Vladimir Putin: Who gave NATO right to kill Gaddafi? Libya was the only country in the world with zero debt before the conflict. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
George Carlin: Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lyndon B. Johnson: Light at the end of the tunnel? We don't even have a tunnel; we don't even know where the tunnel is. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lyndon B. Johnson: The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
A reminder that I'm located in the US, and more particularly in Texas and this is a server run out of my home.
With the massive freeze incoming this weekend, there is a decent chance of a significant and extended power outage (Texas has a notoriously awful and poorly managed power grid, notably run completely separate from the rest of the country).
George W. Bush: I will never apologize for the United States - never, ever! I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Benjamin: Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than a repenting cult. ... An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Benjamin: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Walter Benjamin: A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: All the literature of Reformism - of the so-called "British School of Socialism'' or "Evolutionary Socialism" or "Democratic Socialism" - without exception rests on the permanent assumption of the Empire. The vast overseas tribute income is taken for granted. The problem is seen as one of "distribution." Just as Churchill, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, openly proclaimed the social services to be based on the overseas investment income, so Reformism assumes the same permanent basis for its social services and proclaims the outcome as the "Welfare State." wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Marxism is always moving, is always growing. It is the exact opposite of a ready-made, fixed body of dogmas as its enemies always present it. It cannot be that because it is an interpretation of the real world. The real world is always changing and moving, and therefore the theory has always to develop with the development of the real world. Marxism can never stand still. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: Bourgeois authors have been using up reams of paper praising competition. As a matter of fact, however, capitalism replaced small production by large-scale factory production. Under such capitalism, competition means the brutal suppression of energy of the population. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Clara Zetkin: The proletariat will be able to attain its liberation only if it fights together without the difference of nationality and profession. In the same way it can attain its liberation only if it stands together without the distinction of sex. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Käte Duncker: Men and women, as free and equal, must work together to realize our high goal: the abolition of wage slavery and thus the preparation of the soil on which a better and happier human race can and will grow. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
William Z. Foster: Wall Street, with it's fascist like Taft-Hartley bill, also wants to kill the communist party. But they will fail in this as in their other anti-labor objectives. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Karl Marx: The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Ethel Rosenberg: We do not pretend that we are unafraid. But we fear also for those for whom our death sentence is a precedent, for those who like us may find themselves in our place, unless you, who are free today, make us free again. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Friedrich Engels: Therefore the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity, to palliate them or to deny them-in short, to introduce a conventional hypocrisy which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the first stages of civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement: the exploitation of the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting class simply and solely in the interests of the exploited class itself; and if the exploited class cannot see it and even grows rebellious, that is the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lenin: So long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the "masters". Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
