Red Star Over the Third World Quotes

“Aimé Césaire did not see ‘fascism’ and ‘colonialism’ as separate endeavours. They were kin. But in Europe after 1945, there was a great push to see fascism as merely its European expression, an aberration of the Germans and the Italians. To suggest that fascism was merely Nazism with no linkage to colonialism allowed the Europeans and the North Americans to revive – without embarrassment – their colonial histories.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Should I tell you about my life as the head of the Engels collective farm in the Samarkand region for the past twenty years as a mother who, besides raising six children of her own, adopted ten children of different nationalities during World War II, that having graduated from Samarkand Agricultural Institute, I am now working on a Master’s thesis on the selection of the new, very sweet variety of Sultana grapes. . . . My biography, the biography of an ordinary Uzbek woman, would be a vivid example of what Soviet power has given to the women of the East.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The great social wealth was then turned over to an oligarchy. The social deterioration was rapid. The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that over a million Russians died ‘due to the economic shock of mass privatization and shock therapy’ in the decade from 1991 to 2001. Life expectancy for the Russian male was 65 in the last days of the USSR, but it collapsed to 60 a decade later. Inequality and sorrow returned to the new republics that emerged out of the USSR. No wonder then that polls routinely find that more than half of the Russian citizens dream of a return to the days of the USSR.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The image of communists being thrown from helicopters off the coast of Chile is far less known than any cliché about the USSR.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The anti-colonialism of the early Soviets was mirrored by the anti-fascism of the next generation. This was now damaged by the 20th-Congress revelations and by the invasion of Hungary.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“It was the Soviet Union that saved the world from Nazism. It was Soviet armies that liberated most of the Nazi concentration camps, and it was the Soviet armies that entered Berlin and ended the war.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“In his Fascism and Social Decay (1934), Dutt pointed out that the ‘revolt against science’ prepares the ground for ‘all the quackeries and charlatanries, of chauvinism, racial theories, antisemitism, Aryan grandmothers, mystic swastikas, divine missions, strong-man saviours, and all the rest of the nonsense through which alone capitalism today can try to maintain its hold a little longer’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) – wrote in 1928, ‘We do not wish that Socialism in America be a tracing and a copy. It must be a heroic creation. We must, with our own reality, in our own language, bring Indoamerican socialism to life.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Winston Churchill, an influential person in the British government, said that ‘one might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Racism was vital to the capitalist policies of the United States and the European countries that relied upon ideas of racial superiority to maintain their colonies and semi-colonies as places of super-exploitation of people and nature.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Workers, Lenin wrote, should not seek a better deal within the restricted confines of capitalism, but seek to build a better world within the much broader horizon of communism.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The task of the revolutionary intellectuals is to ‘collect the opinions of these mass statesmen’ – namely the people – ‘sift and refine them, and return them to the masses, who then take them and put them into practice’. This is what the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, writing in his prison cell at around this same time, called elaboration – to take the views of the masses and elaborate them from common sense to philosophy”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Although under the influence of Gandhi we followed another path’, wrote Nehru reflectively in his Soviet Russia (1927), ‘we were influenced by the example of Lenin’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Lenin wrote, ‘insurrection is art’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The goal of the Marxists should be to harness the actual experience of the workers and drive an agenda that would make the worker and peasant power into the power of society.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Give us an organization of revolutionaries’, Lenin wrote boldly and seemingly fantastically, ‘and we will overturn Russia’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World