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Where there is no history of struggle after an uprising, the living memory dies.

Vijay Prashad

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Vijay Prashad
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 14
Historian
Writer
Calcutta
Memories
Struggle
Dies
Living
History
Uprising
Memory

More quotes by Vijay Prashad

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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.
Vijay Prashad
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You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
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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All evidence suggests that Turkey has allowed ISIS fighters, when they've been injured, to return into Turkey and to get treated in Turkey's hospitals.
Vijay Prashad
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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.
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.
Vijay Prashad
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The Islamic State is able to raise finances through taxation, through theft of banks, and certainly through oil sales from the Omar oilfields in eastern Syria. So right now the question of funding isn't of the essence.
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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Leadership is another word for preparation.
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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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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The United States is facing serious pushback from Turkey, which is not comfortable with the view that the Islamic State is a terrorist organization.
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
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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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I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity.
Vijay Prashad
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To be a Communist or to be somebody who believes in the future is a curious thing. So you have to live with people around you, you have to be with the people.
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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To build a mass movement, nonviolence is indispensable.
Vijay Prashad