Random Quotes

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.

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.

May Ayim (1960-1996) was an Afro-German poet, activist, educator, speech therapist.

May Ayim 2003: 30

Ayim was speaking of the challenges presented by alliances between Black and white feminists. For Gayatri Spivak, too, the concept of a “global” sisterhood called for by the women’s movement in the Global North is often nothing more than a paternalistic gesture towards “poor” sisters in the “Third World”. She has on repeated occasions reminded feminist movements in the North that the struggles of women in the South have a different material basis than those fought by women of the “First World”. The widespread practice of romanticising, victimising or portraying women in the South in a paternalistic manner is symptomatic of colonial benevolence. Nonetheless, bell hooks points out that “Solidarity does not necessarily have to be based on shared experience. It can be based on the political and ethical understanding of racism and the rejection of dominance” (hooks 1994: 23)

*May Ayim (2003): Blues in Black-White. Asmara: Africa Word Press
*Gayatri Spivak (1988): In: Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Hrsg.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, p. 66f.
*bell hooks (1986): Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.
* bell hooks (1994): Black Looks. Deutsche Ausgabe, p. 23 f.

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)

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

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was a US-American women’s rights activist with ties to the eugenics movement.

Margaret Sanger (1920): Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentano’s, p. 8.

Margaret Sanger co-founded the IPPF in 1952, which promoted global population control. There are overlaps between feminist, socialist and eugenics currents. The IPPF circulated eugenics’ problematic ideas, without directly referring to the Nazis’ racial hygiene doctrine.

*Betsy Hartmann (1995): Reproductive Rights and Wrongs. The Global Politics of Population Control. Cambridge: South Ende Press.

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.

Egypt, Mohammed Helmy, 1937

Statement protocol, BpB “Mohammed & Anna”, 1937.

Mohamed Helmy, also Mod Helmy, was an Egyptian-German doctor who made it possible for several Jews and other persecuted people to survive in hiding in Berlin at the time of National Socialism. In 2013 he was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, as the only Egyptian among around 70 Muslims to date.

Igal Avidan – Mod Helmy

Frankie Boyle (born in 1972) is a Scottish comedian.

Frankie Boyle (2015): Britain’s criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody.

The quote is from a discussion about anti-migration policies in Great Britain. Boyle claims that poverty and migration have to be associated with the colonial past and exploitation by the British Empire. He also parodies British development aid: “Thanks for the gold, guys, thanks for the diamonds. We did a fundraiser and got you fishing rods.”

Timo Kiesel / Carolin Philipp (2011): white charity. Blackness and whiteness on charity add posters..

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.

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.

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.

This quote is from Genesis, the creation story of the Bible’s Old Testament. The Bible’s texts can be dated back to about 1200 BC was canonised until 135 CE. Christianity took all the books of the Tanakh, rearranged them, and set them out as the Old Testament (OT) which came before the New Testament (NT).

Genesis, The Bible. URL: BBC

It was only from the late 18th century onwards that the extensive and evident long-term effects of industrialisation and urbanisation became apparent in Central Europe. Colonial conquest and “discovery” were shaped by an understanding of nature informed by domination. Hence this quote’s biblical command guided these kinds of actions which were, at the same time, inspired by an interest in scientific and Enlightenment knowledge and in securing economic advantage. The well-known Enlightenment figure René Descartes also described humans as ‘rulers and owners of nature’ (Descartes, 1637, Discours de la méthode, VI, 2). In colonial history, dominion over nature was linked with dominion over people who lived close to nature and who were, in the eyes of colonisers, “primitive” (Müller 2017).

*Franziska Müller (2017): Von grüner Hölle und grünem Gold. (Post)Koloniale gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse. In glokal: Connecting the dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) von Unterdrückung und Widerstand. Berlin.
*Franziska Müller (2020) “Can the Subaltern Protect Forests? REDD+ Compliance, Depoliticisation and Indigenous Subjectivities“ Journal of Political Ecology 27(1), p.419-435.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English philosopher who engaged primarily with political theory. He is considered one of the most important liberal thinkers in Europe.

Thomas Hobbes (1650): Leviathan. Introduction.

One of the preconditions of capitalist development was the disciplining of bodies so that they could be made into pure labour power. According to this logic, a new kind of individual needed to be produced who would be useful to the rising middle class. As in this quote, the body was also understood as a useful machine. In the thinking of the time, attempts were made to rationally explain nature (including the human body) in order to render it controllable.

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

Joseph-Achille Mbembe (born 1957) is a Cameroonian historian and political scientist. He is a professor at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The University of Chicago Press Journal (Achille Mbembe), 13.04.2020:“The Universal Right To Breathe.”

In his article, Mbembe draws attention to the general destruction of the foundations of all life on our planet. “In Africa in particular, but also in many places in the global South, energy-intensive mining, the expansion of agriculture, predatory land sales and the destruction of forests will continue unabated. The power supply and cooling of computer chips and supercomputers depend on it. […] If COVID-19 is indeed the spectacular expression of the planetary impasse in which humanity finds itself today, then it is about nothing less than rebuilding a habitable Earth to give us all the breath of life. We need to reclaim the lungs of our world in order to break new ground. Humans and the biosphere are one. Humanity has no future on its own.”

Palestine, Gregory of Nyssa (around 335/340 – after 394)
Nyssa was born in Caesarea in the 4th century. He was ordained bishop of Nyssa in 372 and enjoyed the reputation of a saint and doctor of the church in the Orthodox Church.

Gregor von Nyssa, Patrologie grecque de Migne, 46,685; quoted in Leon Poliakov, History of Antisemitism, Vol. 1 From antiquity to the Crusades, Worms 1979, 21.

His doctrine of God became known primarily through the merging of Christian and Platonic thought. His main work, the “Great Catechetical Prayer” emphasizes the correctness of Christian teaching towards Jews and Gentiles.

Gregor von Nyssa – Wikipedia

Germany, Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Martin Luther is considered a radical reformer of the medieval Protestant church. His posting of the 95 theses on the castle church in Wittenberg, in which he questioned the infallibility of Catholic authority, led to the division of the church. Luther’s theologically based anti-Judaism branded the Jews as the worst enemies of Christianity who necessarily incurred God’s wrath. Parts of his resentment were reactivated in the modern anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

On the Jews and their Lies, first edition Wittenberg 1543, 92.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC was originally founded in 1946 to ensure the control of malaria in the post-war period. The agency maintains field offices in 49 states. The director from 1983 to 1989 was James O. Mason.

Current Trends Prevention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Report of Inter-Agency Recommendations

Other epidemics have also resulted in BIPoC or people from the Global South being stigmatized. As HIV/AIDS spread in the early 1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under Director James O. Mason, issued a statement classifying Haitians as a high-risk group for HIV/AIDS. The claim was later withdrawn, but the consequences were fatal. The origins of this can be traced back to erroneous scientific assumptions. In 1992, the CDC again issued a warning that Haitian refugees could pose an “unjustifiable threat to the health of the United States”(Washington Post, August 7, 1992). In 2007, another study was published linking HIV to Haiti, stating that “subtype B probably migrated from Africa to Haiti around 1966” and then on to the United States. They base this hypothesis on virus sequences from only five (!) Haitian Americans who contracted AIDS in 1981 and who came to the United States “after 1975”. This stigmatization has had far-reaching effects, including social isolation, discrimination in health care and everyday life, and a negative impact on the entire Haitian community in the United States.

*The Guardian (Edna Bonhomme), 22.02.2021:“From HIV to Covid, pandemics show us fear of disease is colored by prejudice“

Achille Mbembe (*1957) is a post-colonial theorist, philosopher and historian. He is a professor at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg.

Quote: Achille Mbembe (2017): Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 176-177.
Picture: Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

Mbembe develops a critical reflection on the Western notion of reason and rationality. He examines current dynamics of colonialism, racism and resistance and attempts to explore possibilities for a more just and solidary world order. He attempts to show the extent to which the goal of anti-colonial liberation struggles, the right to equal participation for all, remains relevant for the present day.

*Achille Mbembe (2017): Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
*Achille Mbembe (July 1, 2021): Notes on Late Eurocentrism. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Critical Inquiry.

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.