Maoist Quotes

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.

To those who advocate that America follow the Chinese model of a totalitarian lockdown because of a virus or flu strain, must remember that the Maoist principle of Chinese rule is founded on total control of the populace, with the loss of freedom on every front: of speech, movement, work, information. Americans shouldn't be drinking the green tea so unquestioningly.

I am republic I am maoist I am activist and I am this and I am that but why? Why can't; I be

For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism. Faith vs. Fact. p. 220

They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, by means legal and illegal, all the accounts that remained open in the state and in the revolutionary organizations were being closed with a heavy hand. One might easily end up murdered or in jail, and among the common people a stampede had begun.

Before our "company" set off, at a wink from the officer, Plumpie stood up and proposed a search. I could see that some of the others thought she was wasting our time, but our company commander cheerfully seconded her proposal. He suggested we search him first. A boy was called to do this, and found a big bunch of keys on him. Our commander acted as though he had been genuinely careless, and gave Plumpie a victorious smile. The rest of us searched each other. This roundabout way of doing things reflected a Maoist practice: things had to look as though they were the wish of the people, rather than commands from above. Hypocrisy and playacting were taken for granted.

Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party? I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces. In the name of revolution, for thought crimes, Such questions can turn me to ashes.

This is the hope the Maoists offered, the hope of dark clouds gathering over parched, fractured soil; it could rain or it could not, but they brought something new into their lives: possibility.

From the point of view of the history of Marxism, Maoist ideology is noteworthy not because Mao 'developed' anything but because it illustrates the unlimited flexibility of any doctrine once it becomes historically influential.

Just then, Larry recalled a conversation he had with a friend in Ireland, about the situation in Nepal between the King and the Maoists. The friend was sided with the Maoists, which was more or less his political leanings in any case, and stated that at least they were trying to help the people. So Larry had remarked upon the rising death rate, and how the Maoists are just as brutal as the security forces, yet the friend simply shrugged and said you have to expect some collateral damage in a revolution. Oh how he hates that phrase, as that makes it sound like the people’s lives are meant to be expendable, something that a person’s life should never be. Of course, it is very easy to disregard people you have never met, and who are certainly not your friends or family members. After all, in the eyes of an outsider, who is in no danger whatsoever, the people caught up in the situation are nothing more than simply statistics.

The CPI (Maoist) has openly expressed its solidarity with the J&K terrorist groups. These ties are part of their ‘Strategic United Front’ against the Indian State. The CPI (Maoist) also has close links with foreign Maoist organizations in the Philippines, Turkey, etc.

American socialists and leftists were some of the most ardent devotees of Stalinist and Maoist socialism. They also embraced German national socialism, Italian national socialism, Cuban socialism, North Korean socialism and now Venezuelan socialism. We can see this devotion in contemporary progressives and socialists from Bill de Blasio to Bernie Sanders. We also see it in leading progressives and socialists of the past: Charles Beard, Herbert Croly, Corliss Lamont, W. E. B. Du Bois, Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal “brain trust.

Every society thus is a “religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives.

Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.

Countries that quash free inquiry, distrust reason, and practice pseudoscience, such as Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and, more recently, fundamentalist Islamist states, stagnate, regress, and often collapse. Theists and postmodernist critics of science and reason often label the disastrous Soviet and Nazi utopias as “scientific,” but their science was a thin patina covering a deep layer of counter-Enlightenment, pastoral, paradisiacal fantasies of racial ideology grounded in ethnicity and geography, as documented in Claudia Koonz’s book The Nazi Conscience79 and in Ben Kiernan’s book Blood and Soil.80

Jung Chang said that Mao ruled by getting people to hate each other: ‘Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred.

(In fact, I only differ with them in not liking their intolerance, their fascist tactics, their introduction of Maoist brainwashing to our groves of Academe, their utter lack of humor, their continuous violations of ordinary common sense, their evident desire to destroy our Constitution and their lack of simple human decency. Aside from those minor issues, I almost approve the P.C. agenda.)

It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals.

Che Guevera and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it close up, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own.

For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of it's key elements: belief without evidence-in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism.

Technology is the new religion of urban China, and no longer just in the coastal cities. Having wasted decades, centuries almost, overcoming traditional objections to progress, and then wasted thirty years convulsing to a Maoist revolutionary tune, the Chinese have finally gotten themselves into a position where they can develop technology and begin to take on the world. Everywhere you see signs that say REVIVE THE NATION THROUGH SCIENCE AND EDUCATION.

I can't help feeling," says Howard, sticking his head forward ruefully, "now I know who you are, that I've been a bit outspoken in some of my remarks about the system." "Not at all!" says Freddie. "Not a bit!" says Caroline. "But I must in all honesty say," says Howard very quickly, jutting his chin out and smilingly blinking his eyes, "that I still think there are a number of things in the universe which really need seriously looking into." "Oh, the whole thing!" says Freddie with feeling. "Ghastly mess," says Caroline. "Absolute disaster area," says Freddie. "Frightful," says Caroline. "So far as one can understand it," says Freddie. "Freddie feels frightfully strongly about it, you see," says Caroline. Howard looks from one to the other in astonishment. "Good heavens!" he says. "I should never have guessed...." "Oh, Freddie's a terrific radical," says Caroline. "Really?" says Howard. "A terrible firebrand, really," says Caroline. Freddie knots himself up. "A bit firebrandish," he admits. "A bit of a Maoist, to tell you the truth," says Caroline. She looks sideways at Howard to see how he is taking this. So does Freddie. "A Maoist?" says Howard, astonished. "Permanent revolution," says Caroline. "That style of thing," agrees Freddie. "What he feels, you see," says Caroline, "is that people ought to struggle pretty well all the time against the limitations of the world and their own nature. Not stop." Howard gazes at Freddie, deeply impressed. "Don't worry," says Freddie. "I don't think my views have much effect.

Let the tasks for the day announce themselves for your contemplation. Maybe you can do this in the morning, as you sit on the edge of your bed. Maybe you can try, the night before, when you are preparing to sleep. Ask yourself for a voluntary contribution. If you ask nicely, and listen carefully, and don’t try any treachery, you might be offered one. Do this every day, for a while. Then do it for the rest of your life. Soon you will find yourself in a different situation. Now you will be asking yourself, habitually, “What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?” You are not dictating to yourself what “better” must be. You are not being a totalitarian, or a utopian, even to yourself, because you have learned from the Nazis and the Soviets and the Maoists and from your own experience that being a totalitarian is a bad thing. Aim high. Set your sights on the betterment of Being. Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.

The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia headed for even greater disaster. 'Charge the cockpit or you die!' cried the pro-Trump intellectual right. 'I'd rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,' said the pro-Trump left. When people believe that the world is heading off a cliff, they are receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: 'What do you have to lose?' But if the media and intellectuals put events into statistical and historical context, rather than constantly crying 'crisis,' they would make it clearer what the answer to that question is. Revolutionary regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when a charismatic leader forces a radical personal vision on a society. A modern liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it's better to solve problems than to start a conflagration and hope for the best.

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking.

Well what can you expect?' I retorted. 'Those people are, as you say, simple and uneducated. Wasn't it Marx who said that peasants are like sacks of potatoes? Is it surprising that their lives are filled with gods and goddesses and demons?' She glanced at me again. 'You really do not care for ordinary people, do you?' The imputation of elitism made me bridle. 'Why you're quite wrong!' I said. 'I consider myself a person of the left. As a student I was a Maoist fellow traveller. I've always stood in solidarity with peasants and workers.' 'Oh yes, certo!' she said, suppressing a giggle. 'I knew many Maoists and fellow travellers in Italy. They had every regard for the bellies and bodies of poor people - but not, I think, for what is in their heads.

Dhiren broke the silence by starting to hum a tune under his breath,,,, 'The smile of the moon has spilled over its banks'......I was filled with - with what? An affectionate contempt? A sense of ridicule? Shock that Dhiren, the earthy, self-styled tough guy, had any truck with the kind of music he'd consider effeminate? Tagore seemed to be carried inside all Bengalis, regardless of class or social background, like some inheritable disease, silent, unknown, until it manifested itself at the unlikeliest of times. How irredeemably middle class all this was: The Little Red Book and On Practice on the one hand; on the other hand, the poetry of Jibanananda Das in his cloth sidebag and a coy, cloying Tagore song almost involuntary on his lips. There really was no hope of escape for us. ...... For god's sake, Mao by day and Tagore by moonlight? Dhiren didn't miss a beat - That's quintessential Bengali soul for you.

In any case, it is not as if the ‘light’ inspection is in any sense preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system. The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The inspection, that is to say, corresponds precisely to Foucault’s account of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED is now observing the college’s self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing.

And what about Hillel’s famous dictum (which, like Pascal’s, has been beaten to death)? Did Hillel not ask, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I understood, of course. I listened respectfully to the rabbis and hospital chaplains. But I remembered my old friend Benny Lévy, the French Maoist leader and personal secretary to Sartre who turned to the study of the Torah, inviting me to ponder the rest of Hillel’s saying. Yes, of course, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But Hillel followed that immediately by asking, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”2 Notice that Hillel said “what,” not “who.” He wanted us to understand clearly that if I am “only for me,” I become a “what,” a neutral being without qualities, a half-being, a thing. If I graze in the meadow of this me, he insisted, if I confine myself within the me-substance and the persevering ego (a specialty of the West that Covid-19 has raised to the Pantheon), then I am not much of anything; I am a subject without a predicate, a thing without qualification. I place myself under the tyranny of the object. Did someone say “the cult of me”?

I ended up as much a Maoist failure as I had been a Christian failure. Souls were still unsaved, and the imperialist bourgeoisie was still in power. Before I graduated from high school, I had lost my faith in the fundamentalist God I had been trained to worship and serve.

Inclusive growth-oriented policies will bring equitable, inclusive growth and level socio-economic imbalances in society which will remove socio-economic and political alienation and reduce Naxalist and Maoist tendencies. Developmental politics instead of political politics will also reduce the prevalent bitter political alienation.

Ya Ru’s father had drowned in the big political tidal wave that Mao had set in motion.

Such indirection and ambivalence typify the politics of Wong's work. He's not in any conventional sense an ideological filmmaker. "It's never been my intention," he said at the Cannes press conference for 2046, "to make films with any political content whatsoever." A cautious man allergic to grand pronouncements, he doesn't make message movies, much less give political speeches or man the barricades. The rise of China has been the biggest story in the world for the last 20 years--no place has felt this more deeply than Hong Kong--yet Wong's work is notable for its apparent lack of interest in post-revolutionary China, either in its Maoist incarnation or today's hyper-capitalist model launched by Deng Xiaoping, whose death appears in a news report Lai watches in Happy Together. It's not that he doesn't thing about political issues, but he weaves his ideas (and they are intuitions more than ideological stances) into the intricate fabric of his work. This makes him ripe for interpretation, especially by critical admirers who, almost to a one, prefer to think of him as being some sort of social radical whose political ideas bubble beneath the surface of his work.

And how can evil be the mere absence of good? Is genocide the absence of something, of what? Of kindness? Were there no kind Nazis? Of love? Were there no Maoist revolutionaries who loved their families? Evil is an act, we commit evil proactively, it doesn't simply emerge in the absence of good. When you don't put a dollar in the donation tin in the front of the convenience store it doesn't mean that an ax murderer was created. We human beings have one set of actions described as "good" and another set described as "evil.

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in the Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice: “Why are we here today?” she asked. “To make revolution,” they answered. “What kind of revolution?” she replied. “The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted. “And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded. “By destroying the American family!” they answered. “How do we destroy the family?” she came back. “By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly. “And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied. “By taking away his power!” “How do we do that?” “By destroying monogamy!” they shouted. “How can we destroy monogamy?” … “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.648

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

In explaining his shift away from Maoist economics, Deng Xiao Ping, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, described his market-oriented changes as "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Today, American businesses, as well as the media and academic establishments that serve them, increasingly embrace what can best be described as "Chinese capitalism with American characteristics.

the Party attempts to create terms that unite all contradictions, and thereby do away with them. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is one of these. Or the “socialist market economy.” These formulations contain left and right, up and down, Maoist and neo-liberal all at once. Language has overruled logic and in doing so believes itself untouchable. Of course, in reality it is becoming ever more empty and absurd, but in a country where what matters is power and not letters, that doesn’t really make a difference. Here, more often than not, the function of words is to convey an order rather than a meaning: Nod! Swallow! Forget! Kneel! And so the propaganda machine feels perfectly free to compare the Dalai Lama with Adolf Hitler, and at the same time to warn the country’s newspaper editors never to confuse “truth and lies, good and evil, beauty and ugliness.” The true, the good, and the beautiful are always the Party and its Word.

For the convenience of readers, the terms 'Naxal' and 'Maoist' are used interchangeably throughout this book. This is common practice in the media and even the police. In fact, the Maoists too use both terms to define themselves.

Two goals in a Maoist economy are to keep people working whether their job is necessary or not (idleness is the bourgeoisie’s workshop) and to make sure everyone is keeping an eye on everyone else.

The years of speeches about democracy and freedom were just words directed at an audience of mainly conservative Americans who had become enamoured with Africa’s best known ‘freedom fighter’. His commitment to democratic principles was no more real than the Maoist rhetoric Savimbi spouted in the pre-independence days when China was his biggest backer. It all comes down to this: ‘If I don’t win, I won’t accept the result.

Cage was fooling himself if he thought he was destroying power; he was destroying order. Destroying order creates an opportunity for a certain type of power to ascend. What sort of power that might be became clear from Cage’s infatuation with Mao Tse-tung’s totalitarianism. In the early 1980s, Cage said, “The Maoist model managed to free a quarter of humanity: that gives cause for thought. Today, without hesitation, I would say, for the moment, Maoism is our greatest reason for optimism.

He spread his arms in benediction, like that Jesus statue in Brazil before the Maoists blew it up.

The adivasi people have a long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them something of a disservice.

When we are looking for an enemy, we often start by projecting ourselves on an abstract scene, within which the world has disappeared. Let us ask ourselves the same question, but starting from the neighbourhood where we live, from the company where we work, from the professional sector we are familiar with. Then the answer is clear; then the front lines can be distinctly seen, and who is on what side can easily be determined. This is because the question of the confrontation, the properly political question, only makes sense in a given world, in a substantial world. For those who are nowhere, cybernetic philosophers or metropolitan hipsters, the political question never makes sense. It refuses itself to them and leaves them walking backward into abstraction. And that is the price to pay for so much superficiality. As compensation, they will prefer to juggle with some great folkloric significance, to give themselves some post-Maoist or post-situationist thrills.Or, perhaps they will accommodate their nothingness with the last glosses of the ultra-left logorrhoea

you could say that the Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common—they both seek the overthrow of the Indian state.

Chakravarty. But Maoists often terrorise the very people they claim to protect and Adivasis have been killed on suspicion of being police informers or collaborators. I asked Ashim Chatterjee, a member of the original Naxalbari uprising who now mediates between the government and the Maoists, whether the tactics of execution and extortion could be described as terrorism. ”Without taking up the responsibility of organising the class struggle, if you launch an armed struggle, it will inevitably become terrorism. It degenerated into a terrorist campaign. I’ve given it a name; it’s an exercise in socialism in words, and terrorism in deeds,

I should say that it was only for me that Marxism seemed over. Surely, I would tell G. at least once a week, it had to count for something that every single self-described Marxist state had turned into an economically backward dictatorship. Irrelevant, he would reply. The real Marxists weren’t the Leninists and Stalinists and Maoists—or the Trotskyists either, those bloodthirsty romantics—but libertarian anarchist-socialists, people like Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, scholarly believers in true workers’ control who had labored in obscurity for most of the twentieth century, enjoyed a late-afternoon moment in the sun after 1968 when they were discovered by the New Left, and had now once again fallen back into the shadows of history, existing mostly as tiny stars in the vast night sky of the Internet, archived on blogs with names like Diary of a Council Communist and Break Their Haughty Power. They were all men. The group itself was mostly men. This was, as Marxists used to say, no accident. There was something about Marxist theory that just did not appeal to women. G. and I spent a lot of time discussing the possible reasons for this. Was it that women don’t allow themselves to engage in abstract speculation, as he thought? That Marxism is incompatible with feminism, as I sometimes suspected? Or perhaps the problem was not Marxism but Marxists: in its heyday men had kept a lock on it as they did on everything they considered important; now, in its decline, Marxism had become one of those obsessive lonely-guy hobbies, like collecting stamps or 78s. Maybe, like collecting, it was related, through subterranean psychological pathways, to sexual perversions, most of which seemed to be male as well. You never hear about a female foot fetishist, or a woman like the high-school history teacher of a friend of mine who kept dated bottles of his own urine on a closet shelf. Perhaps women’s need for speculation is satisfied by the intense curiosity they bring to daily life, the way their collecting masquerades as fashion and domesticity—instead of old records, shoes and ceramic mixing bowls—and their perversity can be satisfied simply by enacting the highly artificial role of Woman, by becoming, as it were, fetishizers of their own feet.

Part of the Maoist project was the deliberate construction of a new moral identity. To do this it was necessary to destroy people’s previous sense of who they were and to make sure there was no room for it grow back.

She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.

...the War on Terror is in fact a war against Islam. After all, this was never conceived of as a war against terror per se. If it were, it would have included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christian insurgency in East Timor, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, the Jewish Kach and Kahane underground in Israel, the Irish Republican Army, the Sikh separatists in the Punjab, the Marxist Mujahadin-e khalq, the Kurdish PKK, and so on. Rather, this is a war against a particular brand of terrorism: that employed exclusively by Islamic entities, which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the persons who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and the organisations that supported them, but also an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups such as Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Chechen rebels, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban, and any other organisation that declares itself Muslim and employs terrorism as a tactic.

Just as the rapacity of global capitalism has created a surplus population of eastern India’s Adivasis, driving them into the arms of the Maoist Naxalite rebellion, so too did it create a surplus population of New York’s upper-middle and upper class humanities graduates.

And that's all, my young friends. The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the winds of '68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated in that beautiful, tragic year. And I've heard others tell the story many times, and in their telling, the woman who spent fifteen days shut in a bathroom without eating is a medical student or a secretary at the Torre de Rectoría, not a Uruguayan with no papers or work or place to lay her head. And sometimes it isn't even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal troubles. And when I hear these stories, these versions of my story, I don't usually say anything (especially if I'm not drunk). And if I am drunk, I try to play it down. That's nothing, I say, that's university folk-lore, that's urban legend, and then they look at me and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I say (or if I'm drunk, I shout): no, I'm not anybody's mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all.

If Xi personally accepts Maoism, we should not be surprised he believes his Maoist campaign is popular across Chinese society. “Today’s Chinese leadership—under pressure from rising expectations, social dislocation, and popular discontent—again finds itself trying to bridge a credibility gap with the Chinese public,” write Evan Feigenbaum and Damien Ma in Foreign Affairs.

The Maoist mechanisms of social control have been loosened. A totalitarian state has become merely an authoritarian one.

after seeing decades of Maoist campaigns, that idealism mostly resulted in misery. China would be helped only as ordinary citizens went about bettering their own lot,

Lysenko had publicly come out in favor of a technique of close planting of crop seeds in order to increase output. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other for nutrients. This fitted in with Marxist and Maoist ideas about organisms from the same class living in harmony rather than in competition. “With company, they grow easy,” Mao told colleagues. “When they grow together, they will be comfortable.” The Chinese leader drew up an eight-point Lysenko-inspired blueprint for the Great Leap Forward, and persecuted Western-trained scientists and geneticists with the same kind of ferocity as in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Maoist China killed in order to perfect humanity, or the part of it they judged fit to survive.

What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?” You are not dictating to yourself what “better” must be. You are not being a totalitarian, or a utopian, even to yourself, because you have learned from the Nazis and the Soviets and the Maoists and from your own experience that being a totalitarian is a bad thing. Aim high. Set your sights on the betterment of Being. Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better

Given that Marcuse was also calling for “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” (first section/ chapter) and made very clear that liberation means liberation into a new kind of socialism that doesn’t yet exist (that offered praise to the Maoist revolution in China that was going on at the time—to the death of tens of millions), understanding intersectionality as the sociocultural dimension of the “new sensibility

Active demonization of the protest movement had already begun while it was still limited to Punjab. At the end of November, when the farmers’ march was finally stopped on the borders of Delhi, the rhetoric against them was ratcheted up. The BJP general secretary in Uttarakhand on 29 November 2020 called the protestors pro-Pakistan, pro-Khalistan and anti-national. Gujarat’s deputy chief minister called the farmers anti-national elements, terrorists, Khalistanis, Communists and pro-China people having pizza and pakodi. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Chouhan wrote an article blaming the protests on vested interests. Law and justice minister Ravishankar Prasad associated them with the mythical ‘tukde-tukde’ gang. The BJP vice president in Himachal Pradesh called the protests the work of anti-nationals and middlemen. The same day, the party’s spokesman in the state called the protestors miscreants who were the same people behind Shaheen Bagh. On 17 December, the BJP chief minister in Tripura, Biplab Deb, said Maoists were behind the protests, while Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed Opposition parties were using farmers to fuel unrest in the country because they were unhappy about the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. He also blamed communism and those who wanted to promote disorder and didn’t want to see India prosper. BJP national spokesman Sambit Patra called the farmers extremists in the garb of food-providers, another spokesman called them terrorists, and BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya called them anarchists and insurrectionists. On 17 January 2021, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh said the protests were backed by anti-national powers. A BJP MLA from Gujarat wrote to Amit Shah asking him to hang or shoot the protestors. Even in March 2021, the slander of calling the thousands of protestors fake farmers and terrorists continued. The New York Times reported that this demonisation cleaved to a pattern from Modi’s playbook: first the accusations of foreign infiltration, then police complaints against protest leaders, then the arrests of protesters and journalists, then the blocking of internet access in places where demonstrators gathered. All this was akin to India’s actions in Kashmir, and against the protestors of Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere

Perhaps ideological competition is one of the forms of international competition that must be discarded if humanity is to survive. President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union and opening to Maoist China was based on the belief that the United States did not have the ability to produce a global liberal order

Isabel added helpfully. Two doctors, I thought. Making doctor paychecks in America. Living in the suburbs of Milwaukee while their son, miles away, dreamed of the Maoist uprising. My white friends with their white faces and their white lives. Their eyes watching mine. Assigning me a place on their political grid.

Articles in the newspapers and talks by leading Maoists encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism.

the Maoists built up what they called “revolutionary momentum” and kept the pot boiling.

Nixon bombed the hell out of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge seized the moment of chaos, took power, and killed anyone they thought represented corrupt Western culture: lawyers, teachers, artists, people who spoke French, anyone who wore glasses. More than a million civilians died. It was one of those Maoist purges, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China. I never understood in college exactly what that meant, ‘Maoist,’ but I think it means kill everything that moves.

The FBI had established an elegant stealth vehicle for undermining the Communist Party and its Maoist counterparts and all the evidence points to it having done its job well.

For the Party, this adulation is only to be encouraged, because the veneration of Mao is useful to furthering its legitimacy even today. More importantly, it is also a justification for the Party’s continuation of the Maoist–Leninist authoritarian system. Which is why China’s leaders, in their speeches, always make it a point to stress that it was Mao’s legacy – and not the economic reforms and opening up – that provides the bedrock of the regime’s legitimacy.

Fear is the central theme of all stories. A valuable reference material for the researchers of conflict and war." —Dr. Govinda Raj Bhattarai, Professor of English "Showcases the work of literary writers who have engaged with Nepal's Maoist insurgency. A wide range of writers is included in this collection."—Manjushree Thapa, Bestselling Author "Rebel is a rebellious voice against inequality, impunity, corruption, and all injustices against the poor people . . . throws light on the country's grave social, economic, and political situation during the time of conflict."—Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, Former Prime Minister of Nepal

The Maoist politicization of warfare in the 1950s conceptualized a new strategy of active defense.

Anybody who criticizes the corporate takeover of Adivasi land is called an antinational “sympathizer” of the banned Maoists. Sympathy is a crime, too. In television studios, guests who try to bring a semblance of intelligence into the debate are shouted down and compelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation. This is a war against people who have barely enough to eat one square meal a day. What particular brand of nationalism does this come under? What exactly are we supposed to be proud of? Our lumpen nationalists don’t seem to understand that the more they insist on this hollow sloganeering, the more they force people to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” and to declare that “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” the less sure of themselves they sound. The nationalism that is being rammed down our throats is more about hating another country—Pakistan—than loving our own. It’s more about securing territory than loving the land and its people. Paradoxically, those who are branded antinational are the ones who speak about the deaths of rivers and the desecration of forests. They are the ones who worry about the poisoning of the land and the falling of water tables. The “nationalists,” on the other hand, go about speaking of mining, damming, clear-felling, blasting, and selling. In their rule book, hawking minerals to multinational companies is patriotic activity. They have privatized the flag and wrested the microphone.

By the time the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement came on the scene, Zinn had left the party’s ranks, but he was toying with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party and “gave his support to young black militants” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers.29 Actually, Zinn radicalized the students, turned them into militants, and helped found and guide the radical SNCC.

Brendan McMahan HomeMy Books Browse ▾ Community ▾ Find Quotes Results for "J.R.Nyquist" Showing 161-167 of 167 (0.02 seconds) “This brief overview of our situation does not lend itself to an optimistic forecast. Too many of our fellow citizens, year after year, have hidden themselves in the “riskless private sphere,” resting on the safe possession of their “private property,” staying out of political controversies, yielding political ground to increasingly pathological narratives and persons. At long last this “riskless private sphere” is no longer safe. The exits have been blocked. A confrontation is now unavoidable.” ― J.R. Nyquist tags: ayn-rand, libertarianism 0 likes in my quotes “There is a silver lining to all this, according to Jean Bodin. If an insurrection fails, its poison is purged from the body politic. A deluded mob can be cured once its ringleaders are apprehended. And who are these ringleaders, in truth? At beginning of Bodin’s book, On Sovereignty, there is a listing of principles necessary to a well-ordered commonwealth. The cornerstone of these principles might surprise you. In the first place, wrote Bodin, right ordering involves distinguishing “a commonwealth from a band of thieves or pirates. With them one should have neither intercourse, commerce, nor alliance.” ― J.R. Nyquist tags: ayn-rand, libertarianism 0 likes in my quotes “Since most whites are ashamed of America’s past treatment of blacks, they are susceptible to “white guilt.” This guilt is now being exploited to advance a communist agenda, as opposed to the color-blind agenda envisioned by conservatives. The political significance of this cannot be underestimated. According to Trevor Loudon, the organizations behind today’s revolutionary unrest are Maoist; that is, they are ideologically allied with the Chinese Communists in Beijing.

Loudon replied: “When President Trump put tariffs on Chinese goods, the Chinese declared a ‘People’s War.’ This is a Maoist concept. It means a war of attrition on every front. It is harassment to exhaust the United States. They want to take over areas around cities and starve the cities. What they do in an urban setting is attack police stations and set up their own police. They are trying to use these areas as Maoist bases to eliminate the Republican Party in those states.

The Maoists are not the only ones who seek to depose the Indian State. It's already been deposed, several times, by Hindu fundamentalism and economic totalitarianism.

Leftists shrieked like happy hamsters at a recent Canadian (of course) study linking “prejudice” and “right-wing” ideology to “lower cognitive ability.” They also squealed like shiny baby piglets at another recent study that purported to show that liberals and conservatives (whatever that means) have different brain structures. And though they claim to celebrate the rainbow of differences that Goddess has bequeathed us, somehow they find room in their wide-open minds to cheer for the day when we breed all of those differences into extinction. Neither will these diversicrats tolerate any true diversity of thought—they’re lurching toward Soviet-style political psychiatry by suggesting that ideological disagreement on racial matters is a mental disorder requiring medication. Sound paranoid? I’m sure they’re working on a pill for that, too. Sanity is in many ways a social construct, one that varies widely from society to society. In a pragmatic sense I’ll admit it’s crazy to go against the crowd, however abjectly deluded and brainwashed that crowd may be. If you don’t run with them, they’ll stomp right over you like wild buffalo. Despite the soul-blotting excesses of Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism, many neo-Marxists still appear to believe that the control freaks and power psychos are confined to the right.

Conditions were also starkly worsened by ongoing guerrilla warfare, which was stoked by the economic crisis. The war, conducted amidst paroxysms of violence on both sides, was waged by the Peruvian Army against two well-organized but mutually antagonistic revolutionary forces—the Maoist party Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), founded in 1980, and the pro-Russian movement named after the last Incan monarch, Túpac Amaru. As many as twenty thousand people died in the conflict, and the lack of security in the countryside decimated agricultural production and drove migration to cities that were already overcrowded.

Foucault, who had deplored the modern West as “war by other means,” became attracted to the Maoists in the Proletarian Left precisely because they advocated terrorism as “people’s justice.” Foucault urged them to engage in random acts of violence against their bourgeois oppressors, whether guilty or innocent. Foucault grimly explained that the whole notion of innocence and guilt was part of the “incarceration” society of the bourgeois West. He often pointed to the French revolutionary September Massacre of 1792 and “the old Germanic custom” of sticking “the head of an enemy on a stake, for public viewing” as examples of this sort of people’s justice.

In any case, if we are to understand the meaning of Maoist reason and a critique of its boundaries, we must also learn to think Maoism in its totality: which means to also think its distance from pre-Maoist Leninism and pre-Leninist Marxism, and which further means to think what makes Maoism the highest stage of revolutionary science - by what rationale can we call it a stage, what makes the rocess of which it is a part scientific, and what scientific thinking means for Maoists interested in developing revolutionary theory.

If you were to read one of the sermons of the first fathers of the church, from the second or third centuries, about how you should treat the poor, you’d say it was Maoist or Trotskyist

The Chinese government’s distinct attitude to worker protections also extends to its treatment of hundreds of millions of migrants moving from the countryside to the cities. Thanks to China’s hukou system, these workers are effectively illegal immigrants in their own country. Originally meant to keep workers on farms in the Maoist era, the hukou system limits the rights of Chinese to move and settle anywhere in China outside of where they were born.

Life is suffering. The Buddha stated that, explicitly. Christians portray the same sentiment imagistically, with the divine crucifix. The Jewish faith is saturated with its remembrance. The equivalence of life and limitation is the primary and unavoidable fact of existence. The vulnerability of our Being renders us susceptible to the pains of social judgement and contempt and the inevitable breakdown of our bodies. But even all those ways of suffering, terrible as they are, are not sufficient to corrupt the world, to transform it into Hell, the way the Nazis and the Maoists and the Stalinists corrupted the world and turned it into Hell. For that, as Hitler stated so clearly, you need the lie:

Since most whites are ashamed of America’s past treatment of blacks, they are susceptible to “white guilt.” This guilt is now being exploited to advance a communist agenda, as opposed to the color-blind agenda envisioned by conservatives. The political significance of this cannot be underestimated. According to Trevor Loudon, the organizations behind today’s revolutionary unrest are Maoist; that is, they are ideologically allied with the Chinese Communists in Beijing.

For decades, Western analysts have been too quick to overlook or dismiss the persistent influence of the Maoist heritage in contemporary China. In this book, I have argued that Maoism has been underestimated not just as a Chinese but also as a global phenomenon. I have sought to re-centre its ideas and experiences as major forces of the recent past, present and future that have shaped – and are shaping – the world, as well as China. What themes have emerged from observing Maoism’s global travels?

Since the Red Guards had removed the goods displayed in the windows of the shops, Mao’s official portraits were put there. A person walking down the streets in the shopping district would not only be confused by rows of shops bearing the same name, but also had the uncanny feeling of being watched by a hundred faces of Mao.

Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a “religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives.

It's routine, it's a dance and it really needs to stop... And I really wish that these students and the professors who support them understood how dumb they are being considered - not how dumb they look 'cause then it becomes "why are you so concerned what white people think of us?" That's not the point, it's that these people quietly are thinking "these people are dumb and so we're going to approach them on their level." I don't know where people get the idea that that's black strength or that it's "progressive". People REALLY need to get past that. And I just think that black students who protest over things that don't make sense - there's such thing as sensible black protest - but if it's about something that Doesn't. Make. Any. Damn. Sense. And you're making these demands that your school becomes some sort of anti racism academy along the lines of Maoist ideology - you have to understand that the people who give in to you think that you are DUMB AS S*** and you have to understand that that is a problem. You've been condescended to. But no, they don't get it, they just think that to stick your fist in the air and yell certain slogans makes you somebody of higher wisdom and makes you a person who is continuing the struggle of Dr. King. No.

While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.

Zinn also had plenty of time for political activism. He co-founded the New Party, the socialist party that helped Barack Obama win his Illinois Senate seat, and then worked on the Obama presidential campaign with the now defunct ACORN. He worked for or was associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, the Committees of Correspondence for Socialism and Democracy, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM, a Marxist-Maoist collective), and International ANSWER, the anti-war organization controlled by the communist Workers World Party.

I live in fear of making an honest mistake in conversation followed by some kind of Maoist-style recrimination session.

When you live in China as a foreigner, there are two critical moments of recognition. The first comes immediately upon arrival, when you are confronted with your own ignorance. Language, customs, history- all of it has to be learned, and the task seems impossible. Then, just as you begin to catch on, you realize that everybody else feels pretty much the same way. The place changes too fast; nobody in China has the luxury of being confident in his knowledge. Who shows a peasant how to find a factory job? How does a former Maoist learn to start a business? Who has the slightest clue how to run a car rental agency? Everything is figured out on the fly; the people are masters at improvisation. This is the second moment of recognition, and it's even more frightening than the first. Awareness of your own ignorance is a lonely feeling, but there's little consolation in sharing it with 1.3 billion neighbors

The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true. The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy.