It is very difficult to retain a faith in the "essential humanity" of the SS trooper or the Commissar or the racist blinded with hate and fear, or, f… - Noam Chomsky

السلطة تظل قوية عندما تظل في الظلام وبتعريضها للضوء تبدأ بالتبخر

Dr. Arendt takes rather an absolutist view, that I don’t share, about certain historical phenomena such as the character of the new societies that have emerged. I don’t feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. Many things, in fact, do meet the sort of Luxembourgian conditions that apparently Dr. Arendt and I agree about. There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

It’s clear, I believe, that the emphasis on the use of terror and violence in China was considerably less than in the Soviet Union and that the success was considerably greater in achieving a just society.