Communist Comrade Quotes

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

Political correctness is actually a term coined by the Chinese dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong. By “politically correct,” Mao meant adhering to the official position of the Communist Party, which the comrades referred to as “the party line.

The Communist Party, a seeming haven for the radical intelligentsia and apparently uninterested in the ethnic and religious origins of its members, became the sole refuge of certain marginal Jews, who believed it would bring a great and true salvation to the world, a revolutionary universalism in which the destructive differences that divided humankind would once and for all be forever dissolved. It mattered little to most Russians that these Jews were no more Jewish than their non-Jewish atheist party comrades; that they did not speak for or identify with Jews, and indeed were often the enemies of Jews. Further, because many Jews stepped into the vacuum created by the disintegration of the tsarist bureaucracy, it now seemed to many Russians that Jewish government officials were everywhere. Their sudden appearance, concurrent as it was with the Revolution and the Civil War, forever linked those events in the minds of Russians, for whom the Jew now became the evil cause of the Fatherland’s unutterable misery.

The gold-seekers began to work out what the main characters were like. They sketched out dramatis personae such as: UGOLIN: A grand master of the Fascist Order (bass) ALFONSINA: His daughter (coloratura soprano) COMRADE MITIN: A Soviet inventor (baritone) SFORZA: A fascist prince (tenor) GAVRILA: A Soviet Young Communist (mezzo-soprano dressed as a man) NINA: A Young Communist and daughter of a priest (lyric soprano)

Matchevici answered, “I don’t wish to remain alive and be ashamed to look in a mirror, because I will see the face of a traitor. I cannot accept such a condition. I prefer to die.” The officer of the secret police shook Matchevici’s hand and said, “I congratulate you. I didn’t expect any other answer from you. But I would like to make another proposal. Some of the prisoners have become our informers. They claim to be Commu­nist and they are denouncing you. They play a double role. We have no confidence in them. We would like to know in what measure they are sincere. Toward you they are traitors who are doing you much harm, informing us about your words and deeds. I understand that you don’t want to betray your comrades. But give us information about those who oppose you so you will save your life!” Matchevici answered, as promptly as the first time, “I am a disciple of Christ and He has taught us to love even our enemies. The men who betray us do us much harm but I cannot reward evil with evil. I cannot give information even against them. I pity them. I pray for them. I don’t wish to have any connection with the Communists.” Matche­vici came back from the discussion with the political officer and died in the same cell I was in. I saw him die—he was praising God. Love conquered even the natural thirst for life.

You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.

The Party's all-around intrusion into people's lives was the very point of the process known as 'thought reform." Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for 'thought examination' was held for those 'in the revolution." Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from 'bourgeois' backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self-criticism tapped into this.Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control. My mother's cell grilled her week after week, month after month, forcing her to produce endless self-criticisms.She had to consent to this agonizing process. Life for a revolutionary was meaningless if they were rejected by the Party. It was like excommunication for a Catholic. Besides, it was standard procedure. My father had gone through it and had accepted it as part of 'joining the revolution." In fact, he was still going through it. The Party had never hidden the fact that it was a painful process. He told my mother her anguish was normal.At the end of all this, my mother's two comrades voted against full Party membership for her. She fell into a deep depression. She had been devoted to the revolution, and could not accept the idea that it did not want her; it was particularly galling to think she might not get in for completely petty and irrelevant reasons, decided by two people whose way of thinking seemed light years away from what she had conceived the Party's ideology to be. She was being kept out of a progressive organization by backward people, and yet the revolution seemed to be telling her that it was she who was in the wrong. At the back of her mind was another, more practical point which she did not even spell out to herself: it was vital to get into the Party, because if she failed she would be stigmatized and ostracized.

The aristocratic rebel, of whom Byron was in his day the exemplar, is a very different type from the leader of a peasant or proletarian revolt. Those who are hungry have no need of an elaborate philosophy to stimulate or excuse discontent, and anything of the kind appears to the m, merely an amusement of the idle rich. They want what others have, not some intangible and metaphysical good. Though they may preach Christian love, as the medieval communist rebels did, their real reasons for doing so are very simple: that the lack of it in the rich and powerful causes the sufferings of the poor, and that the presence of it among comrades in revolt is thought essential to success. But experience of the struggle leads to a despair of the power of love, leaving naked hate as the driving force. A rebel of this type, if, like Marx, he invents a philosophy, invents one solely designed to demonstrate the ultimate victory of his party, not one concerned with values. His values remain primitive: the good is enough to eat, and the rest is talk. No hungry man is likely to think otherwise.

But I must tell you, comrade Lenin, that your assertion that the anarchists don’t understand ‘the present’ realistically, that they have no real connection with it and so forth, is fundamentally mistaken. The anarchist-communists in the Ukraine (or the ‘South of Russia’ to you communist-bolsheviks who try to avoid the word Ukraine), the anarchist-communists, I say, have already given many proofs that they are firmly pklanted in ‘the present’. The whole struggle of the revolutionary Ukrainian countryside against the Central Rada has been carried out under the ideological guidance of the anarchist-communists and also in part by the Socialist Revolutionaries (who, of course, have entirely different aims from the anarchist-communists in their struggle against the Central Rada). Your Bolsheviks have scarcely any presence in our villages. Where they have penetrated, their influence is minimal. Almost all the communes or peasant associations in the Ukraine were formed at the instigation of the anarchist-communists. The armed struggle of the working people against the counter-revolution in general and the Austro-German invasion in particular has been undertaken with the ideological and organic guidance of the anarchist-communists exclusively.

Matchevici answered, “I don’t wish to remain alive and be ashamed to look in a mirror, because I will see the face of a traitor. I cannot accept such a condition. I prefer to die.” The officer of the secret police shook Matchevici’s hand and said, “I congratulate you. I didn’t expect any other answer from you. But I would like to make another proposal. Some of the prisoners have become our informers. They claim to be Commu­nist and they are denouncing you. They play a double role. We have no confidence in them. We would like to know in what measure they are sincere. Toward you they are traitors who are doing you much harm, informing us about your words and deeds. I understand that you don’t want to betray your comrades. But give us information about those who oppose you so you will save your life!” Matchevici answered, as promptly as the first time, “I am a disciple of Christ and He has taught us to love even our enemies. The men who betray us do us much harm but I cannot reward evil with evil. I cannot give information even against them. I pity them. I pray for them. I don’t wish to have any connection with the Communists.” Matche­vici came back from the discussion with the political officer and died in the same cell I was in. I saw him die—he was praising God. Love

While most American unions supported the Marshall Plan as an economic boon for their members and a necessary defense measure for the West, Al Bernstein’s union did not. Along with all the other Communist-controlled unions in America, Al Bernstein’s United Public Workers attacked the Marshall Plan as a Cold War plot and launched an all-out campaign against it. On the political front, Al Bernstein and his comrades bolted the Democratic Party and organized the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace in the hope of unseating Truman and ending his anti-Communist program. Their actions were in fact a Soviet-orchestrated plot to sabotage the defense of Europe against Soviet aggression.

The one Asian nation with which we have, alas, made no headway whatsoever is China. … The Chinese government, in fact, is totally committed to the Arab war against Israel, and Mr. Arafat and his comrades are constantly given arms, money, and moral support by Peking, though I, for one, have never understood why, and for years, lived under the illusion that if we could only talk to the Chinese, we might get through to them. Two pictures come to my mind when I mention China. The first is the horror with which I picked up a mine manufactured in China – so far away and remote from us – which had put an end to the life of a six-year-old girl in a border settlement in Israel. I stood there near that small coffin, surrounded by weeping, enraged relatives. ‘What on earth can the Chinese have against us?’ I kept thinking. ‘They don’t even know us.’ Then I remember, at the celebration of Kenya’s independence, sitting at a table near that of the Chinese delegation. It was a very relaxed, festive occasion, and I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps if I go over and sit down with them, we can talk a bit.’ So I asked Ehud to introduce himself to the Chinese. He walked over, held out his hand to the head of the delegation and said, ‘My foreign minister is here and would like to meet you.’ The Chinese just averted their gaze. They didn’t even bother to say, ‘No, thank you, we don’t want to meet her.

There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.

Oil “Soviet Russia cannot survive without Baku’s oil,” told comrade Vladimir Lenin. One of the plans was to drain the Caspian Sea: “Is it possible? Can you drain the Caspian Sea?” said the powerful Stalin. It was more an order than a question.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Azerbaijan - Oil Country). Mafia “With his wife Victoria, they reigned here for nineteen years. This period Georgians called ironically the Victorian Era, and his wife got the name Queen Victoria. Victoria created the system when all was for sale: state documents ten times the price; 5,000 roubles to enter the Communist party; 50,000 for the judge job, … “ (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Gruzia - Where Soviet Mafia Was Born). Smoking “Smoking breaks in the USSR were long and often—and became an official excuse not to work, causing huge damage to the already failing state economy. But on the other hand, with zero unemployment and prison terms, if you are not on a payroll, the state could not provide enough work for everybody. People had to show up every day in the workplace. Boredom from nothing-to-do turned into massive laziness and Soviet workers spent long hours in the smoke rooms. For some, it was a place to relax, for others, to provoke a frank conversation—because … Well, let’s talk about it later.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Litva - Friends and Rebels). God “The bus was driving slowly, just forty km an hour on the slippery winter road. Outside was a spectacular view of the Caucasus mountains. Here and there appeared churches: nearby and far away, but always on the top of the hill: “Closer to God, as high as possible,” crossed His mind. The bus stopped with a creaking sound, and He slowly got off: “For me, Khor Virap Monastery will be the resting place: from the Soviet life … from the communist lies … I shall spend here the rest of my life. And from here … I shall go to eternity …” these were His last thoughts before He entered the monastery gate. He was dead tired from all that happened, walking uphill closer to God.” (- Angelika Regossi, “Russian Colonial Food”. Chapter: Armenia - Road in the First Christian State).

reason for communist dispiritedness. The Italian government suppressed the Turin rebels before they could

still remember how bravely we learned to read the new daily newspaper "Radianska Bukovina" (Red Bukovina), just trying to make out the headlines and slowly braving to comprehend the articles. By the beginning of September, barely two months from the occupation, we delved into the study of the History of the Party, meaning the communist party, according to the direction of the Stalin line, the official party line. The teacher was faced with an unusual task, namely, teaching a class, at a university, where practically nobody understood him or the textbook. After every few sentences he stopped to ask: Sie verstehen, Genossen? (Do you understand, comrades?) This was the extent of his knowledge of German. Most of us just picked up single words and wrote them down in the improvised dictionary. It was unusual, but not funny at all.

That the last leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, although devoted to what he called the ‘socialist idea’, had long been sceptical about the ultimate goal of communism was evident from the fact that he recalled with relish a joke from Khrushchev’s time, albeit committing it to print only after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist:     A certain lecturer, speaking about future communist society, concluded with the following remarks, ‘The breaking day of communism is already visible, gleaming just over the horizon.’ At this point an old peasant who had been sitting in the front row stood up and asked, ‘Comrade Lecturer, what is a horizon?’ The lecturer explained that it is a line where the earth and the sky seem to meet, having the unique characteristic that the more you move toward it, the more it moves away. The old peasant responded: ‘Thank you, Comrade Lecturer. Now everything is quite clear.’18 The

The POUM leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid, a church in the Calle Atocha. Nin was separated from his comrades and driven to Alcalá de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June. Despite the tortures he was subjected to by Orlov and his men, Nin refused to confess to the falsified accusations of passing artillery targets to the enemy. He was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to Constancia de la Mora, the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death. A grotesque example of Stalinist play-acting then took place. A group of German volunteers from the International Brigades in uniforms without insignia, pretending to be members of the Gestapo, charged into the house to make it look as if they had come to Nin’s rescue. ‘Evidence’ of their presence was then planted, including German documents, Falangist badges and nationalist banknotes. Nin, after being killed by Orlov’s men, was buried in the vicinity. When graffiti appeared on walls demanding ‘Where is Nin?’ communists would scribble underneath ‘In Salamanca or in Berlin’. The official Party line, published in Mundo Obrero, claimed that Nin had been liberated by Falangists and was in Burgos.

The black man was expected to follow the dictates of Sol and the white masters. Good Negro communists were to be unquestioning Negro communists, who sat quietly and did as they were told. A good black communist listened to the white communist—his comradely master. For all their bluster about elevating blacks, this was how communists treated their African-American brothers.

These tactics, said Johnson, were brought out by Dimitrov, who invoked Greek history, the Battle of Troy, the Trojan horse, as the best model for what they were trying to do. He quoted Dimitrov: “Comrades, you remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy. Troy was inaccessible to the armies attacking her, thanks to her impregnable walls, and the attacking army, after suffering great losses, was still unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the Trojan horse, it managed to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy’s camp.” In other words, said Johnson, what Dimitrov was saying “is that if you cannot take over the churches by frontal attack, take them over by the use of deception and guile and trickery, and that is exactly what the Communists practice in order to infiltrate and subvert the church and prepare them for the day when they would come under the hierarchical and authoritarian control of Moscow.

Stalin is too rude, and this defect, while fully tolerable in the milieu and company among us, Communists, becomes intolerable in the post of general secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to transfer Stalin from this post and name a different person who in all other respects differs from Stalin in having only one advantage, namely that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate toward comrades, less capricious, and so on. This circumstance

For weeks all opinion polls and all responsible commentators had been predicting that there was no hope of the Labour Party being elected on a programme like this. Ever since Harry Perkins had been chosen to lead Labour at a tumultuous party conference two years earlier, the popular press had been saying that this proved what they had always argued – namely that the Labour Party was in the grip of a Marxist conspiracy. Privately the rulers of the great corporations had been gleeful, for they had convinced themselves that the British people were basically moderate and that, however rough the going got, they would never elect a Labour government headed by the likes of Harry Perkins. Picture, therefore, the dismay that swept the lobby of the Athenaeum as the television showed Perkins coming to the rostrum in Sheffield town hall to acknowledge not only his own re-election with a record majority, but to claim victory on behalf of his party. “Comrades,” intoned brother Perkins. “Comrades, my foot.” Sir Arthur Furnival was apoplectic. “Told you the man’s a Communist.

Obama and his cabal of communists picked and the laws they wanted to follow.” It was a free for all for his comrades. Billions of dollars’ worth of intelligence went to China, Russia and Iran. Our ports went to enemy combatants - even those on the Pentagons “blacklist” who were wanted for “capture or kill.” America’s adversaries were awarded and embraced under the Obama

One thing of interest in this regard is that in order to cover their tracks, specifically to explain where the money came from to cover Morris Childs’s considerable medical expenses, Jack concocted a fiction, which he spread among his former comrades. He told them that his brother’s treatment was paid for by the contributions of Party members. As he confided to his FBI handlers and Barron, “Almost none of these assholes will contribute a dime. But no one will ever say he didn’t contribute.”16 The subterfuge was apparently successful.

Our comrades in the textile industry have increased their production more than seventy-five percent.” Now they could show their delight, even though they could not hold hands or kiss, and everybody knew that there was nothing personal and selfish in the way they smiled at each other, that the light in their eyes and the tenderness of their smiles were due to the increase of the production rate of the textile workers and to the general economic growth of the country. There were no more private little worlds in China. He went on telling her all the good news, for it would be embarrassing to sit there in silence. There were many other things he wished to say, and above all he wanted to take her in his arms; he wanted that more than anything else in life, almost as much as he wanted the prosperity and freedom of Chinese people. It was time for him to go now, but he could not tear himself away and he sat there rather stiffly, with the red-star peaked cap on his knees and his shaved head exposed, trying to think of something more to say, some of those things that make a girl happy. “The figures show that we have raised both our industrial and agricultural output by ten percent this year.” This was a good excuse, and she took his hand in both of hers and pressed it lovingly. The doctors smiled, the nurses smiled and the patients smiled, sharing their happiness. He was the youngest general in the People’s Army, and though he had come to see his girl, he was addressing all of them and sharing his presence with them. She held his hand as long as she could without making it appear personal, and then he saw tears in her eyes, but it was all right, nobody could see them.

The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

Although all this abnormal order of things is not of recent date, the characteristic fact of the bourgeois period is that it assumed the principal, dissociated, and autonomous characteristics of a "social morality"—precisely with the "virtuism" of which Pareto accuses it, which to a certain extent was no longer subject to religious morality. Now, it is exactly this morality with a sexual basis that is the principal object of the processes of dissolution in recent times. We hear of a "sexual revolution" supposed to remove both inner inhibitions and repressive social taboos. In fact, in today’s world "sexual freedom" is being affirmed ever more, as a current practice. But we have to consider this in more detail. I must emphasize above all that the direction of the processes at work is toward a freeing of sex, but in no way a freeing from sex. Sex and women are instead becoming dominant forces in present society, an evident fact that is also part of the general phenomenology of every terminal phase of a civilization’s cycle. One might speak of a chronic sexual intoxication that is profusely manifested in public life, conduct, and art. Its counterpart is a gynocratic tendency, a sexually oriented preeminence of the woman that relates to the materialistic and practical involvement of the masculine sex: a phenomenon that is clearest in those countries, like the United States, where that involvement is more excessive. [...] The aspects of the crisis of female modesty are another part of this. Beside the cases in which almost full female nudity feeds the atmosphere of abstract, collective sexuality, we should consider those cases in which nudity has lost every serious "functional" character—cases which by their habitual, public character almost engender an involuntarily chaste glance that is capable of considering a fully undressed girl with the same aesthetic disinterest as observing a fish or a cat. Furthermore, by adding the products of commercialized mass pornography, the polarity between the sexes is diluted, as seen in the conduct of "modern" life where the youth of both sexes are everywhere intermingled, promiscuously and "unaffectedly," with almost no tension, as if they were turnips and cabbages in a vegetable garden. We can see how this particular result of the processes of dissolution relates to what I have said of the "animal ideal," as well as the correspondence between the East and the West. The primitive, erotic life so typical among American youth is not at all far from the promiscuity of male and female "comrades" in the communist realm, free from the "individualistic accidents of bourgeois decadence," who in the end reflect little on sexual matters, their prevalent interests being channeled elsewhere into collective life and class. We can consider separately the cases in which the climate of diffuse and constant eroticism leads one to seek in pure sexuality, more or less along the same lines as drugs, frantic sensations that mask the emptiness of modern existence. The testimonies of certain beatniks and similar groups reveal that their pursuit of the sexual orgasm causes an anguish aroused by the idea that they and their partner might not reach it, even to the point of exhaustion.

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fate­ful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium. Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head. The propaganda section made hundreds of thou­sands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums. Four years later, Clementis was charged with trea­son and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head.

Thou shalt give thy all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt honor the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung with all thy loyalty. Thou shalt make absolute the authority of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt make the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary ideology thy faith and make his instructions thy creed. Thou shalt adhere strictly to the principle of unconditional obedience in carrying out the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung’s instructions. Thou shalt strengthen the entire party’s ideology and willpower and revolutionary unity, centering on the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt learn from the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung and adopt the Communist look, revolutionary work methods, and people-oriented work style. Thou shalt value the political life thou wast given by the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung, and loyally repay his great trust and thoughtfulness with heightened political awareness and skill. Thou shalt establish strong organizational regulations so that the entire party, nation, and military move as one under the one and only leadership of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung. Thou shalt pass down the great achievement of the revolution by the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung from generation to generation, inheriting and completing it even unto the very end.

Comrades and friends,’ he begins, the translation and lip-synch software maxing his street-cred as usual in all the languages of the Community. For this particular nation and region, he comes across speaking English with a gravely Central Belt Scottish accent, which I know for a fact has been swiped from old tapes of the Communist trade union leader and authentic working class hero Mick MacGahey.

The craze surrounding the Beatles—as well as demonstrations and a near-riot by hundreds of kids in Leipzig in October 1965 after authorities there banned almost all the local Beat bands—elicited commentary directly from head of state Walter Ulbricht during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party: I am of the opinion, comrades, that we should put an end to the monotony of the Yeah Yeah Yeah and whatever else it’s called. Must we really copy every piece of garbage that comes from the West?

Comrade Bethune's spirit, his utter devotion to others without any thought of self, was shown in his boundless sense of responsibility in his work and his boundless warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people. Every Communist must learn from him. … We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit everyone can be very useful to the people. A man's ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already nobleminded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people. "In Memory of Norman Bethune" (December 21, 1939), Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 337-38.*

In fact, when I came to Detroit, Coleman Young had just become a hero in the black community because he had stood up against the House Un-American Activities Committee, declaring, “If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I’m a Communist.” Like most of his friends Jimmy was aware that the American Communists had provided indispensable leadership in the struggle against Jim Crow and to create the unions: it was the intervention of the Communist Party that stopped the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys, and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) would probably not have been organized in the 1930s without the active participation of Communist Party members. At the shop and community level Jimmy worked with Communists as comrades; they were his coworkers, friends, and neighbors. During World War II he participated with black members of the Communist Party in sitdown strikes to protest union and management discrimination against black workers. During the Reuther-led witchhunt, when management and the union tried to get rid of radicals, he mobilized black workers to support Van Brooks, a Chrysler-Jefferson coworker and Communist Party member. He was very conscious that without the existence of the Soviet Union and its opposition to Western imperialism, the struggles of blacks in this country for civil rights and of Third World peoples for political independence would have been infinitely more difficult. Jimmy was not unaware of the atrocities that had been committed by the party and Stalin. However, what mattered to him was not the party’s or the Soviet Union’s record but where people stood on the concrete issue at hand, and he was grateful to the party because, as he used to say, “It gave me the fortitude to stand up against the odds.” Like other politically conscious blacks of his generation he recognized that without the Communists it would have taken much longer for blacks to make the leap from being regarded as inferior to being feared as subversive, that is, as a social force.

There was no such thing as Kazakhstan. It was just a chunk of Soviet Union. I had to build a country, to establish an army, our own police, our internal life, everything from roads to the constitution. I had to change the minds of the people 180 degrees, from totalitarian regime to freedom, from state property to private property. Nobody wanted to understand that. My comrades from the communist party were against me. I had to train myself too... I wasn't raised with democracy and freedom of speech.

By June 1919, Mussolini was criticizing Lenin’s handling of the communist revolution in Russia, concerned that he was straying from the tenets of Marxism. Distressed that Lenin was not Marxist enough, Mussolini wrote that his old comrade was ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power.

Stalin is too rude [Stalin slishkom grub], and this fault, fully tolerable in our midst and in the relations among us Communists, becomes intolerable in the office of general secretary. Therefore I propose to the comrades that they devise a way of shifting Stalin from this position and appointing to it another man who in all other respects falls on the other side of the scale from Comrade Stalin, namely, more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate of comrades, less capricious, etc.

I think that after five years of the Russian “revolution the most important thing for all of us, Russian and foreign comrades alike, is to sit down and study. We have only now obtained the opportunity to do so. I do not know how long this opportunity will last. I do not know for how long the capitalist powers will give us the opportunity to study in peace. But we must take advantage of every moment of respite from fighting, from war, to study, and to study from scratch.” “Lenin’s last speech to the Communist International (Fourth Congress; 13 November 1922)

Reasonable conservatism is a healthy thing. But that kind of poisonous divisionist hate-mongering Face has been preaching is one of the standard Communist techniques. If you create a radical right, their vicious nonsense pushes more people toward the radical left. Then when fear pushes people into violence, or silence, the comrades enter and flourish.

Technically the most impressive, however, is the story of the fall from grace of Ignus Nielsen – a prophet and Mazov’s schoolteacher. Despite being a noteworthy figure in the history of the communist movement, he became a disembodied spirit in the hands of the Vaasa censors. Mazov’s apocalyptic bloodthirsty character suddenly became somehow burdensome for the image of the social democratic Nordic countries. So they concocted Nielsen’s disappearance with Graad, following the newly defeated revolution. To the dismay of the censors, dozens of hours of film material were shot of Mazov during the technically advanced Eleven-Day Government, where the revolutionary icon was almost always accompanied by his best friend and comrade-in-arms, Nielsen. Destroying all the material would have raised suspicions. And so it was that an elliptical grey cytoplasm hovers permanently to Mazov’s right. It took historians decades to solve this eerie mystery. Even today, many believe that the cytoplasm is Communism itself.

Ukraine, March 1929 Roman and Ostap founded an organization called OWK. They handcrafted leaflets with thick pencils and distributed them across the city, sticking them to doors and walls. When an OGPU agent of Afros confronted Roman, he boldly stated, "I serve the revolution, comrade. What about you?" Later, Afros and Zhuk summoned the brothers to a commandeered house in the village square. There, Zhuk questioned if Roman wanted to be sent to Murmansk, which Roman refused. He argued that no kulaks were left in Ispas after the severe purge six weeks earlier. Therefore, they decided to form a group open to everyone, planning its first meeting for the next week. OWK, standing for 'Organization without Kulaks,' was envisioned by Roman as a collective for the non-wealthy farmers of Ispas. He believed that maintaining class struggle among Ukrainian farmers was difficult, as the categories changed with each harvest. Given the recent bad harvest and the absence of kulaks, Roman was unsure how to continue the class conflict as Zhuk had outlined. Nonetheless, he reassured Zhuk with a friendly smile about their commitment to removing the last anti-communist elements, thus establishing OWK. Jock insisted that true commitment meant joining collectivization. Roman recognized the inefficiency of small farms and was open to discussing it further, alluding to important details about the Lazar family's land.

Ukraine, March 1929 Roman founded an organization called OWK. He and Ostap made leaflets with their own hands, with the help of thick pencils, and distributed them all over the city, nailing them to doors and walls. When one of Afros' OGPO men stopped him on the street and asked about his actions, Roman replied, "I serve the revolution, comrade. And what are you doing?" The brothers were brought before Afros and Zhuk in the house they had confiscated in the village square. Zhuk asked if Roman wanted to be taken to Murmansk. Roman said no. He explained that apparently there were no kulaks left in Ispes after the concentrated purge six weeks ago. Therefore, Roman And Ostap decided to form an organization that anyone can join, and they are holding the first assembly next week. The organization is called OWK, the acronym for 'Organization without Kulaks'. "I even used the abominable Russian word, out of national solidarity with you and your friends, Comrade Zhuk," Roman said. "It is an organization of non-wealthy farmers, a definition that applies to the entire population that remained in Ispas. It is difficult to continue to maintain in Ukraine the class war between the successful farmer and the less successful farmer, in part because the classification changes from harvest to harvest. Kulak Mouser is the bane of the current harvest. And because the harvest was so bad and despite your laudable efforts, of course, there don't seem to be any kulaks left in our village. So we don't know exactly how to conduct the class war about which you spoke so eloquently a few weeks ago." Her novel to Jouk has a friendly smile. "We are deeply committed to purging the last of the anti-communist elements. And therefore - OW-K. "If you're serious, you'll participate in collectivization," said Jock. "I understand your point about the inefficiency of the small-scale farm, comrade," Roman said. "I am attentive to her. But listen to me until the end. The land of the Lazar family is far from the other farms, and it is impossible to connect it to them easily and create the collectivization, savings and cooperation that you strive for. So this is my proposal: my family and I will agree to meet your quota without collectivization. Let's show you how we work - with your help, maybe lend us a steel plow that expresses our new understanding and partnership? I'm sure it will work much better than our old wooden plows, and we'll do the rest. We will plow our land now, we will plant your wheat in August. We will work tirelessly for the cause and bring you the grain you demand. We will not give and we will not bargain.” "And in return?" "Nothing," Roman said. "In return we will continue to fatten horses and cows in peace." "You intend to pay other people to work in your wheat fields, Comrade Lazar?" asked Zhuk in a smooth voice. "Of course not," said Roman. "I know that even if I only have three horses, and I only pay two people to work for me, it means that I am a fat and lazy kulak, lower than a human pig. Then, as a founding member of OWK, I will have to destroy myself. So the answer is no. I will not pay anyone to work for me. Every person who passes through the fields will work for free, and that is the duty of all Ukrainians, right? As you told us we have to do to be counted for true patriots.