Vijay Prashad > Quotes

“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.”
― Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity

“The annual budget is a much better reflection of a country's morality than its constitution. You put more money into repression, police, military... and so little to taking care of human troubles”
― Vijay Prashad

“The naming of a virus is a controversial matter. In 1832, cholera advanced from British India toward Europe. It was called ‘Asiatic Cholera’. The French felt that since they were democratic, they would not succumb to a disease of authoritarianism; but France was ravaged by cholera, which was as much about the bacteria as it is about the state of hygiene inside Europe and North America. (When cholera struck the United States in 1848, the Public Bathing Movement was born.)

The ‘Spanish Flu’ was only named after Spain because it came during World War I when journalism in most belligerent countries was censored. The media in Spain, not being in the war, widely reported the flu, and so that pandemic took the name of the country. In fact, evidence showed that the Spanish Flu began in the United States in a military base in Kansas where the chickens transmitted the virus to soldiers. It would then travel to British India, where 60 percent of the casualties of that pandemic took place. It was never named the ‘American Flu’ and no Indian government has ever sought to recover costs from the United States because of the animal-to-human transmission that happened there.”
― Vijay Prashad

“For privileged people, equality in an unequal world is a bonanza.”
― Vijay Prashad, No Free Left

“There is that old joke. Why is there never a coup in the United States? Because there is no US embassy there.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

“It was class against class in the immediate years after the Second World War, with the CIA helping the ruling elites to maintain their property and privilege against democracy.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations

“The theory of rogue states and terrorism provided the US with the ability to appropriate the entire discourse of liberalism and human rights to its side – the West is ipso facto the arbiter of human rights and of liberalism, and those that it finds to be violators of these broad principles are rogue states and terrorists. If the US sanctions regime against Iraq could be shown (as FAO did show) to have been responsible for the death of half a million children, that was not to be seen as either the operations of a rogue state or of a terrorist – that was simply unfortunate. If a rogue state or a terrorist killed a few hundred people or even ten people, it was a human rights catastrophe.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

“Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence.

The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“The war against the English was premised against a desire by the European settlers to break out of the Thirteen Colonies and conquer the entire continent; this was a war for colonization, not a war against colonialism.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations

“[W]ho would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labor without want, now wanted to labor in their own image!”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“Aimé Césaire did not see ‘fascism’ and ‘colonialism’ as separate endeavours. They were kin. But in Europe after 1945, there was a great push to see fascism as merely its European expression, an aberration of the Germans and the Italians. To suggest that fascism was merely Nazism with no linkage to colonialism allowed the Europeans and the North Americans to revive – without embarrassment – their colonial histories.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Should I tell you about my life as the head of the Engels collective farm in the Samarkand region for the past twenty years as a mother who, besides raising six children of her own, adopted ten children of different nationalities during World War II, that having graduated from Samarkand Agricultural Institute, I am now working on a Master’s thesis on the selection of the new, very sweet variety of Sultana grapes. . . . My biography, the biography of an ordinary Uzbek woman, would be a vivid example of what Soviet power has given to the women of the East.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The dominant classes in the South might divert the funds towards the creation of an America instead, with vastly well-off sector living in protected zones, separated from rest of the population by well crafted cordons sanitaires.”
― Vijay Prashad

“Between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The anti-colonialism of the early Soviets was mirrored by the anti-fascism of the next generation. This was now damaged by the 20th-Congress revelations and by the invasion of Hungary.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“It was the Soviet Union that saved the world from Nazism. It was Soviet armies that liberated most of the Nazi concentration camps, and it was the Soviet armies that entered Berlin and ended the war.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Racism was vital to the capitalist policies of the United States and the European countries that relied upon ideas of racial superiority to maintain their colonies and semi-colonies as places of super-exploitation of people and nature.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Many decades later, Prebisch recognized this major limitation in the Third World Order: “We thought that an acceleration of the rate of growth would solve all problems. This was our great mistake.”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“The image of communists being thrown from helicopters off the coast of Chile is far less known than any cliché about the USSR.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Winston Churchill, an influential person in the British government, said that ‘one might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“In 1996, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes . The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had released a report on the impact of US-driven UN sanctions on Iraq. It showed that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died because of these sanctions. Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes asked Albright, ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Neither 60 Minutes nor Albright contested the UN report, or the damage done to Iraq. Albright did not wait for a second. She replied, ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.’ That was that, then. The total destruction of Iraq was worth it. But what was being purchased at that price? It was US supremacy.”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations

“The cultivation of cultural nationalism as the social cement in an otherwise-political wasteland is a cause and consequence of the collapse of the Third World. Racial and religious political organization is not prepared to confront capital along with its central role in the creation of planetary distress. Rather, religious and racial organization is now the social balm for hopelessness and helplessness. IMF-driven globalization undermines the possibility of egalitarianism. Racialism and religiosity ridicule equity on behalf of a traditional, mostly hierarchical order. Neither this globalization nor traditionalism is capable of being true to the dreams of freedom and the demands for equality that govern the souls of modern humans.”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“پروژه‌های سیاسی موجود در دنیا –نئولیبرالیسم و مذهب‌گرایی– نمی‌توانند مشکلات حال حاضر را حل کنند. به پروژه‌ی دیگری نیاز است. جهان دیگری را باید تصور کرد. رؤیای دیگری را باید در سر پروراند تا ما را به سوی آینده پیش ببرد”
― Vijay Prashad, Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution

“Workers, Lenin wrote, should not seek a better deal within the restricted confines of capitalism, but seek to build a better world within the much broader horizon of communism.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The great social wealth was then turned over to an oligarchy. The social deterioration was rapid. The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that over a million Russians died ‘due to the economic shock of mass privatization and shock therapy’ in the decade from 1991 to 2001. Life expectancy for the Russian male was 65 in the last days of the USSR, but it collapsed to 60 a decade later. Inequality and sorrow returned to the new republics that emerged out of the USSR. No wonder then that polls routinely find that more than half of the Russian citizens dream of a return to the days of the USSR.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“Lenin wrote, ‘insurrection is art’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“The goal of the Marxists should be to harness the actual experience of the workers and drive an agenda that would make the worker and peasant power into the power of society.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“When the United States continues its embargoes against more than 50 countries - but mostly against Cuba, Iran and Venezuela - when there is a global pandemic afoot, what does this say about the nature of power and authority in our world?”
― Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets

“Give us an organization of revolutionaries’, Lenin wrote boldly and seemingly fantastically, ‘and we will overturn Russia’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World

“In his Fascism and Social Decay (1934), Dutt pointed out that the ‘revolt against science’ prepares the ground for ‘all the quackeries and charlatanries, of chauvinism, racial theories, antisemitism, Aryan grandmothers, mystic swastikas, divine missions, strong-man saviours, and all the rest of the nonsense through which alone capitalism today can try to maintain its hold a little longer’.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World