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Connexions Quotations
Ulli Diemer
Quotes
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Apologists for censorship invariably profess noble motives. They tell us that of course they are in favour of freedom of speech ‘in principle’ – then they go on to explain that ‘the greater good’ requires denying freedom of speech to people whose views they dislike.
- Ulli Diemer
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The energies of much of the left are devoted to issuing appeals to the capitalist state to fix our problems, or to looking for ways to fix the state as if it had somehow accidentally gone off track. The left has always been attracted to the state the way a moth is attracted to a flame, and the darker it gets, the more it is attracted to statist and nationalist illusions.
- Ulli Diemer
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The fallacy of national ‘self-determination’
The hidden meaning, the real essence, of the slogan ‘the right to self-determination’,
is the belief that it is neither possible or desirable for two or more ethnic or language groups to live together in one country.
I cannot imagine a more pessimistic and less socialist point of view.
- Ulli Diemer
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A fundamental fallacy is the belief that because something is bad, or appears to some to be bad, it ought to be banned.
- Ulli Diemer
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If you can understand that your struggle is also somebody else’s struggle,
or that your different concerns and problems are part of the same struggle,
the potential is created for a stronger more effective movement.
The working class movement has slogan: ‘An injustice to one is an injustice to all.’
If that is your approach you understand that solidarity, co-operation, mutual support,
whatever you want to call it, is at one and the same time a duty to your fellow human beings and an act of rational self-interest.
- Ulli Diemer
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In the real world it is rarely possible to draw political boundaries that correspond with nationality.
Nearly every nation-state and aspiring nation-state contains its own national minorities with conflicting nationalist claims on the same territory.
These national groups are usually intermingled and intermarried, sharing the same physical territory,
the same cities and towns, the same streets, the same bedrooms...
As a result ‘self-determination’
for the majority frequently amounts to denying minorities their ‘right to self-determination’.
- Ulli Diemer
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The left has always been attracted to the state the way a moth is attracted to a flame,
and the darker it gets, the more it is attracted to statist and nationalist illusions.
- Ulli Diemer
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The Left has engaged in the futile pursuit of “moving the NDP to the left” since 1933,
achieving pretty much the same result as a dog chasing its tail.
- Ulli Diemer
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Many good ideas have been shipwrecked because people insisted that they were universally applicable, failing to distinguish between situations to which they applied and ones to which they didn’t.
- Ulli Diemer
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Marx was relentlessly critical, always seeking new knowledge and deeper understanding, never feeling that his own understanding of any subject was adequate – hence his well-known difficulties in finishing any work because he was never finished investigating the subject matter in its infinite ramifications. It was Marx who scoffed “I am not a Marxist” and who said that “Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be.”
- Ulli Diemer
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Most of us are not living the lives we would choose to live, but the existing order insists there are no alternatives to itself, and most of us are sufficiently convinced or pre-occupied or discouraged to keep society from coming unglued. Many, many people wish there were alternatives, or think there ought to be, but are resigned to the conclusion that it is utopian to entertain any hopes for real change....
Yet despite the pervasive feeling that ‘nothing can be done’, people do join together to act in common when they feel threatened or wronged, or when they have a goal in sight which they desire passionately enough. Sometimes they organize quietly and gradually. At other times a mass movement explodes into being, seemingly out of nothing, despite the risks and the odds.
- Ulli Diemer
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The Left has engaged in the futile pursuit of “moving the NDP to the left” since 1933,
achieving pretty much the same result as a dog chasing its tail.
- Ulli Diemer
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Neoliberal house of horrors
If Hitchcock had made a film about neoliberal economics, the Chicago School of Economics would be the Bates Motel, Milton Friedman would be the demented proprietor, and Friedrich Hayek would be the dead mother in the attic.
- Ulli Diemer
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One of the problems with our society is that we believe everything has to be new and different. I don’t apologize for having ideas that are ‘old’. Some of the ideas I'm fondest of aren’t just 25 or 100 years old, they’re 2,000 years old or even older.
- Ulli Diemer
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One of the things past movements can tell us – in detail, not just in general – is that people have always resisted injustice, and always sought to create a world based on values of community, sharing, freedom and justice.
- Ulli Diemer
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The shadow which haunts the power structure is the danger that those who are controlled will come to realize that they are powerless only so long as they think they are. Once people stop believing they are powerless, then the whole edifice which they support is in danger of collapse.
- Ulli Diemer
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Social reforms, no matter how valuable and worth pursuing, cannot in themselves defeat capitalism. That requires a revolution: the overthrow of the rule of capital and the state forms through which it rules.
- Ulli Diemer
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The social transformation we are working for is a long revolution – a process that requires the efforts of generations of activists.
- Ulli Diemer
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Struggles for justice are not a fringe phenomenon. They are a force that has changed the world, that can change the world, and that will change the world.
- Ulli Diemer
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We are part of a movement for justice that stretches across continents and across generations. People have always resisted injustice, and always sought to create a world based on values of community, sharing, freedom and justice. We are part of a continuum.
- Ulli Diemer
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We don’t know if we’ll win: history is made by human beings, and where human beings are concerned, nothing is inevitable. But because people do make history, we know that it is possible to build a new world, and we strive to realize that possibility.
- Ulli Diemer
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We need only look at activities of the thousands of people working in grassroots groups across this country, and around the world, to see that people do join with others to block what they see as harmful and to fight for what they consider to be desirable and just. When they do, that which seemed impossible to achieve starts to become possible.
- Ulli Diemer
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We need all the help we can get in overthrowing capitalism, including the help of people who are dead.
- Ulli Diemer
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We’re not going to stop working for justice just because we’re dead.
- Ulli Diemer
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Whatever rights one thinks there ought to be, or whatever rights people are said to have, the rights that people actually have are achieved and protected only by struggle. Rights are won. And they can be lost.
- Ulli Diemer
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Read more about Ulli Diemer.
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