Random Quotes

Chief Luther Standing Bear (1868-1939) was a chief of the Oglala Lakota (or Oglala Sioux), author and philosopher. He contributed to our understanding of indigenous cultures as holistic and respectful of nature.

First People: Chief Luther Standing Bear

It was not only in relation to the Americas, from where this quote comes, that Europeans developed the idea of nature as an unknown, and of people and ways of life as wild. This quote suggests that this was by no means the case for the Lakota Sioux, to which Standing Bear belonged. Standing Bear continued: ‘He knew that a man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence’ (ibid.). As Paula Gunn Allen (1979, quoted in Booth 2003) put it: ‘The land [nature] is a part of ourselves.’

*Annie L. Booth (2003): We are the Land: Native American Views of Nature. In: Selin H. (eds) Nature Across Cultures. Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht.

Golo Mann (1909–1994) was a German-Swiss historian, publicist and writer. He was the son of Thomas Mann, the Nobel prize winner for literature, who had had to leave Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933.

Bildzeitung from 30. January 1991, quoted from Ulrich Herbert (2001: 305).

Golo Mann’s defensive attitude towards migrants represents the practice of German foreigner policy since the end of the guest worker agreement in 1973. At the time the quote was written, the deadly arson attacks on migrants and their houses in East and West Germany began: Rostock, Lichtenhagen, Hoyerswerda, Mölln , Solingen. In all cases, the state in East and West Germany failed to provide adequate protection for the victims or a dignified expression of condolences. In debates, it is argued that one can see from the attacks that the Germans have exceeded their resilience limit and that the right to asylum must therefore be abolished. Finally, the right to asylum was radically curtailed by the CDU, CSU and FDP in 1993 with the consent of the SPD.

*Ulrich Herbert (2001): Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland. München: C.H. Beck.
*Politics Today (06.06.2018): What Changed 25 Years After the Solingen Arson Attack.

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.

Nikolaos Souidas (Greek Vice-Consul in Kavalla) to the Foreign Minister Alexandros Skouzes, Kavalla, Sept. 29, 1907, No.407.

Historical Archive of the Greek Foreign Ministry, file 1907/5

The preponderance of the Israelite community of Salonica, the main harbor and city of Ottoman Macedonia (61.439 inhabitants or 39% of its population according to the first Greek census in 1913), was considered as a negative factor for Greek irredentism. Kavalla was the region’s second port. According to the Ottoman census of 1905, it was inhabited mostly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians (11.242) and Moslem Turks (8.562), plus 1.862 Jews and around 1.000 unregistered Slav sojourners; it was, therefore, considered as one of the main Greek strongholds in Southern Macedonia. The Greek politico-military apparatus had already been waging since 1906 a drastic economic war, coupled with a number of terrorist attacks, against the smaller Bulgarian communities in both Salonica and Kavalla. In Salonica, recommendations by local Greek merchants for an enlargement of the scope of such operations, in order to hit their Jew professional rivals, were tactfully turned down by the leaders of the Greek Organization, who were very conscious to avoid an eventual dangerous backlash. It seems that. for similar reasons, the Vice-Consul’s suggestion for “a systematic underground economic war against the Jews” in Kavalla did not materialize. The town was finally incorporated into the Greek state after the second Balkan war, in 1913.

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts. Christians, Moslems and Jews, 1430-1950. N. York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, pp.252-254; Αθανάσιος Σουλιώτης Νικολαΐδης, Ο Μακεδονικός Αγών. Η Οργάνωσις Θεσσαλονίκης, 1906-1908. Απομνημονεύματα, Thessaloniki: Society for Macedonian Studies – Institute for Balkan Studies, 1959.

This text is one of the first popular migration songs that accompanied the labour migration from the Black Sea region to Europe, which was beginning at the time. In 1977 the musicians Ruhi Su (1912-1985) and Sümeyra Çakir (1946-1990) released the album “Kapıları” (Foreign Countries) together with the “Dostlar Korosu” (Friends’ Choir). Sümeyra died in political exile in Frankfurt. In 1980, she sang the Communist International at a concert in West Berlin by the (Turkish-speaking) West Berlin Workers’ Choir, which brought politically organised migrant workers together around music. After this concert, she had to stay in Germany and in Turkey before the state repression after the military coup in 1980 flee.

Quoted from Ceren Turkmen, original source Ruhi Su; Sümeyra Çakir (1977): “El Kapıları”, Imece Plaklari: Istanbul, Vinyl, LP. music album. The year (1960) indicates the approximate date of origin.

Diasporic workers’ choirs across Europe turned the song “Almanya (Germany), bitter home” into a hidden anthem which achieved cult status, and was sung at major political events as well as everyday cultural club gatherings. For more than 20 years, the song symbolised a cultural practice of migration that was determined by a “nostalgic migration narrative”. This narrative, which was also common in diasporic communist-socialist workers’ choirs, also masculinised migration dynamics. Despite regional differences, the song ignores female labour migration to Europe, which has been central since the 1950s, as well as female wage labour (in family farming, in semi-economised agriculture and in factories) in Turkey.

Deutsche Welle (2021): The German-Turkish Recruitment Agreement 60 years on.

Theodore W. Schultz (1902-1998) was chairman of the University of Chicago Economics Department. He was awarded the Nobel Price for economics in 1979.

Juan Gabriel Valdés (1995): Pinochet‘s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 89

From the 1950s onwards, in the Global South in particular, theories circulated that diverged sharply from Western development ideals. Representatives included the economist Raúl Prebisch (Argentina) and the sociologist Walden Bello (Philippines). They were called “pink-red” economists or dependency theorists. Pink-red denoted an orientation that was left, but not communist (“red”). Many had relationships with heads of state such as Salvador Allende (Chile) and Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran). Because they questioned the general validity of the Western capitalist system, the West tried to change their minds or silence them, which it also attempted through development aid or education (e.g. of Chilean economists at the University of Chicago). Allende was assasinated and Mosaddegh overthrown with the help of Western intelligence agencies.

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

Presbyter Kosma was a Bulgarian writer in the late 10th century. His best-known work, from which the quote comes, is directed against the Bogomilia, an ascetic religious community that was widespread in present-day Bulgaria.

Silvia Federici 2004: 56

Within radical movements of religious heretics, women played a central role (Federici 2004: 22). Mostly founded by women, they emerged in the 11th century in France and Italy as well as in other regions (ibid.). They were vehemently opposed by the church, as the quote makes clear. During the Inquisitions of the Middle Ages and later, people, most often women, were labelled as witches, which act constituted a strategy for breaking up communities and punishing resistant individuals. It is estimated that 200,000 women were tried, convicted and/or murdered during the three centuries when witchcraft persecution was at its peak (ibid.: 208). In southwest Germany alone, 3,200 women were burned as witches between 1560 and 1670 (ibid.).

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

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Guyanese Marxist historian and politician who was murdered in a Guyana Army bomb attack.

Quote: Walter Rodney (1979): People’s Power, no Dictator. Georgetown, Guyana: Working People’s Alliance.
Picture: By Unknown. Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

The quote comes from the speech “People’s Power, no Dictator”, which Walter Rodney gave in 1979. Rodney was a pan-African, Marxist historian and political activist. He came from southamerican Guyana and, after studying in Mona (Jamaica) and London (UK), worked as a university lecturer in Tanzania until he became a professor in Georgetown, Guyana in 1974. He was politically active against the increasingly authoritarian government of Forbes Burnham. In various speeches, he developed the ideas of self-emancipation of the working people, people’s power and multi-racial democracy. In the quote, Rodney opposes the increasingly dictatorial government of Forbes Burnham and emphasizes self-defence as a universal human right.

*Massimiliano Tomba (2019): Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Germany, Esther Bejarano, 2020

Speech on Liberation Day, May 8th, 2020, Hamburg.

Esther Bejarano was a German Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She played with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and others in the Auschwitz girls’ orchestra. Later she became involved in the association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime – the Association of Antifascists.

Esther Bejarano zum 8. Mai: Esther Bejarano: “Wenn ich sehe, wie Neonazis auf den Straßen marschieren dürfen, wird mir schlecht” | ze.tt (zeit.de)

Grassroots initiative from South America.

Imperial College London (2014). Event ‘Leave the Oil in the Soil, Leave the Coal in the Hole, Leave the Gas under the Grass‘

At the climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, grassroots initiatives from South America presented their campaign Keep the oil in the soil! Keep the coal in the hole! The exploitation of fossil fuels destroys living spaces (often those belonging to poor and racialised groups) and is responsible for climate change. In 2007, under pressure from social movements, the Ecuadorian government proposed to not exploit the oil wells in the Yasuní biosphere reserve. The German government was involved in letting this initiative come to nothing.

*EJOLT Press release (2013): Unburnable fuels. How to keep the oil in the soil.

Dr. Stefan Mair (geb. 1964) ist deutscher Ökonom und wird als Afrikaexperte bezeichnet. Er ist seit 2020 Direktor des Deutschen Instituts für Internationale Politik und Sicherheit, Executive Chairman of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP), and member of the executive board of the Federation of German Industries (BDI).

Stefan Mair (2005): Ausbreitung des Kolonialismus.

The quote from the renowned “Africa expert” Mair reflects the endurance of colonial myths into the present. There are many counterexamples one can call up to discredit Mair’s reasoning:
colonial genocides (e.g. in modern-day Namibia) versus the reduction of the mortality rate during colonialism; the use of infrastructure for colonial resource and human exploitation versus the construction of infrastructure during colonialism; the destruction of previously existing, often non-capitalist forms of society or subsistence economy versus social and cultural change. Mair also describes loyalty to the nation as an abstract identity as preferable to other identities. In this way, he uncritically posits European concepts such as the nation as the norm, without naming the problems inherent in these concepts, e.g. nationalism and the resulting wars. The positive reference to ‘political and cultural change in the region’ indicates a positive understanding of colonisation as a civilising mission.

*Monitor (2017): G20-Gipfel: Wer profitiert vom „Marshall-Plan“ für Afrika?
*glokal (2016): Sustaining Inequality – The Neocolonial Politics of Development Education, North-South Volunteering and Fair Trade in Germany. In: darkmatter – in the ruins of imperial culture.

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) was British Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She was nicknamed the Iron Lady because she pushed through her policies to “reform” England against stiff opposition.

Interview in The Observer, 1. May 1983, p. 37.

Thatcher is seen as a symbol of Europe’s turn away from the welfare state and towards the ideologies of individual responsibility and neoliberalism (privatisation, deregulation and the breaking of unions). While Thatcher was Prime Minister in Great Britain, Ronald Reagan was President of the USA (1981-1989). The two are thought of as pioneers of the neoliberalisation of democracy, and in this, they helped forge a global change in politics during the 1980s. Thatcher enforced the logic of necessity with her TINA principle (There is No Alternative), with which severe cuts in social spending etc. continue to be justified to this day. Under Thatcher, the unions were barred from consulting with the government on its labour market policies, many public companies were privatised, and protests against these were crushed. In regards to this, the miners’ strike of 1984/85 is a particularly well known example. She described the disputes surrounding this strike as a prolongation of the Falklands War: ‘We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands and now we have to fight the enemy within, which is much more difficult but just as dangerous to liberty.’ (quoted in Naomi Klein 2007: 138).

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

Bridget Tolley (born in 1960), is a Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg activist for the rights of First Nation women in Canada.

ICMN (2012): Events Commemorating Aboriginal Female Victims of Violence.

Indigenous women were often at the forefront of anti-colonial movements. For example, Toypurina (1760-1799) in present day California or Bartolina Sisa (1750 / 1753-1782) in Bolivia. Sisa was in command of an army of 40,000 fighters who besieged the Spanish colonisers in La Paz for three months in 1781. The International Day of Indigenous Women takes place on the date of her death: she was executed by the Spaniards on the 5th of September, 1782. The educationalist Cyndy Baskin writes that colonial tyranny has often displaced indigenous gender concepts. For example, her research has shown that women were respected members of society in indigenous communities in Turtle Island, Canada (Baskin 2019).

*Pearson McKinney (2016): Before European Christians Forced Gender Roles, Native Americans Acknowledged 5 Genders.
*Beverley Jacobs (2014): How do we stop aboriginal women from disappearing? Ted talk.
*Families of Sisters in Spirit.
*Cyndy Baskin (2019): Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Roles: Traditional Teachings or Internalized Colonialism?

Germany, Max Czollek, 2021
Max Czollek is a freelance Jewish author and poet born in East Berlin.

Federal Agency for Civic Education, 2021.

He did his doctorate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin. His best-known works include “Desintegriet dich” (2018) and “Gegenwartsbewältigung (2020).

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?view=detail&mid=A8EEC67324B8DCF8D0E3A8EEC67324B8DCF8D0E3&q=max czollek friday night jews&shtp=GetUrl&shid=178d3300-a806-4a0b-9190-bc0d58156cd6&shtk=4oCcSWNoIGJpbiBlaW4gc2NobGVjaHRlciBKdWRl4oCdIC0gTWF4IEN6b2xsZWsgenUgR2FzdCBiZWkgRnJlaXRhZ25hY2h0IEpld3MgfCBXRFI%3D&shdk=RGFuaWVsIERvbnNrb3kgaGF0IGdla29jaHQgdW5kIGJpdHRldCBhbSBTY2hhYmJhdC1BYmVuZCB6dSBEaW5uZXIgdW5kIERpc2t1cnM6IGhldXRlIHNlaW5lbiBhbHRlbiBTY2h1bGZyZXVuZCBNYXggQ3pvbGxlayAtIFB1YmxpemlzdCwgT3N0YmVybGluZXIsIEp1ZGUsIHNvIGJlc2NocmVpYnQgQ3pvbGxlayBzaWNoIHNlbGJzdC4gQXVmIGRlbiBUaXNjaCBrb21tZW4ga2FsdGUgQm9yc2NodCAoUm90ZS1CZXRlLVN1cHBlKSB1bmQgZ3LDvG5lciBQZmVmZmkuIFVuZCB2aWVsZSBGcmFnZW4genVtIErDvGRpc2Noc2VpbiB1bmQgenVyIGVpZ2VuZW4gSWRlbnRpdMOkdC4gRGVyIFNjaGF1c3BpZWxlciB1bmQgLi4u&shhk=bDsUB8c0TMIl7v01dxPmh7o5w1%2F%2FdTsoGLMUOvpvmg8%3D&form=VDSHOT&shth=OVP.slGDJpcKfyiVe8NSPrB0pgHgFo

Paul Le Jeune was a French Jesuit who lived in Canada in the mid 17th century. The Jesuits wanted to evangelise and discipline the Montagnais-Naskapi. The Montagnais-Naskapi lived on the eastern Labrador Peninsula.

Eleanor Burke Leacock (1981): Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 50. The year (1637) is an approximation.

The missionary is surprised by the Montagnais-Naskapi’s generosity, sense of community and indifference to status, but at the same time shocked by their contempt for concepts such as possessiveness, authority (Leacock, 1981: 49) and male superiority (Leacock, 1981: 52), and at the fact that they do not punish their children. The coloniser Hernández de Córdoba was also surprised when in 1517 he landed on an island off the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico: there were so many female deities in the temples (Federici, 2014: 277) that he called it the “Isla de las Mujeres” (island of women). Europeans often viewed a lack of male authority as a lack of civilization.

*Silvia Federici (2004): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.
*Howard Zinn (2015): A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial.

Wolfgang Welsch (born 1946) is a German philosopher and advocate of transcultural approaches.

Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (1995): Migration und Kultureller Wandel. Schwerpunktthema der Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, 45. Jg., 1. Vierteljahr.

The transcultural approach emerged from criticism of the intercultural approach and attempts to develop it further. One of its central characteristics is that it does not conceive of cultures as separate units, but rather as networked, mixed and dynamic. It also rejects the idea of cultural geographies. One of the criticisms of this approach, however, is that it does not take power relations into account.

Laila Abu-Er-Rub et al. (2019): Engaging Transculturality. Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies.

Gusta Dawidsohn-Draenger (1917-1943) was born in Kraków to an orthodox Jewish family. After the outbreak of World War II, she played a key role in coordinating Jewish resistance to the Nazis. Together with others – including her husband Shimshon Draenger – she smuggled weapons, organised hiding places and fought with partisans in the surrounding forests. In November 1943, the Germans murdered her and her husband. Between January and March 1943, she had written down her extensive memories on a roll of toilet paper in prison.

Jochen Kast, Bernd Siegler & Peter Zinke (1999): Das Tagebuch der Partisanin Justyna. Jüdischer Widerstand in Krakau. Berlin: Elefanten Press. The year (1943) is an approximation.

This quote, in which Gusta Draenger-Dawidson cites her husband Shimshon Draenger, is a testament to Draenger-Dawidson’s memory of armed resistance to the Nazis in Poland. Jewish resistance to the Nazis, often carried out by individuals and small groups, is rarely mentioned in history books. There were also uprisings and revolts in the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bialystok and Sobibor. The largest resistance group with around 1,200 members was the Jewish partisan Tuvia Bielski in Belarus. The forms of resistance were numerous: they ranged from leaflets and newspapers, the running of theatres and schools, to food smuggling and the forging of documents. An estimated 6 million Jews died during the Second World War from 1939-1945 as a result of the Shoah, the Nazi genocide.

*United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Armed Jewish Resistance: Partisans.

Chancellor Angela Merkel (born 1954) is a politician of the CDU and was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 2005-2021. She was the first woman to hold this post.

Speech in front of the Young Members of the CDU

As chancellor, Angela Merkel made integration a top priority. “Germans with a migration background” caught the media’s attention because of reports on poverty, social inequality in schools, the labour market and so on. The right-wing conservative camp quickly spoke of self-inflicted poverty and the failure of the “multicultural” approach. Angela Merkel initially relied on state integration policy, for example, seting up the German Islam Conference and Integration Summit which has been held every year since 2006. In the same year as the quote, the former SPD politician Thilo Sarrazin published his book Germany Abolishes Itself. CSU chairman Horst Seehofer referred positively to Sarrazin’s idea of a dominant culture. In this statement, Angela Merkel was supporting Seehofer and an authoritarian integration project.

The Guardian (30.08.2010): Bundesbank executive provokes race outcry with book.

Henry Kissinger (born 1923) is a Republican politician and has held many positions, including that of US Secretary of State. He has been internationally criticised for his involvement in numerous government overthrows and for supporting authoritarian regimes (Argentina, Chile, Indonesia/East Timor). In 1973, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2013, an endowed professorship was set up at the University of Bonn in his honour at the initiative of the Federal Republic of Germany’s then Interior Minister de Maizière and Foreign Minister Westerwelle.

Henry Kissinger (1. August 1989): The Caricature of Deng as a Tyrant is Unfair. Washington Post.

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was known for his support of authoritarian regimes around the world. He is accused, amongst other things, of being linked to the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the illegal bombing of Cambodian territory during the Vietnam War. In 1989, the pro-democracy movement in Beijing demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese military brutally crushed protests, killing an estimated 2,000-7,000 and injuring 30,000. In the aftermath, 40,000 people were arrested and hundreds executed. According to Naomi Klein (2007: 185f.), referring to historian Maurice Meisner, China’s communist government cracked down hardest on factory workers. The liberal economic reforms in China in the 1980s (president Deng Xiaoping had taken advice from Milton Friedman, the neoliberal icon) did not produce the hoped-for political liberalisation.

*Democracy Now (11.08.2016): Declassified Documents Show Kissinger Role in Argentine Dirty War.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Moses Witbooi or ǀGâbeb ǃA-ǁîmab (c. 1807-1888) was a Nama captain in present-day Namibia. The quote is from a letter to the Ovaherero Captain Maharero ua Tjamuaha.

Heinrich Vedder (1931): Maharero und seine Zeit im Lichte der Dokumente seines Nachlasses. Windhoek: Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für S.W. Afrika. Band V., p. 18.

The Roman strategy of divide and rule was used by the Germans in Namibia to ensure they would not face a united anti-colonial army. The Witbooi family led the Nama in the resistance against German colonial power. The Nama were attacked by the Germans in 1893, in what became known as the Hornkranz Massacre, in which most of their women and children were slaughtered, while male warriors escaped. Henrik Witbooi, Moose’s son, then led a guerrilla war. After several attempts, which the exchange of letters also bears witness to, from 1904 onwards, the Herero and Nama united their forces in resistance. They then succumbed to the colonial power and were interned in camps where most of the remaining Nama and Herero perished. Overall, it is estimated that between 1904 and 1908, up to 70,000 Nama and Herero died in what was the first genocide of the 20th century (Jorgensen & Markusen 1999: 288).

*Reinhard Koesseler (2007): Genocide, Apology and Reparation – the linkage between images of the past in Namibia and Germany.
*is3w (2007): Altlasten – Namibias langer Weg in die Unabhängigkeit.
*Torben Jorgensen & Eric Markusen (1999): The Genocide of the Hereros. In: Israel W. Charny (Hrsg.): Encyclopedia of Genocide. Band 1, S. 288.