Random Quotes

Annual report of the Governor General of the Belgian colony of the Congo.

Nzula et al. 1979 quoted in Henry Bernstein (2000): “Colonialism, Capitalism, Development.” In: Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (Eds): Poverty and Development into the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 264.

European colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America economically exploited people and their labour, together with nature and its resources. In addition to direct enslavement and the compulsion to work (e.g. through the introduction of taxes), colonisers always tried to morally justify forced labour, e.g. as character forming. Still today, many people are forced into quasi-slave labour, both in Europe (e.g. 145.000 people in Italy in 2016, GSI) as well as in Asia (e.g. 3, 8 million people in China in 2016, GSI). Conditions in US prisons are also dire. For example, working conditions
for inmates in the former Louisiana plantation known today as “Anglola”
are little better than slave labour (peopeoplesworld.org, May 4th, 2018).

*Henry Bernstein (2000): Colonialism, Capitalism, Development. In: Tim Allen / Alan Thomas (Hrsg.): Poverty and Development into the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, S. 241–270.
*GSI Global Slavery Index (2016): Country reports

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Marxist historian and politician from Guyana. Born into a working-class family, he studied in Guyana and Jamaica and taught in Hamburg and Tanzania, amongst other places. In 1980 he was killed in a bomb attack during the election campaign for the Working People’s Alliance. In 2015, a commission of inquiry found that the attack had been carried out by Guyanese government agencies.

Walter Rodney (1973/1983): 344

In his book, Rodney analysed the social and economic history of Africa from the 14th century to the end of the colonial era. In the 15th century, Europe and Africa were still at the same level. He argued that from then on, through enslavement, imperialist domination, colonisation and general exploitation, Africa became dependent on the West. In his view, this explained Africa’s impoverishment and misery after the end of the colonial era.

Walter Rodney (1973, from reprint 1983): How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, Dar-Es-Salaam: London and Tanzanian Publishing House, p. 344

Chanting at a demonstration in Sri Lanka, which was devastated by the 2004 tsunami that destroyed many fishermen’s huts which were never rebuilt because hotels were constructed in their place.

Naomi Klein (2007: 389)

The 2004 tsunami took the lives of around 35,000 people in Sri Lanka, with the majority of victims being small-scale fishermen. The government subsequently banned construction near the coast. However, it exempted the tourism industry from this requirement, and encouraged hoteliers to build where the fishermen had previously lived. Tourism was to be financed with money that came from the relief fund for tsunami victims (see Klein 2007: 385ff.). In general, one can say that those presumably responsible for the spread of so-called natural disasters (e.g. through lifestyle, work in the industrial sector, etc.) are often not affected by their consequences (e.g. the tsunami), and sometimes even benefit from them.

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and Enlightenment figure and is considered the founder of classical economics.

Adam Smith, Adam (1776): The Wealth of Nations. Book I, p.11.

The logic of European economic thinking evident in this quote was used to devalue social and economic systems on other continents and dismiss them as irrational. This argument was also used to legitimate the idea that they should be integrated into capitalism, apparently for their own benefit. The fact that non-capitalist societies found other values, such as equality or solidarity more important than the generation of income and profit (see the Southern African concept of Ubuntu) was not recognised. Nor was the fact that these values underlay a much more ecologically sustainable way of life.

*Abeba Birhane (2017): Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’.
* Piet J. Naudé (2010): “Fair Global Trade: A Perspective from Africa.” In: Geoff Moore, Fairness in International Trade. Durham: Springer‘s.

David L. Budhoo is an economist from Grenada in the Caribbean. From 1966 he worked for the International Monetary Fund, later even as a manager. He designed structural adjustment programmes for Latin America and Africa. His 1988 resignation letter, titled “Enough is Enough,” was more than 100 pages long.

David L. Budhoo (1990): Enough ist enough. Dear Mr Camdessus … Open letter of resignation to the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. New York: Horizon Press.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the structural adjustment programmes made by the international organisations IMF and World Bank were particularly tough and neoliberal: privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation were the goals. While the official mandate of the institutions is “crisis prevention,” Bodhoo describes how he falsified statistics to justify drastic neoliberal economic measures. These statistics made countries (e.g. Trinidad and Tobago) look unstable. As a consequence they could get no or only badly conditioned credits, so that only credits from the IMF and World Bank could help out and implement their neoliberal adjustments. In 2016, the Kenyan government was due to sign the EPA free trade agreement with the EU. “When the government balked, the EU imposed import tariffs on Kenyan products. (…) The agreement itself shows what free trade between unequal partners means: while only 10% of African products are considered competitive on the world market, EPA allows 80% of European Union exports to East Africa to be exempt from tariffs allowed” (Medico International 2017).

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.
*Susan Meeker-Lowry (1995): Mr. Budhoo’s Bombshell: A people’s alternative to Structural Adjustment.
*Medico International (Anne Jung, 2017): Ostafrika. Hunger durch Handel?
*David L. Budhoo (1990): Enough is enough.

Freedom charter created by the African National Congress (ANC), through a process in which 50,000 volunteers in the townships collected important freedom demands of the people. The demands written on individual pieces of paper were then summarised and ratified in 1955 at a congress which 3000 delegates attended.

ANC (1955): The Freedom Charter.

In South Africa, the white minority ruled over the Black majority during the apartheid regime from the beginning of the 20th century (especially after 1948) until 1994. Former ANC resistance fighter Nelson Mandela became the country’s first Black president in 1994. Within apartheid, a distinction was made between White, Coloured, Asian or Indian and Native, each of which had different rights. The ANC was founded as early as 1912, and with the “Defiance Campaign” against the laws of the apartheid regime from 1952-1954, it became a mass organisation of resistance.

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Peter Buxtun (born 1937) is an American social worker and former employee of the United States Public Health Service who became known as a whistleblower due to his publication of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The experiment was discontinued after it became public knowledge.

Der Spiegel (Johanna Lutteroth), 07.06.2012: “Medical scandal Tuskegee death study.”

In the 1930s, doctors began abusing poor black male farm workers suffering from syphilis in the so-called Tuskegee Study. They wanted to investigate how syphilis develops if it remains untreated. The study was conducted by the Public Health Service, an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Almost 400 sick men in Tuskegee (Alabama) were deliberately deprived of effective treatment without their knowledge. It was forbidden to prescribe Penecellin to patients when it was discovered to be an effective drug against syphilis in 1943. The aim was to monitor the progression of the disease and its late effects. “The study had no scientific value at all. Because the gruesome consequences of syphilis had been known for centuries” (Berliner Zeitung, 19.05.2022). The study was only discontinued in 1972, after Peter Buxton had tried in vain for years to draw attention to the abuse. In the 1940s, the same group of researchers infected hundreds of people in Guatemala with the virus in order to research the disease (ibid.). Although the researchers described the Tuskegee study in 15 medical journals, there was never an outcry in the medical community (Martin J. Tobin 2022).

*Berliner Zeitung (Annett Stein), May 19, 2022):“Tuskegee experiment: Consequences of the cruel human experiments continue to this day.”
*Tobin (2022):“Uncovering the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Story and Timeless Lessons.”

Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451-1506) was an Italian navigator and human trafficker. The search for a sea route to India led him to the Americas. Columbus was thus instrumental in the colonization of the continent.

Andres Bernaldez (1930): The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Being the Journals of his First and Third, and the Letters Concerning his First and Last Voyages, to Which is Added the Account of his Second Voyage. London: The Argonaut Press.

European colonial expansion is often divided into three phases: [1] Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, mainly that of the Americas from the end of the 15th century, which was based on the exploitation of resources. [2] The British, French and Dutch colonization of Asia and parts of America and South Africa from the 17th century onwards (with the support of the British East India Company and the Dutch West and East India Companies) as well as settlement colonialism in the Americas and [3] the colonial division of Africa into zones of influence of European superpowers at the end of the 19th century. Although the different phases differed, they were united by the violent subjugation of the population and the belief in white superiority, which is already evident in Columbus’ quote. Colonization was accompanied by great resistance in many areas: In South Africa, there were wars with the Xhosa from 1779 to 1879. The British conquest of India also lasted 100 years. In Algeria, it took the French 20 years to occupy the country.

*Josephine Apraku (2017): Colonialism in the classroom. Webinar.
*Bernd-Stefan Grewe & Thomas Lange (2015): Colonialism. Stuttgart: Reclam.
*Al Jazeera (2019): Because Colonialism. 25min.
*Raoul Peck (2021): Exterminate All the Brutes. Trailer.
*Göran Olsson (2014): Concerning Violence. Trailer.

Walter Charleton (1616-1707) was an English natural philosopher and doctor.

Walter Charleton (1659): Ephesian Matron. Quotet by Silvia Federici (2004: 163).

Time and again, women are used as scapegoats: from the biblical story in which Eve seduced Adam into taking a bite of the apple, to the witch hunts, where women were held responsible for all the social ills of the time. In this quote, women are accused, amongst other things, of driving men crazy through their sexual attractiveness. This inversion of responsibility is still used today, e.g. when a victim of sexual violence, rather than its perpetrator, is held culpable for the violence inflicted on them.

*Silvia Federici (2004): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Semiya Şimşek (b. 1986) is a pedagogist and the daughter of Enver Şimşek, who was the first person to be murdered by the NSU. Semiya Şimşek has become an important voice for victims’ relatives. In her book Painful Homeland: Germany and the Murder of My Father, she works through her experiences around the murder of her father. Semiya Şimşek left Germany and now lives in Turkey.

Süddeutsche Magazin, 10/2013.

Between 2000 and 2007, the neo-Nazi terrorist organisation National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered nine migrants and one policewoman: Enver Şimşek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, Mehmet Turgut, İsmail Yaşar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık, Halit Yozgat Michele Kiesewetter.
Both the NSU and investigators kept these crimes undercover for more than ten years until the NSU exposed itself with a video in 2011. After it became public, some members of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution destroyed relevant files, and high-ranking officers for the Protection of the Constitution resigned. Instead of pursuing actual clues, for years, investigators targeted the victims’ relatives and accused them of criminal activities. The unprecedented right-wing terrorist crimes of the NSU, the investigations and the subsequent trial illustrate only too well the deeply rooted institutional racism of the police, the secret service and courtrooms. The victims’ relatives, co-plaintiffs, activists and critical journalists denounced the fact that during the entire process, right-wing extremist groups were never investigated.

*NSU Watch.
*wsws.org (Dietmar Henning, 15.07.2015): Documentary examines unanswered questions about the National Socialist Underground.

Geert Hofstede (1928-2020) was a Dutch social psychologist, cultural theorist and pioneer of “intercultural learning”.

Geert Hofstede (1991): Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. New York: Mcgraw-Hill Education Ltd.

From 1967 to 1972, Hofstede conducted comparative intercultural research from which he developed a cultural theory. This was based on cultural areas that were clearly distinct from one another, each with its own characteristics. Hofstede’s theory has been used for decades in business and in international youth exchanges as a basis for intercultural learning and intercultural management. For him, a cultural area was synonymous with a nation. He was criticised, amongst other things, for ignoring differences within countries. His Culture Compass App [https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/culture-compass/], allows people to enter which country they come from and where they currently are in order to see what cultural difficulties they might encounter, based on this paradigm. The exhibition Geographic-Postcolonial critically examined this conception of cultural continents.

*Culture Compass App von Hofstede

Turkey, Melitio of Sardis (ca.120-185)
Melitio of Sardis appeared in the 2nd century as Bishop of Sardis in what is now Turkey. He is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Melitio von Sardes, Passover Homilie, quoted by Karl-Erich Grözinger, Die “Gottesmörder, in: Julius H. Schoeps / Joachim Schlör (ed.), Bilder der Judenfeindschaft, Augsburg 1999, 57.

His writings about the Jews as murderers of God, published between 160 and 170, are considered important sources for the development of Christian anti-Judaism. Melito saw the destruction of the temple as well as the suffering of the Jews in the Diaspora as a consequence of their god-murder.

Christlicher Antijudaismus, ein Wegbereiter des Antisemitismus – juedspurenhuenfelderlands Webseite!

Pepe Mujica (b. 1935) was a member of the left-wing Tupamaro guerrillas and was tortured and imprisoned for 14 years during the military dictatorship in Uruguay. He was President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. During his tenure, he donated 90% of his income and was considered the world’s most humble president.

The quote was composed from two sources: an interview on Telesur from 2014 and an article from 2018. The translation comes from Füllgraf 2020.

Mujica criticises what is referred to as Western culture for its view of economic success and consumer goods as life’s ultimate goals. Since our economic system is based on the maximisation of profits, within our societies, a desire to consume must be created and promoted, e.g. through advertising. Thus people strive for the satisfaction of this need without the government or any other authority having to cultivate it in them. Western capitalist culture is thus not only based on democratic and liberal values, but also on an individualistic and profit-oriented culture of consumption, in which Mujica sees a colonisation of life itself. In his documentary The Century of the Self (2002), Adam Curtis explores advertising’s psychological tricks as well as political manipulation of the population.

*Emir Kusturica (2018): El Pepe, una vida suprema. Trailer.
*Alvaro Brechner (2018): La noche de 12 años. Trailer.
*Adam Curtis (2002): The Century of the Self. BBC Documentary.  Full movie.

Aristotele (384 BCE – 322 BCE), ancient philosopher, student at the Platonic Academy and tutor to Alexander at the court of King Philip, taught from 335/4 at the public gymnasium (Lykeion) in Athens and then founded his own school, later named after Peripathos.

Quote: Aristotele: Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 1991, 1255a1–2.
Picture: Nach Lysipp – Jastrow (2006). Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

The quote comes from Aristotle’s first book of his “Politics”, in which he attempts to demonstrate the inequality of the distribution of power and the subordination and superiority of people as a natural fact. In response to the objection that prisoners of war could fall into slavery by chance without having previously been slaves, he argues that it is precisely in their defeat in battle that their previously hidden “slave nature” is revealed. Aristotle’s defense of the institution of slavery was a powerful source of justification for the conquerors, slaveholders and settlers of the pre-modern as well as the modern era.

*New York Times (Agnes Callard, 21.07.2020): Should We Cancel Aristotle?
*Olivia Haynie (27.11.2022): Aristotle and the Argument for American Slavery, Penns.

Velma Hopkins (1909-1996) was a Black American worker. The union she co-founded, Local 22, was led primarily by Black women and fought for economic, racial, and gender equality. The year of the citation is an estimate.

Korstad, Robert Rodgers (2003). Civil rights unionism : tobacco workers and the struggle for democracy in the mid-twentieth-century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 217.

The multiple discriminations faced by Black workers (as women, Black and workers) often go unrecognised. Unions like Local 22 were formed early in the century as a response to this fact. In 1989, the Black American lawyer Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality. An example of multiple discrimination was the lawsuit brought before white women and Black men by Emma Degraffenreid and four other Black women, who were the first to be fired from a General Motors factory (eds. 1989: “Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Issue 1, Article 8, pp. 141ff). While race and gender are currently the subject of much discussion, the question of social class is being pushed completely into the background. As early as 2000, after a whole decade of neoliberalism, bell hooks argued that: “Nowadays it is fashionable to talk about race or gender; the uncool subject is class” (bell hooks (2000): Where we Stand: Class Matters, p. vii).

*Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. Issue 1, Article 8.
*bell hooks (2000): Where we stand: Class Matters. New York and London: Routledge.

The text “Yemenici Bali” (Bali the shoemaker’s boy) comes from the book Dellakname-i Dilküsa (The Book on Bath Servants) from the 17th century, made famous in more recent times by the journalist Murat Bardakçı. “It is one of the rare erotic texts by the Ottomans that has been passed down to our time” (Erdoğan 1998). 1680 is an approximate date.

Quoted by Sema Nilgün Erdoğan (1998, German): Sexuelles Leben bei den Osmanen. Istanbul: Dönence.

Sexual contact between men was just as much a part of the Ottoman Empire as men’s poetry and fantasies about young men. Young boys, who often conformed to specific ideals of beauty, were not viewed as living male beings, but as a kind of imperfect man or woman. For many Ottomans, sexual contact with them was part of gaining experience before marrying a woman. As a man, having a relationship with a woman meant a stable life marked by family planning, loyalty, and purely conjugal sex with one’s wife. In his book Desiring Arabs (2008), Joseph Massad also speaks of Western sexual models that were imposed. He compiles historical Arabic writings on sexual desire and conservative responses to them. There is also ample evidence of homosexual relationships from ancient Greece, especially between men in Sparta and, between women, on the island of Lesbos.

*Arabmediasociety.com, 21.01.2009: Book Review Desiring Arabs.

Germany, Black Rats Tupamaros West Berlin (1969-1970)

Schwarze Ratten TW, Schalom und Napalm, leaflet, in: AGIT 883, No. 40 from 13.11.1969, 9.

Tupamaro’s black rats emerged from the subcultural milieu in West Berlin and were officially founded in 1969. Based on the city guerrilla concept of South America, the group saw itself as part of the internationalist and anti-imperialist movement. An essential part of their ideological orientation was a pronounced anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, which found expression in a bomb attack on the Jewish parish hall in Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse on November 9, 1969. After leading figures were arrested, the group disbanded in July 1970.

Berliner Tupamaros-Anschlag 1969: Dieter Kunzelmann und der “Judenknax” – DER SPIEGEL

Prof. Ranabir Samaddar is the director of the Calcutta Research Group and conducts research on migration and flight, the theory and practice of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control.

*Ranabir Samaddar (2017, in German): Die Krise des Kapitalismus bedeutet nicht das Ende des Kapitalismus. In: glokal e.V. (Hrsg.): Connecting the dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) von Unterdrückung und Widerstand, p. 72.

Samaddar is posing a central question in current debates: how can one grasp the historical and global dimensions of migration? How does the global division of the world relate to neo-colonial relationships of dependency? Does migration only move from the Global South to the Global North, as an attempt to escape from the effects of global patterns of dependency? Does it in this way propel the realities of post-colonial exploitation and oppression into Europe’s “white field of vision”? Wars are mostly take place in the Global South. Poverty, hunger and drought, on the other hand, are not social phenomena that can be explained purely in local and regional terms. Their relationship with global capitalist contexts, in which the Global North continues to be hegemonic, is patent. The wars in the Global South are being waged with weapons made in the Global North. Debt in the Global South leads to profits and economic power in the Global North. Samaddar’s position is key to the argument for a global understanding of responsibility, which perspective is currently insufficiently reflected in debates about migration.

Ranabir Samaddar (2020): The Postcolonial Age of Migration. New Delhi: Routledge.

Samora Machel (1933-1986) was the first president of Mozambique after its independence in 1975. He died in a plane crash. The causes of the accident are unclear.

Stephanie Urdang (1989): And still they Dance: Women, War and the Struggle for Change in Mozambique. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 96.

In many liberated countries, the post-decolonisation period inaugurated a time of transformation, during which political, cultural and economic utopias were articulated and put into practice. Feminism was often of great importance within decolonial struggles, enabling a joint fight against colonial supremacy which cut across gender boundaries. But even if women played a leading role during upheavals and revolutions (Mugo 2010), in subsequent phases, patriarchal role models were again invoked (Linhard 2005). The picture was taken at Machels funeral.

*Micere Mugo (2010): Die Rolle der Frauen in afrikanischen Befreiungsbewegungen – Ein illustratives Beispiel aus Kenia. In: Africavenir (Hrsg.): 50 Jahre afrikanische Un-Abhängigkeiten – Eine (selbst)kritische Bilanz, S. 48-55.
*Tabea Alexa Linhard (2005): Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
*Le Monde Diplomatique (Augusta Conchiglia, 11/2017): The mysterious death of Samora Machel.

Colonel Masanobu Tsuji (1901-1961) was a Japanese officer, military strategist and politician. He was involved in war crimes during World War II, hid in Thailand after the war to avoid justice, but returned to Japan in 1949 and became a member of parliament.

Arthur Zich (1980): Die aufgehende Sonne. Der Zweite Weltkrieg. Niederlande: Time-Life-Books, p. 123. The quote was said between 1939 and 1945.

Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II. ‘Outwardly, Japanese ideologues used anti-colonial (…) rhetoric to stir up resistance against Western colonial powers and to win allies – the slogan was “Asia for Asians“’ (recherche international 2008: 107). Many people, e.g. in Indonesia, first welcomed the Japanese because they drove out Dutch colonial power and abolished their exploitative plantation economy. Japan distributed Dutch possessions to Indonesian peasants. But soon the Japanese obliged many to work as romusha (forced labourers). Around 4 million Indonesians perished in World War II (ibid.: 123). The Indonesian journalist Sunapati described the actions of the Japanese as follows: ‘The wolf goes out the back door, the tiger comes in the front door.’ (ibid.: 107) In other words: ‘The European colonialists ran away, the Japanese fascists came!’ (ibid.).

*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro; recherche international (2012): Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte. Köln.
*Care (Comfort Women Action for Redress and Education):
**Mark Caprio (2010): “Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea: The Colonisation Debate in Japan and South Korea.” In: The Asia-Pacific Journal Volume 8, Issue 44, Number 4.
*Care (Comfort Women Action for Redress and Ed