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Francisco de Vitoria (1483 – 1546) was a Catholic moral theologian, Dominican friar and teacher of natural law. He taught at various universities in Spain and expressed himself in his writings on political issues such as conquests and trade in the Americas. De Vitoria was central to the development of the concepts of “freedom of trade” and “freedom of the seas” (for trade).

Vitorias Schrift (1532): The First Relectio of the Reverend Father, Brother Franciscus de Victoria, On the Indians Lately Discovered.

The right and freedom to travel and trade are seen by de Vitoria as fundamental principles of a natural right. The rights of merchants were placed above any restrictions and protectionism (protection against the import of goods) by noble rulers (princes). However, trade relations were by no means relations between equals. The gold and silver that (according to de Vitoria) ‘the natives have in abundance’ were first obtained through environmentally destructive mining and forced labour, which was dangerous and degrading for workers. German traders and princes even had private colonies in Latin America, Africa and Asia or were involved in the slave trade (Potts 1988: 18). For example, Großfriedrichsburg, in present-day Ghana was a colony of the Great Elector Jakob von Kurland in the 17th century. From 1528 to 1558, Venezuela was a local colony of the Welsers bank (Reader der AG: 4ff.).

*Antony T. Anghie (2005): Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*Lydia Potts (1988): Weltmarkt für Arbeitskraft. Hamburg: Junius.
*AG Weiße deutsche Frauen und Kolonialismus: „Weiße deutsche Frauen & Kolonialismus – Reader zu einer Veranstaltung.“ C/o Infoladen. Kleiner Schäferkamp 46. 20357 Hamburg.

Hungary, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)
Herzl is considered a central figure in modern Zionism. He was born in Pest, today’s Budapest, in 1860 to an assimilated Jewish family. With his work Der Judenstaat, published in 1896.

Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question, Leipzig / Vienna 1896, 12-22.

Attempting to find a modern solution to the Jewish question, Herzl reacted to the apparently anti-Semitic trial against Artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus that had taken place in Paris just two years earlier. Within the Zionist movement, Herzl’s writing advanced to become a pioneering vision of a Jewish state to be created in Palestine.

Theodor_Herzl_-_Der_Judenstaat.pdf (literaturdownload.at)

Micere Mugo (born 1942) is a Kenyan author, poet and activist. She had to leave Kenya in 1982 because of her political activism.

Micere Mugo (2010, in German): Die Rolle der Frauen in afrikanischen Befreiungsbewegungen – Ein illustratives Beispiel aus Kenia. In: Africavenir (Hrsg.): 50 Jahre afrikanische Un-Abhängigkeiten – Eine (selbst)kritische Bilanz, p.48-55.

Women have played an important role in resistance movements: in Europe (see Federici 2009 for a historical overview), in Latin America (see Linhard 2005 on the Mexican revolution) and in Asia (rjb & ir 2008: 100f). In West Africa, the combative Dahomey fought in the 18th and 19th centuries, as described by Stanley Alpern in his book “Amazons of Black Sparta” (2011). There are also testimonies of female fighters in the Mau Mau war against German colonial rulers (Mugo 2004), as well as in the independence movements of the second half of the 20th century (on Zimbabwe, see Sinclair, 1996).

*Micere Githae Mugo (2004): Muthoni Wa Kirima: Mau Mau woman field marshal: interrogation of silencing, erasure, and manipulation of female combatants’ texts. Harare: Sapes Books.
*Stanley B. Alpern (2011): Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey. New York: New York University Press.
*Silvia Federici (2009): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.
*Ingrid Sinclair (1996): Flame. (Documentary on female Guerillas in liberation struggle in Zimbabwe).
*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro & recherche international e.V (2008, in German): Die dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte.
*Tabea Alexa Linhard (2005): Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Geert Hofstede (1928-2020) was a Dutch social psychologist, cultural theorist and pioneer of “intercultural learning”.

Geert Hofstede (1991): Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. New York: Mcgraw-Hill Education Ltd.

From 1967 to 1972, Hofstede conducted comparative intercultural research from which he developed a cultural theory. This was based on cultural areas that were clearly distinct from one another, each with its own characteristics. Hofstede’s theory has been used for decades in business and in international youth exchanges as a basis for intercultural learning and intercultural management. For him, a cultural area was synonymous with a nation. He was criticised, amongst other things, for ignoring differences within countries. His Culture Compass App [https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/culture-compass/], allows people to enter which country they come from and where they currently are in order to see what cultural difficulties they might encounter, based on this paradigm. The exhibition Geographic-Postcolonial critically examined this conception of cultural continents.

*Culture Compass App von Hofstede

William Gumede is a journalist and professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a former ANC activist and leader of the student movement during apartheid.

Interview with Naomi Klein (2007: 205).

According to Gumede, during the transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s, everyone looked to the political negotiations as a guarantee of political freedom for the non-white South African population as a whole. Economic regulations did not receive much attention from ANC fighters. This enabled the white South African elite to secure economic power and therefore their wealth. The ANC government was disempowered in terms of economic policy, it could neither distribute land or water for free because these had been privatised, nor raise the minimum wage because of an agreement with the IMF (Klein 2010: 283, German edition).

*William Gumede (2005): Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. Cape Town: Zebra Press.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Orlando Letelier (1932-1976) was Chile’s ambassador to the US under President Salvador Allende. He was assassinated by a car bomb ordered by General Pinochet in 1976.

Naomi Klein (2007: 99)

In the 1970s, many socialist governments in Latin America (e.g. Chile), Asia (e.g. Indonesia) and Africa (e.g. Congo) were overthrown with the support of Western secret services and replaced by dictatorships. In this way, it was made perfectly clear that if a country dared to take an alternative third way, it would have to pay for it with state terror (cf. Klein 2010: 159, German edition). For many, the dictatorship in Chile was a laboratory for neoliberalism. For Letelier, neoliberal economist Milton Friedman was partly responsible for dictator Pinochet’s crimes. Western companies benefited directly from Pinochet’s military regime: Ford had internment camps for rebellious workers on its factory premises (cf. Klein 2010: 155). Claudia Acuña, a journalist who experienced the dictatorship in neighbouring Argentina, stresses how difficult it was to see that violence was only a means and not the end: the aim was to impose a new economic order. In this, they succeeded: ‘We were able to destroy the secret torture centres, but not the economic system that the military had started’ (quoted in Klein 2010: 178).

*Orlando Letelier (1976): “The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll.” In: The Nation 223, Nr. 28, p. 137-142.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Sitting Bull (ca. 1831-1890) whose actual name was Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake. He was a leader and healer of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux.

Bob Blaisdell (2014): The Dover Anthology of American Literature. From 1865 to 1922. p. 77.

Today’s USA was populated by European migrants as a settler colony. Here, Sitting Bull was speaking as a Native American about the experience of genocidal policies during that colonisation. The Sioux leader, who is admired to this day, mourned the dispossession of the Native Americans. At the same time, through the analysis it presents, the quote also provides information about how Sitting Bull perceived and analysed settlement policies, mass murder and wars, as well as the new culture that was brought to his country with the white man.

*Dee Brown (1970): Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Ludwig Külz (1875-1938) was a doctor and from 1902 head of the Nachtigal Hospital in Togo. The indigenous population was denied access and treatment there. He was also a government doctor in other German colonies. From 1920 onwards he trained so-called emigrants as a professor at the Hamburg Tropical Hygiene Institute. In the quote, Külz referred to the prevailing “motto”, “Black hands, white heads”, which was first postulated by Friedrich Wulffert in a lecture.

Quoted by Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945, S. 59. Original Source: Ludwig Külz (1911): Grundzüge der kolonialen Eingeborenenhygiene, in: Beihefte z. Arch. f. Schiffs- u.Trophyg. 15 (1911) 3, 386-475; Wesen und Ziele (1910).

In the collective memory, German colonial medicine is often associated with “adventure”, dangerous tsetse flies or the self-sacrificing efforts of German doctors “far from home”. At the latest with the “colonial entry” of the German Empire in 1884, many (especially young) doctors took advantage of their assignment in the colonies to advance their medical careers. In this context, they developed dangerous drugs that they tested on the colonized population. This happened primarily in the sleeping sickness concentration camps and leprosy homes in Togo, Cameroon and “German East Africa”. From 1907 onwards there was to be a more “social” colonial policy, based on “humanity, justice and charity”. However, here too, the “effective exploitation of the land and people” – such as the “arms” of the colonized mentioned in the quote, i.e. the labor of the colonized – to maintain and improve the German colonial economy was the actual goal. Ludwig Külz called for a “colonial human economy” that should implement acculturation and the implementation of “colonial racial hygiene” as “sanitary pedagogy”. The task of the “tropical hygienist” is to strengthen the weakening German colonial economy by preserving “valuable” life within the colonized population (e.g. “strong men”). At the same time, it was Külz’s central concern to avoid “bad” or “inferior” lives, especially in the sense of a so-called “mixed-race population”.

*Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh: Paderborn.

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

Paul Bremer (born 1941) was a US civilian administrator in Iraq employed by the US government from 2003-2004.

Washington Post (28.06.2003): Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq.

Bremer’s policy of delaying elections, together with the Americans’ authoritarian occupation strategy, led to an increase in violence between religious groups and violent interpretations of religion (Klein 2010: 508). From the spring of 2004 onwards, the number of violent incidents rose steadily (Klein 2010: 489). With its policy of “regime change”, support of military and other coups throughout the 20th century, the USA as a hegemonic force distinguished itself from Great Britain’s hegemonic policies which had followed classic colonial power.

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

The World Bank is a multinational development bank based in Washington D.C. (USA). Its original purpose was to finance the reconstruction of countries destroyed in the Second World War. Today, the core task is to promote the economic development of “less developed” member states through financial aid, advice and technical assistance.

World Bank, (1998/99): World Development Report: Knowledge for Development. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 1.

The World Bank assesses the development status of countries according to the logic of Western capitalist economies. The assumption that only alignment with these standards will lead to progress in the Global South makes it impossible to recognize non-Western values and world views. From this prevailing development policy perspective, deviating lifestyles and social forms are seen as deficits. And this despite the fact that the Western path of development has not proven itself through exploitation and the destruction of people and nature, among other things. Since its foundation in 1946, all but two of the WB’s chairmen have been white American males. Numerous social movements and NGOs in the Global North (attac) and South (Focus on the Global South) have been criticizing and resisting World Bank policies for decades.

*Franziska Müller & Aram Ziai (2015): Eurocentrism in development cooperation. In: APuZ – Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 7-9.
*Grace Blakeley (2020): The Great World Bank Robbery: An Interview with Walden Bello (Podcast). Tribune Magazine.

Calle 13 is a Puerto Rican rap duo known for the song Atrévete-te-te! (“Dare yourself!”). The band consists of René Pérez Joglar and his half-brother Eduardo José Cabra Martínez. Their songs are often political and critique US policy towards Latin American countries, amongst other things.

Calle 13 (2010): Latinoamérica. In: Entren Los Que Quieran. Sony Music Latin.

Many social and indigenous movements in Latin America have long opposed privatisation and the sale of natural resources. In Bolivia, for example, water rights were sold to the US company Bechtel. Prices rose by 300 percent and people were even banned from collecting rainwater. Resistance against this attempt at water privatisation was successful despite the great repression it was met with.

*Democracy Now (05.10.2006): Bolivian Activist Oscar Olivera on Bechtel’s Privatization of Rainwater and why Evo Morales should Remember the Ongoing Struggle over Water.

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

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

Federal Agency for Civic Education, 2021.

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

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

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

Rabbi Dovid Feldman, Neturei Karta spokesman. Neturei Karta is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group with around 5000 members worldwide.

Speech on January 27, 2014 in Berlin.

They reject the establishment of the State of Israel for religious reasons, and use Holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic narratives in their argumentation models.

Wer sind die Ultraorthodoxen Juden, welche regelmässig Antisemiten unterstützen? – Audiatur-Online

Hans Georg Maaßen (born 1962) was President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution between 2012 and 2018. In 2021 he ran for the CDU for the federal election.

Twitter Hans Georg Maaßen January 10th, 2021

Maassen has been thinking about entanglements in the new right-wing milieu for years. On Twitter, as on other social networks, he is increasingly using ciphers and codes of the new rights.

Faktencheck Neubauer: Maaßen teilt wirklich antisemitische & rechtsextreme Inhalte – Volksverpetzer

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

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

Meyer’s Großes Konversationslexikon was first published in 1840 by the Bibliographic Institute under Joseph Meyer. The series was discontinued in 1986 after the institute merged with Brockhaus Verlag.

Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon (1907): Lexikoneintrag zu “Kultūr”, Band 11. Leipzig, p. 788

Here it becomes evident how clearly linked the understandings of culture and development were thought to be. While the role of dictionaries is to codify social knowledge, at the same time, they exercise the power of definition.

*Stuart Hall (1992): The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power. In: Stuart Hall & Bram Gieben: Formations of Modernity. Understanding Modern Societies: An Introduction. Trowbridge: Redwood Books, S. 275–320.