1934 Quotes

“That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius

“As painful and embarrassing as it may be, the fact remains that we are confronted with a human structure that has been shaped by thousands of years of mechanistic civilization and is expressed in social helplessness and an intense desire for a führer.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“The breakdown of the European party system occurred in a spectacular way with Hitler's rise to power. It is now often conveniently forgotten that at the moment of the outbreak of the second World War, the majority of European countries has already adopted some form of dictatorship and discarded the party system, and that this revolutionary change in government has been effected in most countries without revolutionary upheaval. Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power. After all, it did not make much difference if a few thousand almost unarmed people staged a march on Rome and took over the government of Italy, or whether in Poland (in 1934) a so-called "partyless bloc," with a program of support for a semifascist government and a membership drawn from the nobility and the poorest peasantry, workers and businessmen, Catholics and orthodox Jews, legally won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Ungratified sexuality is readily transformed into rage. "Prison explosions" are outbreaks of sadism resulting from the absence of sexual gratification. Hence, when 33,000 workers leave their employment site all at once precisely in spring, there can be no doubt that the unsatisfying sex-economic conditions in the Soviet Union are the cause. By "sex-economic conditions" we mean more than just the possibility of a regulated and satisfying love life; over and above this we mean everything that is related to pleasure and the joy of life in one's work.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Without the power to put them into practice, truths are of no use. They remain academic.
Power, no matter what kind of power it is, without a foundation in truth, is a dictatorship, more or less and in one way or another, for it is always based on man's fear of the social responsibility and personal burden that "freedom" entails.
Dictatorial power and truth do not go together. They are mutually exclusive.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“The fascist dictator declares that the masses of people are biologically inferior and crave authority, that basically, they are slaves by nature. Hence, a totalitarian authoritarian regime is the only possible form of government for such people. It is significant that all dictators who today plunge the world into misery stem from the suppressed masses of people. They are intimately familiar with this sickness on the part of masses of people. What they lack is an insight into natural processes and development, the will to truth and research, so that they are never moved by a desire to want to change these facts.

On the other hand, the formal democratic leaders made the mistake of assuming that the masses of people were automatically capable of freedom and thereby precluded every possibility of establishing freedom and self-responsibility in masses of people as long as they were in power. They were engulfed in the catastrophe and will never reappear.

Our answer is scientific and rational. It is based on the fact that masses of people are indeed incapable of freedom, but it does not—as racial mysticism does—look upon this incapacity as absolute, innate, and eternal. It regards this incapacity as the result of former social conditions of life and, therefore, as changeable.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“In 1934, at the January Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the Soviet Communist Party, the Great Leader (having already in mind, no doubt, how many he would soon have to do away with) declared that the withering away of the state (which had been awaited virtually from 1920 on) would arrive via, believe it or not, the maximum intensification of state power.

This was so unexpectedly brilliant that it was not given to every little mind to grasp it, but Vyshinsky, ever the loyal apprentice, immediately picked it up: "And this means the maximum strengthening of corrective-labor institutions."

Entry into socialism via the maximum strengthening of prisons! And this was not some satirical magazine cracking a joke, either, but was said by the Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“Politically, we are still stuck in the systems of thought of the Greek and Roman slave states, no matter how much we rant about "democracy.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“The lorries thunder through mile upon mile of farmland, indeed, but... it is obviously related to an urban economy... Dereliction is the word... The stigmata of neglect litter the highway {A80] almost all the way from Glasgow to Stirling... let the intelligent traveller consider as he passes through them the nature and provenance of Millerston, Mollinsburn, Cumbernauld and Dennyloanhead. It is impossible to traverse such communities without seeing that something rather horrible once happened to Scotland, something from which it has never recovered.”
― George Blake, The Heart of Scotland