Quotes About Oppression

The sum total of my current assets is: The knowledge that the psychotic violence of making black people black so that white people can be white runs through me as surely as it does through the bodies of all the jailers and the jailed.

And so the bulk of chicotte blows were inflicted by Africans on the bodies of other Africans. This, for the conquerors, served a further purpose. It created a class of foremen from among the conquered, like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps and the predurki, or trusties, in the Soviet gulag. Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcing someone else to administer the terror

One British missionary was asked repeatedly by Africans, "Has the Savior you tell us of any power to save us from the rubber trouble?

Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcing someone else to administer the terror.*

To get at parts of the vine high off the ground, men frantic to get every possible drop of rubber would sometimes tear down the whole vine, slice it into sections, and squeeze the rubber out. Although the Congo state issued strict orders against killing the vines this way, it also applied the chicotte to men who didn't bring in enough rubber. The chicotte prevailed. One witness saw Africans who had to dig up roots in order to find enough rubber to meet their quotas.

Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.

I find a tattered copy of 1984. I open the book and read a little. Of course it is fiction, but the author gets a few things right—the control, the scrutiny, the feeling that nothing can be spontaneous, that the slightest move carries consequences for your future. It evokes a feeling I haven't experienced in a long time, a sense that, even though you have a great job and house, there is no safe place to turn. The

Are there labor camps here?" he asked. "No," she said. "Mandatory marriages, forced-criticism sessions, loudspeaker?" She shook her head. "Then I'm not sure I could ever feel free here," he said.

Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University.

the reports of which were so harrowing—forced abortions, amputations, communal executions—that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in

Our plastic muskets, though powderless, will frontload, and our coup will not be bloodless, nor will the blood be lambly. It will stain the lion's den whose bars though invisible are verily there as well roll along, doo-da doo-da and a thousand lonely dirges.

The worst thing about Communism is what comes after.

Ludzie! ka?dy z was móg?by, samotny, wi?ziony, My?l? i wiar? zwala? i pod?wiga? trony.

as for those of you who are complicit, it is not you that I want to destroy, but your shackles

slaveowners and their allies in the United States tried to protect their country from the most democratic, egalitarian, and terrifying prospect of the Age of Revolution: a generalized slave rebellion.

The whole enterprise involved terror and violence.

Morgan argued that the attitude of the free people of color toward the United States depended on the policy of the government toward them: "They may be made good citizens or formidable abettors of the black people.

It is far easier to sell the case for occupation and enslavement if you are persuaded that the indigenous people are different, have different origins, and are qualitatively inferior to colonists.

My adversaries… applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.

The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.

The scream of the twelve-inch shrapnel is more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers. Therefore let them go on with their hissing.

If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as 'legal'. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources.

Staatsautorität als Selbstzweck kann es nicht geben, da in diesem Fall jede Tyrannei auf dieser Erde unangreifbar und geheiligt wäre.