliot Trudeau won 74 of the province's 75 seats. The Liberals swept the four Atlantic provinces, a historical first. The party won all 32 seats there, in strongholds where the Conservatives were well established. The Liberal game plan - whatever its shortcomings - had what it took to get the Liberal Party of Canada from third place to victory in a single election. This was another historical first. "To turn a situation like that around the way Trudeau did is exceptional," says Jean-Marc Leger. "There was a desire for him to succeed, and he did succeed." For Justin Trudeau, the Trudeau name had long been both an asset and a liability. The son had inherited his father's old party but now he had rebuilt it in his own image. He had run his campaign his way. This was his victory, and his alone.

It is especially humbling that the simplest Trotskyist, council communist or anarcho-syndicalist militant saw much more clearly than famous and brilliant theorists that, however deserved the terminal defeat of the Soviet bloc and of Soviet-style state capitalism had been, however understandable and salutary the sudden East European infatuation with freedom and rights, however promising the fall of the market Stalinist parties, it was at the same time a historical disaster, heralding the demise of working-class power, of adversary culture, the end of two centuries of beneficent fear for the ruling classes. What was a philosophical construction and idealization in Marx’s Capital—capitalism as a total system, with capital as the only Subject—became a palpable, quotidian reality.

What thus emerged from the Russian Revolution was a new model of state capitalism which, in turn, would become attractive to the bourgeoisie of “backward” countries and colonies of the Western colonial powers (like Cuba, Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, etc.). They could use the State to keep Western multinationals from bleeding the country dry, and try to “develop” independently through state mobilisation of the population. Devoid of real proletarian initiative, this was a flawed model, and even the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic abandoned Stalinism after the death of Mao by setting up Special Economic Zones to attract international capital and build a new Chinese capitalist class (so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). What they have in fact returned to is the type of state capitalism that Lenin advocated in 1918, opposed by the Left Communists of that time. Across the world many workers in the former Eastern European bloc still think it was better than what they have now. But neither “state capitalism” nor “state socialism” are socialism as understood by Marx. Both depend on the exploitation of workers whose surplus value is the basis for capitalist profit and who have no actual political say in the system.

SANDINISTAS. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional—FSLN), more commonly known as Sandinistas, ruled Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990, attempting to transform the country along Marxist-influenced lines. The group formed in the early 1960s, and spent the first two decades of its existence engaged in a guerrilla campaign against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, receiving backing from Cuba which remained a close ally when the Sandinistas took office. With popular revulsion towards Somoza rising, in 1978 the Sandinistas encouraged the Nicaraguan people to rise up against his regime. After a brief but bloody battle, in July 1979 the dictator was forced into exile, and the Sandinistas emerged victorious. With the country in a state of morass, they quickly convened a multi-interest five-person Junta of National Reconstruction to implement sweeping changes. The junta included rigid Marxist and long-serving Sandinista Daniel Ortega, and under his influence Somoza’s vast array of property and land was confiscated and brought under public ownership. Additionally, mining, banking and a limited number of private enterprises were nationalized, sugar distribution was taken into state hands, and vast areas of rural land were expropriated and distributed among the peasantry as collective farms. There was also a highly successful literacy campaign, and the creation of neighborhood groups to place regional governance in the hands of workers. Inevitably, these socialist undertakings got tangled up in the Cold War period United States, and in 1981 President Ronald Reagan began funding oppositional “Contra” groups which for the entire decade waged an economic and military guerrilla campaign against the Sandinista government. Despite this and in contrast to other communist states, the government fulfilled its commitment to political plurality, prompting the growth of opposition groups and parties banned under the previous administration. In keeping with this, an internationally recognized general election was held in 1984, returning Ortega as president and giving the Sandinistas 61 of 90 parliamentary seats. Yet, in the election of 1990, the now peaceful Contra’s National Opposition Union emerged victorious, and Ortega’s Sandinistas were relegated to the position of the second party in Nicaraguan politics, a status they retain today. The Marxism of the Sandinistas offered an alternative to the Marx- ism–Leninism of the Soviet Bloc and elsewhere. This emanated from the fact that the group attempted to blend a Christian perspective on theories of liberation with a fervent devotion to both democracy and the Marxian concepts of dialectical materialism, worker rule and proletariat-led revolution. The result was an arguably fairly success- ful form of socialism cut short by regional factors.

However, it appears Roosevelt’s failed legislative effort, and accompanying public attacks on the Court, had their intended effect. Associate Justice Owens began voting with the liberal bloc and Associate Justice Van Devanter announced his retirement. A coincidence? I doubt it.

White evangelicalism in particular appears to be undergoing seismic shifts. The religious group that, during my lifetime, has supplied the Republican Party's most important single voting bloc, making up close to one-third of GOP voters and which supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 in massive numbers, is getting older and whiter as a time when the nation as a whole is becoming increasingly diverse.

Today, members of the same demographic sometimes resort to violence and intimidation to achieve a fraction of the political influence they once wielded as a powerful voting bloc (Dancygier 2010). Estranged from the middle, they feel silenced and ignored by mainstream political parties and therefore, in the United States and the United Kingdom, have created their own. In

One can point to the confusion created by heretical concepts, such as those found in so-called Liberation Theology, promoted chiefly by the Jesuits, which became very popular and influential in Latin America.519 We know, of course, that Liberation Theology was pervaded with Marxist sentiment. Some ultimate insiders, such as Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the leading Romanian spy chief who defected to the West in the late 1970s, have gone so far as to claim that Liberation Theology was created by the KGB. “The movement was born in the KGB,” states Pacepa unequivocally, “and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology.” Pacepa, a very high-level Communist Bloc intelligence official, gave specific details: “The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret “’Party-State Dezinformatsiya [Disinformation] Program’ approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool.”520

When these same globalists became fearful of worldwide communism (they needed separate national or economic blocs to play off against each other for the tensions necessary for maximum profit and control), they supported National Socialism in Germany. German army intelligence agent Adolf Hitler was funded to provide a bulwark against the Communist tide by enlarging his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), in turn sowing the seeds of World War II. Three prominent Americans who were instrumental in funding the Nazis were National City Bank (now Citicorp) chairman John J. McCloy; Schroeder Bank attorneys Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles; and Prescott Bush, a director of Union Banking Corporation and the Hamburg America shipping line.

But the foremost concerns of the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc—affordable housing, clean water, police brutality, the racial wealth gap, and reparations for state-sanctioned discrimination (as has been accorded other groups discriminated against in the United States)—have remained on the back burner, or have even been considered radioactive issues for the party that African-Americans help to sustain. To those who say that this would be impractical, it would be the duty of the party representing and dependent on the subordinate caste to open the eyes of their fellow Americans and make the case for a more egalitarian country.

After a massive military parade, the Soviet leader’s pronouncements to the media in a public walkabout (unheard of by any Eastern Bloc leader until then) shocked Honecker and those closest to him in the SED hierarchy—Gorbachev announcing to the cameras, “A party that lags behind the times will harvest bitter fruit.

The “Chinese question” found its answer at the national level, in the debate over a California-led plan for Chinese exclusion. In reconstructing the United States, California was emerging as the regional swing vote, just as the state’s enfranchised settlers became single-issue voters. The transcontinental railroad solidified the state’s membership in the Union, which was far from a given considering how often the territory had changed hands in the previous few decades as well as its continual political instability and foreign interference in Mexico, not to mention the temporary sundering of the United States itself. California’s Unionist majority helped repair that split, cutting off the Confederacy’s western tendency. But Unionist didn’t necessarily mean faithfully devoted to principles of abolition democracy and the spirit of the slave revolution. The race-based exclusion of Chinese from the country flew in the face of Reconstruction and the black-led attempt to create a pluralist, racially equal nation. But that seeming contradiction was no contradiction at all for California’s white Jacksonians, because they maintained a consistent position in favor of free white labor and free white labor only. As for the regionally aligned party duopoly, California’s vote swung against the South during the war, but it could swing back. Federal civil rights legislation meant to force the ex-Confederate states to integrate also applied to settler California’s relations with the Chinese, which left the southern and western delegations looking for a solution to their linked nonwhite labor problems. If former slaves and their children were able to escape not just their commodity status but also their working role in the regional economy, southern planters threatened to bring in Chinese laborers to replace them, just as planters had in the West Indies. That would blow the exclusion plan out of the water, which gave California an incentive to compromise with the South. These two racist blocs came to an agreement that permanently set the direction of the modern American project: They agreed to cede the South to the Confederate redeemers and exclude the Chinese.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing, never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing [amoral aristocratic radicalism], never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

Ironically, his Communist counterpart in East Germany was also a former anti-Nazi. Walter Ulbricht escaped to Russia during the Hitler years and became a stalwart supporter of Joseph Stalin. He then returned to Germany in 1945 to head the new Socialist Unity Party, lobbying for reform and independence from the Soviet bloc while at the same time advocating the building of the Berlin Wall. He blamed, … the 10 million Germans who in 1932 cast their votes for Hitler in free elections, although we Communists warned that ‘He who votes for Hitler, votes for war.’ … The tragedy of the German people consists of the fact that they obeyed a band of gangsters. The Communist state ensured East Germans would not make the same mistake again by depriving them of the right to vote.

The Republican decision to exploit the race issue and abandon the option of becoming a party of reform manifested itself in the 1961 speech in Atlanta by Barry Goldwater to a gathering of Southern Republicans. “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are,” he declared.

Each party used evictions, forced residential cleansing, denial of public services, government-sponsored gang violence, intimidation by a politicized police force, and outright demolition of entire garrisons to punish the other party’s supporters. Elections, by the 1970s, had become violent turf battles in which whole neighborhoods voted en bloc and fought each other with rifles in the streets. They were fighting quite literally for survival, since the losers’ districts might be physically demolished. This pattern empowered nonstate armed groups.

The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows: Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror. Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage. Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government. Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West. Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.