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Imperialism Quotes

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Imperialism Quotes

“Deutschland über alles (The Sonnet) If the germans have no right to take pride in their past, neither do the british or the americans. In fact, the scale of british and american atrocities, surpasses the SS many folds. 'Deutschland über alles' is 'jingle bells', compared to british and american holocaust. Yet germany had the human decency to dump its horrific national anthem, while colonial pride is still dominant, across much of america and england. Radical inhumanity warrants radical reparations, a concept yet foreign to Buck House and Uncle Sam. When you are the largest manufacturer of massacre, making amends should be your existential anthem.”

Civil RightsGenocideColonialismImperialismBritish EmpireHuman Rights ViolationColonial HistoryMassacreIndigenous RightsAbolish Monarchy
Book:Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations
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“Refugees & Colonizers (The Sonnet) Refugees carry culture, Colonizers carry infection. Colonizers are the virus, Refugees are civilization. Refugees live on hope, Colonizers thrive on greed. Refugees dream of acceptance, Colonizers dream supremacy. Refugees are the true free and brave, they carry within the silver lining. There's nothing brave about genocide, no matter the whitewashed thanksgiving. Refugees are practicing healers, living testament of wounds to ointment. Colonizers are proof of darwinism, that from monkeys comes the human race.”

ImmigrantsGenocideColonialismImperialismRefugeesColonial HistoryRefugee CrisisMassacreIndigenous RightsColonizers
Book:Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations
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“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within national borders. For the first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money, since uncontrollable investments in distant countries threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production to a system of financial speculation, and to replace the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the stock market.”

CapitalismInvestmentImperialismBourgeoisie1968Swindle
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics.”

RacismImperialism19th CenturyEugenicsBourgeoisieDarwinismSurvival Of The Fittest1967Herbert SpencerClass Relations
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“The philosophy of Hobbes, it is true, contains nothing of modern race doctrines, which not only stir up the mob, but in their totalitarian form outline very clearly the forms of organization through which humanity could carry the prerequisite for all race doctrines, that is, the exclusion in principle of the idea of humanity which constitutes the sole regulating idea of international law. With the assumption that foreign politics is necessarily outside of the human contract, engaged in the perpetual war of all against all, which is the law of the "state of nature," Hobbes affords the best possible theoretical foundation for those naturalistic ideologies which hold nations to be tribes, separated from each other by nature, without any connection whatever, unconscious of the solidarity of mankind and having in common only the instinct for self-preservation which man shares with the animal world. If the idea of humanity, of which the most conclusive symbol is the common origin of the human species, is no longer valid, then nothing is more plausible than a theory according to which brown, yellow, or black races are descended from some other species of apes than the white race, and that all together are predestined by nature to war against each other until they have disappeared from the face of the earth.”

EvolutionImperialismBourgeoisieHobbes1967Race Theory
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is the accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.... .... The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power.”

ImperialismPolitical PowerBourgeoisieHobbes1967
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.”

CapitalismForeign PolicyImperialismBourgeoisie1967Constant Growth
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“And with this feeling, I poised in my mind some other questions as to the soundness of beliefs I had long held, based upon copy-book maxims drilled into one generation of American children after another: "Merit wins...Survival of the fittest...You can't change human nature...The best people...The poor you have with you always...and the whole long line of rubber-stamp moral precepts. What were these but glittering emblems set up by the moneyed class to serve its own purposes? Born bourgeois, my brain had been filled from infancy with the nonsense of super-patriotism, with the lily-white virtues of imperialism added in due time. I had harbored these false values because I didn't know any better. I had been a drifter, innocent and sheep-minded long enough.”

ValuesMeritPatriotismImperialismBourgeoisieSurvival Of The Fittest
Book:The Best of Art Young
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“Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)”

PoliticsUnited StatesMoralityBritainAfricaImperialismIraq WarAbolitionBritish EmpireCaribbeanSlave TradeAmerican ImperialismAnti Americanism
Book:A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
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“South Earth Summon (Naskaristana 2800) I am the Son of South Earth, my spice-tolerance is superhuman, but lies-tolerance is nonexistent - my resilience knows no mortal limit, but I have zero tolerance for intolerance. I speak more languages than most northerners, I've devoured more scriptures than most northerners, I have assimilated more cultures and disciplines, which is why I say, there is no north, no south, when it comes to virtues and vices of human nature. So I'm not saying South is better than the North, but reparations are foundational to civilization; enlightenment was born in the South of Earth - math, medicine, poetry, philosophy, theology, almost everything was invented in the South, then the Northerners barged in, and pretended they invented astrophysics. I come from the other half of the world that has been systematically reduced to footnotes of northernized history normalized as world history, now I am a bigger giant than all your white giants combined, now I speak, and you listen.”

ColonialismImperialismWorld HistoryDecolonizationReparationsCultural AppropriationWhitewashGlobal SouthAncient CivilizationScientific History
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
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“The global power's domination of the rest of the world mirrors the hegemony of the human race over other living creatures. Now, it is not clear how this 'superiority' of the human species over all the others would be given up. Indifference to politics is said to be due to the disintegration of the social bond. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is the wide scope for action within civil society and the intensification of communication networks - together with the promotion of a freedom whose perpetual benefits we enjoy, but of which we no longer have the concept - that create the absenteeism from oneself and from others of which political absenteeism is merely a symptom.”

ImperialismAnthropocentrismAbsenteeism
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Crazy Horse was dead. He was brave and good and wise. He never wanted anything but to save his people, and he fought the Wasichus only when they came to kill us in our own country. He was only thirty years old. They could not kill him in battle. They had to lie to him and kill him that way. I cried all night, and so did my father.”

DeathColonialismImperialismNative AmericansLakotaAmerican IndiansCrazy HorseBlack ElkOglala Lakota
Book:Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
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“The year the Europeans seized Jomo Kenyatta (1952), Chepusepa and I were sharing our homestead with Arimo, a Teso, who was a headman of the local road crew. One day, Arimo's son found an ostrich's nest between Amudat and Katabok, while he was watching cattle. There were six eggs, and both of our cowherds took one. The brought the two eggs to our home and put them in the ashes near the fire. After two weeks, they hatched. I remember the baby ostriches walking about, eating millet and stones. Arimo took care of them, and they grew quite large. One night a leopard got the female, but the male continued to thrive, and Arimo harvested its feathers twice. Then, one day, when it was fully grown, our ostrich wandered into the town of Amudat. A European saw it and asked the people, "Where did this come from?" "Oh, it is the 'ox' of a man named Arimo, they told him. The European immediately summoned Arimo to Amudat. "Do you have license to keep an ostrich?" he demanded. "Of course not!" Arimo replied. "This ostrich doesn't belong to anyone else--it's mine. So why do I need a license?" But the European decreed,"From this day on, you must not keep this ostrich without a license. If you do, you will go to jail for stealing from the government!" That was only the beginning. The Europeans have been seizing our pet ostriches ever since. When other people heard about Arimo's trouble, they killed their ostriches so they could at least have the feathers. Another man was so angry, he killed his female ostrich and destroyed all her eggs.”

AfricaImperialismKenya
Author:Pat Robbins
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“We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect... Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of Germain imperialism.”

Middle ClassDeclineNaziImperialism
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Maman ordered the pork meatball bánh mì, and I ordered the lemongrass chicken bánh mì, with an order of shrimp salad rolls to share. "People forget about the French and the Vietnamese, sometimes," she told me as we waited. "The French brought their baguettes, and the Vietnamese used them to make bánh mì sandwiches. And then the French came home with a love for Vietnamese chicken soup deep in their souls." "There are perks to imperialism," I noted.”

ImperialismFrenchVietnameseBaguette
Book:A Table by the Window
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“This is exactly what it means to be caught in the colonial matrix of power. It is to be constantly suffering from lack of options, and constantly finding oneself in such a position that all the choices available have already been chosen for you. As a result, you are constantly trapped and unable to think or do otherwise. You are consistently deprived of the possibility of working with other possibilities.”

KnowledgeColonialismImperialismCritical ThinkingCurriculumDecolonizationDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
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“One of the most serious damages caused by the domination and hegemony of Western knowledge is that it makes you dismiss knowledge from every other part of the world – even your own – as less than or inferior. To decolonize, then, means to believe in our ability to be producers not just consumers of knowledge. In any walk of life, being just a consumer carries the danger of being deprived and impoverished as soon as the suppliers choose to block their production from you (be it knowledge, goods, mobility, and so on), which is precisely what happens when the West practices its favorite vicious game of sanctioning and cornering any country or group of people that dares to challenge its hegemony, or seek to change the rules of the game as we know it.”

KnowledgeColonialismImperialismCurriculumDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
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“If I could summarize everything I have learned from my praxis, it is this: Every human being can and must contribute to this world. I believe that contributing to the world in meaningful ways is non-negotiable. Yet at the same time, most people never realize their dreams of making meaningful contributions. Most people I have met in most places, including in the West itself, feel unfulfilled. They feel alienated from what they love and what they do, regardless of where they are or what they do. Fulfilment seems to be reserved solely for the few privileged elites primarily interested in dominating everything under the sun, including knowledge production.”

PowerSelf RealizationFulfillmentColonialismImperialismCurriculumDecolonizationDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
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“In the area of Middle East Studies, you can always count on getting funding if your research is about minorities being treated horribly by ‘authoritarian regimes’ that the West want to topple, women oppressed and forced to wear the hijab, masculinity and femininity, gays are oppressed, refugees (provided that they are seeking safety in the West and running from a ‘dictator’ the West wants to topple), and so on. The pattern and the intentions are clear to a vigilant observer. What all such topics have in common is not that they are not important or need attention (they are so on both counts), but that their function is to maintain the West’s colonial and racist gaze on the rest of the world, which, in turn, serves the West’s hegemony and control over others. Furthermore, the single thread that connects the topics above is that they all practically open the door for Western intervention in the region under the pretext of ‘salvaging’ this cause or that group of people.”

ResearchPhilanthropyImperialismFundingCurriculumHegemonyDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
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“While the imperial university continues to pay lip service to letting the subaltern speak, make no mistake: the subalterns have never been silent. They have always been thinking, writing, doing, and sensing. The problem has always been with the shortsightedness and racism of the colonizers and the imperial spaces where certain knowledge gets produced and promoted, while other knowledge gets silenced, mutilated, and buried under the rubble of indifference and arrogance.”

KnowledgeColonialismImperialismCurriculumHegemonyDecolonialityKnowledge ProductionSubaltern
Author:Louis Yako
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“Dismantling and destroying Iraqi education was not just ‘collateral damage’ from the occupation: it was part and parcel of the occupation forces’ deliberate efforts to restructure the Iraqi state, society, and identity as many testimonies in this study make clear.”

WarConflictColonialismImperialismIraq WarCurriculumHigher EducationMiddle East Conflict
Book:Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile
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“Another way, and this applies to all the areas covered under this section, is by practicing what I call intellectual boycotting, which I simply define as: boycotting any intellectual or writer canonized and imposed on us through Western academic institutions, media, or any other institution with money and power. Note that this doesn’t mean not to read them, but rather, to read and cite them (if necessary) with caution, and preferably with the intent of debunking or exposing their silences and blind spots rather than using them as a compass to evaluate other forms of knowledge.”

KnowledgeResistanceImperialismAcademiaHegemonyIntellectualsAcademicsDecolonialityKnowledge ProductionBoycotting
Author:Louis Yako
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“I personally believe (and I know many readers will find this controversial) that we should never engage with any writers or scholars whose work is intentionally Euro-American centered and purposely ignores or refuses to engage with knowledge produced by thinkers outside the West. In other words, in knowledge production, reciprocate treatment (whether in engagement or citation) can be effective in challenging and changing the rules of the game.”

ImperialismAcademiaHegemonyIntellectualsAcademicsDecolonialityKnowledge ProductionLife Of The MindSubalternBoycotting
Author:Louis Yako
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“Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected: ‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.’ Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf? Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forces’ earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoples’ collective consciousness.”

WarColonialismImperialismIraq WarHigher EducationDecolonizationHegemonyMiddle East ConflictMiddle Eastern Studies
Book:Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile
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“Yet, in most of the world, US power was hegemonic more than coercive. The United States’ offer to serve as policeman of the world has been accepted by a majority of the world since 1945, and by almost the entire world after 1991. Many countries look to the US military’s command of the commons (the world’s airspace and seas as well as outer space) to ensure global order and to protect them from nearby regional powers that, in the absence of American military dominance, could dominate or invade their neighbors. Thus, communist Vietnam, after decades of fighting and millions of deaths to free itself from US domination, eagerly signed up for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is considering allowing the United States to base warships at Cam Ranh Bay to deflect Chinese power—and of course each and every Eastern European country begged for admission to NATO and the EU, just as Western European governments positioned themselves after World War II within a geopolitical and economic structure designed and controlled by the United States in return for protection from the USSR. American aid through the Marshall Plan came after the recipient governments had already cast their lot with the United States.”

ImperialismHegemony
Book:First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers
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“I don't incidentally suggest that the deceit is conscious. Much more likely, it's just the enormous power of conformity to convention, to what Gramsci called hegemonic "common sense." Some ideas are not even rejected; they are unthinkable. Like the idea that US aggression is aggression; it can only be "a mistake," "a tragic error," "a strategic blunder." I also don't want to suggest this is "American exceptionalism." It's hard to find an exception to the practice in the history of imperialism.”

ImperialismHegemonyComformity
Book:The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change
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“The capitalist world-economy needs the states, needs the interstate system, and needs the periodic appearance of hegemonic powers. But the priority of capitalists is never the maintenance, much less the glorification, of any of these structures. The priority remains always the endless accumulation of capital, and this is best achieved by an ever-shifting set of political and cultural dominances within which capitalist firms maneuver, obtaining their support from the states but seeking to escape their dominance.”

StatesCapitalismImperialismAccumulationHegemonyProfitsWorld Systems Analysis
Book:World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
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“It still shocks me to see countless academics who consider themselves intelligent, deep, or critical who constantly post and share articles from places like NYTimes, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other such sources that, at the surface, appear to be intelligent, objective, and critical even of the power under which they operate (the Western elites), but if you dig deeper, you will discover that they are, one way or another, in perfect harmony with the imperial and colonial agenda of the West against the rest.”

MediaPropagandaDeceitControlImperialismDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
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“Decolonizing knowledge shouldn’t put us in the position of only producing knowledge as a reaction to Western knowledge. Our existence should not become one in which everything we produce is to justify our intellectual existence vis-à-vis the West. It means to produce what we see as important, fit, and nurturing to our communities, countries, and cultures, in separation from the West and its colonial and imperial agenda. This way, we will ensure to not waste our energy in simply reacting to the West to justify the value of our contribution to knowledge.”

ThinkingWisdomCreativityColonialismImperialismDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialitySubaltern
Author:Louis Yako
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“It is fair to argue that conservative and liberal media in the West are two sides of the same coin. I personally see CNN and Fox News as complementing not contradicting each other. The former gives viewers the false impression of being liberal and critical of the system, while the latter vehemently promotes and defends the existing militaristic, racist, and supremacist system in place. The former gives the world the false impression of freedom and democracy where everything and everyone can be criticized and held accountable (which is far from the truth), while the latter constantly agitates the public to ensure that the predominantly militaristic, capitalist, and racist system remains intact. The outside world thinks that America is so free to have a newspaper like the NYTimes, but they don’t realize that the system operates precisely as Fox News wants it to.”

MediaDeceptionPropagandaImperialismPublic OpinionHegemonyMedia ManipulationDecoloniality
Author:Louis Yako
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“Second…decolonizing is about reeducating ourselves in ways that allow us to reconnect with our own souls, minds, and bodies. To rebuild all that has been damaged by the colonial wounds and the disciplinary institutions we dealt with throughout our lives. It is indeed about reeducating ourselves in such ways that we realize our full potential to contribute to our communities and to the wider world. We must learn (or relearn) how to harvest the fruit of knowledge from every part of the world, not just the West.”

WisdomKnowledgeSelf WorthColonialismImperialismDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonial Option
Author:Louis Yako
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“One of the biggest and most invisible – which in the long run becomes visible— wounds of coloniality is to make those at the receiving end of it question themselves; their physical, mental, and spiritual value and meaning; their ability to think, invent, innovate, and theorize. It happens so slowly, viciously, and unconsciously that many people suddenly see themselves at a point where the only expertise and knowledge they deem valuable come to them from the heart of Europe and North America. The colonized, slowly but surely, become at once the dagger and the wound to themselves. We come to such a place where we cooperate with the dagger against our own wounds. It takes a long time and reflection to realize that the wound (the colonized mind) will never stop bleeding so long as it is cooperating with the dagger (coloniality).”

ThinkingWisdomCulturePowerColonialismImperialismDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialityKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
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“For example, the colonized people have ‘regimes’ and ‘dictators’, whereas the West has ‘democracies’; the people in the ‘first world’ ‘tolerate’ cancer chemotherapy and ‘tolerate’ refugees or other religions and beliefs; if you go to work and settle in the West, you are an ‘immigrant’, but when Westerners come to plunder your country and get overpaid jobs (often despite mediocre qualifications), they are ‘expats’; and on goes the list of how we devalue ourselves and glorify our killers and plunderers without even realizing it simply through the language we use daily.”

ColonialismExploitationImperialismThird WorldDecolonizationHegemonyDecolonialityPlundering
Author:Louis Yako
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