Rajiv Chopra

“And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. “They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash!” – that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating. And when I think about it all now, I wonder who first talked about kulak trash. Lenin? Was it really Lenin? How the kulaks suffered. In order to kill them, it was necessary to declare that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans said that Yids are not human beings. That’s what Lenin and Stalin said too: The kulaks are not human beings. But that’s a lie. They are people. They are human beings. I can see now that we are all human beings.60”
― Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows

“A book with the delicious title of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, composed by an unnamed Greek in about 80 CE, gave detailed navigational instructions to those planning to sail to what is now Gujarat, and thence to gain access to the Deccan, where one could buy and export such specialties as ginseng, aromatic oils, myrrh, ivory, agate, carnelian, cotton cloth, silk, Indian muslins, yarn, and long pepper.”
― Wendy Doniger, Beyond Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics

“China remained a poor country, with a per capita gross domestic product of only $175 in 1978. Industrial and agricultural shortfalls were severe; in 1975, for example, actual steel output fell 36 percent short of the planned target, and grain was 9 percent below the planned target.19 Chinese economists reported scenes of stark indigence: “I remember going to a village where they had only one blanket for the whole family, and only one bowl,” a researcher recalled.20 Visiting the developed world brought more bad news.”
― Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s

“I asked you how the Germans could send Jewish children to die in the gas chambers. How, I asked, could they live with themselves after that? Was there really no judgement passed on them by man or God? And you said: Only one judgement is passed on the executioner – he ceases to be a human being. Through looking on his victim as less than human, he becomes his own executioner; he executes the human being inside himself. But the victim – no matter what the executioner does to kill him – remains a human being forever. Remember now?”
― Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows