Random Quotes

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*Audre Lorde (2009): I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde.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.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Marxist historian and politician from Guyana. Rodney was born into a working class family, studied in Guyana and Jamaica and taught in Hamburg and Tanzania, amongst other places. In 1980 he was killed in a bomb attack while campaigning for the Working People’s Alliance. In all likelihood, the then Forbes Burnham administration was responsible for the murder.

Walter Rodney (1973: 96)

Rodney claims that a) the transatlantic abduction and forced enslavement of millions of Africans to Europe and America, b) economic exploitation and c) political colonial power resulted in the systematic underdevelopment of Africa. His book was enormously influential in efforts to develop a new anti-colonial perspective within historiography. Rodney’s book concludes with the statement that the only humanistic way to liberate and develop Africa would be to end the neo-colonial regime.

*Walter Rodney (1973): How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London & Dar-Es-Salaam: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.

Anonymous enslaved person in Barbados.

Quote: Anonym (1676): Great Newes from the Barbadoes, Or, A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes against the English and the Happy Discovery of the Same with the Number of Those That Were Burned Alive, Beheaded, and Otherwise Executed for Their Horrid Crimes. With a Short Discription of That Plantation. London: L. Curtis, p. 6
Picture: Wikimedia

England appropriated the island of Barbados in 1625, continuing to control it until 1962. Over the course of the previous century, its inhabitants had either been kidnapped and enslaved or driven out by the Portuguese. Working on the plantations, English and Irish serfs, enslaved Africans and American indigenous peoples were settled, exploited, tortured and murdered in the cultivation of sugar cane. They defended themselves, often together, through flight, arson, murder and revolt. In the Caribbean, as in other parts of the Americas, resilient formerly enslaved people formed what were called Maroon communities (Linebaugh & Rediker 2008).
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*Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker (2000): The Many-headed Hydra. New York: Verso.

Peter Buxtun (born 1937) is an American social worker and former employee of the United States Public Health Service who became known as a whistleblower due to his publication of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The experiment was discontinued after it became public knowledge.

Der Spiegel (Johanna Lutteroth), 07.06.2012: “Medical scandal Tuskegee death study.”

In the 1930s, doctors began abusing poor black male farm workers suffering from syphilis in the so-called Tuskegee Study. They wanted to investigate how syphilis develops if it remains untreated. The study was conducted by the Public Health Service, an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Almost 400 sick men in Tuskegee (Alabama) were deliberately deprived of effective treatment without their knowledge. It was forbidden to prescribe Penecellin to patients when it was discovered to be an effective drug against syphilis in 1943. The aim was to monitor the progression of the disease and its late effects. “The study had no scientific value at all. Because the gruesome consequences of syphilis had been known for centuries” (Berliner Zeitung, 19.05.2022). The study was only discontinued in 1972, after Peter Buxton had tried in vain for years to draw attention to the abuse. In the 1940s, the same group of researchers infected hundreds of people in Guatemala with the virus in order to research the disease (ibid.). Although the researchers described the Tuskegee study in 15 medical journals, there was never an outcry in the medical community (Martin J. Tobin 2022).

*Berliner Zeitung (Annett Stein), May 19, 2022):“Tuskegee experiment: Consequences of the cruel human experiments continue to this day.”
*Tobin (2022):“Uncovering the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Story and Timeless Lessons.”

The General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1885, from which this quote comes, was the final document of a meeting that lasted more than 2 months. The German Empire, the USA, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden-Norway took part in it. African representatives were not present.

Deutsches Reichsgesetzblatt (1885): Generalakte der Berliner Konferenz. Nr. 23, p. 225

In 1884, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened the Berlin Conference to lay the foundations for the division of Africa for trade and into colonies. The standards defined in the conference’s document, which European powers portrayed as guaranteeing protection for Africans, were violated in all colonies: oppression, violence and arbitrariness were the norm for the colonised (Zimmerer 2021). Shortly after the conference, nearly the entire African continent was divided between seven European countries. In 1914, half of the earth’s surface and a third of the world’s population was living under colonial rule (Bertelsmann Universal-Lexikon 2006: 496). Bismarck is treated as a “cautious colonial politician” in historiography (see Bpb 2015). However, this is not because he was against subjugating and exploiting other peoples, but because for him, the costs outweighed the benefits (ibid.).

*Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2015): Bismarck und der Kolonialismus.
*DW.com (17.10.2016): Recognising Germany’s Colonial Crimes: Work in Progress.

Thomas Sankara (1949-1987) was a revolutionary, pan-Africanist and internationalist. He became President of Burkina Faso in 1983 in a coup, and was assassinated in 1987 in a Western (CIA) backed plot. His successor, Blaise Compaoré, was likely involved in the murder, and was ousted in 2014 after 27 years in office. In 2021, Compaoré was tried in his absence before a military court on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of Sankara.

Speech at the United Nations

During the anti-colonial independence movement, the former colonies demanded the democratisation of the world, e.g. the UN. Sankara addressed issues such as gender, environment, radical political reforms and democracy as well as colonial domination. From the 1990s, the TINA doctrine (There is No Alternative, see Thatcher) spread and, given the circumstances, neoliberal market democracy was sold as the only possible system. The discourse then changed, moving away demands for the democratisation of global structures to a focus on “good governance” and democratisation within states – all this while global injustice persisted. In contrast to many neoliberal governments in the West in the 1980s, alternatives were still conceivable in some countries of theso-called Third World. Sankara’s government contained more women than that of any other African country, and his bodyguards were women on motorcycles. He forbade circumcision and polygamy and promoted contraception. During his rule, state luxury cars were sold and replaced with cheap state vehicles, while education and health care were improved, land reform carried out, reforestation promoted and international development aid rejected because, in his words: “He who feeds you controls you” (see Shuffield 2006).

*Robin Shuffield (2006): Thomas Sankara. The Upright Man.
*David Scott (2017): From the right to trade to Good Governance.
*Anthony Anghie (2004): Imperialism, Souvereinity and the Making of International Law. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Aboriginal activist group from Queensland, Australia.

Damien Riggs (2004): “Benevolence and the Management of Stake: On Being ‘Good White People’.” Philament: An Online Journal of the Arts and Culture (Issue 4: August). The year (1970) is an approximation as the quote was used by various Aboriginal groups in different times and settings.

The idea of charity is present not only in what is referred to as development aid. In other areas too, certain groups are depicted as needy because they are apparently incapable of helping themselves. In Australia, the Aborigines are often portrayed as requiring assistance. At the same time, Aborigines play a prominent role in social struggles (e.g. in the environmental protection movement or in protests against uranium mines). However, there is often a lot of tension and paternalism within movements made up of both non-Aboriginals and Aboriginals. The Aboriginal activist Gary Foley wrote that he felt that he had to reinvent the wheel for every generation of non-Aborigines (Foley 1999), i.e. that he had to repeatedly teach white Australians to work together with them on an equal footing.

*Gary Foley (1999): Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori struggle for self-determination.
*Clare Land (2015): Decolonizing Solidarity. Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles. London: Zed Books.

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.”

Hendrik Witbooi, actually ǃNanseb ǀGabemab (ca. 1830-1905) was, from the end of 1888, the captain of the Orlam people, the Witbooi, who were related to the Nama.

Der Spiegel 13/1985.

Theodor Gotthilf Leutwein was commander of the Kaiserliche Schutztruppe and governor of German South West Africa. Hornkranz (in today’s Namibia) is known for a colonial massacre which took place in 1893 in which 80 Witbooi fighters were killed and 40 women and children abducted under Leutwein’s command. Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi is viewed and celebrated as the first African leader to mount armed resistance against the German colonialists. What is interesting in this exchange of letters is that in Leutwein’s replies, those affected by colonisation are held equally responsible for the brutality that was part and parcel of colonial conquest. Leutwein describes Witbooi’s “stubbornness” as irrational behaviour that endangered peace in the German protectorate. In this way, Witbooi is also held responsible for the war and murder of the Witboois. Then as now, the strategy pursued was one that sought to preserve prosperity and peace in Germany at the expense of the Global South. Even today, resistance to colonial rule is hardly discussed in local history books and is therefore not given the value it deserves. Instead, the fairy tale of equal trade relations and voyages of discovery is still being told. Witbooi died in 1904, in fighting against German colonial power.

*Reinhard Koesseler (2007): Genocide, Apology and Reparation – the linkage between images of the past in Namibia and Germany.

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

Nikolaos Souidas (Greek Vice-Consul in Kavalla) to the Foreign Minister Alexandros Skouzes, Kavalla, Sept. 29, 1907, No.407.

Historical Archive of the Greek Foreign Ministry, file 1907/5

The preponderance of the Israelite community of Salonica, the main harbor and city of Ottoman Macedonia (61.439 inhabitants or 39% of its population according to the first Greek census in 1913), was considered as a negative factor for Greek irredentism. Kavalla was the region’s second port. According to the Ottoman census of 1905, it was inhabited mostly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians (11.242) and Moslem Turks (8.562), plus 1.862 Jews and around 1.000 unregistered Slav sojourners; it was, therefore, considered as one of the main Greek strongholds in Southern Macedonia. The Greek politico-military apparatus had already been waging since 1906 a drastic economic war, coupled with a number of terrorist attacks, against the smaller Bulgarian communities in both Salonica and Kavalla. In Salonica, recommendations by local Greek merchants for an enlargement of the scope of such operations, in order to hit their Jew professional rivals, were tactfully turned down by the leaders of the Greek Organization, who were very conscious to avoid an eventual dangerous backlash. It seems that. for similar reasons, the Vice-Consul’s suggestion for “a systematic underground economic war against the Jews” in Kavalla did not materialize. The town was finally incorporated into the Greek state after the second Balkan war, in 1913.

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts. Christians, Moslems and Jews, 1430-1950. N. York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, pp.252-254; Αθανάσιος Σουλιώτης Νικολαΐδης, Ο Μακεδονικός Αγών. Η Οργάνωσις Θεσσαλονίκης, 1906-1908. Απομνημονεύματα, Thessaloniki: Society for Macedonian Studies – Institute for Balkan Studies, 1959.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French writer and feminist. She was friends with the anti-colonial resistance fighter and psychoanalyst Franz Fanon, who was active against the Algerian war and French colonial aspirations. She analysed and critiqued different power structures such as capitalism, racism and sexism. She also took on many leftists because she argued that women’s oppression would not automatically resolve itself under communism. Being of the opinion that women also contributed to their own oppression and must free themselves from it, she also argued with other feminists.

Naomi Klein (2010: 179, German edition)

It is often the case that only capitalism’s extreme effects are criticised, but not the economic system itself, which is presented as the only one that is feasible (cf. Klein 2010: 36). Calling for radical systemic change was far more common in the 1960s than it is today. When Pope Francis said in 2013 that, in general, ‘capitalism kills’, there was a great outcry in the German media (welt.de (2013): Die Kirche sollte den Kapitalismus schätzen, Zeit.de (2013): Heillose Kapitalismuskritik). In the 1960s, many social movements and anti-colonial struggles on all continents campaigned for radical systemic change. Back then, the idea of an alternative to the existing economic and social system was much more conceivable for many people than it is today.

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

Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) was the first Chancellor of the Federal German Republic from 1949-1963.

Horst Gründer (1999): „… da und dort ein junges Deutschland gründen“. Rassismus, Kolonien und kolonialer Gedanke vom 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, p. 327.

Konrad Adenauer is known as the first Federal Chancellor of Germany after the Second World War. But he was also deputy president of the German Colonial Society from 1931 to 1932. This statement on the German Empire’s colonial policy was made during his official activity as Mayor of Cologne. The ideology of the “people without space” underlay the pursuit of settler colonisation and emigration after the First World War. Before that, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the victorious powers had taken over German “protected areas” and accused the Germans of both incompetent and particularly violent colonisation practices. The Allies wanted to limit “Wilhelmine imperialism”, for which reason they agitated aggressively against the so-called “lie of colonial guilt”.

DW (22.09.2021): Namibia: A timeline of Germany’s brutal colonial history.

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.

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.

Ukraine, Paul Celan, 1968
Paul Celan was a Jewish German-speaking poet who was born in Chernivtsi (today Ukraine) in 1920.

“Todesfuge”, The sand from the urns 1968.

His name was originally Paul Antschel, later Romanized Ancel, from which the anagram Celan arose. Paul Celan is considered one of the most important German-speaking poets of the 20th century.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?view=detail&mid=C320A35F78FE11C8B585C320A35F78FE11C8B585&q=celan todesfuge&shtp=GetUrl&shid=37b84559-bfd1-4955-9ba9-eadaf1ac5301&shtk=UGF1bCBDZWxhbiBUb2Rlc2Z1Z2U%3D&shdk=TWl0IGRlbiBHZW1DJGxkZW4gZGVzIERldXRzY2hlbiBNYWxlcnMgQW5zZWxtIEtpZWZlciBiZWdsZWl0ZXQuIEluIDE5NDUgZ2Vib3JlbiwgZ2VoQzZydCBkZXIgTWFsZXIgenUgZGVyIE5hY2hrcmllZ3NnZW5lcmF0aW9uIGRldXRzY2hlbiBLQw%3D%3D&shhk=wRLqtYJqIY6rCsR61rcVpXEO91b%2Brt61wW8g3YcyEJY%3D&form=VDSHOT&shth=OVP.RicxtTPiJF_otPWFSVbcHgEsDh

Pliny the Elder was a Roman historian.

Plinius, Historia naturalis 33,1. 33,33. 33,73

During the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean region was extensively deforested for the construction of ports and cities. The soil was destroyed by mining, metal and precious metal extraction. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder critiqued this in his work Natural History (Historia naturalis), in which an examination of social relations with nature and the appropriation of nature were already hinted at. In this quote, he was describing the devastating consequences of gold mining (Müller 2017).

*Franziska Müller (2020) “Can the subaltern protect forests? REDD+ compliance, depoliticization and Indigenous subjectivities”, Journal of Political
Ecology 27(1), p.419-435.

Germany, Rudolf Augstein (1923-2002)

Rudolf Augstein, We are all vulnerable, Der Spiegel, 11/30/1998.

Augstein was born in Hanover in 1923. As a Wehrmacht soldier, Augstein was deployed on the Eastern Front as a radio operator and gunner. After the war, he first worked as an editor for the “Hannoversche Nachrichtenblatt” before founding the news magazine “Der Spiegel” in 1947 with two colleagues. He was editor of the magazine until his death.

Die Debatte von der Leitkultur (hagalil.com)

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) was a German Marxist, women’s rights activist and KPD parliamentarian until 1933. She was a gifted orator and arch enemy of Paul von Hindenbrug, then President of the Reich, whom she described as a servant of capital. She died in exile in Moscow.

Clara Zetkin (1924): Die Intellektuellenfrage. In: Protokoll. Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale, Bd. II, S. 946-982.

The workers’ movement put pressure on the German imperial government, especially in the 19th century. Chancellor Bismarck introduced reforms and improvements for workers in an attempt to placate them. As a Marxist, for Zetkin there was a connection between the prosperity and emancipation of workers in the Global North and the exploitation of workers in the Global South. Marxist historians like Silvia Federici and Walter Rodney further claim that the industrial revolution in Europe would not have been possible without slavery and the plantation system in the Global South, the enslaved workers and export-oriented production (Federici 2014: 129, German edition). Rodney described European workers as being bribed with “colonial profits” (Rodney 1972).

*Walter Rodney (1972): How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.
*Maria Mies (1986): Patriachy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Women in the International Division of Labour. London & New York: Zed Books.
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia (auch in deutscher Übersetzung)
*Anne McClintock (1995): Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.

Prussian Law on the Punishment of Vagrants (Prussia was a former German state).

Quote: Law on the Punishment of Vagrants, Beggars and the Work-shy. From January 6, 1843. In: Law Collection for the Royal Prussian States 1843. Berlin: Law Collection Office, p. 19.
Picture: Wikimedia

The Prussian Law on the Punishment of Vagrants, Beggars and the Work Shy legalised the imprisonment of homeless people in work houses. The peak of discrimination against those without recognised jobs or homes was reached during the Nazi era. In 1933, the persecution, detention and murder of so-called ‘work shy’ and ‘anti-social’ people began.

*Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker (2000): The Many-headed Hydra. New York: Verso. Chapter 2.