Communist Revolution Quotes
The major problem at the time was not the capitalist in the industrial revolutionary sense of the word as there was little industry. China as an agrarian society but the vast majority of the land was owned by relatively few wealthy families. It was close to a feudal system and that was the target for the Communists and their revolution. There was a very small proletariat. Their methods were brutal, but they executed the landlords and the class warfare ended quickly. Sun Yat-sen was not able to solve the land problem, nor was Chiang Kai-shek as most of his major supporters were landowners of warlords who controlled the landowners.
The early revolutionary Chinese Communists had a much more democratic and civil-liberties oriented view of government than after the had won and gained control of China. Then the problems were so enormous with such meager resources that the insecurity of the party government let to a civil rights flip flop and a politically authoritarian government. Stability is today the most important priority for the Chinese Communist party so that free speech, protests and other civil liberties are curtailed. Economic development is the more important activity and political development is lagging, but while economic development is racing ahead, Chinese political development improves only slowly. Dissidents like Liu Xiaobo are pushing the process.
Immediately after the Russian Revolution, the provisional government appointed him as Ambassador to the United States. However, the provisional government was supplanted when the Bolsheviks took over. See {640094} and {640095} for more on the Communist struggle with the Russian Peasants. Not enamored of Communism, he stayed in the United States with many other Russian refugees.
This is one of the most indelicate political statements ever made. Normally, the argument that communists should be murdered is incendiary enough, but this remark came shortly after the Arizona attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords where she was shot in the head.
A. B. Magil. Poem written upon the suicide of the Russian Poet, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, 1893-1930. The fact that a Marxist Russian Poet would commit suicide was not seen as the result of a mental problem like depression, but as a political act and a statement of dissatisfaction with 1930 Russia.
The one area where communists were successful was in fighting for the Russian Homeland in WWII and the subsequent assault on Germany from the East. Most American military experts did not believe that the Russians could hold out. However with American weapons and supplies they proved most effective in causing German casualties. The Russians, however, had lost 22 million soldiers and civilians—a fearful cost. But the Communists proved they could lead a nation at war, and this success bought them 50 years of acceptance from the Russian people before their inability to manage a civilian society finally became clear and the Soviet Union collapsed.
According to Palmer, all labor strikes were a part of the international communist movement to take over America. This quotation is an excellent example of the conflation and the strange logic of the extreme anti-communists of the red scare. It started with a railroad strike. Because some of the strike leaders were socialists and some communists, the strike was communist. And if it was communist, the strike is but one step in capturing the political and economic power of the nation, and the purpose of that was to overthrow the government and substitute the governmental structure of Russia. With such thinking no labor action could be seen as American and patriotic if there were any socialists or communists participating in the strike. Later in the McCarthy era, a strike would be a menace if any participant even had been a communist or was related to one or had friends who were communists or even if not but the Communists morally supported the strikers, then the strike was dangerous. The same thing for civil rights. The Communists loudly opposed racial segregation. Therefore any effort to end segregation was a danger to America and furthers the communist conspiracy. This “logic” can be seen well into the 1960’s by the Southern segregationist leaders.
New York Times Russian correspondent was commenting on the prognosis for the Russian revolution:
The condition of most of Europe towards the end of WWII was dire. However, even then it was clear that since there were organized communists (partisans who fought the Nazis during the war) many of them would try and dominate the postwar politics in many counties. This was no surprise to American planners and policy makers.
