Sholem Asch Quotes

The joy and hope which the Red Army marching forward calls forth in the hearts of the tortured masses, also throws fear and dread into the enemy's heart, into the hearts of the fascists of all colors, into the hearts of all the debased human worms who have the sorry courage to aid fascism, to give it comfort, to whitewash it and to deliver into its hands the fate of the Jewish masses. Woe to such misleaders!

Suffering, my son, is the fount of love. Suffering is the grace, the great grace, which our Father in heaven pours down upon us. For suffering gives men submissive hearts. He that does not suffer thinks that he stands upon a mighty rock which he himself has raised. He does not see his brother; he sees only himself. He believes in no one; he believes only in his own strength. His heart becomes a swamp which swarms with reptiles: pride, obstinacy, and self-love. And when his footstool is rolled away from under him, he sinks, together with all the reptiles, into the depths of hell. But he to whom God has granted suffering shall find his pains like ropes which bind him to his Father in heaven. His heart is awake to feel the pains of his brother in need. He sends afflictions upon you and makes you small on earth that you may be great in heaven.

The masses have learned the great lesson of what happens to an ideal when traitors abandon it to the enemy. German Social Democracy, Noske and Hitler, will forever stand before the eyes of the people like black shadows to teach them in whose hands to entrust power.

When an idea, summoned by need and discontent, fails to be realized, an alien dark force, conceived by the devil, arrives and bestially throws itself into the void left by the ideal. It utilizes the despair created by the unrealized ideal, often operates with the same phrases, sows the same hopes until it wins over the deceived masses to its side. Like Satan, it stands upon the structure erected by the ideal, to usurp power. A clear example of this is the rise of Hitlerism in Germany. Nazism was made ripe by the leadership of German Social Democracy which had failed to fulfill its duty towards the embittered German masses. If German Social Democracy had used the power which bankrupt German Junkerdom so completely delivered over to it, if German Social Democracy had realized the revolutionary program which it had preached for generations, Hitler could not have deceived the German masses with a promise that he would realize the program in his own manner.

Considering the world scene in this light, one can say with certainty that if Lenin had not succeeded in carrying through the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and power had remained in the weak, half-traitorous hands of Russian Social Democracy, a Russian Hitler and a Russian Nazism would have arisen a decade earlier than in Germany. There would have been no Red Army to destroy Nazism and fascism today. The world is only now beginning to enjoy the fruit of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It is thanks only to the Bolshevik Revolution that the world will arise cleansed of Hitler, even if wounded and bloody.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.