13 Colonies Quotes

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen. I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man... Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing. Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object. ...we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration: 'The world is my country; to do good my religion.' Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in 'The Rights of Man', and that genius busy at his favorite task - liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, 'The Rights of Man' yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke's effort in his 'Reflections'. Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him. 'Tom Paine is quite right,' said Pitt, the Prime Minister, 'but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.' Here we see the progressive quality of Paine's genius at its best. 'The Rights of Man' amplified and reasserted what already had been said in 'Common Sense', with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France. So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre's enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument. But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of 'The Age of Reason' and now turned his time to the latter part. Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events 'The Age of Reason' appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle - a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

The Declaration of Independence . . . is much more than a political document. It constitutes a spiritual manifesto—revelation, if you will—declaring not for this nation only, but for all nations, the source of man's rights. Nephi, a Book of Mormon prophet, foresaw over 2,300 years ago that this event would transpire. The colonies he saw would break with Great Britain and that 'the power of the Lord was with [the colonists],' that they 'were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations' (1 Nephi 13:16, 19). "The Declaration of Independence was to set forth the moral justification of a rebellion against a long-recognized political tradition—the divine right of kings. At issue was the fundamental question of whether men's rights were God-given or whether these rights were to be dispensed by governments to their subjects. This document proclaimed that all men have certain inalienable rights. In other words, these rights came from God.

You’re a man milliner, Poirot. I never notice what people have on.” “You should join a nudist colony.” As

I’m guessing normal for us won’t include a two-story Colonial in the suburbs? A Corgi, two kids, and a minivan?” Roth

summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted. Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, “Virginia’s slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.

On January 30, 1750, Mayhew stood in the pulpit of Boston’s Old West Church and preached on the occasion of the 101st anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. His message from Romans 13, titled “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the High Powers,” became “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America.”2 When published, Mayhew’s sermon spread like electricity through the Colonies. John Adams, fourteen at the time, read it over and over “till the Substance of it, was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”3 Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism” for the American Revolution.4 Others have called it “the first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the crown.”5 In

In 1822, the American Colonization Society established a new colony on the West Coast of Africa that in 1847 became the independent nation of Liberia. By 1867, the American Colonization Society had sent more than 13,000 former slaves to this new country. In the 1830s, the society was harshly attacked by abolitionists, who tried to discredit colonization as a scheme perpetrated by the slaveholder’s to rid themselves of any responsibility regarding the freeing of their former slaves. Some years later, after the Civil War, when many blacks actually wanted to go to the new country of Liberia, the money needed to send them back had dried up. During the latter part of the 19th century the American Colonization Society stopped transporting former slaves to West Africa and used its money on educational and missionary efforts thereby promoting its religious agenda instead.

point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe—colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars—and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpass that number in the first three weeks. In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day’s casualty rolls—with fifty-eight thousand Allied soldiers dead or wounded, it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world—and judge that the numbers “cannot be considered severe.” The effect of all this on the collective European

Victorious in World War I, the ruling powers of France and the United Kingdom spent the 1920s rebuilding their economies and military strength, while Germany remained subordinate, its power stunted by the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty demanded severe economic reparations and imposed tight constraints on the German military, prohibiting it from having planes, tanks, and any more than 100,000 troops. Germany was forced to surrender its overseas colonies as well as 13 percent of its European territory (and 10 percent of its population), and to submit to Allied occupation of its industrial core, the Rhineland.125 Most damaging to German pride was the “war guilt” clause, which laid blame for the war squarely on Germany. While “bitterly resented by almost all Germans,”126 the so-called “slave treaty”127 nevertheless “left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation.”128 Only twenty years after the Great War, Adolf Hitler would use that strength in a second attempt to overturn the European order. Hitler “focused relentlessly” on bringing about Germany’s rise.129 After his National Socialist Party won elections in 1933, Hitler moved to consolidate his power through extra-democratic means. He justified himself with a call to marshal “all German national energies” toward the singular objective of rearmament to secure his vision of Lebensraum for the German people: “He wanted the whole of central Europe and all of Russia, up to the Volga for German Lebensraum to secure Germany’s self-sufficiency and status as a great power,” as Paul Kennedy puts it.130

(about Pilgrims) It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet, between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower's manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper and a hatter- occupations whose importance is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment. Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as "Captain Shrimpe" hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives from whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labelled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterwards, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it. They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigours ahead, and they demonstrated their manifest incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toe-hold into a self-sustaining colony.

One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2

Sadiq al-Mahdi, former prime minister of Sudan, would agree. On March 24, 1999, he wrote to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, that “the traditional concept of JIHAD does allow slavery as a by-product.”11 And so slavery persists to this day in some areas of the Islamic world. The BBC reported in December 2008 that “strong evidence has emerged of children and adults being used as slaves in Sudan’s Darfur region”—where a jihad rages today.12 Mauritanian human rights activist Boubakar Messaoud asserted in 2004 that in that country, people are born and bred as slaves: “A Mauritanian slave, whose parents and grandparents before him were slaves, doesn’t need chains. He has been brought up as a domesticated animal.”13 Three years later, nothing had changed. Messaoud explained in March 2007, “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”14 Likewise in Niger, which formally abolished slavery only in 2003, slavery is a long-standing practice. Journalist and anti-slavery activist Souleymane Cisse explained that even Western colonial governments did nothing to halt the practice: “The colonial rulers preferred to ignore it because they wanted to co-operate with the aristocracy who kept these slaves.”15 Islamic slavery has not been unknown even in the United States. When the Saudi national Homaidan Al-Turki was imprisoned for holding a woman as a slave in Colorado, he complained that “the state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.”16 Where did he get the idea that slavery was a “traditional Muslim behavior”? From the Koran. Slavery: it’s in the Koran. And if it’s in the Koran, it is unquestionably right.

The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, better known as the American Colonization Society was a group established in 1816 by Robert Finley of New Jersey which supported the migration of free African Americans to the continent of Africa In 1822, the American Colonization Society established a new colony on the West Coast of Africa that in 1847 became the independent nation of Liberia. By 1867, the American Colonization Society had sent more than 13,000 black emigrants to this new country. Beginning in the 1830’s the society was harshly attacked by abolitionists, who tried to discredit colonization as a scheme perpetrated by the slaveholder’s to rid themselves of any responsibility regarding the freeing of their former slaves. Of course this was true prior to the Civil War and laterr during the “Jim Crow” era! The concept had a sizable following of, southern whites, who thought of this as a way to rid America of a growing black population. Others felt that since the slaves were brought to America against their will that it was only right that they be returned to Africa. Paul Cuffee and other free Blacks petitioned the Massachusetts government to either give African and Native Americans the right to vote or to stop taxing them. Cuffee also advocated the return to Africa of freed slaves. Some years later, after the Civil War, many freed blacks actually wanted to go to the new country of Liberia to make a better life for themselves, however the money necessary to send them back, as could be expected, dried up. The entire program came to an end during the latter part of the 19th century when the American Colonization Society stopped transporting former slaves to West Africa and concentrated instead on educational and missionary efforts. Those blacks that did come from the United States and populated Liberia became known as the Americo-Liberians who soon become the ruling class of Liberia.

Plantation owners were at the top of the social pyramid. Their “semi feudal model required a vast and permanent underclass to play the role of serfs on whose toil the entire system depended.”12 When the number of white indentured servants dried up in the 1680s, slave traders offered a solution: an abundant supply of African slaves. Since slavery was not yet legalized, the colonies enacted laws limiting the rights of Blacks. Among the first was a 1639 decree that “‘all persons except Negroes’ were to get arms and ammunition— probably to fight off Indians.”13 Before the legalization of slavery, indentured whites and Blacks had similar rights, although Blacks tended to be punished more harshly.

the first colonisation of Ireland seems to have taken place ca 1484 BC (the 2520th year after the Creation).13 It was the colony led by one Partholan, which landed in the estuary of the river Kenmare. Partholan himself was to die thirty years later in about 1454 BC or Anno Mundi [the year of the world] 2550. Some three hundred years later, it is recorded that the colony was wiped out by a plague, 9000 men, women and children dying in one week alone. The name of the area in which they had settled was later called Tallaght, denoting a place where plague victims lie buried, and it is interesting to note that it is still littered with ancient burial mounds today.

World Bank and the International Monetary Fund The World Bank has been in existence since the end of the Second World War. This bank initially operated under the name International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and it collaborates closely with the equally famous International Monetary Fund (IMF). Because both institutions cannot move an inch without the Rothschilds and their monopoly over the world capital, they are completely dependent on this powerful financial dynasty. It is not surprising that the bankers holding top positions within these institutions are Illuminati. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are two instruments used by the leaders of the New World Order to destroy countries and then govern these territories as colonies. These territories don’t have their own government, nor their own institutions, budgets and frontiers. These colonies only have their own government on paper, which is under the direct supervision of the IMF. According to the Canadian professor and economist Michel Chossudovsky “Wall Street” rules both the IMF and the World Bank:

This papal document—which has not yet been repudiated by the Catholic Church—was the basis for the Christian justification of colonialism and the building of competitive Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, Belgian, German, and other Euro-Christian empires that spanned the world.13 It was the genocide card that was given to every white Christian nation.

Part of what facilitates this closure to alternative epistemologies within the dominant knowledge system is a tendency toward a reductivist scientism – the conviction that science is the best, if not the only, way of knowing, “that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge but rather must identify knowledge with science.”11 This tendency is apparent in the early Comtean version of positivism, where the movement of intellectual thought leads from superstition to the triumph of science, the “culminating stage of human knowledge” where “one devotes oneself to the search for relationships through observation or experimentation…the stage toward which all human history has been advancing.”12 It emerges at the beginning of the twentieth century in Max Weber's 1930 introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he comments that “Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize to-day as valid.”13 It also surfaces mid-century in a logical positivism committed “to epistemology as the central task of philosophy, to science as the single best way of knowing, and to the unity of science as a goal and methodological principle.”14 Such scientism aids and abets the kind of cultural practices displayed in Exhibit Two (see Chapter 1). Appeals to the interests of science, to the advancement of archaeological and biological knowledge, are seen by many to trump the moral objections of indigenous peoples to the desecration of ancestral graves.

Un autre exemple de fausse psychologie de nos « bureaux arabes ». Nous avons, pour les élections en Algérie, recours à l'influence des congrégations musulmanes sur la masse des électeurs illettrés. Cette politique de corruption est publique et compromet à la longue certaines vedettes précieuses. L'administration se dit alors dans sa sollicitude : il y a un moyen, pour les musulmans, d'être absous de leurs péchés, c'est d'aller à La Mecque. Nous leur paierons le voyage. Ils rempliront leurs devoirs coraniques ; ils nous reviendront absous, la conscience blanche comme neige. Ils pourront recommencer à notre service ; nous aurons donc double bénéfice. Mais un des derniers bénéficiaires de ce système ingénieux vient de le gâcher et nous a forcés, en revenant de La Mecque, à payer la scolarité d'un de ses fils à al-Azhar « pour se racheter » aux yeux de l'Islam anticolonialiste. Cet homme nous aura coûté fort cher pour aboutir au mépris réciproque et définitif. [L'Occident devant l'Orient. Primauté d'une solution culturelle. In: Politique étrangère, n°2 - 1952 - 17ᵉannée. pp. 13-28]

... a tese de Florestan Fernandes, estabelecendo que os escravos foram entregues ao deus-dará e à miséria depois da abolição, pode começar a ser desconstruída desde aqui. Primeiro, por se chocar com a notável e comprovada ascensão social de pretos e mulatos em nosso Século XIX, de Pedro II aos primeiros dias republicanos. Depois, pelo fato de que, no 13 de maio de 1888, escravos praticamente inexistiam no país. Terceiro, porque a ascensão social negromestiça se deu antes, durante e depois da abolição. Quarto, no caso particular da Bahia, as informações indicam que não houve maior alteração na situação dos escravos pós-abolição. Os agora ex-escravos continuaram exercendo ofícios tradicionais, além de avançar em outras direções. A conjuntura não foi diversa no Rio de Janeiro.

The killing and mangling in 2014 of some 13,000 people, most of them civilians, and the destruction of the homes and property of hundreds of thousands, was intentional, the fruit of an explicit strategy adopted by the Israeli military at least since 2006, when it used such tactics in Lebanon.

The killing and mangling in 2014 of some 13,000 people, most of them civilians, and the destruction of the homes and property of hundreds of thousands, was intentional, the fruit of an explicit strategy adopted by the Israeli military at least since 2006, when it used such tactics in Lebanon. The Dahiya doctrine, as it is called, is named for the southern suburb of Beirut—al-Dahiya—which was destroyed by Israel’s air force using 2,000-pound bombs and other ordnance

both women writers and questions of gender and sex have been central to the development of Arab intellectual and political life beyond the confines of well-known debates about the status and rights of women. Specifically, it shows how a broad faith in middle-class women’s power as childrearers enabled Islamists, liberals, and feminists alike to contend with three questions that defined intellectual life: how to imagine futures after imperial rule, how to balance the promises of democratic politics with the interests of reformist elites, and how to stabilize existing social hierarchies under the shifting conditions of colonial capitalism. In other words, the story of tarbiya lays out some of the central contradictions of democracy and capitalism as they were encountered in Cairo and Beirut. On another level, the book attempts to think with the concept of tarbiya to analyze the broader questions of social and political reproduction that challenged Arab intellectuals and many others at the turn of the twentieth century, and that continue to challenge us today.13 It shows how writers, both men and women, turned to childrearing to understand

Since colonial days, Americans have been the population least sympathetic to debtors. In a way this is odd, since America was settled largely by absconding debtors, but it’s a country where the idea that morality is a matter of paying one’s debts runs deeper than almost any other. In colonial days, an insolvent debtor’s ear was often nailed to a post. The United States was one of the last countries in the world to adopt a law of bankruptcy: despite the fact that in 1787, the Constitution specifically charged the new government with creating one, all attempts were rejected, or quickly reversed, on “moral grounds” until 1898.13

When the world’s first steam-locomotive-powered main-line railway was opened in England in the 1830s, Australia was a series of sparse settlements mostly divided by great distances. The only effective form of long-distance transport was by ship. All inland transport was either by horse, bullock or foot. Between the more closely situated settlements this was perhaps not such a great problem, but it was a serious impediment to the development and prosperity of the Australian colonies. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, this problem was largely resolved by the building of railways.

Americans have been the population least sympathetic to debtors. In a way this is odd, since America was settled largely by absconding debtors, but it’s a country where the idea that morality is a matter of paying one’s debts runs deeper than almost any other. In colonial days, an insolvent debtor’s ear was often nailed to a post. The United States was one of the last countries in the world to adopt a law of bankruptcy: despite the fact that in 1787, the Constitution specifically charged the new government with creating one, all attempts were rejected, or quickly reversed, on “moral grounds” until 1898.13

Sasha Costanza-Chock’s book Design Justice outlines the principles and explores how “universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism).”12 Design can be a tool for collective liberation. The disability justice movement has taken leadership on this issue.13 The #disabilityjustice hashtag is one place to start learning more; other hashtags for learning about disability include #deaftwitter, #blindtwitter, #a11y, #blindtiktok, #disabilityawareness, and #instainclusion.

Queen Anne’s War ended disastrously for France, causing her to lose all of her colonies in America and nearly all in India. Her loss of Canada made the Louisiana colonists fear that there would soon be a change in domination. Indeed, on November 13, 1762, the king of Spain, Charles III, accepted by the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau the gift of Louisiana from his cousin, Louis XV, the king of France.

In 1822, the American Colonization Society established a new colony on the West Coast of Africa that in 1847 became the independent nation of Liberia. By 1867, the American Colonization Society had sent more than 13,000 former *blanks* to this new country.In the 1830s, the Society was harshly attacked by abolitionists, who tried to discredit colonization as a scheme perpetrated by the *blankholders* to rid themselves of any responsibility regarding the freeing of their former *blanks*.Some years later, after the Civil War, when many blacks actually wanted to go to the new country of Liberia, the money needed to send them back had dried up. During the latter part of the 19th century the American Colonization Society stopped transporting former *blanks* to West Africa and used its money on educational and missionary efforts, thereby promoting its religious agenda instead.