Random Quotes

Tupac Katari (1750-1781) was an Aymara leader in the rebellion against Spanish colonisers in present-day Bolivia. He took the names of earlier resistance fighters (Tomás Katari and Túpac Amaru) who were killed by the Spanish in 1572.

Quoted by Thomas Guthmann (2017): Körper im Zeichen des Zeitstrahls. In glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand, p. 98

Tupac Katari assembled an army of 40,000 fighters and besieged La Paz. His wife, Bartolina Sisa, commanded the siege and played an important role after Katari’s capture. However, the overthrow of European colonialism in most Latin American countries in the 19th century did not mean that free and equal societies could develop. This was because the formal end of European colonialism did not mean the end of power relations. New hierarchies were created, and the distribution of wealth in many countries was tied to class, race and gender. Aníbal Quijano argued that global capitalism replaced colonialism as the system of domination and that the main beneficiaries of this system continued to be Europeans and their descendants in other countries (Quijano 2007: 168). Tupac Katari’s remarks were taken up again in 2003 when the people of Bolivia opposed the sell off of their natural gas. ‘When neoliberal President Sanchez de Lozada was ousted from the presidency, the slogan echoed through the streets of El Alto’ (Guthmann 2017: 98). Former Bolivian President Evo Morales also sees himself as an inheritor of Tupac Katari’s tradition of resistance (Morales’ inaugural speech reported in the New York Times, 23 January, 2006).

*Thomas Guthmann (2017): Körper im Zeichen des Zeitstrahls. In glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand.
*Anibal Quihano (2007): Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies 21 (2-3); 168-178.
**The New York Times (23.01.2006): “Bolivia Indians Hail the Swearing In of One of Their Own as President.”

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was an Afro-Caribbean French writer and politician, founder of the Negritude movement that sought to liberate Black people from colonial rule.

Aimé Césaire (1968/2000)

In his 1950 essay On Colonialism, from which this quote comes, Césaire denounced the fact that while colonialism feigned a desire to “civilise”, its real goal was always exploitation (1968: 8). Both the colonised and European proletarians, he wrote, had understood this long ago (1968: 6). Here, Césaire posited a problematic connection between the Holocaust and colonial genocide, writing that ‘what he [the European citizen] does not forgive Hitler [is] not the crime per se (…) but that it is a crime against white people’ (1968: 12). in a different vein, Michael Rothberg argues for a multidimensional culture of remembrance that does not set victims against each other. For an example of such a position, see the cooperation between Ibrahim Arslan, survivor of the racist arson attack in Mölln/Northwest Germany, and Ester Bejarano, Auschwitz survivor (Möllner Reden im Exil from 2013).

*Aimee Césaire (2000): Discourse on Colonialism. A Poetics of Anticolonialism.

Brothers Keepers is an association of predominantly Black musicians who have joined forces due to increasing racism in Germany, in order to draw attention to the difficult, sometimes life-threatening situation for people with a migration background, Blacks and people of colour. The lyrics are from the song Adriano (Last Warning), the part from which the quote is taken is rapped by Samy Deluxe and D-Flame.

Brothers Keepers (2001): Adriano (Letzte Warnung).

Brothers Keepers, an association of mainly Black musicians from Germany, sang about the murder of Alberto Adriano on June 5, 2000 in their song Adriano. Adriano Alberto, father of three, was brutally beaten by three Nazis, dying of his injuries a few days later. With this song, Brothers Keepers also wanted to draw attention to the intensification of racism, which increased significantly after the fall of the Wall. They also directed their critique at the political sphere, and at the lack of interest in racism and people affected by racism. This song can also be understood as a form of resistance and an announcement by self-organised Black musicians that they refuse to accept racism in Germany any longer.

*Advanced Chemistry (1992): Fremd im eigenen Land.
*Samy Deluxe (2001): Weck mich auf.
*SXTN (2016): Ich bin schwarz.
*Ah Nice (2016): Ich bin Schwarz.

USA, Norman G. Finkelstein (1953-)
Finkelstein is a Jewish-American political scientist specializing in Holocaust studies and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Norman G. Finkelstein, Die Holocaustindustrie. How the suffering of the Jews is exploited, Munich 2001, 5.

Finkelstein published a number of books on both subjects. He gained international fame through the controversy associated with his book “The Holocaust Industry” in 2000. DePaul University in Chicago refused him promotion to full professor in 2006 because of the dispute related to the book.

Norman G. Finkelstein , The Holocaust Industry. Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (deutschlandfunk.de)

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso (1919-2014) was a commander of the anti-Japanese Hukbalahap People’s Liberation Army in the Philippines during World War II. Here about the “liberation” and reoccupation of the Philippines by the USA in 1944.

Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro & Recherche International e.V. (2008): 100f.

The Philippines was a Spanish colony from 1571 until, as an outcome of anti-colonial liberation struggle, it declared independence in 1898. However, its independence was not recognised, and in the ensuing Philippine-American War of 1899 to 1902, a fifth of the population lost their lives. The islands then became a US colony until 1942 when they were occupied by Japanese troops. The Anti-Japanese People’s Liberation Army was the largest resistance movement in the Philippines and consisted of 30,000 fighters and 70,000 reservists. They collaborated with the US against the Japanese, but were a left-wing partisan group opposed to US colonial rule. According to writer Ricardo Trota Jose, 80% of Filipinos were either in the resistance or supported it ‘One million Filipinos fought in various guerrilla movements. The only problem was: there were not enough weapons. For twenty volunteers who went to the partisans, only one rifle came’ (rjb & ri 2008). The Philippines gained independence in 1946, but a US-friendly government was then installed. It was only in 1990, under President Corazon Aquino, that resistance fighters were finally recognised as such (Rheinisches Journalistenbüro & Recherche International 2008: 100f.).

*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro & Recherche International e.V. (2008): Die dritte Welt im zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte.

Unknown author. The text was adopted after a peasant assembly in Memmingen during the German Peasants’ War (1524-26).

Quote: Twelve Articles of the Peasants
Picture: Cleveland Museum of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons,

In the aftermath of the Reformation, many peasants saw their belief confirmed that the previous legal order did not represent God’s will and that it was unjust. Drawing from the Bible they argued against the church-sanctioned order. The Twelve Articles of the Peasantry are considered to be an early claim for human rights and freedoms in Europe. In addition to the abolition of serfdom, the claims included the right to hunt and fish, the freedom to elect and depose a pastor, and an independent judiciary. The rebels explicitly referred to Martin Luther (1483-1546), who, however, rejected the uprising and called for the crackdown of the peasant uprisings. The crackdown followed and the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry did not come into force.

*Translation of the entire text here.
*Joshua J. Mark (2022): Twelve Articles. World history encyclopedia.

August Bebel (1840-1913) was a German politician who founded the organised labour movement in Germany, and was considered the father of German social democracy.

Reichtstagsprotokoll from 01.12.1906

August Bebel’s speech in the Reichstag, from which the quote comes, was a contribution to the debate on how to deal with the war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama in what was then the German colony of German Southwest Africa (from 1904 to 1908). Bebel favoured a “civilising mission”: i.e. colonisation no longer as a “means of destruction” but as a “means of preservation”. This way of thinking was based on a racist concept of culture and a division between “civilised” and “primitive” peoples. The self-proclaimed civilised peoples thus legitimised their rule over and education of others. There were bitter disputes among the social democrats about colonial politics (see Kautsky 1907). Eduard Bernstein and Gustav Noske were not entirely averse to colonialism, while Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky were staunch opponents.

*International Press Correspondence (1928): Social Democracy and the Colonial Question.

John Holloway (born 1947) is an Irish lawyer, sociologist and philosopher whose early work in the 1970s focussed mainly on Marxist economics. Since 1991, he has been closely associated with the Zapatist@s in Chiapas, Mexico, who are working to build a libertarian form of grassroots government.

John Holloway (2010: 8).

Many viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union and other so-called socialist states as representing the disappearance of an alternative model of society. At the end of the 1980s, the West proclaimed what US political scientist Francis Fukuyama, writing in 1989, termed the ‘end of history’. Thus Western representative democracy, coupled with a market economy, was promoted as the only legitimate and imaginable form of society left. Within this framework there are, as Holloway puts it in this quote, different forms. None of these, however, question capitalism and representative democracy’s overall structure.

*John Holloway (2010): Crack Capitalism. London & New York: Pluto Press.

Song about Mary Thomas (ca. 1848-1905), called Queen Mary. She was one of three black leaders of the labor protests in the Virgin Islands, then a Danish colony.

Citation: Jeannette Allis Bastian (2003): Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost its Archives and Found its History. London: Libraries Unlimited, p. 12.
Image: Wikimedia

Although slavery was abolished in 1848, working conditions had not improved much. Together with Queen Agnes and Queen Mathilda, Queen Mary organized the so-called Fireburn protests in 1878. These were the largest workers’ protests in Danish history(The Workers Museum 2018: Fireburn) in terms of participation in the protests, the destruction of infrastructure and, above all, the loss of life, especially on the side of the rebels (conversation by glokal with Gunvor Simonsen, University of Copenhagen 2020). Statues on the islands and in Denmark, songs and theater performances keep the memories of the three “queens” alive.

*Gunvor Simonsen (2017): Slave Stories: Law, Representation, and Gender in the Danish West Indies. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
*Jeannette Allis Bastian (2003): Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. London: Libraries Unlimited.

Gusta Dawidsohn-Draenger (1917-1943) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Krakow. In her youth, she joined the Zionist youth group Akiva, for whose newspaper she wrote articles and on whose board she served. After the outbreak of the Second World War, she was instrumental in coordinating the Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Together with others – including her husband Shimshon Draenger – she smuggled weapons, organized hiding places and fought with partisans in the surrounding forests. She and her husband were murdered by the Germans in November 1943. Between January and March 1943, she wrote down her extensive memories on a roll of toilet paper in prison.

Jochen Kast, Bernd Siegler & Peter Zinke (1999): The diary of the partisan Justyna. Jewish resistance in Krakow. Berlin: Elefanten Press. The year (1943) indicates the approximate date of origin of the quotation.

This quote, in which Gusta Draenger-Dawidson quotes her husband Shimshon Draenger, bears witness to the armed resistance against the Nazis in Poland. Jewish resistance against 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 group of Bielski partisans in Belarus. The resistance was diverse: it ranged from leaflets and newspapers to the operation of theaters and schools to food smuggling and document forgery. An estimated 6 million Jews died during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 in the Shoah, the Nazi genocide.

*Julius H. Schoeps, Dieter Bingen & Gideon Botsch (2016): Jewish Resistance in Europe (1933-1945): Forms and Facets.
*Wolfgang Benz (2002): Lexikon des Holocaust, Munich: Ch. Beck.
*Claude Lanzmann (1985): Shoah. Documentary film.
*Jules Schelvis (2003): Vernichtungslager Sobibór, Münster: Unrast.

An anonymous serf in a mid 12th century English chronicle. Serfdom developed in medieval Europe after the end of the enslavement of Europeans between the 5th and 7th centuries. Serfs were the property of their masters, but had more freedom than enslaved people and could use the commons of forests, lakes and meadows, etc.

Rodney Hilton (1973): Bond Men Made Free. Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. New York: Viking Press Inc.

Despite their attachment to princes, serfs had a degree of independence, being able to support themselves from the commons. As part of the development of early capitalism in the 16th century, land was massively privatised (Federici 2014: 68, German edition). People became impoverished and dependent on the social systems created as early as 1530 (Federici 2014: 84). Land privatisation occurred all over the world: In the 16th century, European traders had “privatised” much of the Canary Islands and turned it into sugar plantations. In the Americas, by the beginning of the 17th century, a third of the common land used by Native Americans was already occupied by the Spaniards. (Federici 2014: 68). In their encomienda system, the inhabitants of the conquered country were awarded to the coloniser by the Spanish crown.

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia.

USA, Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Henry Ford was an American industrialist and automobile manufacturer, best known for founding the Ford Motor Company.

Henry Ford, Der internationale Jude, Leipzig 1937.

Ford’s technological, socio-political and economic approaches, in which in particular the expansion of production through the division of labor and rationalization were conceived, defined the production of goods after the First World War to a large extent under the term “Fordism”. Ford published a large number of anti-Semitic publications, including the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which was then known as a forgery.

Judenhass in den USA: So antisemitisch war Henry Ford – WELT

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is  a Turkish Politician. He started his carrer as Major of Istanbul (1994-1998). Later he became Primeminister of Turkey (2003-2014). Since 2014 he is President of Turkey.

https://www.salom.com.tr/haber-108792-cumhurbaskani_erdogan_kavalanin_arkasinda_macar_yahudisi_soros_var.html

In 2013, Osman Kavala is said to have attempted to overthrow the Erdogan government in connection with the Gezi protests. It’s the end of a contentious trial that many Western countries see as politically motivated. The European Court of Human Rights ordered Osman Kavala’s release in 2019. In 2022, Kavala was sentenced to life imprisonment.

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/kavala-tuerkei-101.html

Poland, Gusta Dawidsohn-Draenger (1917-1943)
Gusta was born in Cracow to an Orthodox Jewish family. In her youth she joined the Zionist youth group Akiva, for whose newspaper she wrote articles and was on the board of directors.

Jochen Kast (ed.), The diary of the partisan Justyna, Berlin 1999.

After the outbreak of World War II, she played a key role in coordinating the Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Together with others – among them her husband Shimshon Draenger – she smuggled weapons, organized hiding places and fought with partisans in the surrounding forests. In November 1943 she and her husband were murdered by the Germans. Between January and March 1943 she recorded her extensive memories on a roll of toilet paper in prison.

Gustav Davidson | Penny’s poetry pages Wiki | Fandom

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

Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi (1717-1771) was an economist, cameralist and lawyer.

Quote translated after: Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi (1762): Vergleichungen der europäischen mit den asiatischen und andern vermeintlich barbarischen Regierungen, Berlin.
Picture: praebook – The World biographical encyclopedia.

Justi dealt with issues of law, economics, politics and philosophy in numerous writings. The quote comes from a text in which he compares European governments with other – supposedly barbaric – governments. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Justi particularly criticizes the European self-image of being better developed than other peoples of the world. That this is not the case, that Europeans themselves are crude, can be seen in the actions of the European peoples. The aim of his book is to change the self-image of the European peoples. Justi thus takes a progressive position for his time.

*Ulrich Adam (2006): The Political Economy of J.H.G. Justi. Oxford: Peter Lang.
*Erik S. Reinert (2009): Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi – The Life and Times of an Economist Adventurer, in: Jürgen Georg Backhaus (ed.), The Beginnings of Political Economy. Wiesbaden: Springer, p. 33-74.

Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1679) was originally a clothes merchant who went bankrupt in the Civil War and thereafter became a Protestant reformer and political activist in England.

Gerrad Winstanley (1649): A declaration from the poor oppressed people of England.

Even before Winstanley, there were many heretic movements in France and Italy in the 11th century, most of them founded by women, that rebelled against the omnipotence of church and state (Federici 2014: 48, German edition). Centuries later, once women had been ousted from public life, Winstanley was one of England’s most notorious reformers (or diggers). Diggers are often referred to as the predecessors of the communists. They occupied and tilled public lands, distributing the proceeds freely to those in need, promoting comprehensive land reform and common ownership. Winstanley based this early communism exclusively on the Bible. The digger communes that had formed throughout England were finally crushed in 1651. Local landowners were mostly responsible for this.

*The Guardian (1999): Levels of Optimism.
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia.

Jair Bolsonaro (born 1955) has been President of Brazil since 2019. He has been heavily criticised for his authoritarian and neoliberal politics, as well as for his misogynistic, homophobic and racist statements.

Telesur, 23.09.2020: Bolsonaro Blames Indigenous Peoples, NGOs, Press for Disasters.

From 2000 to 2018, an area of rainforest the size of Spain, some 513,016 km², was cut down (Amazonia Socioambiental 2020). Bolsonaro in particular, whose political career is supported by large landowners (Süddeutsche, 17.05.2020), is promoting the destruction and exploitation of the rainforest and, as a consequence, climate change. New areas for cattle breeding and agriculture are to be deforested. The extraction of natural resources such as minerals or oil in the Amazon region will also be permitted by new laws. In addition, Bolsonaro’s plans will soon make it easier for companies to obtain legal titles to indigenous lands. The German federal government signed a supply chain agreement with Brazil in December 2019, according to which imports of meat, soy and wood were to be produced both in deforestation-free land and without slave-like working conditions (Nachdenkseiten 2021). However, one year later, while imports from Brazil had increased overall, only 22% of soy imports were certified (Deutsche Umwelthilfe 2020). In the second largest rainforest in the world, in western Papua New Guinea, which has been occupied by Indonesia since 1963, deforestation is being promoted in indigenous areas (Raki Ap 2021) and the local population suppressed (UN Human Rights Office, 30.11.2020). At the same time, Western corporations such as BP continue to go about their business undisturbed there are active and do not ‚ want to interfere in political matters (Financial Times, 16.09.2019).

*Humans Rights Watch (2021): “Attempt to Greenwash Bolsonaro’s Environmental Record Backfires at OECD.”

Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010) was a Native American activist, feminist and chief of the Cherokee/Tsalagi Nation.

Jone Johnson Lewis (2017): Wilma Mankiller Quotes. (Orgina source unknown).

Stereotypical depictions of Native Americans are widespread, especially in Western films, but also in other genres. They were often presented in one-sided terms as a violent threat, which retrospectively justified the dispossession and genocides of indigenous peoples in the Americas by the Hollywood culture industry. At the same time, white people were mostly portrayed as individuals and representatives of a higher culture, thereby strengthening white supremacy. Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee, worked with empowerment techniques and the dissemination of positive self-images from marginalised groups in order to counteract this specific racist image production. John Wayne, the best-known Western actor, said of the dispossession of indigenous peoples: ‘We did nothing wrong in taking this great land from them. This so-called theft was nothing but a matter of survival’ (Der Spiegel, 06/11/2019).

*Neil Diamond (2010): Reel Injun. Dokumentary. (Trailer)
*Red Haircrow et al. (work in progress): Forget Winnetou. Going beyond Native Stereotypes. Dokumentary.
*Matika Wilbur (2013): Changing the way we see Native Americans. Dokumentary.
*Der Spiegel (11.06.2019): Wild ist der Westen, schwer ist der Beruf.

Adolph von Hansemann (1826-1903) was a colonial trader and banker. He turned his father’s bank into the largest private bank in the German Empire.

*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro & recherche international (2012): Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte, p. 156, in German

Chancellor Bismarck asked the entrepreneur Hansemann to come up with ways of enforcing German colonial goals in the Pacific. Hansemann’s suggestions as to which areas should be colonised were almost exactly implemented by German colonial policy in 1884, 1845 and 1899. In Hansemann’s language, areas not occupied by white people and not “developed” by international trade structures were referred to as “free”. Hansemann saw the German justification for founding colonies in the fact that German merchants have already spread there anyway. Successful capitalist trade therefore justifies the colonisation of non-whites.

*Eduardo Galeano (1997): Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York. Monthly Review Press.