Quotes

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent

All over the world, Wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

www.internationalmagz.com

VLADIMIR LENIN

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cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4515233

"Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance/ struggle against Israel colonialism according International Law" - Ben Norton

You underestimate my ability to break things

• Naomi Nagata

"The United States, the UK, Germany, and France—these are some of the most oppressive and repressive governments in the world if you remove all of the self-praise and the propaganda that they spew about themselves and about freedom and civil rights and so on.

They are a Western axis against freedom, and if you don't know that—I mean, if you live there and you don't know that—then you just haven't tested it.

The only way that you can live in any of those countries—and increasingly in the US—and not know that they are despotic tyrannies, is if you have been so numbed and so brainwashed that you hold no opinion in your head that wasn't put there by the state, that wasn't injected into your lifeless brain by the mainstream media.

So, you never had anything to protest about.

You never questioned your government.

You never challenged the official narratives about anything.

That's the only way that you can't know what I'm talking about.

And that makes you even more repressed, more oppressed, and more tyrannized than the people who are getting beaten and who are getting detained for objecting to their government's brutality.

You're even more of a victim.

You're even more abused than those protesters who are getting clubbed upside the head and getting choked and getting abused by the security forces because your government, your rulers, your ruling class has never let you live a day in your life without telling you what to think and sabotaging your ability to think for yourself.

You're the most abused in your society.

What they did to you is worse than beating; it's worse than detention; it's worse than imprisonment.

At least those protesters who are getting beaten and arrested by the police—at least their minds are free, at least they have their own thoughts in their heads.

But you—your leaders have made you a zombie that thinks that the right thing, the moral thing, is whatever power chooses to do; your government has put you into a moral coma.

You're morally comatose.

They put you under an induced coma so that you can't see them sponsoring the wanton murder of 34,000 people, some 24,000 innocent women and children.

You can't see that there's anything wrong with that.

You feel nothing, or even worse, you think it's the right thing, you think it's the moral thing, you think that what your government is doing is good by sanctioning indiscriminate slaughter; you think that's fine.

Why?

They've robbed you of your very humanity, and that's the only reason that you can believe that you live in a free society.

That's the only reason that you can believe that you live in a society with civil rights and liberty and free speech and all of those other wonderful things that you never had and never will have.

The only freedom that you have in those countries is the freedom to agree with power.

You're free to submit to the powers that be."

Source: https://twitter.com/nxt888/status/1784491213548368231

Disclaimer: i could not find a more solid source for this quote. The tweet attributes it to a person named Shahid Bolsen. I do not know anything about this person. Cursory research indicates they are a somewhat obscure middle eastern political commentator. This is not an endorsement of whatever other political views they may or may not hold, as i have no clue in that regard. Regardless who said it and whether or not they are someone we would agree with more broadly, this is in and of itself an excellent quote that perfectly encapsulates the reality of western societies: we are the most propagandized people in the world.

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Nukes are a great solution to a lot of problems, in accordance with the first Rule of Warfare, that there is no such thing as overkill.

• Isaac Arthur 2024

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But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.

It is often said that the working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory reveals the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory, and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily, provided, however, this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity, provided it subordinates spontaneity to itself. Usually this is taken for granted, but it is precisely this which Rabocheye Dyelo forgets or distorts. The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless, most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree.

—V.I. Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?"