#stalin

If our enemies take me And people stop talking to me, If they confiscate the whole world— The right to breathe, open doors, Affirm that existence shall go on And that people, like a judge, shall judge, And if they dare to keep me like an animal And fling my food on the floor, I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony, But shall write what I am free to write, My naked body gathering momentum like a bell, And in a corner of the ominous dark I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice And move my hand in the darkness like a plough And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes, Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest, Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow, And in the depths of the unguarded night The eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shine And a flock of flaming years swoop down, And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth. But on this earth (which shall escape decay) There to wake up life and reason will be ↗

— Osip Mandelstam

#food

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#eastern-european #ernest-gellner #ethnic-cleansing #genocide #germans

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler. ↗

— Mario Batali

#distributed #good #hands #hitler #into

Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again. ↗

— Lionel Blue

#cracked #early #i #idolatry #open

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness. ↗

— Joe Eszterhas

#correctness #i #out #political #political correctness

Joseph Stalin is a titan of thought. His name is to be given to an entire century. ↗

— Palmiro Togliatti

#entire #given #his #joseph #name

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#dictatorship #emotional-plague #hitler #laval #liberty