Totalitarian Quiz

IN THE spirit of final exams, please match the following quotations with the leader who uttered them. Some answers may appear more than once, and some may not appear at all. No aids are permitted. You may not leave the room until 90 minutes have expired. Good luck, and have a great summer.

1. "Members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA must systematically apply the mass line in all their work, resolutely uphold the Party's discipline, and take initiative in carrying out its line and policies."

2. "We must do away completely with all manifestations of disunity. We should encourage comrades to take the interests of the whole into account. Every Party member, every branch of work, every statement and action must proceed from the interests of the whole party; it is absolutely impermissible to violate this principle.... We must combat individualism and sectarianism so as to enable our whole Party to march in step and fight for one common goal."

3. "The achievement and maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible without a party which is strong by reason of its iron discipline. But iron discipline in the Party is inconceivable without unity of will, without complete and absolute unity of action on the part of all members of the Party. This does not mean, of course, that the possibility of conflicts of opinion is thereby precluded....But after a conflict of opinion has been closed, after criticism has been exhausted and a decision arrived at, unity of will and unity of action of all Party members are the necessary conditions without which neither Party unity nor iron discipline in the Party is conceivable," [emphasis added].

4. "It must never be forgotten that nothing that is really great in this world has ever been achieved by coalitions...And thus the folkish state above all will never be created by the compromising will of a folkish working confederation, but soley by the iron will of a single movement that has fought its way to the top against all."

5. "All class-conscious workers must clearly realize that factionalism of any kind is harmful and impermissible.... Factionalism in practice inevitably leads to the weakening of harmonious work and to intensified and repeated attempts by the enemies of the governing Party, who have wormed their way into it, to widen the cleavage and to use it for counterrevolutionary purposes....

"Criticism of the Party's shortcomings [is] absolutely necessary....[But] every critic must see to it that the form of his criticism takes account of the Party's being surrounded by enemies."

6. "We encourage dissent. We encourage members to voice their opinions. But when the club reaches a decision, we hope that members respect that decision. When combating the left, we must present a united front....[I]t is important to support one another in our common cause--the promotion of mainstream Republican thought at Harvard."

7. "It is, therefore, most necessary that a movement, for pure reasons of self-preservation, should, once it has begun to achieve success, immediately block enrollments and henceforth increase its organization only with extreme caution and after the most thorough scrutiny."

8. "I like controversy, but not within my own board. This semester, we've had a cleaning-out process. Now, the board is set. The controversy is over. Now, the people who resigned have no say at all."

a. Mao Tse-Tung, Chinese revolutionary leader.

b. Bob Avakian, chair of the central committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

c. Josef Stalin, Soviet dictator.

d. Sumner E. Anderson '92, president of the Harvard Republican Club.

e. Adolph Hitler, Nazi dictator.

f. The executive board of the Harvard Republican Club, in a letter explaining the censure and dismissal of former executive board member David R. Ackley '91.

g. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), Russian revolutionary, Soviet dictator.

Answers:1-b, 2-a, 3-c, 4-e, 5-g, 6-f, 7-e, 8-d.