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Slave Trade Quotes

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Slave Trade Quotes

“A Brief History of Earth Cannibals (Sonnet) There's no such thing as slave traders, get your language straight, you idiots - they were human traffickers, not traders, you trade in commodity, not people. Colonizers were not slave traders, they were terrorists and traffickers; settlers are not civilizers, they are plague upon the civilized world. The world outside europe was already civilized beyond the wildest dreams of the europeans, then those brutes set sail, and the human race experienced an extinction level catastrophe. To trade in human lives like livestock is the savagest form of cannibalism - white history sells the West as the free world, but dig into earth history, and you'll realize, West is the biggest threat to life and freedom. Here is some rectified history, dig up the rest for yourself - Churchill was a big fat cannibal, Leopold was an ugly deadly virus, Columbus was a most wanted terrorist.”

SlaveryGenocideColonialismBritish EmpireEthnic CleansingHuman TraffickingCannibalismSettlersSlave TradeIndigenous Rights
Book:Sonnets From The Mountaintop
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“Mobile's AfricaTown: Published timelines of African-American history invariably mention that the last slave ship to bring Africans to North America was the *Clotilde* … what they never explain is how this happened 50 years after the United States banned the importation of slaves. The explanation is both trivial and tragic. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipbuilder, made a wager over a few whiskies that he could elude federal agents… …While descendents of the Clotilde captives still hold reunions in the area, there is little physical evidence of this community’s origins, except for the bust of Cudjoe Lewis… …Lewis (who was originally called ‘Kazoola’) died in 1945, possibly the last surviving slave-ship captive in America.”

MobileAlabamaSlave TradeMiddle PassageSlave ShipAfricatownCudjoe Lewis
Book:Lonely Planet Louisiana & the Deep South
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“In Colonial English they say: not all muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are muslim. In Naskarian English we say: not all white people are animal, but 99% of historic predators, terrorists, traffickers, thieves, morons and imbeciles were white. United States has a 9/11 Memorial, Germany has a Holocaust Memorial, but if you endeavor to commemorate the earth victims of White Terrorism, you'll run out of walls before you run out of names.”

TerrorismGenocideHolocaustNaziWhite PrivilegeIndigenous PeopleColonial HistorySlave TradeColonizersEthnics Cleansing
Book:Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat
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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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“Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy captives- as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in motion.”

ResponsibilityHistoryCapitalismDominationHegemonySlave Trade
Book:How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
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“In 1892, a Belgian trader and his entire caravan of six Europeans and 40 porters were beheaded by a thug controlled by the notorious slaver and warlord Msiri, who asked that their heads be returned to him to decorate his compound. The trader had tried to persuade Msiri and other local tyrants to sell their ivory to his company, which could transport it by river, thus obviating the need for slaves.”

SlaveryCongoLeopold IiSlave TradeCentral AfricaCongo Free TradeEast African Slave TradeMisiri
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is— "How many skulls?"— the same way that whalers hail— "How many barrels?" And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.”

SlaveryVillainPirateSlave TradeMoby DickSlave Ship
Book:Moby Dick
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“There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good. In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world. George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.”

American HistoryClassismSlave TradeSlavery In The United StatesDeep South
Book:American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
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“The truth is that any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based on the surviving records is bound to be low, because there were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves (and withholding data. Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million was accepted as basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape of Africans from 1445 to 1870.”

LossLaborAccuracySlave TradeUnderdeveloped Countries
Book:How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
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“Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by the standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person is forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of greatest importance.”

OpportunityDevelopmentSlave TradeOpportunity Cost
Book:How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
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“That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate.”

DeathRaceSlaverySlave TradeRace America
Book:The Chaneysville Incident
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“One of the things that is constantly questioned is profitability. The thinking is mostly: the slave trade is so strange, you only drive it if you earn a lot from it. While, for example, an awful lot of slaves already died of infectious diseases while travelling across the Atlantic. I calculated that the Dutch slave trade was only an estimated 0.005 per cent of national income. So that is not much. Moreover, the Dutch slave trade is the only one that ceased to exist for economic reasons.”

SlaverySlave TradeDutch SlaveryAtlantic Slavery
Book:De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse slavernij in een notendop
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“I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control. This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them. The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons.”

Refugee CrisisSlave TradeAnti Immigration
Book:Gun Island
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“[Slave] trade ... is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish ... liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman [peddler].... It is a clear truth, that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.”

MenLittlesCareLawCompanyLibertyClearDirectorsDirectTradeSlaveTendenciesTyrantsShockingDiminishPettyLaws Of NatureViolationDealerSlave TradePeddler
Author:James Otis
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“Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.”

IfsGivingWellsMadeCultureTermSawsDiversityUltimateTablesTradeSlaveDinnerGoing AwayWhy NotShoreGuestsDiverseFeathersSpainLegislatureHispanicConcessionsCultural DiversityDinner TableSlave TradeDiverse Cultures
Author:Ana Castillo
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“That's our mirror. Every dip, every crash, every bubble that's burst, a testament to our brilliant stupidity. This one gave us the railroads. This one the Internet. This one the slave trade. And if we hope to do anything about saving the environment, or getting to other worlds, we'll need a bubble for that too. Everything I've ever done in my life worth anything has been done in a bubble: in a state of extreme hope and trust and stupidity.”

IfsWorldNeedsHas BeensStatesDoneEnvironmentInternetMirrorsTradeSlaveExtremesStupidityBrilliantSavingBubblesCrashTestamentOther WorldsRailroadsDipSlave Trade
Author:Lucy Prebble
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“It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.”

FeelingsLawHoursHurtLossResultsPiecesEconomicCenturyTenTradeBillsSlaveProfitOperationsHistorianIt HurtsLegislationHumanitarianism19th CenturyAbolitionMarxistSlave TradeNoblemenProfit And Loss
Author:Barbara Tuchman
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“When I heard the truth about my name was not Cassius Clay, like I knew a black man in America named John Hawkins. Now, you know who John Hawkins was.He was a slave trader from England. But the white people of that time, if one had five slaves and his name was Jones, they would be called Jones' property. [...] Now that I'm free, now that I'm no longer a slave, then I want a name of my ancestors.”

PeopleIfsKnowsMenWantWould BeAmericaNamesBlackWhiteFiveHeardEnglandPropertySlaveAncestorClayTradersSlave TradeCassiusCassius Clay
Author:Muhammad Ali
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“It's worse than slave trade because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80 percent of the people of this world. These 80 percent live on the biodiversity and the knowledge they have evolved as part of a rich collective heritage involving the use of seeds for growing crops and medicinal plants for healing.”

PeopleWorldUseHealingRichGrowingThis WorldSurvivalPercentTradePlantSlaveSeedsCollectivesHeritageCropsInvolvingBiodiversitySlave Trade
Author:Vandana Shiva
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“The story [in 12 Years a Slave] serves as a metaphor for the fear of having your family taken away, and for being abused in such a horrific way. I lost it a lot of times watching that film, particularly when seeing the grace of the man when he finally makes it back home aged, changed, forever brutalized, and yet he apologizes to his family for his long absence. That was such a profoundly moving moment capturing the triumph of dignity over the disgraceful behavior of those involved in the slave trade.”

MenWayYearsLongMomentsStoriesHomeFilmMovingLostForeverTakenGraceSeeingChangedHe ManInvolvedBehaviorDignityTradeSlaveMetaphorAbsenceTriumphOur FamilyApologizingBack HomeHorrificDisgracefulSlave Trade
Author:Benedict Cumberbatch
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“Zwarte Piet, or 'Black Pete,' is a relic from slavery. It is something that should have long been eliminated, and it's very insulting to black Dutch people. It's shocking to me that it still exists, but I think it's about the lack of knowledge and education regarding the roots of the character in the slave trade.”

PeopleThinkingShouldLongStillsCharacterBlackRootsShould HaveSlaveryTradeSlaveShockingInsultingDutchRelicsEducation And KnowledgeSlave TradeLack Of Knowledge
Author:Roger Ross Williams
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