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Oppression Quotes

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Oppression Quotes

“Starting from the premise of the organic unity of the nation, the opposition can be painted as social groups outside the ‘nation’, since, simply put, they threaten the nation’s natural harmony. However, this concept is only plausible if the regime, or, more precisely, the military, is able to portray itself as a representative of the nation and guardian of the state, which it has been very successful in doing. Hence, opposition to the military regime is equated with treason to the nation, and thus should be repressed by any means necessary. The narrative used to solicit popular support involved the propagation of numerous conspiracy theories, including the claim that the events of 2011, the groups that participated in it, and those who support it are part of a systemic effort to destroy the Egyptian state, which was only thwarted by the military’s intervention in 2013.” Chapter “Genesis”, page 33”

MilitaryUnityTyrannyOppressionConspiracyEgyptOtheringCoupModern EgyptEl Sisi
Book:Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge
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“To be effective as a liberation worker--that is, one who is committed to changing systems and institutions characterized by oppression to create greater equity and social justice--a crucial step is the development of a liberatory consciousness. A liberatory consciousness enables humans to live their lives in oppressive systems and institutions with awareness and intentionality, rather than on the basis of the socialization to which they have been subjected. A liberatory consciousness enables humans to maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression characterizing society without giving in to despair and hopelessness about that condition, to maintain an awareness of the role played by each individual in the maintenance of the system without blaming them for the roles they play, and at the same time practice intentionality about changing the systems of oppression. A liberatory consciousness enables humans to live "outside" the patterns of thought and behavior learned through the socialization process that helps to perpetuate oppressive systems.”

OppressionLiberationSocialization
Book:There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist
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“If, though, the phenotype then encountered an environment richer than expected, the thrifty phenotype might be -mismatched- to the greater abundance. It is this mismatch, it is argued, that has led to the prosperity for adults to develop obesity and other metabolic disorders during adulthood in our contemporary, industrialised environments.”

OppressionObesityFatSjwFat PeopleMismatchFat Studies
Book:Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
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“There is no other industry as cruel and oppressive as factory farming. With regard to numbers affected, extent and length of suffering, and numbers of premature deaths, no other industry can even approach factory farming. Billions of individuals are exploited from genetically engineered birth, through excruciating confinement, to conveyor belt dismemberment. Consequently, there is no industry more appropriate for social justice activists to boycott.”

Social JusticeOppressionVeganismAnimal CrueltyAnimal LiberationBoycottFactory FarmingAnimal StudiesFarm AnimalsEthics And Diet
Book:Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices
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“[Sin ese libro], tú no podrías escuchar nada sobre nuestra tradición de resistencia femenina a la opresión, que se remonta a la mujer nativa que tomó los techos de las casas en lo que luego se convertiría en México e "hizo llover dardos y piedras" sobre los invasores españoles. O a la mujer que, en Oaxaca, demandó a su esposo por abuso y logró que su caso llegara a la corte en 1630. O a las mujeres Maya que encerró al cura español en su iglesia por no aceptar que se enterraran a las víctimas mayas de una epidemia de tifus en tierras de la iglesia. O a las masivas "Revueltas del Maíz" de 1962 realizadas por mujeres que se rehusaban a morir de hambre. [Without a book like this] you would not hear about our tradition of female resistance to oppression, going back to Aztec women who took to the rooftops in what later became Mexico City and ‘rained down darts and stones’ on the invading Spainiards. Or the woman who filed suit in Oaxaca against her husband for abuse and had her case heard in court-in 1630! Or the Maya women who lackeed up the local Spanish priest in his church for not having Maya victims of a typhus epidemic buried in church ground. And the massive ‘Corn Riots’ of 1692 by women who refused to starve.”

HistoryOppressionMayaMexico CityAztecChicanoChicanaOaxacaChicanas
Book:500 Years of Chicana Women's History / 500 Años de la Mujer Chicana: Bilingual Edition
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“Whatever mainstream Western liberalism is--and I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them--it subscribes to this calculus.”

OppressionLiberalismOppressedProgressivismProgressivesLiberalsSystems Of OppressionWestern Liberalism
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?")”

WorldTalkingBlindGenderOppressionWomanQuestionExperiencesHuman BeingSystemsSilencingBlack Men
Book:We Should All Be Feminists
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“I see the reflection, the alter-ego, my all capital name, CROWNED. Wore it proud like a title but realized it wasn't who I truly was so I looked within and found the fact of who I Am. Now I look back and ask "What's a king to a god & to God?" Eat on the bread and sip on the wine, feed on these words and be divine.”

GovernmentPoetrySlaveryOppressionDeceitNameNamelessTrickerySubliminal Messages
Book:The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey
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“There are human made laws and divine laws of nature, sometimes these laws coincide but not always. To paraphrase Saint Thomas Aquinas, any law that uplifts humankind, gives rein to other people expressing the profundity of life, and gives flight to their personality is just. Or as expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr., any law is unjust that distorts the soul, damages the personality of any person, bestows any group with a false sense of class superiority, or imposes upon any individual or oppressed group a segregated and false sense of inferiority.”

LawJusticePrejudiceOppressionSegregationLaws Of NatureInferiorityLawsUplifting QuotesNatural Laws
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“119When you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don’t want to allow for serious dialogue... and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, 'If you speak the truth, we’ll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica,' the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people.”

PeopleLoveTruthOppressionMilitary Industrial ComplexPrison Industrial Complex
Author:Cornel West
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“Unlike the poor English, Irish, and native indentured servants, the African imports and their children were now considered property.... By creating a legally binding, race-based, intergenerational, perpetually oppressed class of human beings, Virginia revealed that all that nonsense in the colony's first charter about God, liberty, and the "true religion" was a farce. Slavery was an American idea, not a product of the time. No law was passed in England that legalized slavery. France's Code noir was similar, but it would come about two decades after Virginia's declaration. From its inception, America was always a pyramid scheme where the wealthy benefited from the labor of the poor.”

OppressionSlavery In The United States
Book:Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America
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“[1916] The IWW’s involvement in the [Minnesota] Iron Range’s labor unrest led mine company owners to take extreme actions and, just as in other conflict locations, they mobilized the businesses and municipal offices under their ownership. All mail and telegrams to and from Virginia were halted and reviewed. In other locations, including Biwabik, Aurora, and Eveleth, general stores turned away miners and their famlies. When the strikers formed their own cooperative for supplies and groceries, Oliver Iron Mining Company pressured wholesalers to serve notice that all credit would be curtailed pending the strike, and that payments for supplies must be made weekly. Meanwhile Sheriff Meining publicly announced new jail sentences for other agitators and miners for simply saying, “Hello Fellow Worker,” carrying a red IWW membership card, or discussing industrial unionism on public streets.”

UnionsOppressionWorker RightsIwwWobblies
Book:Frank Little and the IWW: The Blood That Stained an American Family
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“No matter the time and era, if ever a government in any corner of the world, begins to persecute a population on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, in the name of national security and prosperity, then it is the existential responsibility of every thinking human to stand up and defy the authority of such heinous, uneducated, megalomaniacal, delusional and self-righteous government.”

GovernmentPoliticsDemocracyCitizensOppressionPersecutionSegregationPolitical PhilosophyGovernment Abuse
Author:Abhijit Naskar
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“The responsibility of raising the challenge is typically in the hands of those who recognize that they have a subordinate status. It's very hard to recognize that. People lived for millennia without recognizing that they are being subordinated in systems of power. It's true of women for example or slaves. Most slave societies were accepted by the slaves as legitimate and, in fact, necessary. And the same is true of, for example, people who have jobs today in our society. Almost without exception they consider it legitimate for them to be in a position where they have to rent themselves in order to survive. That's certainly not obvious. And in fact, if you go back a century ago, it was not only considered not obvious, it was considered outlandish by ordinary working people. I'm not talking about Marxists or socialists or anybody like that, but say mill hands in Lowell, Massachusetts who never heard of socialism, who regarded it [renting oneself] as a form of slavery and were complaining that they had not fought the civil war to replace chattel slavery by wage slavery, and that therefore those who work in the mills ought to own them, because that's the republican rights that we won in the American revolution and so on and so forth. So, you know, it's not obvious. But, by now, I think enough indoctrination and propaganda and so on has taken place so people do regard that form of subordination to external authority as legitimate. Whether they should is another question, but the fact is they do, just as, for most of history, women have accepted a subordinate role as correct and proper and so on, and slaves did, and people living in feudal societies [did]. In a feudal society, people had a place, some kind of role, and, quite typically, these societies were stable because people regarded those structures as legitimate. The same is true of religious structures. Throughout human life there's a whole variety of systems of authority and oppression and domination and so on, which are usually accepted as legitimate by the people subordinated to them. When they don't, you have the struggles and revolutions and sometimes changes and sometimes brutality and so on.”

PowerAuthoritySlaveryOppressionDominationAnarchismFeudalismWage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“In academic circles influences by Said, any reference to acts of 'terrorism' was soon regarded as off-limits, a reflection of Zionist efforts to discredit the legitimate aspirations of a subject population by casting aspersions on their so-called freedom fighters. In this way, 'blaming the victim' was deployed as an ideological weapon that might constrain debate.”

LanguageIsraelTerrorismOppressionComplexityMiddle EastVictimhoodVictim Blaming
Book:The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
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“Peace with non-fundamentalists terrifies the fundamentalist because to them, being Christian doesn't mean just being 'good' - it means being 'better' than others. Being better that others means having to see them as enemies - and making war on them. The fundamentalist views not being allowed to make war on their enemies as oppression of their faith, or defeat.”

WarChristianFaithPeaceDefeatGoodOppressionEnemiesBetterFundamentalistTerrifiesNon Fundamentalists
Book:Fearotica: An Anthology of Erotic Horror
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“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

HistoryOppressionCommunismClass Struggles
Book:The Communist Manifesto
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“Wanna lead the world? First learn about the world - get so lost in the struggles of each and every people of planet earth, that you forget where you came from altogether - get so lost in the struggles of the people of earth, that for the first time in life you start to breathe as a whole human being - get so lost, that for the first time you see the light of dawn not as a puny slave to puny borders, but as the civilized maker of a civilized world.”

Social JusticeInjusticeCivil RightsOppressionInclusionIntoleranceMulticulturalismReformerHumanitarian CrisisHuman Rights Violation
Book:Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth
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