Random Quotes

Toypurina, 1760-1799, was a Tongva/Gabrieliño medic and leader of a rebellion against Spanish missionaries in what is now California.

Thomas Workman Temple II (1958): Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel,’’ Masterkey 32, no. 5: 136–52.

Toypurina led a rebellion against the San Gabriel Mission in California. The missionaries under Junipero Serra pioneered the Spanish colonisation of California. Serra was canonised in 2015. Across the Americas, indigenous peoples were stripped of their lands by European colonisers or, post-independence, by the countries’ non-indigenous elites. In Argentina, which is almost 8 times the size of Germany, the southern half of the country was independent indigenous territory until the late 19th century. From 1878-1885, the brutal military Conquista del Desierto was carried out. After the sell-off and privatisation of the land that followed, only 12,500 hectares of territory remain today (1 ha ≈ 1 football field). The largest landowner since the land privatisation campaign under neoliberal President Carlos Menem in the 1990s is the Italian fashion group Benetton. A law passed in 2011 by the Cristina Kirchner government (2007-2015) to prevent land sales to foreign companies – but not to Argentine ones – was reversed by President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019).

*Suppressed Histories: The holy woman Toypurina
*Indian Country Today Media Network: Junipero Serra as Indian Killer
*Petition: Urge Pope Francis to abandon the canonization of Junipero Serra 
*Eduardo Galeano (1997): Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York. Monthly Review Press.

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

Naomi Klein (2007: 389)

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

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

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

Walter Rodney (1973/1983): 344

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

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

Marlon Riggs (1957-1994) was a US-American filmmaker, poet, and gay rights activist.

Quoted from Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied in: José Esteban Muñoz (1999): Disidentifications. Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 9.

In this quote, Riggs was talking about how different structures such as racism and sexuality influence each other. This is referred to as intersectionality. Thinking about discrimination in an intersectional way does justice to a complex reality in which everyone always feels that they belong or are assigned by society to various categories (age, gender, sexual identity, disability, legal status, educational qualifications, and many more). For example, Audre Lorde wrote that she was Black within the lesbian community and lesbian within the Black community. Lorde wrote that there was no hierarchy of oppressions, for which reason one must always recognise and consider oppression in its diverse forms.

*Marlon Riggs (1994): Black is … Black ain‘t. Dokumentarfilm. 87 min.
*Marlon Riggs (1989): Tongues untied. Dokumentarfilm. 55 min.
*Audre Lorde (2009): I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Employee of the Westphalian-Lippian Landscape Association which oversees social and youth work as well as assistance for people with special needs.

Quote: Jörg Huwer (2014): Gastarbeiter im Streik. Die Arbeitsniederlegung bei Ford Köln im August 1973. Köln: DOMiD, p. 23.
Picture: Ford73 Blogspot

The booming West-German post-war economy needed workers, but did not want to pay high wages. German politics and business argued that workers from southern Europe and North Africa could get paid less. And because they had no collective bargaining agreements, so they did not have the same employment rights. The quote shows how workers were characterised during the 20th century (with no mention of structural descrimination, they were constructede as deficient individuals, Türkmen, 2017: 50). Increasingly, however, these workers organised themselves. In 1973, 6,000 Turkish workers at Ford in Cologne went out on a ‘wildcat strike’ which was sparked by strict vacation regulations. The strike was defeated, amongst other things, by thugs hired by factory management (Betriebszelle Ford, 1973: 68).

*Transversal (10/2017): “Lotta Continua in Frankfurt, Terror of Turks in Cologne. Migrant Struggles in the History of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
*Ceren Türkmen (2017). Gastarbeitsgeschichte zwischen Migrationsregime, Staat und kommunaler Befreiung. Methoden zur Wissensproduktion, Material & Machtkritik. In glokal: Connecting the Dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) zu Unterdrückung und Widerstand.
*Betriebszelle Ford der Gruppe Arbeiterkamps (1973): Streik bei Ford Köln.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was an Afro-Caribbean-French politician and author. He was a co-founder of Négritude and part of the anti-colonial movement.

Quote: Aimé Cesairé (1972): Discourse on Colonialism. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, p. 3.
Picture: Jean Baptiste Devaux, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia. Creative Commons.

The quote comes from Césaire’s published speech “On Colonialism”. He criticizes the self-image of enlightened Europe. He shows that human rights do not apply to everyone in a colonized world. Many people only became aware of human rights violations by Europeans through National Socialism, when they took place within Europe. Césaire’s criticism of colonialism is important, but he fails to recognize the specific nature of racialized anti-Semitism when he turns Jews into white Europeans. To this day, Césaire is an important reference in discussions about the relationship between colonialism and the Shoah. Some see Césaire’s ideas as a way of understanding the relationship between colonialism and the Shoah. Others see him as a pioneer in relativizing the Shoah.

*Amy M Cools (26.06.2019): Happy Birthday, Aimé Césaire!
*Philip Kaisary (2012): Human Rights and Radical Universalism: Aimé Césaire’s and CLR James’s Representations of the Haitian Revolution. Law and Humanities, 6 (2), p. 197–216.

Andrew Fisher (1862-1928) was Australian Prime Minister from 1908-1909.

Andrew Fisher (1910): Election Speeches. Australian Labour Party.

Australia is also settler colony. Around 1788 the first British ship landed in Australia, which at that time was inhabited exclusively by Aboriginal peoples. The conquest and land grab of Australia proceeded rapidly. Local white Australians aspired to independence, which led to the founding of the Australian Confederation in 1901. This statement makes it clear how quickly distortion can occur: white Australians had only recently and violently migrated to the country, and shortly thereafter had developed xenophobic attitudes towards other migrants. They imagined the country’s “white purity” being threatened by foreigners and tried to legislate it into being through the aggressive “White Australia Policy”.

*Philip Gavin Griffiths (2006): The Making of White Australia: Ruling Class Agendas, 1876-1888. Doctoral Thesis. The Australian National University.

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.

Austria-Hungary, Zvi Rix, 1968

The Jews in Germany now, Leo Katcher 1968.

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1909, the Jewish doctor first worked in Vienna. After the National Socialists came to power, he fled and devoted himself to psychoanalysis with a focus on generational trauma processing. He emigrated to Israel where he lived until his death.

Zvi Rix – Wikipedia

Poland, Leon Pinsker (1821-1891)
Pinsker was born in a small town in what is now Poland, the son of an orientalist.

Leon Pinsker, “Autoemancipation!”, Berlin 1882, 13

Pinsker gave up his desire to pursue a career as a lawyer due to the restrictions on admission for Jews to universities. This experience, as well as the impressions of the pogroms that flared up at the end of the 19th century, led him from his former assimilationist attitude to a Zionist position, which he described in his book “Autoemancipation! – Reminder to the tribal comrades “formulated. Today the work is considered to be one of the most important early Zionist writings.

Judah Leib “Leon” Pinsker (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

Sinthujan Varatharajah (born 1985) is a political geographer based in Berlin.

Sinthujan Varatharajah (2015): Das Selbstgespräch brechen: Perspektiven auf Asyl von ehemaligen Geflüchteten.

In 2015, refugee and migrant movements to Europe reached a peak. The borders remained closed, which led to the deaths of countless people on the dangerous routes of the Mediterranean and in transit countries. Movements from below were formed, which self-organised to provide support at sea, in countries of origin, transit and arrival. Those participating in them included migrant organisations, NGOs, volunteers, church members, doctors and journalists. The strict border regime policy experienced a historic rupture when Angela Merkel briefly opened the borders. The refugee issue became very prominent in the media. In this context, Sinthujan Varatharajah made the charge that the focus was on white people and that the voices of refugees were rarely heard.

Sinthujan Varatharajah (2014): The Walls the West Won’t Tear Down.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) is a Nigerian-US-American writer.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017): Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.

People are divided into two genders as early as infancy. It is not only parents who shape gender-specific upbringings, but also capitalist economic production, which is divided into products for “boys” and “girls” through what is termed “gender marketing”. These are designed and marketed in such a way that children learn how they “have to” be at an early age. This sales strategy primarily serves the company because it generates more sales: a girl needs a pink bicycle with a princess, while her brother will definitely want a blue two-wheeler with a picture of a pirate. Uta Brandes from the University of Cologne researches this issue and says: “Take Lego. It used to be a neutral toy, back when there were only colourful blocks. Today there is the pink Lego Friends series for girls ”(Emma, 11/06/2008).

*Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017): Dear Ijeawele or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
*The Guardian (11.10.2021): “Lego to remove gender bias from its toys after findings of child survey.”

Julius K. Nyerere (1922-1999) was the independence leader and later first President of Tanzania. This quote is from a speech he made to the UN about the Maji Maji War of 1905-07. The missing years are 1885, and then again 1885 and 1900.

Julius Nyerere (1966): Freedom and Unity (Uhuru na Umoja). A Selection from Writings and Speeches. 1952-1965. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 40 ff.

Nyerere was commemorating the Maji Maji Rebellion against German colonial rule in what was then German East Africa. This is considered one of Africa’s greatest colonial wars and was built on a broad alliance of different colonised groups. From the 1950s onwards, anti-colonial independence movements fought successfully across the continent: Libya became the first African colony to become independent in 1951, and most African countries followed in the next 25 years. From then on, however, the West employed strategies of economic subjugation (debt and tariff policies). David Budhoo, former IMF economist, wrote: ‘Everything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south ‘privatized’ or die; towards this end we ignominiously created economic bedlam in
Latin America and Africa in 1983-88’ (quoted in Klein 2010: 239).

*Global Black History (2016): The Maji Maji Revolt in Tanzania 1905-1907.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Otto Glagau (1834-1892)
Glagau appeared at the end of the 19th century as a journalist for the Berlin national newspaper. In his o.s. Scripture accused the Jews of using unfair and devious methods of dominating finance and capitalism as a whole. Glagau’s considerable financial loss in the so-called Founder’s Crash of 1873, for which he also blamed the Jews, may not have been insignificant.

Otto Glagau: The stock market and start-up fraud in Berlin. Leipzig 1876, XXIV.

Glagau appeared at the end of the 19th century as a journalist for the Berlin national newspaper. In his o.s. Scripture accused the Jews of using unfair and devious methods of dominating finance and capitalism as a whole. Glagau’s considerable financial loss in the so-called Founder’s Crash of 1873, for which he also blamed the Jews, may not have been insignificant.

Anfänge des modernen Antisemitismus. Bedeutung und Auswirkung der Werke von Otto Glagau auf die Bevölkerung von Hannah Köhn auf reinlesen.de

Hinmaton-Yalaktit (1840-1904), also known as Chief Joseph, was a Wal-lam-wat-kain, a Nez-Percé subgroup of the Wallowa River Valley in northeastern Oregon, USA. He became well known as an astute tactician during the Nez-Percé War.

Speech during a visit in Washington.

Chief Joseph the Elder, Hinmaton-Yalaktit’s father, had “secured” land for the Nez Percé on a reservation, which led to them settling. As a result of the gold rush of 1863, the majority of Nez Percé land was expropriated by the federal government. In response, Chief Joseph the Elder then burned the US flag and his Bible. After his death, Hinmaton-Yalaktit continued Nez Percé resistance. His concept of freedom also included the freedom to trade. But unlike de Vitoria, he presented the idea of equality as fundamental to trade. In the same speech, he denounced that “I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.” (www.pbs.org)

*Howards Zinn (1980): A People‘s History of the United States. 1492-present. New York: Harper Collins.
*The Washington Speech.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), born in Frankfurt am Main as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, was a philosopher and co-founder of the Frankfurt School, known for studies on the authoritarian character.

Theodor W. Adorno (1975): Schuld und Abwehr. Gesammelte Schriften Band 9/2. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

In 1933, Adorno was banned from teaching by the Nazis because he came from a Jewish family on his father’s side. He therefore emigrated to the USA. After his return in 1953, he observed how in post-Nazi Germany the term “race” had become taboo and was gradually being eliminated from everyday usage. Together with Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, he developed a critique of the Enlightenment and progressive thinking in the context of German society after Auschwitz. Etienne Balibar and Stuart Hall later built on observations made by Adorno in their research on “cultural racism” and “racism without race”.

*Stuart Hall (1990): Cultural Identity and Diaspora.

Troy-Anthony Baylis (born in 1976) is a Jawoyn Aboriginal from northern Australia. He is an artist, curator and writer.

Troy-Anthon Baylis (15.04.2014): The art of seeing Aboriginal Australia’s queer potential. In: The Conversation.

Troy-Anthon Baylis researches gender diversity and has found that there are indigenous names for non-binary genders on the Australian Tiwi Islands (The Hook Up 2018). Non-heterosexual concepts such as “two-spirit” in North America, were part of sexuality in many pre-colonial societies. These were viewed by the Christian Church and colonialists as immoral reprehensible and therefore forbidden. In the Catholic Church, homosexuality and non-procreative sex were condemned as early as the Third Lateran Council of 1179 (Boswell 1981, quoted from Federici, 2014: 47) as a sin against nature (Spencer 1995, quoted from Federici, 2014: 47).

*The Hook Up (2018): What do we know about queer Indigenous history?
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban und die Hexe. Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Wien: Mandelbaum.
*Pearson McKinney (2016): Before European Christians Forced Gender Roles, Native Americans Acknowledged 5 Genders.
**Arabmediasociety.com, 21.01.2009: Book Review Desiring Arabs.

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…”,

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English playwright.

William Shakespeare (1611): The Tempest.

In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Caliban, an indigenous man from a fictional island and son of the witch Sycorax who is referred to in the quote, organises an uprising against the Europeans of the island together with two European workers. The uprising fails. Black poet Aimé Césaire wrote the play A Tempest in 1969 in order to confront Western ideologies. The quote represents the European spirit of the 16th and 17th centuries. During this period especially, femininity was portrayed as depraved and dangerous. This was in part because women played a major role in the movements of heretics, which questioned the authority and power of the church and thus represented a threat to order in that period. One of the defining features of this campaign of vilification was the burning of witches. Between 1550 and 1650, a particularly large number of women in Europe were burned as witches (Federici 2009: 229).

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban und die Hexe. Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Wien: Mandelbaum.
*Aimé Césaire (1969): A Tempest. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications.
* Sarah Richt (2019): A Tempest by Aimé Césaire: Curriculum Guide for Postcolonial Educators.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist and journalist, and co-founder of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association). His main work Das Kapital is one of the most important books for the international labour movement.

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1960): Werke. Band 9. Berlin/DDR: Dietz, p. 221.

Even Karl Marx, who fought for the liberation and empowerment of the European proletariat, submitted to the European ideology of supremacy. Nonetheless, his ideas and theories inspired movements in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America to throw off colonial or bourgeois rule, and were still prominent during the First World War (starting with the Russian October Revolution of 1917). However, the newly created systems were by no means free from domination. There were also mass communist movements in England, Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as, for a short period, Soviet republics (Räterepubliken) in Bremen, Leipzig and Munich. Many theorists and activists in Third World liberation movements referred to Marx, e.g. Walter Rodney from Guyana or Fidel Castro in Cuba and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. There was also a strong Marxist movement in India. Intellectuals still invoke Marxism today, e.g. the historian Vijay Prashad (author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007)) or the literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak (1988)).

*Vijay Prashad (2007): The Darker Nations. A People‘s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press.
*The Times of India (2018): “Marxism Should be Re-imagined”: Spivak.