Was Castro sincere when, during his guerrilla war, he swore that he was not a Communist? If so, when did he change, and why? Looking back, does he believe he might have chosen a better course?
I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.
I joined the Communist Party when I was 18. When I was 10, there was the miners’ strike, and the Cold War was going on; it was quite a potent time to get involved in politics. I got involved through my grandfather, who was a member.
In the minds of many Americans, if you are a radical Democrat or a Socialist, you are automatically a Communist. And if you are a Communist, then therefore you are an anti-American person and a person who is not a patriot. But nothing is further from the truth.
I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I’m regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I’m on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfortable.
Ronald Reagan, when he was campaigning for President, said that he would break relations with Communist China and re-establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But when he got into office, he pursued a very different policy of engagement with China and of increasing trade and business ties with China.
I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young – my wife was from there – and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside.
My grandfather was an American Communist, and he married my grandmother, who was a Russian Communist. During the 1950s, the McCarthy era, my family was viciously persecuted.
The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao’s image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.
Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students.
To me, both the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto contain underlying truths, but the West doesn’t permit a middle road.
I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.
Can the wider West establish a global ‘cyber NATO?’ It would be difficult, but so, too, was the founding of NATO itself, which was called into being only after successive communist coups in Eastern Europe.
Communism is a way of thinking. Socialism is wimpy communism. When you don’t have the courage to become a communist, you become a socialist.
For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed.
The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest threat our country faces, so we cannot afford a strategic shortfall that gives China a leg up.
On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
China’s one-child policy was born in 1980, after years of less severe measures to discourage births. The Communist Party promised that the policy would be temporary.
What my Republican colleagues often don’t understand is that labor is a human-rights issue. I have to remind them Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement brought down the Communist bloc.
I’m not a communist or social democrat or anything else. I’m a free man.
The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about ‘socialism with a human face.’
Taking your clothes off in front of strangers is something of a hobby in Germany, among both men and women, especially in the former communist East, where it was one of the few freedoms allowed.
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it’s Whitman, who lost his job for ‘Leaves of Grass,’ or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose ‘Howl’ was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you’re going to put yourself in jeopardy.
I consider the philosophy of the Communist Party as not applicable to our American way of life.
Escapees from Communist China and the Soviet Bloc have inoculated America from the evils of Marxism in the past, but it seems every generation needs a new lesson.
I’m totally open to changing my beliefs. I could grow up to be a total communist. I could grow up to be a Neocon. I’m looking to have my views challenged. I’m looking to be corrected.
Life in a Chinese village is much more organised because the Chinese Communist Party has a presence even in the remotest Chinese village – a presence of the kind that no governmental or non-governmental organisation has in Indian villages.
I grew up pretty much prevented from knowing anything from Communist China except that they were the bad guys that stole our country.
China’s leaders seek to subordinate the rights of the individual to the will of the Communist Party. They exert government control over companies and subvert the privacy and freedom of their citizens with an authoritarian surveillance state.
As America’s nuclear strategic monopoly faded, the United States sought to create advantages elsewhere, notably in the peaceful cooperation between the United States and communist China under Deng Xiaoping.
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken.
The ‘Bolton News’ is the best place for online comments. They say I’m an absolute idiot and a communist anarchist. I was never an anarchist; I was a communist!
The individualist is an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men); the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial (Thank God I am one in a crowd).
I want to leave this world as a Communist.
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
With me it was that defending the Communist Party was something worse than naming the names.
I grew up in Communist China and never had much money to my name, and then, all of a sudden, I had giant student loans.
When I joined the Communist movement in 1935 it was based upon the belief that mankind’s future was to be found there. Certainly, millions who joined it the world over, like myself, didn’t join it for profit.
Dubois, later in his life, would join the Communist party and renounce his American citizenship. His ‘integration at all costs’ message would, decades later, continue to influence the community’s self-perception.
I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.
Remember that the Communist Party is a meritocracy in China.
The so-called ‘materialistic conception of history,’ with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the ‘Communist Manifesto,’ still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.
No company fails in communist China, because they’re all partly owned by the government.
In Romania, during the communist regime, we were very culturally suppressed. At 18 years old, I wasn’t allowed to wear bell-bottom jeans and eyeliner. I couldn’t understand why!
One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message – all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.
When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the ’50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.
I believe that the Tibetans should have the right to control their own destinies and decide for themselves whether they want to be part of China or not. But this view isn’t shared by most Chinese, or even the leaders of most Western democracies. As long as the Communist Party is in power, there is little hope for Tibet.
I should like to underline: no people, no country, in which a Communist dictatorship has been established, ever found its way out of it.
My dad was a Communist Party member who fought for his country.
Whatever labels may be attached to the fifteen charges brought against me, they all arise from my having been a member of the Communist Party and from my activities as a member.
It’s important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn’t know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.
