Ideological Purge Quotes

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.

The policy now seems to be to squeeze out anyone who is tainted by strong fighting ideas…. It seems to me that official Sinn Fein is inclined to be ever less militant and ever more political and theoretical…. It is rather pitiful.

I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers.

Pol Pot - he rounded up anybody he thought was intellectual and had them executed. And how he told someone was intellectual or not was whether they wore glasses. If they're that clever, take them off when they see him coming!

[T]he Committee on Un-American Activities calls upon the American labor movement ... to amend its constitutions where necessary in order to deny membership to a member of the Communist party or any other group which dedicates itself to the destruction of America's way of life.

Among the elementary measures the American government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under a National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of bourgeois ideology.

Pol Pot carried out through the years enormous purges against his own followers because of his paranoia.

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.

If communism in Hollywood is now mythical, it is only because this Committee conducted three investigations to bring it about. The industry itself did certainly not accomplish this.

In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor.

Republicans, Weed Out Your Progressives