Quotes About Oppression

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a scientific hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. Reason became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America's brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed some 20,000 rebels, and saw an estimated 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease.

In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In

There was nothing inherently wrong with colonialism, he felt, if its administration was fair and just. He

Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . . They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night. . . . As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.

Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall.

to speak, as Leopold's officials did, of forced laborers as libérés, or "liberated men," was to use language as perverted as that above the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei.

Chekhov, knowing the weight of his own country's history of serfdom, spoke of how Russians must squeeze the slave out of themselves, drop by drop. Russia's continuing troubles show how long and hard a task this is.

In Berlin, after she took part in a failed general strike and uprising, her petite figure with its large hat and parasol still considered a threat by right-wingers, Rosa Luxemburg was beaten and shot by army officers and her body dumped in a canal.

bayonet was a weapon with a worker at each end.

slavery's demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty suppressed by British troops.

he wrote a trenchant warning of the "far-reaching consequences over the wider destiny, not only of South Africa, but of all Negro Africa" that would flow from the fact that Britain had set up the new, independent Union of South Africa with an all-white legislature.

the idea of independence and self-government in Africa was voiced by almost no one, except for a few beleaguered rebels deep in the Congo rain forest. In

He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If

Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum. Copying

When Leopold turned over his colony to Belgium he burned all the state records, declaring, 'I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.') Truly, this is the aching heart of the story: how a population comprised of millions of souls, spread over nearly a million square miles, rich in language and music and deeply honored traditions, can be muted and erased.

several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests that interfered with discipline.

For him, colonies existed for one purpose: to make him and his country rich. "Belgium doesn't exploit the world," he complained to one of his advisers. "It's a taste we have got to make her learn.

Someone once tried to compliment Leopold by saying that he would make "an excellent president of a republic." Scornfully, he turned to his faithful court physician, Jules Thiriar, and asked, "What would you say, Doctor, if someone greeted you as 'a great veterinarian'?" The ruler of a colony would have no parliament to worry about.

The Irish, he told Lloyd George, were "like nothing so much as a lot of frightened children who dread being thrashed.

of white men they are branded with a red-hot

today's Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.

Dr. Sheppard has not only stood before kings, but he has also stood against them. In pursuit of his mission of serving his race in its native land, this son of a slave . . . has dared to withstand all the power of Leopold.