Vijay Prashad Quotes
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It's Israelis who are ready to abandon the hard work of peace.
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I think a far more important strategic way to deal with the Islamic State would be to bring some of these regional partners and explain to them that Turkey's own contradictory foreign policy has to end. I mean, if United States is serious, it has leverage over Turkey. And apparently it has not been able to move Turkey sufficiently.
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Organizing is always a relationship between the person who arrives and says 'Let's meet together' and the person who comes to the meeting.
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There's a different use for different strategies.
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Where there is a living memory of struggle, they have a living memory of the rebellion. Where there's no struggle afterward the rebellion is forgotten.
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Interestingly, what the bourgeois women's groups in India wanted to do in the nationalist period is to have the peasant women essentially follow them... They would be the leaders and the peasant women would be the masses.
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Mr. Obama needs to make a phone call to Ankara and have a serious conversation about why the current government in Turkey isn't going to seal its border, why it doesn't take a stronger position against the Islamic State.
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I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity.
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To build a mass movement, nonviolence is indispensable.
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The best intentions (of respect and tolerance) can often be annoying to those whose cultures are not in dominance: we feel that we are often zoological specimens.
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You see often it's not ideas, it's inertia, it's bureaucratism, it's all the other things that sometimes come in the way of a good idea.
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There are people who are saying that they voted twice for Mr. Obama and they are now feeling a great sense of regret, not only over Guantanamo, etc., but now perhaps the entry into a new war in West Asia.
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You see all kinds of anarchic forms of rebellion, but the moment of preparation is when the Communists and other kinds of political forces play a roll.
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You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.
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It's plain that the American right wing, the Republicans and some sections of the Democratic Party, don't really care about international norms. They believe in the executive authority of the president. They don't even believe the United Nations or international law should play any role vis-à-vis American policymaking.
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The Chinese did after all decide that the Soviet Union was a greater threat than the United States and decided to come to terms with the United States when Nixon visits China.
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Interestingly, if you write preparation out of history, leadership and preparation, the building of confidence among people who are exploited, you've actually methodologically written out the Communists because, when an uprising takes place, you don't necessarily see red flags everywhere.
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People who become important activists, they also struggle with the process of discovery.
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We come from the future, essentially, because we have all these ideas about gender equality, sexual freedom, and these are not shared by the working class, the peasantry among whom we work.
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You see, one strand...of anarchism believed that you needed to use essentially homeopathic doses of terror by assassinating people, et cetera, the so-called 'propaganda of the deed', and that this propaganda of the deed would rouse people up, give them confidence to rise up. Another section believed 'No, it was not by seeing something happen that people get confidence, but it's by acting', in other words, the movements must go among the people and produce small struggles, bigger struggles, to give people greater and greater confidence.
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There's no UN resolution that allows the United States to carry out operations in Syria. You'll remember that in Libya in 2011 there was a great hoopla made about the importance of getting a UN resolution. Here there was no attempt to get any resolution. They simply bombed in Syria.
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The question of international norms or international resolutions, you know, coming from Mr. Obama is not really about whether there are international norms or resolutions to uphold.
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There's a right-wing shift in Israeli society, very hard right shift.
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From 1991 till the present, Iraq sovereignty has been trampled by the United States.
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When anarchists are having a debate, they're having a debate about tactics, 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?' The question isn't 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?', the primary question is how do you build confidence among the masses of people who experience hierarchies, who experience exploitation, who experience oppression.
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We are social beings who make communities with an urgency, and it is a stern charge to make us take refuge in the lonely world of oneself. ...Racism attempts to occlude our cosmopolitanism (of the songs in and out of our bones), and it often appropriates our mild forms of xenophobia into its own virulent project. Difference among peoples is something that we negotiate in our everyday interactions, asking questions and being better informed of our mutual realities. To transform difference into the body is an act of bad faith, a denial of our shared nakedness.
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Turkey is using the Islamic State in the same way as Pakistan used the Taliban in Afghanistan. You know, that's perhaps Turkey's strategy.
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Where there is no history of struggle after an uprising, the living memory dies.
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It's important to reflect about what's happening inside Israel.
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There are several studies done of peasant uprisings where the first chapter might be 'conditions in that area' and so the conditions are bad, and then the second chapter is a kind of conjectural event, somebody's shot and then there's an uprising. But there's no consideration, no chapter on preparation.
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