Quotes

Let me say a slur

• Yugopnik

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6825820-the-capitalists-will-sell-us-the-rope-with-which-we

The heads of government in America are not the real rulers. I have talked with many of them from the President down. Some of them would really like to use power for the people. They feel baffled by their inability to do so; they blame other branches of government, legislatures, courts. But they haven’t analyzed the real reason. The difficulty is that they haven’t power to use. Neither the President nor Congress nor the common people, under any form of organization whatever, can legally dispose of the oil of Rockefeller or the gold in the vaults of Morgan. If they try, they will be checked by other branches of government, which was designed as a system of checks and balances precisely to prevent such “usurpation of power.” Private capitalists own the means of production and thus rule the lives of millions. Government, however chosen, is limited to the function of making regulations which will help capitalism run more easily by adjusting relations between property and protecting it against the “lawless” demands of non-owners. This constitutes what Marxists call the dictatorship of property. “The talk about pure democracy is but a bourgeois screen,” says Stalin, “to conceal the fact that equality between exploiters and exploited is impossible. . . . It was invented to hide the sores of capitalism . . . and lend it moral strength.” [Stalin, Leninism, I, 46]

Italy has sent thousands of troops, and Germany has sent cannons and planes, to the fascists in Spain. But what did the Spanish people get? Jesus said, "I was hungry, and you gave me no meat. I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink. I was naked, and you did not clothe me." -- yeah, is it not so? What have the democratic countries given Spain? Have they done anything but deny Spain the most necessary, or even closed their borders for all provisions?

While the fascists have openly sent troops, we volunteers have had to trick the police of France and our countries of birth with all sorts of roundabout ways to Spain. We would get to Spain even if the Devil himself were assigned to guard the border. But what's worse is that the "democracies" refuse to buy weapons for Spain, indeed, they refuse the Spanish Republic its right-- which is clear as a sunny sky-- to defend itself. But the Lord said, "inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." And the ways these "democratic" countries have treated Spain, are the ways, should Spain fall, these countries will be treated by the same forces they today aid indirectly.

(source: Yngvar Ustvedt's Arbeidere under våpen: Norske frivillige i den spanske borgerkrig, page 45; own translation)

Source

Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/09/kah2-s11.html

I call out to you, my people

I firmly clasp your hands,

I kiss the earth beneath your feet

and declare: I sacrifice myself for you.

I give you the light of my eyes as a gift.

I give you the warmth of my heart.

The tragedy I live

is my share of your own.

I call upon you,

I firmly clasp your hands.

In my land I never was disgraced,

never lowered myself.

I always challenged my oppressors,

orphaned, naked and with bare feet.

I felt my blood in my own hands,

never lowered my flag.

I always protected the grass

on my ancestors' graves.

I call out to you, my people,

I firmly clasp your hands.

— Tawfiq Zayyad, 1966 (as translated by Mohammed Sawaie in The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems)

This poem was also the basis of a famous Palestinian nationalist song: https://youtu.be/ec2yB6nMGxM