Norman Finkelstein Quotes
When I was a young man, my mother said to me, 'You can't be a communist without being a militant atheist.' So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.
Finkelstein, Norman. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein. Directed by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier, Ridgen Film, 2009.
Throughout the history of American Slavery, the Southern apologists for slavery have accused abolitionists and anyone opposed to slavery of being Communists, Atheists, or any other group that was generally unpopular in the day. This is one of the early instances where that heinous practice was started. However it continued and became especially virulent, in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s where anyone who opposed segregation was accused by Southern Segregationists of being Communists and Atheists as well as other unpleasant epithets. Most religious Americans opposed slavery in the 1850s but there are some in the South, like this Preacher, who seemed totally ignorant of the strong pro abolitionist views of the many religious leader abolitionists in the North and a few in the South.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had more influence and visibility than any other first lady, before or since. She was First Lady for 3+ terms—longer than any other, and in addition to her official duties, she wrote a very popular daily newspaper column. As FDR was handicapped and could not travel much, she traveled all over the nation and the world. She was also very outspoken and no one ever knew whether or not she was speaking with the President’s concurrence or was on her own. She tended to be very liberal—especially in terms of the evils of racial segregation—then legal, and the problems of workers. Her broad influence was very damaging to Southern Segregationist groups and arch Conservative economic groups, who realized that her influence in the change of public opinion was much more effective at changing America than were the socialists and communists who were calling for revolution and were so unappealing that they could easily be attacked. Mrs. Roosevelt was for them more dangerous than Communism.
Other totalitarian systems were defeated or simply crumbled with age…Only Communist systems prevail.
This was of course written before the fall of the Soviet Union and world wide communism.
The archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Segura, had put the Catholic Church in the midst of the political struggle siding with the Fascists against the Republicans. In retaliation, several Catholic churches and convents were burned. The Cardinal and others wanted to take severe reprisals against the Republicans.
He was not asked to change his views, simply to remain silent, He refused as he felt that his silence would be dishonest. Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
Vladimir Lenin
The modernity of this ancient leader is striking. For another example see his view on the importance of engendering supportive public opinion: XXX
While this was his opinion, it was never issued in a Papal Bull or had the force of Catholic law. Meanwhile, almost all of the socialist movements in the West have had Catholics in their leadership and many democrats of modern times would have been considered socialist. Many countries with high proportions of Catholic voters have elected socialist governments in secluding Spain and Italy.
The Ottoman Turks made the great mistake of allying themselves with Germany in WWI. At the end of the war, most of the Ottoman Empire in was stripped from Turkey by the terms of the peace treaty, corruption was rampant, and Turkey was culturally, scientifically, and economically quite backward and the nation was further hampered by Islamic Fundamentalism. The nation as they envisioned it at the time did not survive. Soon Demal and the other Young Turks were unseated in the almost bloodless revolution of Ataturk who then made the nation secular, modernized it and triggered the development that makes it the most modern and powerful Islamic country in the world, and a major economic and military power in the world.
This quotation illustrates a peculiar situation with regard to President Barack Obama. Among some subgroups of the United States, there are people who hate President Obama. And some of them, throughout his Presidency, has described Obama in these obviously false phrases. They manage to hold these false belief’s despite the fact that the refuting evidence is very easy to find. Obama was a very devout Protestant. And his political world view was not communism or Marxism, but middle of the road. He was not even in the left wing of his Democratic Party. However what De Varona and others with these seemingly absurd views discount the data because it is part of a communist conspiracy to plant false information so they can put their man in the White House.
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist, former professor, and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007.
