---
title: '<cite class="book">Letters of Insurgents</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-10-18T16:44:15+00:00
url: /quotes/letters-of-insurgents/
categories:
  - Uncategorised

---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
  <p>
    <q>She&#8217;s a commie,</q> he said, as matter-of-factly as if he were saying, <q>She&#8217;s tall.</q> He had considered and rejected this possibility as well. <q>She started being one during the depression. She likes to talk about it, but I never understood any of that shit about workers wanting commies to run the unions and factories. I never met any who wanted that. But she thought that&#8217;s what they wanted and the union paid her to organize workers to want that. After the war the union threw her out on her ass and not one worker stood up for her. She still thinks that&#8217;s what everyone wants.</q>
  </p><footer>Sophia Nachalo and Ron</footer>
</blockquote>

> <q>But my good fellow.</q> Zdenek shouted, <q>don&#8217;t you see that it&#8217;s impossible to overthrow a ruling social order with organisation and discipline? What you&#8217;re talking about is the reinstatement of the ruling order, not its overthrow.</q><footer>Yarostan Vochek and Zdenek</footer> 

> I can&#8217;t formulate either my goals or my means. I can tell you neither where I&#8217;m going nor how I&#8217;ll get there. Yet I feel more vibrant, more alive, than I felt when I thought I knew my direction and my destination because I had words for them. I feel alive precisely because I don&#8217;t know what the next moment will bring.<footer>Yarostan</footer> 

> Despite all that&#8217;s happened during the past fourteen years, Daman has somehow managed not to change a single one of his ideas!&#8230;He could have put all his views on a phonograph record fourteen years ago and anyone who wanted to meet him could simply play the record. That&#8217;s eerie. Daman isn&#8217;t altogether a living person.<footer>Sophia</footer> 

> A prisoner whose helplessness leads him to seek out guards who are <q>on our side</q> is terribly similar to the worker who thinks a politician is <q>on our side.</q> The prisoner&#8217;s justification is that the guards are armed. The prisoner&#8217;s human prospects do in fact reside in the guard. But a worker who thinks his human prospects reside in the politician is deluded.<footer>Yarostan</footer> 

> I know that the only way you&#8217;d ever go to a university building would be with a stick of dynamite in your hand.<footer>Tina</footer> 

> You have your reasons. But your reasons aren&#8217;t good enough for me. They don&#8217;t grow out of my own life. I do things for Sabina&#8217;s reasons and I do others for Sophia&#8217;s but I never do anything for my own reasons. I don&#8217;t even know what my own reasons are. And that&#8217;s all I want right now. To discover my own reasons. To become me, Tina, a human entity, someone who&#8217;s neither Sophia nor Sabina.<footer>Tina</footer> 

> Finally I admitted, <q>I&#8217;m completely lost. I don&#8217;t understand you, Sabina&#8230;And I don&#8217;t see how I fit into it all!</q>  
> Sabina reached for my hand and said, looking straight into my eyes, <q>There&#8217;s nothing to understand, Sophia, and nothing to fit into. It&#8217;s your life to do with as you will. There&#8217;s no structure. Nothing is banned. Everything is allowed. No holds are barred.</q>  
> <q>What&#8217;s everything?</q> I asked hesitantly.  
> Letting go of my hand, she said, <q>My life, my desires, my capacities; those are my axioms.</q><footer>Sophia and Sabina</footer> 

> A person freely creates her own life, but in circumstances not of her own choosing.<footer>Sabina</footer> 

> Every person who comes into this room has an altogether different account of what&#8217;s happening; each person has different stories to tell. And it&#8217;s precisely this that makes every encounter so stimulating.<footer>Sophia</footer> 

> <q>I wouldn&#8217;t feel bad for having a bad memory, Sophia, but for having to take someone else&#8217;s word about an event I had experienced. How can you let everything in your head just lie where it falls, without ever moving it around? There&#8217;s no such thing as a bad memory; you&#8217;re just lazy!</q><footer>Sabina</footer> 

> It&#8217;s easy to have reservations, Sophia. I didn&#8217;t act on them, and that&#8217;s all that counts.<footer>Sabina</footer> 

> Alberts affirmed technology; he rebelled against everything that constrained the further development of productive forces. That&#8217;s why he ended up considering human beings reactionary. Human beings constrain the development of productive forces; human beings have to be overcome. The beings who would inhabit the crystal palace wouldn&#8217;t be human beings.<footer>Sabina</footer> 

> Yara showed me that what my mother had called the devil is what&#8217;s most natural in all of us, what we feel; it&#8217;s our desires and our passions; it&#8217;s what we are. No sword is needed to embed the devil in us; the devil is already there; it&#8217;s the removal of the devil that requires a sword.<footer>Mirna</footer> 

> Was I really what Yara had called me: a hypocrite who applauded at a great distance acts which I dared not undertake in my own home and neighborhood?<footer>Yarostan</footer> 

> According to official accounts, an army of four million men is massed at our frontiers. Four million! In some circles they&#8217;re described as <q>barbarian hordes,</q> but I&#8217;m sure the vast majority of them are workers, exactly like the people they&#8217;re coming to repress&#8230;It would be more comforting to think the invaders were creatures from another planet, or insects. What is so terrifying is the thought that the invaders are workers like ourselves, workers who may next week be repressed by armies consisting of some of the very workers they are repressing now. It isn&#8217;t <q>they,</q> <q>the enemy,</q> who are driving those tanks and carrying those rifles. It&#8217;s <q>we</q> &mdash; we comrades, fellow workers, brothers, we who failed to communicate with each other, we who failed to destroy the schools where we&#8217;re taught to produce the tanks &mdash; the schools where we&#8217;re taught to obey the commanders who order us to assassinate each other.<footer>Yarostan</footer> 

> What kind of system can afford to support a permanent force of four million trained assassins? Can you even imagine how much of society&#8217;s activity has to be concentrated on war-related work to supply an army of four million &mdash; in <q>peace time</q>?<footer>Yarostan</footer> 

> I don&#8217;t have the instincts of ants or bees; I can&#8217;t function in a hive.<footer>Yarostan</footer> 

> My very dreams were contaminated by the monstrosity he [Titus Zabran] stood for: the will to impose mental constructs on living people &mdash; which as Zdenek so perceptively pointed out can only be done by means of <q>historically available</q> instruments: guns, tanks, police and armies.<footer>Sophia</footer> 

> I think the split was between the world of those who, like Ted, Jan and Mirna, sought to realize their own potentialities among others realizing theirs, and the world of those who, like Luisa and Daman and Titus Zabran, sought to fit human beings into what Sabina called a crystal palace, which in practice was always the same regimented barracks, the hive you&#8217;ve rejected. Like Sabina, and like me, you had a foot in both worlds.<footer>Sophia</footer>