Quotes About Imperialism

I look to Agent Orange—the spreading of twenty million gallons of deadly herbicides across Vietnam by U.S. forces from 1961 to 1971—long studied as part of the history of warfare and combat zones and as environmental history but rarely joined with the enduring violence of compounded forms of imperial governance. It is far from the only one.

see the interview done by Valentine Daniel for Public Culture (24, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 487–508).

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

Im generally of the view that we should know the names of those who enacted and justified imperial power - but only if the glorifying can be supplemented with plaques that tell us the shameful histories of, for example active participation in the slave trade or highly successful and profitable lives extracted from slave plantations.

Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if only indirectly and collectively, and not to have to bear its burdens.

Today you cannot talk about a United Nations system;… what actually exists is a domination system over nearly all countries in the world by a small group of powers under the aegis of the United States, determining all issues.

This may be the last stage of imperialism–having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.

Who cares if virtually the entire world views Obama's drone attacks as unjustified and wrong? Who cares if the Muslim world continues to seethe with anti-American animus as a result of this aggression? Empires do what they want.

The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.

The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India.

We really need to stop the imperialist tendencies of countries like the United States and Great Britain.

We are still faced, even in Europe, with the return of imperialist tendencies, attempts to change borders by force, assaults on other states, taking their land, enslaving citizens.

In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.

When Christians faced oppression at the hands of Roman imperialists, they did what Jews had done when they faced oppression at the hands of Babylonian imperialists: dreamed of vengeance and enshrined the dream in theology.

TSHEMBE It may be, Mr. Morris, that I have developed counterassumptions because I have had—(Mimicking lightly but cruelly)—too many long, lo-o-ong "talks" wherein the white intellectual begins by suggesting not only fellowship but the universal damnation of imperialism. But that, you see, is always only the beginning. Then the real game is begun.

CHARLIE (Incredulous) Matoseh, I don't believe it—that you can sit here, under this very roof where you learned to read and write—and deny the dedication of those who came here— TSHEMBE (Utter dismissal) I do not deny it. It is simply that the conscience, such as it is, of imperialism is Ã¢â'¬Â¦ irrelevant.

All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be ours, including both Floridas," he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798.

Theodore] Roosevelt referred to [Emilio] Aguinaldo as a renegade Pawnee and observed that Filipinos did not have the right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy it.

Reconciling empire and liberty - based on the violent taking of Indigenous lands - into a usable myth allowed for the emergence of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing could be sold to the people - indeed could be fought for by the young men of those very people - by promising to expand economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.

Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without pause, and the march across the continent used the same strategy and tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly deadly firepower. Somehow, even "genocide" seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest destiny.

A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.

Rudyard Kipling