Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 2

"Patriotism is not an abstract concept. It begins from one's own home. It buds out from the love for one's parents, spouses and children, the love for one's own home, village and workplace, and further develops into the love for one's country and fellow people."

- Kim Jong-un, Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and supreme leader of Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

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"By 'Conservative Revolution' we mean the return to respect for all those elementary laws and values without which the individual is alienated from nature and God and left incapable of establishing any true order. In the place of equality comes the inner value of the individual; in the place of socialist convictions, the just integration of people into their place in a society of rank; in place of mechanical selection, the organic growth of leadership; in place of bureaucratic compulsion, the inner responsibility of genuine self-governance; in place of mass happiness, the rights of the personality formed by the nation."
--Edgar Julius Jung, "Germany and the Conservative Revolution," 1932
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"The story told in this book is the story of the British empire, which by 1900, fearing the rising power of the young German Reich, contrived in secrecy a plan for a giant encirclement of the Eurasian landmass. The main objective of this titanic siege was the prevention of an alliance between Germany and Russia: if these two powers could have fused into an ‘embrace,’ so reasoned the British stewards, they would have come to surround themselves with a fortress of resources, men, knowledge and military might such as to endanger the survival of the British empire in the new century.
(…)
By 1890 (…) Bismarck himself, who was now being dismissed by the new Emperor, Wilhelm II, had been capable of identifying a ‘new course’ for Germany. He clearly comprehended, as will be emphasized hereafter, the importance of not antagonizing Russia.
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By 1900 it was clear to the British that the Reich could indeed ‘pull it off’ (...) British cauchemar would come true: if Germany and Russia united in one form or another, the Eurasian Embrace would come into existence: that is, a concrete Eurasian empire at the center of the continental landmass, which would come to rest on an enormous Slav army and German technological mastery. And that, the British elite sentenced, was never to be, for it would have mortally threatened the supremacy of the British empire.
(…)
By 1922 Hitler was growing increasingly deaf to any score of Eurasian harmony: conservative ideologue Moeller van den Bruck, who longed to witness a blending of the Occident with ‘the great human poetry of the Orient’, encountered the Nazi leader and engaged him in a long discussion, at the end of which, exhausted, he confided to a friend: ‘The fellow never comprehends.’
(…)
The Strasser brothers incarnated the anti-capitalist current of Germany’s petty bourgeoisie, a movement that hearkened back to late-Renaissance German utopianism, for which land was conceived as inalienable and protected by a ‘peasant aristocracy,’ industry segmented into guilds, and national union achieved by a federation of self-governed cantons. A federated Germany, in the view of the Strassers, meant a federated Europe, and an anti-British alliance of free workers across Eurasia. There was no trace of the religious racialism of the Hitlerites in the Strassers’ outlook.
(…)
The present geopolitical policy of the United States is a direct and wholly consistent continuation of the old imperial strategy of Britain. It is that unmistakable cocktail of aggression, subversion and mass murder waged at the vital nodes of the landmass, from Palestine and Central Asia to the gates of China, in Taiwan and Korea, that seeks to undermine any movement towards a confederation of nations capable of turning the continental base into a Eurasian league of socio-political cooperation and defense against Anglo-American assault."

G.G. Preparata, "Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich", pp. XVII, 5-8, 135-136, 187-188 & 263

H/t Arslan Akhtar

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From James Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republic - To the Irish People:

The struggle for Irish freedom has two aspects: it is national and it is social. Its national ideal can never be realized until Ireland stands forth before the world, a nation free and independent. It is social and economic; because no matter what the form of government may be, as long as one class own as their private property the land and instruments of labor, from which all mankind derive their subsistence, that class will always have it in their power to plunder and enslave the remainder of their fellow creatures. Its social ideal, therefore, requires the public ownership by the Irish people of the land and instruments of production, distribution, and exchange to be held and controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the entire community. But every Irish movement of the last 200 years has neglected one or the other of these equally necessary aspects of the national struggle. They have either been agrarian and social, and in the hunt after some temporary abatement of agricultural distress have been juggled into forgetfulness of the vital principles which lie at the base of the claim for National Independence, or else they have been national and under the guidance of middle-class and aristocratic leaders, who either did not understand the economic basis of oppression, and so neglected the strongest weapon in their armory, or, understanding it, were selfish enough to see in the national movement little else than a means whereby, if successful, they might intercept and divert into the pockets of the Irish middle-class a greater share of that plunder of the Irish worker which at present flows across the channel. The failure of our so-called ‘leaders’ to grasp the grave significance of this two-fold character of the “Irish Question” is the real explanation of that paralysis which at constantly recurring periods falls like a blight upon Irish politics. The party which would aspire to lead the Irish people from bondage to freedom must then recognize both aspects of the long-continued struggle of the Irish Nation. Such a party is the newly-formed Irish Socialist Republican Party. In its resolve to win complete separation from all connection with the British Empire, and the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic, it embodies to the full the true Irish ideal – an independent nation with a social-democratic organization of society, thus adapting to the altered environment of the nineteenth century the vital principle of common ownership of the means of life which inspired the Brehon laws of our ancient forefathers. In its program of immediately practical reforms will be found the only feasible proposals yet formulated, either for averting from Irish farming the ruin with which it is threatened by the competition of the mammoth farms and scientifically equipped agriculture of America and Australia, for lessening the tide of emigration or for using the political power of the Irish people with potent effect in paving the way for the realization of a revolutionary ideal. We ask you then to join our ranks; to spread our ideas; to work for our success, which means your emancipation; to help us to blend the twin streams of National and Industrial Freedom into one irresistible torrent, sweeping all obstacles before it, and bearing grandly onward on its bosom the toiling millions of the Irish race, proudly enthusiastic in their desire to join the mighty ocean of lovers of Humanity who in every clime under the sun are working and hoping for the time when oppression and privilege will be no more; when “every man will be a Kaiser, every woman be a queen.”

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“Capitalistic economy is deeply anti-personal: it dehumanizes economic life and makes man a thing. This is expressed in the present period of decline by the fact that it is becoming constantly more anonymous. Capitalism is itself breaking down the principle of private property: it is difficult to know who is a proprietor and just what he owns. The power of the banks is a faceless, anonymous power. The trusts are anonymous, impersonal institutions. It is even uncertain who is responsible for the misery under which the world is now suffering: there is no culprit, for he has no name. The unemployed do not know who is to blame for their bitter lot. Man is crushed by a vast shapeless, faceless, and nameless power, money.” - Nicolas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World

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[50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre]

"Sometimes there were even too many civilian corpses, leading to a different sort of statistical manipulation: body-count deflation. After the My Lai massacre, the American Division claimed only 128 enemy dead, when in actuality more than 500 civilians had been slaughtered.
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Soldiers realized that small groups of civilians could be killed with impunity and logged as enemy dead, but larger numbers might raise red flags if there were no U.S. casualties or few weapons captured. To avoid uncomfortable questions about skewed kills-to-weapons ratios, many patrols planted grenades, rifles, or other arms on dead civilians as a matter of standard operating procedure. They obtained these from weapons caches they discovered, or by taking arms from prisoners or enemy dead carrying more than one weapon, or sometimes even by repurposing U.S. weapons as enemy matériel. As one marine explained, “When civilians got killed, no problem, just stick a chicom [Chinese communist] grenade on ’em, or an AK[-47 assault rifle], they become VC.“
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At My Lai, a number of soldiers became “double veterans,” as the GIs referred to men who raped and then murdered women. As the writers Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim reported, “Many women [at My Lai] were raped and sodomized, mutilated, and had their vaginas ripped open with knives or bayonets. One woman was killed when the muzzle of a rifle barrel was inserted into her vagina and the trigger was pulled.” In one sexual assault, three men held a teenage girl to the ground and violated her. Afterward, the girl was shot in the head and killed.

As the record of the war indicates in copious fashion, however, such crimes were hardly confined to My Lai. A marine who had served in Quang Tin Province, for example, testified that a nine-man squad entered a village ostensibly to capture “a Viet Cong whore.” The men located a woman, then serially raped her. The last one of them shot her through the head.
(...)
As with other crimes in Vietnam, the documentary record of detainee torture is sparse but exceptionally suggestive. For example, the files of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group—the secret Pentagon task force set up to monitor war crimes in the wake of the My Lai massacre—describe 141 substantiated instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or enemy prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water, or electric shock. But this is the merest tip of the iceberg: most of these cases came from just one investigation of the 172nd Military Intelligence Detatchment, a single unit of fifty to a hundred men, one of many such American units in Vietnam.”

Nick Turse, "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam"