Fernando Haddad Quotes

Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

The greatest threat to the security of the people of North Korea comes from the government of North Korea.

Today Chile is a country subjected by its Armed Forces to a regime similar to those that appeared in fascist occupied Europe. The country is under state of siege, all the cities under curfews, there are military tribunals established under the military code that like those established during times of war allow no appeal. There are mass arrest of the population and pogroms against foreigners, etc. The Chilean Armed Forces has declared war against the Chilean People…

The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror - real or fake, provoked or accidental - can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

Movies like 'The Interview' and 'Team America: World Police' don't often show the realities of life in North Korea and the human rights violations perpetrated by the government there.

For more than four decades, the Libyan people have been ruled by a tyrant - Moammar Gaddafi. He has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world - including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents.

Singling out political opponents for working against the ruling party is precisely the tactic of every tyrannical government from Red China to Venezuela. The first step in the process is creating unfounded public suspicion of political opponents, followed by arresting and jailing any who continue speaking against the regime.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.

I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.

Fascism in Uruguay did not begin just with the military coup of 1973, but years before, even when there was still a government with a constitution and parliament.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don't know.

Occasionally, the horrors of life in North Korea do show up in our American satire.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

This is probably my last free statement through our news media, where the radio and television are already under the heel of the ruling political party of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. One would have thought radio and television were enough as propaganda tools.

The Dirty War La Guerra Sucia

Communism of every type and stripe brings with it an ideological straight jacket. Thought control, brain-washing, censorship, imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture are the indispensable weapons of Communist rule.

When despots rule, cartoonists die.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

The Russian Bolsheviks sold out most of the hopes of us early communists. The standard of living increased, and education and medicine improved finally after the 1917 Revolution, but the Russians today have as little freedom as we had under the Czar. That is the tragedy of Russia.

There is a terrible price the U. S. Government must pay when it associates itself … intimately with a repressive regime.

He [Rafael Trujillo] had his torture chambers. He had his political assassinations. But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works, and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.