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Colonialism Quotes

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Colonialism Quotes

“De moeder van mijn moeder was een Javaansche vrouw. Meent u dat het geestig is, majoor, om mij daarom te bespotten? U hebt in Breda de academie doorloopen. Daar hebt u, toen u jong was, het een en ander moeten leeren van de Geschiedenis der Hollanders op Java. In die geschiedenis vindt u eindelooze reeksen opstanden waarbij Hollandsche moeders en kinderen werden vermoord. Moet u nu nog van mij leeren, hoe vaak het gebeurd is, dat Javaansche baboes met gevaar voor eigen leven getracht hebben de Hollandsche kinderen te redden, die aan haar zorgen waren toevertrouwd? Is u uit de geschiedenis der Hollanders op Java vergeten, majoor, hoeveel Javaansche vrouwen zich voor die kinderen aan stukken hebben laten hakken?…. Als u dat niet weet, dan kent u de geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië slecht. En als u het wel weet, schaam u dan, als u iemand een sienjo noemt.”

“The whole of Java is immediately subject to the Netherlands. There is no question of tribute, or levy, or alliance. The Javanese is a Dutch subject. The King of the Netherlands is his king. The descendants of his former princes and lords are Dutch officials. They are appointed, transferred, promoted, dismissed by the Governor-General, who rules in the name of the King. The criminal is convicted and sentences under a law made in The Hague. The taxes the Javanese pays flow into the Exchequer of the Netherlands.”

“The heinous misdeeds committed by the empire are no longer privy to debate. It's a known fact, at least to people with some basic brains... Imagine me coming to your home and then declaring myself the guardian of the house while helping myself with all your resources and keeping you as underling - you know, like the pilgrims did to the native Americans. Sucks right! Exactly my point!”

“Barbarism, thy name is Britain. In this day and age, if any societal structure is a revolting blot on the fabric of the democratic world, it's not Russia or North Korea, but the not-so-great Britain. The queen might have been a nice person, I don't know. But when a person is declared the supreme authority (head of state) of an entire people by birth, it's not something to take pride in, rather it's something to be ashamed of. Britain may mourn the death of the queen as a person, but no land deserves to be called civilized while mourning the death of a monarch. Let me put this into perspective. Almost every week a country celebrates independence from britain - if this doesn't tell you why the monarchy is the antithesis of everything that is civilized, nothing can. I wonder, they can throw a homeless man in jail for lifting a bread out of hunger, yet the empire walks free, even after raping, pillaging and looting from 90% of the world's countries! Where is the ICC (International Criminal Court) now, when one monarch after another sits on the throne, wielding the crown jewels encrusted with national treasures stolen from all over the globe!”

“When the descendants of a brutish empire continue to represent and maintain the authority of that empire, such descendants do not deserve even an ounce of respect from civilized humans, any more than their ancestors do, let alone be declared head of state. It'd be like respecting a neonazi for advocating for a new confederate America.”

“Twit & Trash (The Sonnet) There is nothing more cataclysmic than a sea of unarmed citizens out for justice - even the richest oligarchic leeches, armed with billions of robots, tanks and satellites, would crumble like twigs. Born to privilege, most tech giants are tech trash, loaded with more nuts than the Enigma machine. In the salacious pursuit of the silicon dream, these nutters are the antithesis of Tesla and Turing. Tech giants are giants by the will of people, takes less than a month to bankrupt their worth. Any giant who thinks they are above the people, are the puniest form of termites on earth. Clockwork mice and clockwork minds both can run great distances with no sense of why? Children of earth still sleep without food, yet colonizer kids are headed for the sky!”

“There were waves of genocide that overcame indigenous populations of Oceania and do we have a library of books or films to tell our story? No. We have tourist hula shows and commercials where the “natives” tend to tourists like indentured servants with plastic, lifeless smiles. It’s not such a charming picture, is it? The truth is ugly, but so is ignorance or denial of such atrocities and pain.”

“Sometimes you hear people say: "Those Apaches were bad." I don't know. They are peaceful people today, doing a good job with their livestock. In the early days they did cause the Pimas, and others, some trouble. We had plenty from our farms and those Apaches only had what they could hunt over their wild mountains. Sometimes they would come down and raid us and we fought them back away from our settlements and then left them alone. They never tried to drive us off our land and away from our homes. We never tried to drive them out of their own country. But the white man did. If you were an Apache what do you think you would have done? (from chapter "The Apache Wars")”

“In a game, there is a main character raised within American culture: he speaks in slang, lives for sex and pleasure, feels "successful" if the opposite sex chases after him, shows off by driving cars and motorcycles, obtains respect if he buys a yacht, worships money and wealth, has numerous tattoos and ornaments, spends his nights in clubs and casinos, feels "powerful" when he holds a gun, makes racist jokes, swears in every sentence, thinks and acts like he is at the center of the universe, and so on. Even if this game is produced in the United States, due to the fact that the whole world has now been made interconnected and interdependent, it easily spreads and influences other unconscious peoples. A child in Jakarta, Stockholm, or Prague begins to use the exact same sayings and do the exact same actions born of Brooklyn streets, Californian frat parties, and Los Angeles gambling centers. The result is that even the culture of a completely different country on the other side of the world ends up becoming American; the narrator in the game becomes the very thing children dream of, teenagers chase after, and adults turn into reality.”

“The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.”

“My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.”

“he ordering of cultural customs, forms of governance and economic institutions as being better or worse does not fit into the modern ethos of equality. We- rightly- want equal opportunities and rights. A positive vision of the colonial past apparently doesn’t fit into that. I mean, my whole university is busy decolonizing! That is the train I slammed into.”

“If we can stop undermining our self as Africans and start valuing who are and what we have. We must stop it ,with the mental of thinking that people who speaks their native tongue. Who following their tradition, practices their culture and value their heritage . Don’t know things, are lame, boring, retards, not interesting, not modern, not clued up and not Important enough. Thinking that they are behind, slow, old fashion and school, because they don’t know western or they don’t know the things we know or following up with trends ,fashion and western as we do. Invest In yourself by embracing who you are.”

“Azad Earth Army (The Sonnet) From river to the sea, Al Shams to Alpha Centauri, I'll radicalize each child into a volcanic veteran of inclusivity. Palestine, Kashmir, America, every territory will be humanized, without resorting to canon calls, for my soldiers are walking dynamite! Give me a speck of spinal nerve, I'll weave awaken bulldozing thunder! My patriots are keeper of the world, not stately pawn of terror and blunder. Awake, arise, adopt the world, let no monkey nationalize your humanity. Final call to a free* world, you, o bravehearts, are my *Azad Earth Army!”

“Great works of literature from other places are not only censored by banning them, but even more so by silencing them, by refusing to translate them in the first place. Marginalization is the worst form of censorship and intellectual assassination. Likewise, choosing what gets translated into a certain language and what gets marginalized is a form of shaping and constructing the historical memory of a place according to whims of those who own the money and means of knowledge production.”

“There are an estimated 258 million migrants around the world, and many of us are migrating to countries that previously colonized and imperialized us. We have a human right to move, and governments should serve that right, not limit it. The unprecedented movement of people - what some call a "global migration crisis" - is, in reality, a natural progression of history. Yes, we are here because we believe in the promise of the American Dream - the search for a better life, the challenge of dreaming big. But we are also here because you were there - the cost of American imperialism and globalization, the impact of economic policies and political decisions.”

“[Robert] Pastor explains that the United States did not want to control Nicaragua or other nations in the region, but it also didn't want to allow developments to get out of control. It wanted Nicaraguans to act independently, except when doing so would affect US interests adversely. In short, Nicaragua and other countries should be free: free to do what we want them to do, and should choose their course independently, as long as their choice conforms to our interests. If they use the freedom we accord them unwisely, we are entitled to respond with violence, in self-defence.”

“... this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic, it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!”

“Rich, modern countries have common traits that make them different from poor, traditional countries, which also share common traits. Differences in wealth can lead to conflict between societies, but the evidence suggests that this mainly occurs when rich and powerful societies try to conquer and colonize poor and traditional societies.”

“Arabs & Garbage" Strange is the Arab story with garbage! Who told them who taught them to toss garbage randomly wherever and however they please? When will the Arabs understand that placing garbage in its right place will solve half of their environmental and societal problems? And the other half of their problems will be solved, too, as soon as they stop tossing out their human gems forcing out their most talented and qualified human capital to serve foreigners in foreign lands? When will the Arabs stop getting rid of their best minds, replacing them with foreign garbage they glorify simply because the foreign individuals have white skin and blue eyes and claim to possess skills and expertise the Arabs can’t survive without… When will the Arabs understand that placing garbage in its right place -be it the garbage that govern their countries or the foreign garbage they import – will solve all their problems? [Original poem published in Arabic on February 20, 2024 at ahewar.org]”

“I do not believe guilt is inherited, but responsibility is, and there is nobody alive today whose existence has not been shaped by colonialist, racist forces. That is a legacy we all live with, and we should all deal with the consequences. If you have benefitted, then soaking yourself in remorse and guilt does not help anyone. What you can do, though, is ask constantly how you have felt those benefits. At whose expense were they gained?”

“The First World War (Sonnet 1501) There are bigger villains than Adolf, But they are not deemed villain so long as they do white man no harm. Two world wars count for nothing, compared to the struggles of the rest of the world. You only hear of two world wars, not more, Because world history is actually white history. White welfare has always been default human welfare, Like today we humans deem animal welfare secondary. Even the world map as you know is one big lie, depicting an exaggerated size of the global north. Rather than arguing over the planethood of Pluto, How about you right the wrongs right here on earth! Endeavor as human and reclaim your humanhood, Work for actual human welfare, defying white denial. There never was a world war, there was only white war, The first world war has just begun, against violation.”

“The cards are simply a tool, she says, and they should not be idolized, especially because they were given to us by a dead white man. “I’m sure he was as good as they’ll ever be, but he was still a colonizer and a businessman. Selling the cards as the only tool people could use to divinate and erasing the fact that many of us had been doing it very well without any tools at all,” she likes to remind me.”

“There never was a war of the free world against fascism, there was only war between two versions of fascism - because the so-called free world has tortured and massacred more lives than the third reich could only dream of. There never was a world war between good and evil, there was only war between two evils. There never was a world war against tyranny, there was only war between an established tyrant regime and a rising one. The real first world war has just begun - the war between good and evil - the war between emancipation and occupation - between inclusion and exclusion - between expansion and contraction - between reason and rigidity - between humanity and inhumanity. I call it, World War Human. And unlike previous times, we won't win this war by old-fashioned bullets and bombs, or by deceit and diplomacy. The World War Human can only be won by education, and education alone - by an ardent, absolute, unambiguous, unbending, undoctrinated, unphobic, unwhitewashed, decolonized, nonpartisan, gender neutral, valiant, self-correcting and conscientious execution of education.”

“The demands of the Young Lords could have been written today. We believed in the power of the people and in community and personal transformation. We demanded the redistribution of economic and social resources. We fought for racial justice and the equality of women. As internationalists, we condemned all political, economic, and military intervention by one nation against another. We battled proudly against exploitation, social injustice, and colonial domination. It was a call for revolution!”

“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.”

“A bookish man, he read widely, but rarely in search of new knowledge. Instead, he sought confirmation of his preexisting fantasy about an orient that lay almost on Europe’s doorstep. This dream drove him across the ocean sea, where he saw and heard things already in his own head; sirens, cannibals, subjects of the great Kahn, even an island off Hispaniola inhabited by Amazons. Other men of his day had clearer vision. “The hidden half of the globe is brought to light,” Peter Martyris, an Italian historian in the Spanish court wrote upon Columbus’ return from his first voyage in 1493. The next year, Martyris became the first European to refer to the Indies as “Ab orbe novo.” The New World. Yet Columbus never grasped the immensity of what he’d done. The more he saw, the less he learned. Mysticism, and dreams of the Orient kept overwhelming the evidence of his own senses.”

“Greeks did not invent philosophy, philosophy had existed across Latin America, Africa, Arabia, India and China, thousands of years earlier, not as some elitist discipline, but as everyday way of life, later the europeans contributed their puny drop in the ocean, but of course, the myth of europe as the origin of philosophy goes deceptively well with the whitewashed history of earth. Enlightenment and civilization did not originate in europe, they were born of the lands colonially categorized as uncivilized.”

“Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation. The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks’s mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.”

“Тут можна було впиватися локальним гардкором, як впивалися ми — бідні п'яні дурні з калічної країни, які раділи, що їм вдалося знайти ще більшого каліку за себе.”

“Such an increase in supply price [i.e. raw materials from the Global South], however, creates serious problems for capitalism. These arise not because of a diminishing rate of profit or a slide towards a stationary state as Ricardo had feared. Such fears relate in any case to long-run prospects. Increasing supply price, in so far as it gets translated to an increase in price, undermines the value of money, and that is a very serious and immediate issue for capitalism. If wealth-holders believe that the value of money in terms of commodities is going to fall over time, then nobody will hold wealth in its money-form.”

“The lie [is] that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them. I suppose it's a natural enough lie. But it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine. There's an everlasting sense of being a sneak and a liar that torments us and drives us to justify ourselves night and day. It's at the bottom of half our beastliness to the natives. We Anglo-Indians could be almost bearable if we'd only admit that we're thieves and go on thieving without any humbug.”

“who is more barbaric? The alleged cannibalistic savages, who at least waited until their victims were dead before they cooked and ate them? Or the European slave traders who thrived on live meat, that is, the exploitation of these human 'animals'?”

“The fusion of economics and politics is a critical part of this model and is something early liberal theorists missed. States consistently seek to protect 'their' capitalists all over the world. Whether in the form of taxation, trade policy, or foreign policy, capitalists always rely on politicians to provide them with opportunities for profit-making abroad. Lenin, who in 1917 wrote that imperialism was the 'highest stage' of capitalism, realized that this fusion of state and corporate power would make it even harder for poor states to catch up with rich ones. While this fusion of corporate and political power is largely hidden within modern capitalist economies, historically it was understood to be a central component of imperial power. We have already seen how early capitalist states sought to govern the world economy through corporate sovereigns like the East India Company. The Nazi Party also encouraged the creation of 'trusts, combines and cartels' on the basis that doing so would support the German state's imperial power at home and abroad. Unions, and any other threats to corporate power, were destroyed, and a law was passed to 'force industries to form cartels where none existed.' Unchecked corporate power -fused with that of the state- was a key component of Nazism.”

“. . . [H]ad North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.”