Random Quotes

Spanish priest in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Paul F. Ramirez (2018): Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason. Standford: Stanford University Press, p. 12

According to Ramirez (2018: 12), many speeches condemned indigenous people who opposed the epidemic measures taken by the Spaniards as “superstitious”. However, their fear was not unfounded, as the first Europeans brought smallpox, measles, flu and typhus with them, against which the indigenous population had no defences. Thus most indigenous people fell victim not to the Europeans’ superior weapons, but to their epidemics. According to scientific estimates, up to 95 percent of the population in large parts of the double continent was killed within just 100 years (Wagner 2020). Today, argues the epidemiologist Rob Wallace, new pathogens in the form of diseases for humans, other fauna and flora are constantly being created, thanks in part to the destruction of nature and habitats, factory farming‚ and the capitalist economy’s promotion of profit over nature, people and health (Wallace 2020).

*Der Freitag (Thomas Wagner, 28.09.2020): Der Viren-WirtPandemie Hinter Covid-19 stehen Massentierhaltung und Raubbau, also der Neoliberalismus, erklärt Rob Wallace. Der Freitag 38/2020.
*Rob Wallace (2020): Competing with Nature: COVID-19 as a Capitalist Virus (Interview by Ashley Smith). Spectre Journal 16.10.2020.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American human rights activist and civil rights activist as well as philosopher, sociologist and historian.

Quote: Letter to the newly founded United Nations: “An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.”
Picture: By Unknown author. WIkimedia. Creative Commons.

In the letter to the newly founded United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights implemented with reference to the experiences of National Socialism, Du Bois links the situation of black people in the USA with general questions of human rights. While the USA, as an ally in Europe, was instrumental in the liberation from fascism and injustice, black people in the USA continue to be denied basic rights. Du Bois appeals to the world community not to leave the unjust treatment of black people to the USA as a domestic political problem, but to apply the standard of general humanity and democracy to the USA as well.

*Thomas C. Holt (2008): “Du Bois, W. E. B.“, in: African American National Biography, Henry Louis Gates Jr. a. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (eds.). New York: Oxford UP.
*W.E.B. Du Bois (1947): “An Appeal to the World : A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities…”,

Mary Clarke, (date of birth unknown – 1984) was a Koori Aboriginal activist. The quote comes from a speech recorded at a meeting with journalists. The meeting was organised to speak out against the eviction of a woman and her children of multiracial decent from their home in Framlingham Settlement, Victoria, Australia.

Original source: Newspaper Melbourse Argus (22.02.1951). Reprinted in: Jan Chritchett (1998): Untold Stories: Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p. 4.

Australia was one of Great Britain’s settler colonies. In 1770, James Cook claimed eastern Australia for the British Crown. He also put forward the idea of a prison colony to relieve overcrowded British prisons. In 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed in Sydney with 1,500 prisoners. It is estimated that between 1788 and 1900 up to 90% of Australia’s indigenous people were killed by introduced diseases, land dispossession and violent conflict. There were mass shootings, people were thrown in groups off cliffs or offered land poisoned with arsenic or other substances (Behrendt 2012: 274). George Reid, a politician from the Free Trade Party, said in an election speech in 1903 that ‘we should have a white Australia’ (he became Prime Minister in 1904). Forging a white Australia was a key political goal not only for him, however, but for European settlers in general over the centuries. The protests of the Aboriginal population also go back a long way. In 1938 a silent march was held to commemorate 150 years of land grabbing and colonization (creativespirits.info).

*Foley, Gary (1999): ATSIC: Flaws in the Machine. The Koori History Website.
*John Harris (2003): Hiding the Bodies: the myth of the humane colonisation of Australia. In: Aboriginal History Journal. Canberra: Australian Centre for Indigenous History, S. 79-104.
*Larissa Behrendt (2013): Indigenous Australia for Dummies. Canberra: International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, S. 53f. (Rezension)
*creativespirits.info: Aboriginal timeline: Protest.

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a Black investigative journalist, sociologist, and feminist. She documented the lynch law in the United States in the 1890s.
The missing years are 1865 and 1895.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1895/1969): On Lynching. Southern Horrors – A Red Record – Mob Rule in New Orleans, New York: Arno Press, p. 8.

After the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the liberation of enslaved people, the number of lynchings rose rapidly. The victims were almost always Black men who were hanged from trees. Lynchings were carried out by white mobs to spread terror. For example, up to 300 Black Americans were murdered in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, with the massacre not becoming part of the school curriculum until 2020. In addition, the Jim Crow laws, which enforced segregation, were introduced in southern states, and these remained in effect until the 1960s. The singer Billie Holiday protested against the lynchings by singing the song “Strange Fruit” in 1939: “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

*Audrey Lorde (1984): Sister Outsider. Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press
*Toni Morrison (2000): Sehr blaue Augen. Reinbeck: Rowohlt.
*Billy Holiday (1939): Strange Fruit. Text von Abel Meeropol

Resolution of assembled free blacks, Bethel AME Church, Philadelphia, January 15, 1817

Resolution of assembled free blacks “A Voice from Philadelphia. Philadelphia, January, 1817” in William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: Or an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society (Boston, 1831).

Culture or cultivation are also used to refer to the improvement of the soil for agriculture. Uncultivated soil is considered “wild”, as in this quote which comes from a gathering of free Blacks. They opposed moving to West Africa because they wished to contribute to the cultivation of American soil. Slave owners saw free Blacks as a threat because they might inspire those still enslaved to revolt; hence they were to be shipped to the yet to be created Liberia. However some abolitionists (opponents of slavery) also supported the move to Liberia, viewing it as an opportunity for emancipation (see History Today, April 4, 2020).

*History Today (Angela Thompsell, 04.04.2020): The Foundations of Liberia.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was one of the most important German Enlightenment philosophers.

Source of the German original: Karl Bremer (1996): G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen, Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte (1822/1823). Bd. 12. Hamburg: Meiner, p. 98-100.

During the Enlightenment, the idea emerged that societies owed their ongoing development to reason. In order to achieve a higher level of development, it was considered necessary to control and subjugate nature, along with those people who were termed primitive peoples. According to G.F.W. Hegel, only white people possessed the “reason” necessary for progress, which is why they had to “humanise” the rest of the world. Africa was considered to be a continent without history in which people “did not develop”. Europeans justified colonial violence through the philosophical construction of their superiority.

*Rebekah Nicholson (2006): The Enlightenment and Its Effects on the Haitian
Revolution of 1789-1804.
*Eduardo Grüner (2008): “Haiti: a (forgotten) philosophical revolution.”

Poland, Piotr Rybak, 2019

Public Speech 2019, Auschwitz.

Piotr Rybak, a convicted Polish nationalist and open anti-Semite, at a right-wing extremist Polish demonstration on the 74th anniversary (2019) to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp from the Nazis.

Antysemicki marsz w Kaliszu. Nowe fakty – Poznań (onet.pl)

Walden Bello (born 1945) is a Filipino sociologist and director of the NGO Focus on the Global South. Bello was in the resistance against dictator Marcos (who ruled the Philippines from 1965-1986), and was one of the first critics of globalisation. Bello broke into the World Bank office in the early 1980s and stole some 3,000 pages of confidential documents to prove collaboration between the International Monetary Fund (the World Bank’s sister organisation) and Marcos.

Walden Bello (2019): „We Have to Move to a Post-Capitalist System“. In: Jacobinmag 28.10.2019

In recent decades, there has been an increasing financialisation of the economy. Today, rather than through the production of goods or services, vast amounts of money can be made or lost in very short intervals through financial transactions. In his book Dark Victory (1994), Bello describes how financialisation was implemented as a strategy by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in order to re-subjugate the decolonising Global South, for example, through currency speculation. Thus in 1997, thanks to rumours about a lack of dollar reserves in Thailand, banks and investors immediately withdrew their money not only there, but also in other countries, which then went bankrupt as a result.

*Walden Bello (1994): Dark Victory. The United States and Global Poverty. Amsterdam: Transnational Institut.

Mevlanzade was a Kurdish Ottoman author and journalist who witnessed the period of upheaval from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic as a politically active person, while producing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He spent his last years as an exile of the Turkish Republic in the French Mandate Syria and was active in the founding of the then Kurdish movement Xoybun.

Mevlanzade Rıfat Bey (2013): Siyonistler Osmanlıyı Nasıl Yıktı? Derin Tarih Kültür Yayınları, İstanbul. S. 70

His anti-Semitic texts have been rediscovered in Turkey in the last 10 – 15 years, especially by the Islamist and national-conservative circles, and have been republished and transliterated without any critical comments. The book of Mevlanzade, from which the quotation below is, was first published in 1923 during his exile in Constanza, Romania.

Yetkin, E. Y. (2018): Imperialer Wahn und Untergangsfantasien. Zum Antisemitismus der konservativ-nationalistischen Szene in der Türkei. In: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 27. Metropol Verlag. S. 204–228

Paul Mecheril (born 1962) is a German education researcher. He researches education in the migration society from a racism-critical perspective.

Paul Mecheril et al (2010): Bachelor | Master: Migrationspädagogik. Weinheim: Beltz, p. 77ff.

Mecheril criticises intercultural competence as diversity management from a dominant perspective. Within it, it is considered desirable that (usually white) people acquire so-called intercultural competence through further training and stays abroad. Paradoxically, however, migrants and people of colour are usually not recognised as having these intercultural skills. Why is it that migrant strategies for surviving in a racist society are not understood as intercultural competence?

*Paul Mecheril et al (2021): Regimes of Belonging – Schools – Migrations: Teaching in (Trans)National Constellations. Wiesbaden: Springer.

Robert Koch (1843-1910) was a German microbiologist and is considered one of the pioneers of bacteriological research. He achieved worldwide fame through his discoveries of pathogens, including the tuberculosis bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and the cholera pathogen (Vibrio cholerae), which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905.

Robert Koch (1904):“On sleeping sickness (letter to the Minister of Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs)“

Medical research played a key role in colonialism. According to the former director of the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine (University of Heidelberg), Africa could never have been colonized in this way without the progress made in the fight against malaria and other diseases (SRF, 04.02.2021). From 1906 to 1906, Robert Koch experimented with the arsenical agent Atoxyl in what is now Uganda. He was aware that Atoxyl is dangerous in high doses. Koch injected the drug at intervals of seven to ten days, accepting pain, blindness and the death of thousands of people (ibid.). The sick were held in so-called concentration camps. Koch took the concept of the concentration camp from the British colonizers of South Africa, who imprisoned political opponents in these camps (Bauche 2006). The camps served as a place of isolation for the sick to prevent the spread of disease, but also as a research facility where people were forced to undergo medical experiments “Since precise observation over a longer period of time is possible in the concentration camps, it is here that the most recommendable mode of atoxyl treatment can be found and, for example, a staged therapy can be tested” (Robert Koch quoted from Bauche 2006).

*Manuela Bauche 2006: Robert Koch, sleeping sickness and human experiments in colonial East Africa. In: Freiburg Postcolonial/Orte

Padre José de Acosta (ca. 1539-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit. After teaching at the university in Spain, he travelled to the Americas as a missionary in 1570. He is the author of the Historia natural y moral de las Indias from which the quote is taken.

Padre Joseph de Acosta (1589): Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias. Sevilla: Casa de Juan de Leon, p. 26.

It was by labelling the indigenous population of the Americas as bestial, cannibalistic, devil worshippers and so on, that the Spaniards justified their conquests. This is how they disguised their pursuit of gold and silver as a civilising mission (Federici 2009: 221). These accounts, reproduced by de Acosta and others, helped the Spanish crown acquire complete authority over the Americas from the Pope in 1508, and were the bases for justifying subjugation, enslavement, rape, torture and annihilation. Some pre-colonial societies in the Americas did indeed engage in mass human sacrifice. However, there was no comparison between these and the almost complete annihilation of the indigenous population organised by the Spaniards, which the Dominican monk Bartolomé de las Casas, amongst others, described. According to Cortés, 100,000 people died in the conquest of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 (ibid.: 222).

*James Cockcroft (1983): Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation and the State. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 19
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban und die Hexe. Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Wien: Mandelbaum kritik & utopie, p. 267ff.

Ian Hancock (born 1942), who is Romani, researched this quote from 1852. In 1971 he was awarded a PhD despite not having a high school diploma. He subsequently became a professor at the University of Texas and opened the Romani Archive and Documentation Centre, which contains over 10,000 titles on the subject of Rrom*nja and Sinte*zza. His book The Pariah Syndrome is one of the few to provide a historical account of Romanian Rrom*nja slavery.

Quote: Ian Hancock (1987): The Pariah Syndrome. An Account of Gypsy Slavery Tucson: Karoma Pub.
Picture: ORF

While slavery had been forbidden in Europe since the early Middle Ages, the serf system (Federici, 2014: 27) continued to exist. The fact that 14th century Romanian chronicles first mention Romn*ja as “objects” in monasteries suggests another reality: that both the royal family and nobility enslaved them. Even in monasteries, one could find enslaved Romn*ja working in different professions, as blacksmiths, miners, cooks, field workers or musicians.

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

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a psychiatrist, politician, writer and pioneer of anti-colonial movements who grew up in the French colony of Martinique. After fighting against fascist Germany as a soldier in the French army, he joined the Algerian liberation struggle against French colonial power in the 1950s.

Frantz Fanon (1963/2004: 53)

Fanon described “development” and “underdevelopment” as direct consequences of colonialism after the liberation of the colonies. He took the view that development aid was not “aid” but rather compensation for colonialism’s atrocities and exploitation.

*Frantz Fanon (1963/2004): The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Nicolas Sarkozy (born 1955) was French President from 2007 to 2012.

Baffour Ankomah (2007): “Shame On You, Mr. Sarkozy”. In: New African Magazine, 30.10.2007.

This quote comes from a speech by Sarkozy at a university in Senegal which is named after the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986). Diop argued that Western history studies the world from a Eurocentric perspective. It also tremendously distorts the history of Africa. France was involved in colonial attacks on Senegal from the 17th century onwards and became a colonial power in 1891. In 1960, the country achieved independence. Senegalese commentators accused Sarkozy of using racist colonial language. Sarkozy’s successor, President Emmanuel Macron, has continued to use this colonial discourse. In 2017, he claimed that Africa had “civilizational problems”, including in part “because women have seven children.”

*Boniface Mabanza (2019): “The right to say No. Women organizing against extractivism in southern Africa.”

Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676) was a protestant reformer and political activist in England.

Gerrad Winstanley (1649): The new law of righteousness, p. 158.

Winstanley was active in the Diggers movement which consisted mainly of landless farmers who were demanding land for the general population in which to grow their food. He aspired to a society without money and wage labour. In this quote, Winstanley pointed out that violent structures and relationships tended to be reproduced over and over again. People subject to violence and oppression were generally those most likely to notice this fact. And these people usually did not belong to the dominant race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on categories, i.e. the poor, women, homosexuals, racialised people, transgender, and so on.

*Maria Mies (1986): Patriachy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Women in the International Division of Labour. London & New York: Zed Books.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) was a member of the Dominican Order and active as a bishop in the Spanish colonies in America. The Valladolid dispute (1550-1551) between de las Casas and the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda dealt with the question of the legitimacy of the enslavement of the indigenous population of America. Sepúlveda represented the interests of Spanish landowners, de las Casas pointed out the violent acts of the Spaniards. The missing dates are 1494 and 1508, a period of 14 years.

Howard Zinn (1980): The People’s History of The United States. New York: Harper Collins.

In the first century of America’s occupation, the population decreased by approximately 75 million (95% in some areas) as a consequence of imported disease and murder (Federici 2009: 85f.). As early as the 1560s, there were resistance movements against the Spaniards. For example, members of the Taki Onqoy movement (1560-1572), which arose in what is now Peru, were opposed to any cooperation with the Europeans and advocated an alliance of Andean indigenous peoples to end European colonisation. They rejected Christianity and Christian names as well as food or other consignments from the Spaniards, they paid no tribute and did not work for the conquerors (Stern 1982: 50ff.).

*Steven J. Stern (1982): Peru‘s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest. Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, S. 50ff.
*Silvia Federici (2009): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) was a formerly enslaved Haitian who led the resistance against France. These lines come from a letter Louverture wrote to Napoleon, to which he attached this constitutional text.

Constitution of Haiti (1801)

It began in 1791 with an uprising of 50,000 people: Haitians, most of whom were enslaved, fighting for their independence from France. In 1794, slavery was abolished. With the war of independence dragging on for several years, Napoleon threatened to reintroduce slavery. But the Haitians won and became the first Latin American country to become independent in 1804. However, a coalition of European states and the United States boycotted the country. Since the prosperity of colonial states was based on the plantation economy and therefore on the principle of slavery, they feared that the Haitian revolution could also inspire other oppressed peoples. As a result, Haiti was forced into isolation in terms of foreign policy and the new state was obliged to make vast compensation payments to former slave owners. In return for recognising Haiti as an independent state in 1825, France demanded compensation of 150 million francs. It was not until 1883 that Haiti was finally able to pay off this amount which it did with the help of loans (Ziegler 2010). The high national debt it was saddled with immediately after independence is often seen as marking the start of Haiti’s economic dependence on the outside world. At the World Conference Against Racism in 2001, Haiti demanded compensation from France.

*Project in Haiti and the Domenican Republic where Youth work on the history of slavery and liberation.
*Jean Ziegler (2010): Haiti und der Hass auf den Westen. In Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.

Jakob Fischbacher (1886-1972) founded the Bavarian Party in 1946, which saw itself as a meeting place for conservatives and separatists for an independent Bavaria. Central to the party’s project was defence against German refugees from the East.

Der Spiegel 16/1947: Preußen-Attacke.

After the Second World War, there was not only transnational migration, but large parts of the population also migrated within the new states. In Germany, 14 million expelled Germans migrated west from the eastern areas occupied during fascism, and from former parts of Germany. In Bavaria in the years up to 1950, the population increased by almost 30%. Although the Eastern refugees were included in the “völkisch” notion of German identity, they were vehemently repelled for reasons of radical redistribution. Andreas Schachner of the Bavarian Party said that so many foreigners were using Bavarian mangers “that pogroms would be necessary to restore justice” (Hoefer 2015). These slogans are echoed in current discussions that have accompanied the movements of refugees and migrants to Europe since the early 2010s.

*Carsten Hoefer (2015): “Die Flüchtlinge müssen hinausgeworfen werden.”

Franz Müntefering (born 1940) is a German Social Democrat. From 2005 to 2007 he was Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs.

Quote: Katharina Schuler (11.01.2010): Hartz IV: Arbeiten fürs Essen. In: Die ZEIT.
Picture: Wikimedia

With the introduction of a new unemployment benefit (Arbeitslosengeld II, also called Hartz IV) in Germany, many unemployed people were exposed to severe control and repression. According to the unemployed workers’ initiative Basta!, the widespread ‘lie of the lazy unemployed’ plays into the hands of those who benefit from underpaid work on the one hand, and the intensification of everyday work on the other.

*Wilhelm Heitmeyer; Kirsten Edrikat (2008): Die Ökonomisierung des Sozialen. Folgen für „Überflüssige“ und „Nutzlose“. In: Wilhelm Heitmeyer (Hrsg.): Deutsche Zustände, Band 6, S. 55-72.
*Guardian (01.01.2013): „’Hartz reforms’: how a benefits shakeup changed Germany“