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Totalitarianism Quotes

“Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this... At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.”

WritingLiteratureImaginationLibertySoviet UnionTotalitarianismIntellectual FreedomCommunsim
Book:The Prevention of Literature
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“Our contemporary poverty is as transparent as glass and as invisible as the air. Our poverty is kilometer-long lines, the constant elbowing, spiteful officials, trains late without reason, the water cut off by some disaster (...), the monotony of living without any hope whatsoever, the decaying historic cities, the provinces emptying the rivers poisoned. Our poverty is the grace of the totalitarian state by whose grace we live.”

PovertyTotalitarianism
Book:A Minor Apocalypse
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“Dr. Kim couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark. Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.”

PovertyCommunismDictatorshipTotalitarianismNorth KoreaFamine
Book:Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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“The Scavenger's Ledger by Stewart Stafford The scratch of a nib on paper Tells me I am alive, I think. At this Heaven/Hell midpoint— A torn throat for a poison drink. The horizon lit up again tonight, Rebels fight for futile freedom, Happiness, a cold, distant stranger, No gifted transfusion to bleed him. Willingly failing the audition of life, Food appears to have lost all taste, A numb tongue or cheap ingredients, I cannot let one crumb go to waste. They’ve finally cured me of love, Stripped every vestige of me away, Carrying my grave upon my back, Their snail slithers from day to day. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

PhilosophyDespairIsolationExistentialismDystopianGothicTotalitarianismContemporary PoetryDark PoetryOrwellian
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.”

EvilDictatorshipRapeTotalitarianismArgentina1970sBanality Of EvilHannah ArendtJorge Rafael VidelaHitch 22
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Like most of the students of Crozer [Theological Seminary], I felt that while war could never be a positive or absolute good, it could serve as a negative good in the sense of preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system—Nazi, Fascist, or Communist.”

WarEvilSurrenderResistanceCommunismFascismTotalitarianismNazism
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“Our forefathers were heroes. But why were they heroes? Because they fought for democracy. They fought for the life and liberty of the Filipino people. They fought for our independence, our freedom. They fought against tyranny, totalitarianism, and dictatorship. They fought for us and that is something we must be grateful for.”

PeopleLifeFreedomLibertyDemocracyIndependenceGratefulTyrannyThanksHeroesDictatorshipTotalitarianismFilipino
Book:Naaalala Niyo Ba Ang Noli Me Tangere?
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“In Chapter 77, you had people of totally different worldviews and ideas joined together,” says Patrik. “You had, for example, democratic socialists on the one side and fervent Catholics on the other side. It was totally normal for me that as a small child, I was being raised in a community of people with very different opinions. So it shattered the bubble around me.” The lesson of valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals is something that Christians today need to embrace. “When we look at what’s happening in America today, we see that you are building walls and creating gaps between people,” he says. “For us, we are always willing to speak, to talk with the other side to avoid building walls between people. You know, it is much easier to indoctrinate someone who is enclosed within a set of walls.”

TruthFreedomLibertyChristianityCapitalismLiesCommunismInquiryTotalitarianismDissidents
Book:Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents
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“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

TruthFilmScienceReligionFaithLiteraturePoliticsUnited StatesProgressAtheismSelf LoveEnlightenmentArgumentLiesHumanismConvictionRussiaSocialismJournalismCommunismIronyGermanyLos AngelesIndividualismSouth AfricaCold WarSoviet UnionTotalitarianismCritical ThinkingOrthodoxyBerlinSelf PityApartheidPostmodernismLiterary CriticismSectarianismTribalismPopulismEuphemismHedonismMonotheismGeorge OrwellMunichGroupthinkSolipsismPolytheismThomas MannPotusRonald ReaganRadical PoliticsMargaret ThatcherRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsApoliticismGeorge Hw BushBought PriesthoodXhosa PeopleZulu PeopleCape ColouredsEurocentricismGerman PeoplePersonality Politics
Book:For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
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“All of us are on edge as we try to navigate this rapid collapse of democracy and the US’s slide into a totalitarian regime. I don’t recall a time, even during the early years of the pandemic, when there was this much constant and relentless stress and fear. The resulting anxiety, anger, and other negative emotions get misdirected to ourselves and the people closest to us, often without our being conscious of it. This is a tactic and goal of fascism, as a populace that is constantly on edge and emotionally dysregulated is easier to control.”

FearDemocracyTrumpAnxietyEmotionsStressAngerFascismTotalitarianismEmotional Regulation
Author:Vu Le
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“We have a tendency to describe capitalism with familiar, well-worn words like ‘markets’ and ‘trade’. But this isn’t quite accurate. Markets and traders were around for thousands of years before capitalism, and they are innocent enough on their own. What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it’s organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we measure as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.”

CapitalismEconomicsLogicGreenDefinitionsTotalitarianismMarketsGdpDegrowth
Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“Any religion-based state has a mission to limit the minds of its people, to fight the developments of history and logic, and to dumb down its citizens. It’s important to stand in the way of such a mentality, to deny it from continuing its mission to murder the souls of its people, killing them deep within while they are still alive and breathing.”

ReligionLibertyHistoryLogicIslamOppressionPersecutionTotalitarianismSaudi ArabiaFreedom Of ExpressionAuthoritarianismTheocracyStultification
Book:1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think
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“If readers and writers are conscious of language, they will cease to be susceptible to corrupt political argument. Totalitarianism will lose its strength in the face of crisp, clear prose. It is a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of the English language. That Orwell was willing to assign language such power underscored his belief in the centrality of speech to politics, and the importance not only of securing free speech, but of ensuring that words that are spoken freely are also spoken honestly.”

SpeechFree SpeechPower Of WordsTotalitarianismGeorge OrwellWords Are Powerful
Book:Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition
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“And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.”

Human NatureTerrorHolocaustTotalitarianismStalinismFacism
Book:Life and Fate
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“We would do well, as Orwell counselled, to see the traces of the dystopian around us, to find the ends of those threads and how far along we are; the most accurate prophecy being that people, and the allure of domination, never really change. We can Copenhagenise our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, but provided we are still embedded in systems that reward cronyism, exploitation and short-term profiteering, that require poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups. What may save us is, in Orwell’s words, a dedication to ‘common decency’ and the perpetual knowledge that it need not be like this.”

HopeHuman NatureExploitationTotalitarianismDystopiaOrwellian
Book:Imaginary Cities
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“As [Isaiah] Berlin wrote to George Kennan in 1951, 'What we violently reject is ... the very idea that there are circumstances in which one has a right to get at, and shape the characters and souls of other men for purposes which these men, if they realized what we were doing, might reject.' The respect for individual liberty goes hand in hand with the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental principle and is incompatible with treating human beings as sheer material to be conditioned and shaped at will.”

LibertyHumanismModerationMarxismTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismPolitical TheoryUtopianism
Book:Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
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“So when you write a book like "The Handmaid's Tale" in 1985, what you're hoping as a citizen is that it will become obsolete. And in the '90s, right after the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, it appeared that it might become obsolete. But then things turned around and went in the other direction. So it's been quite frightening to watch those kinds of changes. And I think one of the things that has happened is that people of my age and older who remember the effects of the Great Depression and World War II have died out, and younger people don't remember what totalitarianisms were really like. So they get off on collecting, you know, German buttons, but they don't remember what really happened. And when you do remember what really happened, you were quite appalled by what's going on in Ukraine because it's happened before. And you were quite appalled by the polarization in American society, which also happened before in the 1930s. So yes. The patterns that are alarming - and as I've often said, I didn't put anything into "The Handmaid's Tale" that has not happened sometime somewhere before.”

ChangeTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismDystopiaHandmaids TaleHistory Repeating
Author:Margaret Atwood
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“Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy. And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.”

LoveReasonTruthBeliefFearResponsibilityAtheismCrimeHealthMoralityEthicsEvidenceGuiltAtheistIntellectMythDebateRedemptionIndifferenceDictatorshipTotalitarianismHomo SapiensWishful ThinkingCompulsorySupreme BeingLove Your NeighborAtheist ArgumentRichard DawkinsDawkinsHuman SacrificeEternal PunishmentEternal FatherChristopher HitchensHitchensAncient MythChristianity Is ImmoralDivine DictatorshipGreat Atheist ArgumentHitchslapImmoral Christianity
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”

TruthFascismTotalitarianismAuthoritarianism
Book:On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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“This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend people against the evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of the evildoers and against the people!”

TotalitarianismWar Crimes1976NurembergOath Of OfficeFollowing OrdersOaths
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
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“Гуляет по лесу дракон. Встретил медведя. «Медведь, — говорит дракон, — у меня в восемь часов ужин. Приходи — я тебя съем». Идет дальше. Бежит лиса. «Лиса, — говорит дракон, — у меня в семь утра завтрак. Приходи — я тебя съем». Идет дальше. Скачет заяц. «Стой, заяц, — говорит дракон, — у меня в два часа обед. Приходи — я тебя съем». — «У меня вопрос», — поднял заяц лапу. — «Давай». — «Можно не приходить?» — «Можно. Я тебя вычеркиваю из списка». Но мало кто способен задать такой вопрос… Бляааа!”

JokeTotalitarianism
Book:Czasy secondhand. Koniec czerwonego człowieka
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“I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.”

LiteratureMusicFoodTelevisionBooksHungerTheatreNewspapersPropagandaCinemaAirportsTotalitarianismNorth KoreaTourismCultsHero Worship2000Kim Jong IlKim Il SungPyongyangManchuriaTourism In North KoreaShenyang
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
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“It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.”

ClassTotalitarianismMassesDefinitionPolitical MovementsApolitical1967Party PoliticsApoliticism
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic.”

IntegrityPropagandaTotalitarianismStalinismGeorge OrwellJoseph StalinRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsNational Security Agency
Author:William Giraldi
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“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said. "Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?" "Absol—well, okay." "Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?" "All right, I'll grant you that, but—" "Saving civilization from a horde of—" "It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply. "Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?”

WarCivilizationSlaveryGoodTotalitarianismLong Run
Book:Thud!
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“It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was 'a war without end.' I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht's character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for.”

WarTotalitarianismNihilismSuperstitionAl QaedaWar On TerrorAuthoritarianismOsama Bin LadenIslamismWar In Afghanistan 2001Bertold Brecht
Book:The Enemy
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“The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.”

WarPoliticsUnited StatesChinaNuclear WeaponsTotalitarianismNorth KoreaWashington Dc1968South KoreaKorean War1976United States ArmyMao Zedong20002001Kim Jong IlSeoulKim Il SungPyongyangMadeleine AlbrightChinese PeopleAxe Murder IncidentKorean Demilitarized ZoneLand MinesSichuanKorean PeninsulaOttawa TreatyTaedong RiverUnited States And WmdUss Pueblo Ager 2
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
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“І раптом мені стукнула в голову егоїстична, по-романтичному зухвала думка — про своєрідне відшкодування. Його ж таки треба вділяти соратникам, які жертвують своє найсокровенніше задля Держави. Відплачувати їм треба найвищим і найціннішим із усього, чого тільки можна запрагнути, — славою й почестями. Якщо слава й почесті служать достатньою втіхою покаліченому на війні солдатові, то чом би їм не послужити в такий самий спосіб людині, покаліченій внутрішньо?”

WarTotalitarianismDystopiaState
Book:Kallocain
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“Nine out of ten eugenicists in the 20th Century were also Progressives or Socialists, as central to the eugenic creed is the desire to engineer and centrally plan human reproduction and heredity. These were not people that believed in individual liberty. They certainly didn't believe the individual had the right to chose their own mate freely. They were statists, They were totalitarians at heart.”

SocialismSocialistAutonomyTotalitarianismCivil LibertiesEugenicsStatismIndividual LibertyProgressivismProgressivesReproductive RightsTotalitarianSocialized MedicineScientific RacismUtopian SocialismCentral PlannersRace HygieneStatistPlanned SocietyFabian SocialismEugenicistsCivil Libertarian
Author:A.E. Samaan
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