Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
As quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (1981), page 103.
Attributions
Statement of 1918, as quoted in Trotsky : The Eternal Revolutionary (1996) by Dmitri Volkogonov, p. 213
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
As quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (1981), page 103.
Attributions
“The idea of a concentration camp is excellent.”
Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
On ideas of eradicating 'counter-revolutionaries and traitors' in Estonia, as quoted in Stalin : A Biography (2004) by Robert Service, p. 158; also in Bol'shevistskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska, 1912-1927, p. 36.
Contemporary witnesses
Gilles Dauvé (1947) French writer
"Letter on Animal Liberation" (1999)
“I'm a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.”
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker
“Concentration is the ROOT of all the higher abilities in man.”
Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 11
“You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp”
Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist
Chronicles of Dissent, December 13, 1989 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/db-8912.html <br class="br">Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s <br class="br">Context: Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...
Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism
Part 3, Ch. 12, § 3.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Context: The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States
Paris Review (Summer 1966)
Context: If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution
Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 2, p. 66