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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.

Vijay Prashad

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Vijay Prashad
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 14
Historian
Writer
Calcutta
Idea
Often
Ideas
Come
Sometimes
Way
Good
Things
Inertia

More quotes by Vijay Prashad

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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.
Vijay Prashad
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Over the last two or so decades, there's been an increase in thinking among the Left, liberals, intellectuals in the direction of so-called spontaneity. In other words that uprisings happen spontaneously, people are frustrated, angry, then they spontaneously rise up. And what they don't require is preparation, or what we used to call leadership.
Vijay Prashad
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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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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.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
Vijay Prashad
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From 1991 till the present, Iraq sovereignty has been trampled by the United States.
Vijay Prashad
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When you are threatened, when your life is threatened, you have to fight back.
Vijay Prashad
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People who become important activists, they also struggle with the process of discovery.
Vijay Prashad
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You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.
Vijay Prashad
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There's a different use for different strategies.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
Vijay Prashad
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I don't recall an American president basically coming out and criticizing the Israeli public.
Vijay Prashad
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I consider this a kind of neoliberalism of the Left, this rise and promotion of spontaneity above preparation.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
Vijay Prashad
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It's important to reflect about what's happening inside Israel.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
Vijay Prashad
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We would like to participate in manifestations, in Occupies and things like that. We would like to be involved in a march. But we don't actually see the very hard work that goes to build confidence towards those events. And we don't have a shared discussion.
Vijay Prashad
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It is convenient for Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to say the rise of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the Iraq War because that takes the culpability off their shoulders. The Islamic State is a product of the Iraq War. It took about a 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and the British destroyed it in an afternoon.
Vijay Prashad
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People were, in good faith perhaps, writing history books about the Indian working class, Indian peasantry, et cetera, and at no point did Communists make an entry, not even to be criticized. They were essentially being whitewashed from history.
Vijay Prashad