“
Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.
”
”
N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
“
There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.
”
”
James Baldwin (No Name in the Street)
“
How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d'Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity.
Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought be could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking.
Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we've been given?
...
His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
“
I’ve come to see “Bitches be crazy” as less a statement by men that women are crazy or even a reappropriated statement by women defending their own madness. Instead, I see the phrase and imagine a colon after “bitches,” rendering it a command to other women, a battle cry. It is a way of saying, “We took back ‘bitch’ already. And now we have come for ‘crazy.
”
”
Alana Massey (All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers)
“
But artists aren’t the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they’re often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are “sent back” to recover the territory are always those who don’t mind associating with the colored people! And it’s a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers.
”
”
bell hooks (Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism)
“
Your gut includes the stomach, small intestine, large intestine (which includes the colon), liver, and gallbladder. The gut is responsible for ensuring that you absorb the nutrients of the food you eat, properly expel waste and toxins, and maintain a strong immune system. Yet not only is it critical for these everyday functions, your gut also holds a life force of its own. Food does not digest just from the physical process of food breakdown (a process scientific study hasn’t fully pieced together); there are also critical spiritual and metaphysical factors involved in digestion. That’s why enlightened beings on the planet employ eating techniques such as slow and thorough chewing; mindful, present eating; prayer before, during, or after meals; and becoming one with your food.
”
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Anthony William (Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal)
“
Some may say it’s tiresome to dwell on the hurt- after all there’s a relentless (if artificial) drive to Stay Positive! in America, to focus only on solutions—yet an essential step in the process of decolonization is hearing the painful stories of the colonized and the exploited, respectfully and with an open heart.
”
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Edgar Villanueva (Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance)
“
My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death. ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time.
”
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Sherwin B. Nuland
“
repeat after me:
1. our immigrant families are not just ‘homophobic’ they are also ‘colonized.’
2. our parents have histories, genders, and sexualities, too.
3. they are just as broken as we are (but we have the words — i mean the english — to say it)
4. the diaspora responds to racism with heteronormativity
5. trauma seeps through generations
”
”
Darkmatter
“
There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.
”
”
James Baldwin (No Name in the Street)
“
I believe in han. There's no perfect English-language equivalent for this Korean emotion, but it's some combination of strife or unease, sadness, and resentment, born from the many historical injustices and indignities endured by our people. It's a term that came into use in the twentieth century after the Japanese occupation of Korea, and it describes this characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world. It is transmitted from generation to generation and defines much of the art, literature, and cinema that comes out of Korean culture.
”
”
David Chang (Eat a Peach)
“
Moreover, we look in vain to philosophy for the answer to the great riddle. Despite its noble purpose and history, pure philosophy long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence. The question itself is a reputation killer. It has become a Gorgon for philosophers, upon whose visage even the best thinkers fear to gaze. They have good reason for their aversion. Most of the history of philosophy consists of failed models of the mind. The field of discourse is strewn with the wreckage of theories of consciousness. After the decline of logical positivism in the middle of the twentieth century, and the attempt of this movement to blend science and logic into a closed system, professional philosophers dispersed in an intellectual diaspora. They emigrated into the more tractable disciplines not yet colonized by science – intellectual history, semantics, logic, foundational mathematics, ethics, theology, and, most lucratively, problems of personal life adjustment.
Philosophers flourish in these various endeavors, but for the time being, at least, and by a process of elimination, the solution of the riddle has been left to science. What science promises, and has already supplied in part, is the following. There is a real creation story of humanity, and one only, and it is not a myth. It is being worked out and tested, and enriched and strengthened, step by step. (9-10)
”
”
Edward O. Wilson (The Social Conquest of Earth)
“
Colon in particular had great difficulty with the idea that you went on investigating after someone had confessed. It outraged his training and experience. You got a confession and there it ended. You didn’t go around disbelieving people. You disbelieved people only when they said they were innocent. Only guilty people were trustworthy. Anything
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Feet of Clay (Discworld, #19))
“
08/14/1025h. Dessert Competitions.
08/14/1315h. Illinois State Fair Infirmary; then motel; then Springfield Memorial Medical Center Emergency Room for distention and possible rupture of transverse colon (false alarm); then motel; incapacitated till well after sunset; whole day a washout; incredibly embarrassing, unprofessional; indescribable. Delete entire day.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
“
[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.
[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.
”
”
Ryszard Kapuściński (Travels with Herodotus)
“
Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor.
All over the world, community in the broader sense-the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship- is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism's implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
”
”
Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
“
Before the Belgians arrived and colonized Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis lived in peace. But colonization is built on the idea that we are not the same, that we don’t possess equal humanity. The Belgians imposed their cruel ideology: their belief that people with certain-sized skulls and certain-width noses were better and smarter than others, that they belonged to a superior race. This ideology leached into the Rwandan psyche and caused the country to self-destruct.
”
”
Clemantine Wamariya (The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After)
“
Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.
”
”
Max Hastings (Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975)
“
Today the danger is coming from the East, a danger which comes in with a smiling face and goes out after enslaving Muslim societies economically.
”
”
Abdulhakim Idris (Menace: China’s Colonization of the Islamic World & Uyghur Genocide)
“
In reality it was like this: Earth was colonized
by the Zycronites, who developed the ability to travel from one space dimension to another at a
period several millennia after the epoch of which we speak. They arrived here eight thousand
years ago. They brought a lot of plant seeds with them, which is why we have apples and
oranges, not to mention bananas—one look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer
space. They also brought animals—horses and dogs and goats and so on. They were the builders
of Atlantis. Then they blew themselves up through being too clever. We’re descended from the
stragglers.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
“
During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And so the full history of Leopold’s rule in the Congo and of the movement that opposed it dropped out of Europe’s memory, perhaps even more swiftly and completely than did the other mass killings that took place in the colonization of Africa.
”
”
Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost)
“
When I saw those hundreds of journals I felt for a long moment that I had become that old biologist after all. That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you from the outside in, forcing you to live in it's reality.
”
”
Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1))
“
Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian's congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it's a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an intense hatred and desire to kill—and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred—and he happens to be an Algerian.
”
”
Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
“
The cause of this transformation, effected by the Meiji Restoration from 1868 onward, was the determination of influential members of the Japanese elite to avoid being dominated and colonized by the West, as seemed to be happening elsewhere in Asia, even if the reform measures to be taken involved the scrapping of the feudal order and the bitter opposition of the samurai clans.39 Japan had to be modernized not because individual entrepreneurs wished it, but because the “state” needed it. After
”
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Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers)
“
This has been particularly difficult because many on the "left" uphold the mythology that since we work against "The evils of the world," we are somehow free of racism, sexism, classism, anti-Semitism, ableism and adultism (the institutional power adults have to oppress and silence young people). After years of antioppression training and organizing work, however, I now know that many "progressive" people and organizations are just as invested in either/ or dichotomous thinking and in perpetuating oppression in the world.
”
”
Bushra Rehman (Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Live Girls))
“
The colonized intellectual is responsible not to his national culture, but to the nation as a whole, whose culture is, after all, but one aspect. The colonized intellectual should not be concerned with choosing how or where he decides to wage the national struggle. (168)
”
”
Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
“
knew everything about him, the way wives do. I even knew the inside of him, having been there that day in Dr. Ruffner’s office to review the footage of Joe’s colon. We sat and watched light travel through his most intimate inner tubing, and after that we were really bound together for life.
”
”
Meg Wolitzer (The Wife)
“
This is a story of almost unimaginable tragedy. Indigenous people looking back on five centuries since the European invasion began to know what comes after the end of the world. Their ancestors' lives and culture were ended due to war, disease, and starvation. The impact of colonization continues to influence Indigenous peoples' lives. Over the past several hundred years, their lands, resources, and livelihoods have been taken away or destroyed. With few ways to make a living and to feel purpose and a connection to the world at large, they struggle to create thriving and healthy communities.
”
”
Eldon Yellowhorn (Turtle Island: The Story of North America's First People)
“
After two centuries of colonization, the air struggle on Mars was still so critical that the V-L Law, the Vegetative-Lynch Law, was still in effect. It was a killing offense to endanger or destroy any plant vital to the transformation of Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere. Even blades of grass were sacred. There was no need to erect KEEP OFF THE GRASS neons. The man who wandered off a path onto a lawn would be instantly shot. The woman who picked a flower would be killed without mercy. Two centuries of sudden death had inspired a reverence for green growing things that almost amounted to a religion. Foyle
”
”
Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination)
“
This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.
”
”
Kaitlin B. Curtice (Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God)
“
Take terrorism, one example among the methods used in that struggle. We know that leftist tradition condemns terrorism and political assassination. When the colonized uses them, the leftist colonizer becomes unbearably embarrassed. He makes an effort to separate them from the colonized's voluntary action; to make an epiphenomenon out of his struggle. They are spontaneous outbursts of masses too long oppressed, or better yet, acts by unstable, untrustworthy elements which the leader of the movement has difficulty in controlling. Even in Europe, very few people admitted that the oppression of the colonized was so great, the disproportion of forces so overwhelming, that they had reached the point, whether morally correct or not, of using violent means voluntarily. The leftist colonizer tried in vain to explain actions which seemed incomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the death of children and persons outside of the struggle, or even of colonized persons who, without being basically opposed, disapproved of some small aspect of the undertaking. At first he was so disconcerted that the best he could do was to deny such actions; for they would fit nowhere in his view of the problem. That it could be the cruelty of oppression which explained the blind fury of the reaction hardly seemed to be an argument to him; he can't approve acts of the colonized which he condemns in the colonizers because these are exactly why he condemns colonization.
Then, after having suspected the information to be false, he says, as a last resort, that such deeds are errors, that is, they should not belong to the essence of the movement. He bravely asserts that the leaders certainly disapprove of them. A newspaper-man who always supported the cause of the colonized, weary of waiting for censure which was not forthcoming, finally called on certain leaders to take a public stand against the outrages, Of course, received no reply; he did not have the additional naïveté to insist.
”
”
Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and the Colonized)
“
seventeen of the twenty inches of the small intestine can be removed with little functional consequence. Most of the colon can be removed as well. In fact, nearly the entirety of the intestines can be removed. Yet remarkably, there are no reported neuropsychiatric effects in these patients after decades of experience around the world.
”
”
Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
“
Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”14
”
”
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
“
Some of the wives had already put their names on the waiting list for Pan Am’s first commercial flight to the Moon, but now that wasn’t going to happen. There would be no “orbital newspapers, updated every hour” per Arthur C. Clarke’s dream; no Lunar Hilton, which Barron Hilton had proposed; no Lunar Disney; and no chain of A&W Root Beer stands that Pete Conrad and Jim Lovell had planned, half jokingly, to open on the Moon after we colonized.
”
”
Lily Koppel (The Astronaut Wives Club)
“
These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get “their” representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on—even forcibly and violently—opinions and sets of mind that a short time later—years, a month, even a few minutes—they might utterly repudiate.
”
”
Doris Lessing (Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta)
“
Lowlanders who left Scotland for Ireland between 1610 and 1690 were biologically compounded of many ancestral strains. While the Gaelic Highlanders of that time were (as they are probably still) overwhelmingly Celtic in ancestry, this was not true of the Lowlanders. Even if the theory of 'racial' inheritance of character were sound, the Lowlander had long since become a biological mixture, in which at least nine strains had met and mingled in different proportions. Three of the nine had been present in the Scotland of dim antiquity, before the Roman conquest: the aborigines of the Stone Ages, whoever they may have been; the Gaels, a Celtic people who overran the whole island of Britain from the continent around 500 B.C.; and the Britons, another Celtic folk of the same period, whose arrival pushed the Gaels northward into Scotland and westward into Wales. During the thousand years following the Roman occupation, four more elements were added to the Scottish mixture: the Roman itself—for, although Romans did not colonize the island, their soldiers can hardly have been celibate; the Teutonic Angles and Saxons, especially the former, who dominated the eastern Lowlands of Scotland for centuries; the Scots, a Celtic tribe which, by one of the ironies of history, invaded from Ireland the country that was eventually to bear their name (so that the Scotch-Irish were, in effect, returning to the home of some of their ancestors); and Norse adventurers and pirates, who raided and harassed the countryside and sometimes remained to settle. The two final and much smaller components of the mixture were Normans, who pushed north after they had dealt with England (many of them were actually invited by King David of Scotland to settle in his country), and Flemish traders, a small contingent who mostly remained in the towns of the eastern Lowlands. In addition to these, a tenth element, Englishmen—themselves quite as diverse in ancestry as the Scots, though with more of the Teutonic than the Celtic strains—constantly came across the Border to add to the mixture.
”
”
James G. Leyburn (Scotch-Irish: A Social History)
“
The first flight of a previously flown booster came a month later on a launch also from 39A. After the launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space,” one that SpaceX had been working toward for fifteen years. This, he said, would be what would ultimately lower the cost of spaceflight, perhaps by a factor of a hundred or more—“the key to opening up space, and becoming a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.
”
”
Christian Davenport (The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos)
“
Needless to say, cooking for a man with such a delicate palate can be challenging and every once in a while I like to make something that isn't served with a glass of milk and a side of applesauce. This can be difficult with a husband with such discriminating taste buds. Difficult, but not impossible, if you're willing to lie. Which I am. During the winter months I love to make soups and one of my favorites is taco soup. It has all of the basic food groups in one bowl; meat, veggies, beans, and Fritos. It's perfection. I've been warming bodies and cleaning colons with this recipe for years. However, when I met my husband he advised he didn't like beans, so he couldn't eat taco soup. This was not the response I hoped for. I decided to make it for him anyway. The first time I did I debated whether to add beans. I knew he wouldn't eat it if I did, but I also knew the beans were what gave it the strong flavor. I decided the only way to maintain the integrity of the soup was to sacrifice mine. I lied to him about the ingredients. Because my husband is not only picky but also observant, I knew I couldn't just dump the beans into the soup undetected. Rather, I had to go incognito. For that, I implored the use of the food processor, who was happy to accommodate after sitting in the cabinet untouched for years. I dumped the cans of beans in the processor and pureed them into a paste. I then dumped the paste into the taco soup mixture, returning the food processor to the cabinet where it would sit untouched for another six months. When it came time to eat, I dished out a heaping bowl of soup and handed it to my husband. We sat down to eat and I anxiously awaited his verdict, knowing he was eating a heaping bowl of deceit. “This is delicious. What's in it?” he asked, in between mouthfuls of soup. “It's just a mixture of taco ingredients,” I innocently replied, focusing on the layer of Fritos covering my bowl. “Whatever it is, it's amazing,” he responded, quickly devouring each bite. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to slap the spoon out of his hand and yell “That's beans, bitch!” However, I refrained because I'm classy (and because I didn't want to clean up the mess).
”
”
Jen Mann (I Just Want to Be Alone (I Just Want to Pee Alone Book 2))
“
The idea behind a stool transplant is to “reseed the lawn,” so to speak. After exposure to weeks or months of antibiotics (including Vanco) the normal bowel flora — the organisms in your colon that help prevent infection — is weakened. They simply can’t keep C. diff out. In other words, the normal barrier function of the colonic flora is gone, and C. diff gets right back in. So putting in some normal flora from a healthy donor is like reseeding the lawn — it restores the barrier. When that happens, C. diff cannot get back in, and the infection is cured.
”
”
J. Thomas LaMont
“
We don't destroy colonial attitudes about the landscape by erasing people from it altogether, and forbidding their ever-morphing acts of meaning-making. We don't preserve our natural landscapes by turning them into inviting back gentleness into our relationship with the earth, by allowing meaning to take hold again. We should encourage enchantment to bolt like a weed. It is, after all, native here. The stones, and the dried-out heather, and the sound of the sea, and the moon above our heads have all been storing it like a battery, waiting for its current to be found again.
”
”
Katherine May (Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age)
“
Madness for destroying the colonized having originated with the needs of the colonizer, it is not surprising that it conforms so well to them, that it seems to confirm and justify the colonizer’s conduct. More surprising, more harmful perhaps, is the echo that it excites in the colonized himself. Constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed on all institutions and in every human contact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? It cannot leave him indifferent and remain a veneer which, like an insult, blows with the wind. He ends up recognizing it as one would a detested nickname which has become a familiar description. The accusation disturbs him and worries him even more because he admires and fears his powerful accuser. “Is he not partially right?” he mutters. “Are we not all a little guilty after all? Lazy, because we have so many idlers? Timid, because we let ourselves be oppressed.” Willfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized. It thus acquires a certain amount of reality and contributes to the true portrait of the colonized.
”
”
Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and the Colonized)
“
Benefits of the Master Cleanse Detox Diet and How to Conserve a Healthy Cleansing
The Master Detox in 14 days , also referred to as lemonade diet regime, is not new and has been known for decades. It demands drinking only lemonade made from fresh squeezed lemons and normal water, maple syrup, along with cayenne pepper. So there is no strong food during the detoxification course of action.
Typically, any lemonade diet regime will last for 10 to 14 times and is known to be very efffective regarding colon cleansing. It's good in dissolving built-up wastes in our intestinal tracts.
Besides colon detox, master cleanse diet plan can also be used for rapid weight loss. In 2007, the gifted singer/actress Beyonce Knowles used soda and pop diet pertaining to 14 days and lost Twenty-two lb or 9 kilograms. She made it happen for her part in the video Dreamgirls. As a result, this diet plan received huge advertising attention.
Remember that weight loss utilizing master cleanse detox diet is not a long term remedy. After the clean, you should return to a healthy as well as well-balanced diet which consists of plenty of fruits and also fresh vegetables and occasional in included fats as well as sweets. That is how you have a long-lasting and healthful detox.
Hence the key to long-term wholesome detoxification is always to focus on receiving plenty of exercise and having a well-balanced eating habits high in fruit and vegetables and low throughout added fatty acids and sugars.
Some of the great things about Master Cleanse Detoxification Diet are usually:
- Waste food, plague and phlegm that developed and caught up in our digestive tract tracts might be expelled.
: Can result in weight loss but should followed healthy way of life after detox otherwise you're sure to gain it back in time.
”
”
bdx
“
August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful, not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born. Tell them that something was stolen from a place inland, from the five hundred acres where her people lived. She wanted to tell them that the world was all askew and she thought it was because of the artefacts, that she thought they should understand it was all so urgent now, that they knew truths now tell them that she wasn’t extinct, that they didn’t need the exhibition after all.
”
”
Tara June Winch (The Yield)
“
AFTER 1917, THE Palestinians found themselves in a triple bind, which may have been unique in the history of resistance to colonial-settler movements. Unlike most other peoples who fell under colonial rule, they not only had to contend with the colonial power in the metropole, in this case London, but also with a singular colonial-settler movement that, while beholden to Britain, was independent of it, had its own national mission, a seductive biblical justification, and an established international base and financing. According to the British official responsible for “Migration and Statistics,” the British government was not “the colonizing power here; the Jewish people are the colonizing power.”84
”
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Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
“
Mark appears to acknowledge the reality that “no one had the strength to subdue” the demon of Roman military occupation (5: 4)—including the Jewish rebels. Yet he makes his revolutionary stance clear by symbolically reenacting the exodus story through a “herd” of pigs. With the divine command, the imperial forces are drowned in the sea. It is no accident that in the aftermath of this action the crowd, like Pilate, responds with “wonder” (thaumazein; 5: 20). To invoke the great exodus liberation story was, as it has been subsequently throughout Western history, to fan the flames of revolutionary hope (Walzer, 1986). Yet Mark realized that the problem was much deeper than throwing off the yoke of yet another colonizer. After all, biblical history itself attested to the fact that Israel had always been squeezed, courted, or threatened by the great empires that surrounded it. And the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids had only resulted in recycling oppressive power into the hands of a native dynasty, one that in turn became an early victim of a newly ascendent imperial power, Rome. Thus the meaning of Jesus’ struggle against the strong man is not reducible solely to his desire for the liberation of Palestine from colonial rule, though it certainly includes that. It is a struggle against the root “spirit” and politics of domination—which, Mark acknowledges matter of factly, is most clearly represented by the “great men” of the Hellenistic imperial sphere (10: 42).
”
”
Ched Myers (Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus)
“
Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?"
Mustapha Mond laughed. "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut," he answered. "We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas–that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!" he repeated.
The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully.
"It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle–an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing."
"What was that?" asked the Savage.
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
The Savage sighed, profoundly.
"The optimum population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled on the iceberg–eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above."
"And they're happy below the water line?"
"Happier than above it.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
“
A courtesan would receive years of training in literature, etiquette, dance and music before she was
allowed to make her first public appearance. Courtesans have played quite a huge role in enriching
our country’s traditions in music and art, you know. And sexuality – that too was considered an art,
an ancient art…”
What did it mean for the courtesans to have to make themselves available to the colonizer? To lay
their bodies open to sex, to medical inspection, to laws? And all this to keep the military virile and
marching towards the expansion of Empire! What happened to the women afterwards, that’s what I
want to know! In fact, I don’t think it was very different from slavery in America – Black women
eroticized, abused, discarded. No, the real story must have been far, far worse. Before the British,
after the British.
”
”
Debotri Dhar (The Courtesans of Karim Street)
“
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.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.
This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.
This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”
“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”
After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.
”
”
William S. Burroughs
“
Malibu catches fire.
It is simply what Malibu does from time to time.
Tornadoes take the flatlands of the Midwest. Floods rise
in the American South. Hurricanes rage against the Gulf of
Mexico.
And California burns.
The land caught fire time and again when it was
inhabited by the Chumash in 500 B.C.E. It caught fire in the
1800s when Spanish colonizers claimed the area. It caught
fire on December 4, 1903, when Frederick and May Rindge
owned the stretch of land now called Malibu. The flames
seized thirty miles of coastland and consumed their
Victorian beach house.
Malibu caught fire in 1917 and 1929, well after the first
movie stars got there. It caught fire in 1956 and 1958,
when the longboarders and beach bunnies trickled to its
shores. It caught fire in 1970 and 1978, after the hippies
settled in its canyons.
It caught fire in 1982, 1985, in 1993, 1996, in 2003,
2007, and 2018. And times in between.
Because it is Malibu’s nature to burn.
”
”
Taylor Jenkins Reid (Malibu Rising)
“
The Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 was a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.2 Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin had launched the invasion of Lebanon to quash the power of the PLO, and thereby end Palestinian nationalist opposition in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to the absorption of those territories into Israel. This would complete the colonial task of historic Zionism, creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country. After two decades of a relatively manageable occupation, Begin and Sharon, two fervent partisans of the Greater Israel ideal, had inadvertently sparked a new level of resistance to the process of colonization. Opposition to Israel’s landgrab and military rule has erupted within Palestine repeatedly and in different forms ever since.
”
”
Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
“
He was moved by the monologue of a soldier who wrote in his kibbutz journal (every kibbutz in Israel has a kind of ‘village voice’) of what he had seen and done in the occupied West Bank. The soldier told how he and his comrades entered a Palestinian school, locked about twenty eight-year-old boys in a classroom, threw in some gas grenades and kept the children in there for quite a while, causing such panic that at least half of them jumped out of the windows, breaking their legs in the fall. This was a punishment for stone throwing by students from a nearby college, who were not caught. What drew Evron’s attention was not so much the horrific story itself, but the fact that the soldier who published the story in a kibbutz publication seemed to believe that telling the story absolved him and his friends from his actions. The same applied to a group of soldiers in a famous publication, soon after the June 1967 war, entitled Conversations Between Soldiers. The uneasiness Evron felt in 1967 became a review of liberal Zionism and its role in sanitizing and disguising the horrors of Zionist colonization and occupation since 1882
”
”
Ilan Pappé (The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories)
“
This isn't out of keeping with Edwin's experience of Canada - if anything, he reflects, it would come as the shock of his life if after a half a year in the New World he were to find himself suddenly able to charm the locals - but the flat uninterest of the women's gaze is unnerving. This is a moment, he realizes, when he could express his views on colonization to people on the other side of the equation, so to speak, but he can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound absurd under the circumstances - if he tells them he believes colonization to be abhorrent, surely the logical next question will be Then what are you doing here? - so he says nothing further, and then they're behind him and the moment has passed...
He never goes into the forest, because he's afraid of bears and cougars, but now it holds a strange appeal...Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, that's unfair - this place isn't death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn't care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn't even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility)
“
Mohammed started telling me about some of the most horrific stories he encountered in Mosul during the ISIL years, including when he worked at a local NGO as a caseworker. ‘How can you not be traumatized and suffer sleepless nights when dealing with a story of a 13-year old boy who was escaping for safety with his parents and sister from the right to the left side of Mosul, while it was being liberated by the Iraqi army?’ Mohammed paused, lit a cigarette, rolled down the car window, and continued, ‘as they were running, the father wanted to make sure the road was clear, so as soon as he ventured out, he got a bullet in his head from a sniper. The mother ran to him crying and screaming. She, too, got a bullet in her head. As the little boy and his sister tried to escape, the girl was shot, but she didn’t die. After hiding in a nearby building for a while, they came out and took their parents’ bodies to bury them in that same empty building they took as a shelter. Once done, as they were leaving, the little girl got yet another bullet and died this time. The 13-year old boy survived, but did he really survive? Can even a person who hears this story survive it?
”
”
Louis Yako
“
Statement on Hamas (October 10th, 2023)
When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny".
The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on.
After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality.
Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly.
I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.
However, I do have one problem here. Why do civilians have to die, if that is indeed the case - which I have no way of confirming, because news reports are not like reputed scientific data, that a scientist can naively trust. During humankind's gravest conflicts news outlets have always peddled a narrative benefiting the occupier and demonizing the resistance, either consciously or subconsciously. So never go by news reports, particularly on exception circumstances like this.
No matter the cause, no civilian must die, that is my one unimpeachable law. But the hard and horrific fact of the matter is, only the occupier can put an end to the death and destruction peacefully - the resistance does not have that luxury.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
“
Letter to the tech giants:
When fame and abundance kiss somebody’s feet before that person is wise enough, he or she is very likely to lose track of what’s necessity and what’s luxury. And modern society is filled with examples of such intelligent stupidity – stupidity that is carried out by apparently smart humans. Because being smart is not the same as being wise. The world has enough smartness, but not enough wisdom to bring that smartness into proper productive practice – and I mean productive practice not sophisticated practice – there is a difference. A person smart enough to visualize a Falcon rocket engine can easily pinpoint the locations of various organizations that spread terrorism, yet the person chooses to explore the space further instead of prioritizing the technological advantages to first fix real issues of the human society that inflict harm to the humans every walk of the way.
The world is a miserable place not because we have lack of resources, but because those who have an abundance of resources do not have the slightest idea of true human need. The resources needed for colonizing Mars if put to proper practice can fix the world’s global warming issues – it can fix the world’s climate change issues – it can fix the world’s terrorism issues, yet people are more interested in the pompous idea of living in Mars for whatever reason, instead of paying attention to improving human condition on earth. I am not against technological advancement, for I am a scientist, but my soul aches when I see smart people are dumb enough to chase after illusory glory of doing something different and innovative instead of focusing the powers of their soul on cleaning up the misery business on earth. You can, yet you don’t. Why?
Smartness without wisdom is stupidity. You are smart – yes indeed – but I am sorry – you are stupid at the same time. How can you dream of having a cheese burger on Mars when your own kind on Earth is suffering! How can you think of taking rich kids into the orbit just so they can admire the beauty of earth from the heavens, when that very earth is infested with the primordial evils of human character! Awaken the human within you my friend, and pay attention. Awaken the human within and let it consume all the miseries from the world that you live in. Say a member of your family falls ill, would you ignore his or her misery completely just because you want to make life more comfortable for others than it already is, or would you first try everything in your capacity in order to heal your loved one!
Be wise my friend, for it is not enough to be smart. You are smart – there is no doubt about that – so utilize that smartness for humanity and heal your own kind. Heal your kind with your capacity my friend. It is wailing for healers – not some delusional faith healers, but real tangible healers. Would you not do anything! Would you not give your soul to fix the broken soul of this world! Arise my friend, Awake my friend and work for humanity, not to make it sophisticated, but to make it peaceful first. Remember, humanity first, then everything else. Peace first, sophistication later. Harmony first, luxury later.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar
“
the effects of this commitment throughout the Third World are dramatically clear: it takes only a moment’s thought to realize that the areas that have been the most under U.S. control are some of the most horrible regions in the world. For instance, why is Central America such a horror-chamber? I mean, if a peasant in Guatemala woke up in Poland [i.e. under Soviet occupation], he’d think he was in heaven by comparison—and Guatemala’s an area where we’ve had a hundred years of influence. Well, that tells you something. Or look at Brazil: potentially an extremely rich country with tremendous resources, except it had the curse of being part of the Western system of subordination. So in northeast Brazil, for example, which is a rather fertile area with plenty of rich land, just it’s all owned by plantations, Brazilian medical researchers now identify the population as a new species with about 40 percent the brain size of human beings, a result of generations of profound malnutrition and neglect—and this may be un-remediable except after generations, because of the lingering effects of malnutrition on one’s offspring. 54 Alright, that’s a good example of the legacy of our commitments, and the same kind of pattern runs throughout the former Western colonies. In fact, if you look at the countries that have developed in the world, there’s a little simple fact which should be obvious to anyone on five minutes’ observation, but which you never find anyone saying in the United States: the countries that have developed economically are those which were not colonized by the West; every country that was colonized by the West is a total wreck.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
“
When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny".
The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on.
After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality.
Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly.
I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
“
Have I really been in a battle?” wondered Stendhal’s hero after many hours blundering around the field of Waterloo, and many people today share a similar perplexity. Like Stendhal’s hero, they eat and drink and sustain the business of life, but the meaning of it all depends upon their conviction of contributing to the liberation of workers, women, the colonized, or other varieties of the oppressed. Like Fabrizio del Dongo, they find a regiment and tag along—the Hussars against Patriarchy, the Dragoon Guards of the Proletariat, and so on. Quite where the real battle lies is hotly disputed, but its significance is agreed to be a final end to oppression. (…) My argument, then, is an exploration of the hypothesis that there is a pure theory of ideology, and while from one point of view it is a critique, from another it is a do-it-yourself ideology kit. It begins with some suggestions about how ideology was generated from eighteenth-century social theory. The long central section is an attempt to characterize ideologies as forms of understanding. The last section develops the view that, although ideology must take on political trappings in order to transform the world, its real character is entirely antithetical to the practice of politics. Ideology is to reality, I suggest, as (in Tolstoy’s opinion) the reports of battles are to the concrete experience of individuals in the field. In ideological moods, we think we see in social and political life those clear lines from the history books depicting the battle order of the antagonists in massed array. They have neat, clear names like bourgeois and proletarian, colonialist and national, city-dweller and producer, in a word, oppressor and oppressed. The actual reality, however, is messy. Things change all the time, and it becomes impossible to keep any clear and distinct identities in focus. Confronting the arguments of ideology, we are forced to transform the Stendhalian question: Is it really a battle that we are in?
”
”
Kenneth Minogue (Alien Powers)
“
We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states.
In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton.
Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.
”
”
Grace Blakeley
“
A True Story Let me tell you about Wendy. For more than ten years, Wendy struggled unsuccessfully with ulcerative colitis. A thirty-six-year-old grade school teacher and mother of three, she lived with constant cramping, diarrhea, and frequent bleeding, necessitating occasional blood transfusions. She endured several colonoscopies and required the use of three prescription medications to manage her disease, including the highly toxic methotrexate, a drug also used in cancer treatment and medical abortions. I met Wendy for an unrelated minor complaint of heart palpitations that proved to be benign, requiring no specific treatment. However, she told me that, because her ulcerative colitis was failing to respond to medications, her gastroenterologist advised colon removal with creation of an ileostomy. This is an artificial orifice for the small intestine (ileum) at the abdominal surface, the sort to which you affix a bag to catch the continually emptying stool. After hearing Wendy’s medical history, I urged her to try wheat elimination. “I really don’t know if it’s going to work,” I told her, “but since you’re facing colon removal and ileostomy, I think you should give it a try.” “But why?” she asked. “I’ve already been tested for celiac and my doctor said I don’t have it.” “Yes, I know. But you’ve got nothing to lose. Try it for four weeks. You’ll know if you’re responding.” Wendy was skeptical but agreed to try. She returned to my office three months later, no ileostomy bag in sight. “What happened?” I asked. “Well, first I lost thirty-eight pounds.” She ran her hand over her abdomen to show me. “And my ulcerative colitis is nearly gone. No more cramps or diarrhea. I’m off everything except my Asacol.” (Asacol is a derivative of aspirin often used to treat ulcerative colitis.) “I really feel great.” In the year since, Wendy has meticulously avoided wheat and gluten and has also eliminated the Asacol, with no return of symptoms. Cured. Yes, cured. No diarrhea, no bleeding, no cramps, no anemia, no more drugs, no ileostomy. So if Wendy’s colitis tested negative for celiac antibodies, but responded to—indeed, was cured by—wheat gluten elimination, what should we label it? Should we call it antibody-negative celiac disease? Antibody-negative wheat intolerance? There is great hazard in trying to pigeonhole conditions such as Wendy’s into something like celiac disease. It nearly caused her to lose her colon and suffer the lifelong health difficulties associated with colon removal, not to mention the embarrassment and inconvenience of wearing an ileostomy bag. There is not yet any neat name to fit conditions such as Wendy’s, despite its extraordinary response to the elimination of wheat gluten. Wendy’s experience highlights the many unknowns in this world of wheat sensitivities, many of which are as devastating as the cure is simple.
”
”
William Davis (Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health)
“
Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.”
James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.”
The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution.
James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.”
Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.
”
”
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
“
According to Lerone Bennett Jr., the author of the book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, Lincoln even made many racist jokes and used racist language. Many Lincoln admirers have claimed that he no longer concerned himself with repatriating Blacks out of America after the Civil War. However, Phillip Maggess and Sebastian Page, the authors of the book Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement For Black Resettlement, have used documents from the British and U.S. National archives to prove that until the last moments of his life,
”
”
Aylmer Von Fleischer (The Abraham Lincoln Deception: The President Who Never Set Slaves Free And Did Not Want Blacks in America)
“
In 1522, the country now known as Venezuela was colonized by Spain. Venezuela declared independence from Colombia In 1830. During the 19th and most of the 20th centuries Venezuela was ruled by caudillos or military strongmen. In the 1950’s, Venezuela became a good example of a Latin American Country, ruled by a benevolent dictator on the very far right. This automatically made Venezuela our ally and thus received huge grants from us. President Marcos Pérez Jiménez was awarded the Legion of Merit by Dwight D. Eisenhower. In return for this, he allowed American corporations to flourish in his country. Of course, he was also always ready to accept personal contributions. Since 1958, the country has had a series of democratic governments. It’s economy depended on the export of coffee and cocoa until oil was discovered early in the 20th century. It now has the world's largest known oil reserves and is one of the world's leading exporters of oil.
The people lost confidence in the existing parties since the government favored the large corporations over their needs. This led to Hugo Chávez being elected president in 1998, In 1999 the Constituent Assembly wrote a new Constitution of Venezuela. Chávez also initiated programs aimed at helping the poor.
In 2013. After the death of Chavez, Nicolás Maduro his vice president was elected. Problems ensued causing an economic recession. Inflation also became the worst in the country's history, leading to hunger, crime and corruption. Protests starting in 2014 became prevalent and continue until now, leaving many of the protesters maimed or dead.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Essay on Submission"
Having ebbed in the disbelief of it instead of its weight.
Stone-tiled the floor the blood a trickling fire confessional.
Here the ocean metaphor refused.
He tore me shut & seeping no vastness.
To marvel or hide in.
Being told i don’t exist i laugh with wounded teeth into.
The folds of his larynx a choir of bees rattle me.
Into myth less the mechanics of.
Throat than the usage the context neither divorced from combustion.
Of birth more or less i forgave him before.
He entered because he swelled for me i could never trust.
Myself in his hands but i did want.
Him.
Knocking leaning into the sliver of light he.
Missed the wastebasket he couldn’t bear.
The sight of me i never slept.
With the lights off i don’t know that.
History.
But i named it so it can’t be.
Holy.
Or rather question.
Of distance my skin.
And cold waters my skin and woundless.
Skin i wade in the contradiction.
After i wanted only to be.
Held.
No.
Distance his hand & the small of my.
Back his hand & the lip.
Of a waterfall here i reject the landscape.
Its vastness i don’t think.
We’re looking for the same thing you.
And i you’d think olympus.
Would dethrone itself of goldenrod leaves i told you it was.
Blood did i claim it.
Mine i am built of avoidable.
Violences with one drop apocalypse.
The burning wilderness you can see yourself.
Out now histories like this cannot.
Be known let alone escaped even the one.
Where i set fire to my colonizer i can afford neither.
Reclamation nor reconciliation.
No.
Unfragmented i cannot give you an ending.
That isn’t body lunar.
And concave staining instead.
The bathroom floor.
”
”
George Abraham
“
Even centuries after the last unsuccessful Crusade, the Crusades had a lasting impact on medieval Europe. The kingdom of Jerusalem was essentially Europe’s first colony and inspired later monarchs and military leaders to embark on massive projects of colonization.
”
”
Hourly History (The Crusades: A History From Beginning to End (Medieval History))
“
The apparent incompatibility between the abundance of habitable planets in our Galaxy and the lack of extraterrestrial visitors, known as the Fermi paradox, suggest the existence of what Hanson calls a "Great Filter," an evolutionary/technological roadblock somewhere along the developmental path from nonliving matter to space-colonizing life. If we discover independently evolved primitive life in our Solar System, this would suggest that primitive life is not rare, and that the roadblock lies after our current human stage of development-perhaps because assumption 1 is false, or because almost all advanced civilizations self-destruct before they are able to colonize. I'm therefore crossing my fingers that all searches for life on Mars and elsewhere find nothing: this is consistent with the scenario where primitive life is rare but we humans got lucky, so that we have the roadblock behind us and have extraordinary future potential.
”
”
Max Tegmark (Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality)
“
Ironically enough, the United States had almost nothing to do with the age-old conflict between Islam and the West. The founding of Constantinople, the birth of Islam, and the Crusades occurred centuries before North America was even colonized. The United States was only peripherally involved in creating the borders of the Middle East after World War I. This centuries-old conflict was not America’s fight, but Washington blundered into it and chose to make stabilizing the Middle East its main foreign policy objective.
After World War II, and especially during the Cold War, the United States became the guardian of Middle East stability. Islamic fundamentalists believe the United States has been policing a Middle East full of divisions that were deliberately put there to keep the region weak, keep Israel secure, and keep pro-American autocracies in place in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and, until 1979, Iran—in short, to keep Muslims locked in a nation-state system that thwarted the rightful destiny of Islam.
”
”
Richard Engel (And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East)
“
In 1821, the United States government sent Dr. Eli Ayres to West Africa to buy, on what was known as the “Pepper Coast,” land that could be used as a colony for relocated slaves from America. He sailed to the location on the Mesurado River aboard the naval schooner USS Alligator, commanded by Lieutenant Robert Stockton. When they arrived, Stockton forced the sale of some land at gunpoint, from a local tribal chief named King Peter.
Soon after this sale was consummated, returned slaves and their stores were landed as colonists on Providence and Bushrod Islands in the Montserado River. However, once the USS Alligator left the new colonists, they were confronted by King Peter and his tribe. It took some doing but on April 25, 1822 this group moved off the low lying, mosquito infested islands and took possession of the highlands behind Cape Montserado, thereby founding present day Monrovia. Named after U.S. President James Monroe, it became the second permanent African American settlement in Africa after Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Thus the colony had its beginnings, but not without continuing problems with the local inhabitants who felt that they had been cheated in the forced property transaction. With the onset of the rainy season, disease, shortage of supplies and ongoing hostilities, caused the venture to almost fail.
As these problems increased, Dr. Ayres wanted to retreat to Sierra Leone again, but Elijah Johnson an African American, who was one of the first colonial agents of the American Colonization Society, declared that he was there to stay and would never leave his new home. Dr. Eli Ayres however decided that enough was enough and left to return to the United States, leaving Elijah and the remaining settlers behind. The colony was nearly lost if it was not for the arrival of another ship, the U.S. Strong carrying the Reverent Jehudi Ashmun and thirty-seven additional emigrants, along with much needed stores. It didn’t take long before the settlement was identified as a “Little America” on the western coast of Africa. Later even the flag was fashioned after the American flag by seven women; Susannah Lewis, Matilda Newport, Rachel Johnson, Mary Hunter, J.B. Russwurm, Conilette Teage, and Sara Dripper. On August 24, 1847 the flag was flown for the first time and that date officially became known as “Flag Day.” With that a new nation was born!
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
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.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
I wrote down, things like:
Untangle yourself. Stop saying you love him. You're wearing a groove in your mind. Say it when you mean it. Save money. Small steps. Save money every month. Remember you're a grown woman now. Be more proud and more relaxed. Don't feel persecuted by stupid students. Don't think about them. Don't let your mind get colonized. Get on with your work. Don't pet him. Don't act like a baby. Don't be a cat. Be decent to him and to yourself. Respect yourself and him. See your friends. Don't be sly. Don't be deceitful. Don't snoop. Don't ask him questions for the sake of it, it's lonely-making to sit and listen when he's said it before, when he won't let you in. Keep your footing. Leave the room if he calls you a name. If you save money you can leave the flat if he's nasty. Stand up for yourself but don't waste your energy. This is your time and your energy. Don't try and 'manage' him. Be natural and let him be natural. That's what love is. No more cramped feelings, on either side.
How did these small steps fare? Strangely. Keeping myself to myself more. Sometimes it felt like we'd done it. Sometimes not. Sometimes he whimpered in pain and I was Mrs Pusskins again, and what was wrong with that? It felt soothing. Coming home from work, standing on the landing, he'd open his mouth and lift his arms for a hug, and we'd hold each other and I'd feel safe and happy, with someone I could love in a natural way.
Once, when I was in the living room after he'd gone to bed, he came in and did a little pirouette in his Y-fronts, trying to get me to look. I did look up and smile, but I didn't run to him, like I used to, didn't fuss him. Was that wrong? He performed a hurt little moue in the proscenium, before walking off slowly with an 'I say' and a sort of half toddlerish wobbling walk.
'That was a good dance!' I called after him, stupidly.
I did see my friends more, stayed later at work to do my own work.
”
”
Gwendoline Riley (First Love)
“
The history of the land is a history of blood.
In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming.
It’s all in the telling.
The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow.
Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness.
Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.)
The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead. The land remembers everything, though. It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting.
The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood. Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded.
The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb.
All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us. We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing.
One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis.
Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever! Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun.
”
”
Libba Bray
“
Lee did not side with Virginia to perpetuate slavery. The accounts of Mary Custis Lee and William Allan reiterate the position he outlined in letters to his family. He considered slavery to be an evil, a curse on white and black alike, that God, in due course, would bring to an end. Precisely how slavery would cease was best left to God and not to human intervention, which would inevitably be plagued by sin—as, in his eyes, Northern abolitionists amply proved. Although he never shared the Custis family’s passion for colonizing freed slaves in Africa, he claimed, after the war, “always to have been in favor of emancipation—gradual emancipation.”24 However self-serving his perspective may have been, and however unrealistic it surely was, he nevertheless hoped for slavery to end.
”
”
R. David Cox (The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Library of Religious Biography (LRB)))
“
Rainbow Days by Stewart Stafford
They make us live in monochrome,
Autoerotic under a mirrored dome,
Regurgitating back this non-entity,
Inside I scream it's the death of me.
In between bouts of colon screening,
Rainbow days in a third eye's gleaming,
Silence a throbbing executioner's drum,
Brass muffling the demagogue's hum.
Shattered manacles I'm going to see,
As I'm leaving this world for infinity,
Christen horror hurricanes after me,
On submerged planet earth, Terra-Firma-On-Sea.
© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
With Winthrop came seven or eight hundred, increased very shortly to a thousand, by some additional vessels; and this was soon after followed by a second thousand. No such attempt at settlement had been seen before on the American continent. It was not the longing for adventure, but the transfer of a people, a government, and a Church; and this it is which separates it from all other colonizing undertakings in America at their inception, and which made the Massachusetts settlement from the beginning such a moving force in American history.
”
”
Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston)
“
Since that Cochrane Collaboration analysis, the results of the largest, most expensive diet trial ever done have been published. That trial tested the benefits and risks of eating less fat and less saturated fat for women, who were rarely included in any of the earlier trials. This was the Women’s Health Initiative that I mentioned back in chapter two. Forty-nine thousand middle-aged women were enrolled in the diet study, and twenty thousand of them were chosen at random to eat low-fat, low-saturated-fat diets, with less meat, more vegetables, more fresh fruits, and more whole grains. (This trial was funded not because the authorities were willing to doubt publicly that eating less fat would prevent heart disease but because previous trials had not included women, and the authorities were being pressured to take women’s health as seriously as they did men’s.) After six years on the diet, these women had cut both their total fat consumption and their saturated-fat consumption by a quarter, lowering their total cholesterol and their LDL cholesterol below (albeit only very slightly below) that of the other twenty-nine thousand women, who were eating whatever they wanted and yet their low-fat diet, as the final reports stated, had no beneficial effect on heart disease, stroke, breast cancer, colon cancer, or, for that matter, fat accumulation. Eating less total fat and saturated fat, and replacing the fatty foods with fruits and vegetables and whole grains, had no observable beneficial effect at all.
”
”
Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It)
“
Some sources say that Imbolc means “in the belly of the Mother.” In either case of its meaning, this celebration is in direct relation to, and an extension of, the Winter Solstice – when the Birth of all is celebrated. Imbolc may be a dwelling upon the “originating power,” and that it is in us: a celebration of each being’s particular participation in this power that permeates the Universe, and is present in the condition of every moment.
This Seasonal Moment focuses on the Urge to Be, the One/Energy deeply resolute about Being. She is in that way – and Self-centred. In the ancient Celtic tradition Great Goddess Bri wilful gid has been identified with the role of tending the Flame of Being, and with the Flame itself. Brigid has been described as: “… Great Moon Mother, patroness (sic … why not “matron”) of poetry and of all ‘making’ and of the arts of healing.” Brigid’s name means “the Great or Sublime One,” from the root brig, “power, strength, vigor, force, efficiency, substance, essence, and meaning.” She is poet, physician/healer, smith-artisan: qualities that resonate with the virgin-mother-crone but are not chronologically or biologically bound – thus are clearly ever present Creative Dynamic. Brigid’s priestesses in Kildare tended a flame, which was extinguished by Papal edict in 1100 C.E., and was re-lit in 1998 C.E.. In the Christian era, these Early Spring/Imbolc celebrations of the Virgin quality, the New Young One - became “Candlemas,” a time for purifying the “polluted” mother – forty days after Solstice birthing. Many nuns took their vows of celibacy at this time, invoking the asexual virgin bride. This is in contrast to its original meaning, and a great example of what happened to this Earth-based tradition in the period of colonization of indigenous peoples.
”
”
Glenys Livingstone (A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her)
“
anyone ought to be able to speak Morporkian,” said Colon, gradually regaining his mental balance. “Even babies learn it. I bet it comes easy after learning somethin’ as complicated as Klatchian.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Jingo (Discworld, #21))
“
Many of us understand that America was built on the brutality of slavery and the looting of Indigenous land. Fewer recognize the colonization of Mexico by the United States as a third pillar in the creation of present-day America. The first colonization of Mexico was of course by Spain. But the second colonization of my people came at the hands of the United States during the Mexican-American War. In school we learn of it as Manifest Destiny, as the God-given right of white people to steal native land. The result was not only the taking of land...but the reluctant acquisition of Mexicans.
...The annexation of Texas into the United States and a dispute over where the Texas border should be drawn gave President James Polk an excuse to loot more Mexican land...There were between 80,000 and 100,000 Mexicans living in the land stolen by the United States. Polk wanted the land, but not the Mexicans on it. They were never immigrants; they didn't come to the United States or cross the border; the border crossed them. After the war, the Mexico-U.S. border was carefully drawn to keep as many Mexicans out as possible, a purpose it still serves. But the border never stopped out roots from growing on both sides.
”
”
Julissa Arce (You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation)
“
Built in the early days after the Romans colonized Campania, the structure was vastly older than Rome’s famous Coliseum.
”
”
Tasha Alexander (In the Shadow of Vesuvius (Lady Emily, #14))
“
And after all that searching, someone finally answered. A Daglan who had been using his army of mystics to scour galaxies for our world. The Daglan promised him every reward, if only he could nudge my mother toward this moment, to use the Dread Trove to open a portal to the world he indicated. A step beside her, Nesta clicked her tongue in disgust. My mother did not question Pelias, her conspirator and ally, when he told her to will the Horn and Harp to open a doorway to this world. She did not question how and why he knew that this island, our misty home, was the best place to do it. She simply gathered our people, all those willing to conquer and colonize—and opened the doorway. In a chamber—this chamber, if the eight-pointed star on the floor was any indication, though the celestial carvings had not yet been added—beside red-haired Fae who looked alarmingly like Bryce’s father, Helena and Silene appeared, grown and beautiful, and yet still young—gangly. Teenagers. In the center of the chamber, a gate opened into a land of green and sunshine. And standing there among the greenery, waiting for them … “Oh fuck.” Bryce’s mouth dried out. “Rigelus.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3))
“
prove his superiority over others: “It’s on the ruins of my entourage that I must build my virility.” The West Indian’s drive to overcome his inferiority complex is aimed not at the French, or even at the békés, but at his own peers of color, whom he seeks to dominate, a bleak reminder of how colonial oppression is internalized and reproduced, after the formal end of colonialism. The Adlerian themes in Mannoni—the colonizer’s fears of inferiority, the psychic pleasure of domination, colonial repression as narcissistic and spectacular exhibitionism—would later find even more powerful expression in The Wretched of the Earth. But Fanon historicized the pathologies of colonial psychology by situating their formation in the structures of racial and economic domination, rather than in parent-child relations.
”
”
Adam Shatz (The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon)
“
After every one of these profit frenzies come the promises: next time, there will be firm laws in place before a country's assets are sold off, and the entire process will be watched over by eagle-eyed regulators and investigators with unimpeachable ethics. Next time there will be "institution building" before privatization (to use the post-Russia parlance). But calling for law and order after the profits have all been moved offshore is really just a way of legalizing the theft ex post facto, much as the European colonizers locked in their land grabs with treaties. Lawlessness on the frontier, as Adam Smith understood, is not the problem but the point, as much a part of the game as the contrite hand-wringing and pledges to do better next time.
”
”
Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
“
Unfortunately, bad institutions tend to perpetuate bad institutions, creating a vicious circle, sometimes called the “iron law of oligarchy.” Those who have power under the current political institutions get to make sure that the economic institutions work toward making them rich, and once they are rich enough they can usually use their wealth to forestall any attempts to move them out of power. For example, in an article that has become a classic, Acemoglu, Robinson, and Simon Johnson showed that former colonies where the disease environment prevented large-scale settlements by Europeans tended to have worse institutions during colonial times (because they were naturally picked for being exploited from afar), and these bad institutions continued after decolonization. Abhijit and Lakshmi Iyer found a striking example of the long shadow of political institutions in India. During British colonization, different districts got different systems of land-revenue collection, for largely accidental reasons (mainly, which institution was chosen depended on the ideology of the British servant in charge of the districts and the views prevalent in Britain at the time of conquest).
”
”
Abhijit V. Banerjee (Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty)
“
Dear Voyagers,
Your cameras have shown us the vastness of the universe,
Our eyes too can gaze upon the heavens and revel in nature,
But behind our eyes,
There’s something called a mind that processes it all.
What we call the mind
Spins countless tales and stories,
With such variety that one could say,
For every human that has ever lived, there exists a different image, emotion, analysis, and worldview, and this can be beautiful and at the same time terrifying.
I imagine mapping the universe completely,
Discovering life in other systems and galaxies,
Might be much sooner than charting the map that could explain human existence.
So many questions remain for me,
Like if,
In the coming decades, poverty is eradicated,
Freedom is universal,
Mars is colonized, and people live there,
Cities rise above Venus,
Plant-based diets replace meat,
Equality reaches every person and no one is questioned for their beliefs, orientations, or thoughts,
Diseases are cured,
Physical labor becomes meaningless, and robots end the hardship of human toil,
Earth’s climate change is halted,
Firearm possession is made free, and today’s concerns are all resolved—will everyone then live in peace?
My mind, my eyes, they know the answer:
“No.”
Probably then,
Conspiracy theorists
Would say it all happened in a studio,
Some would claim that veganism’s goal is to destroy chakras,
Others would start revolts against order and law, criticizing even that beautiful state.
This dissatisfaction doesn’t belong to any specific class or group,
It’s what we all are.
Environment and culture matter, but I think even if a brain chip were made
To transfer every piece of knowledge on Earth,
All fields of science, memories,
Experiences, languages, and the stories of every civilization, every human, and everything ever experienced to our minds,
We’d still harbor doubt.
Our efforts to prove ourselves to each other
Will be in vain.
Perhaps the right path
Is to continue and enjoy the unknown,
Or maybe to accept and find joy in never truly experiencing joy.
I play Hans Zimmer’s “Stay,”
Yet my mind continues to drift,
Time passes,
Those around me age as I move forward towards an unknown destination.
Perhaps someone, something,
4.5 billion light years away,
Is staring at a point in the sky,
They don’t know I’m here in an existential crisis,
That Earth is in a fight for survival,
How I envy them,
Staring into that dark spot in the sky,
They too are fortunate for not existing in this moment,
Or for their light not having reached me.
If Earth’s light reaches them,
They would surely grieve for these restless, lost souls,
For human history is tied to sorrow, pain, separation, and nothingness.
Perhaps the Big Crunch,
Absolute nothingness,
Is the only cure for this pain—
The pain of being and existing.
Dear Voyagers,
When your signal to Earth is lost,
It will feel like the death of a loved one,
Even though I know you’re alive somewhere, traversing an unknown path,
Something I doubt will happen after human death,
And even if it does,
It wouldn’t lessen the grief of those left behind who have yet to join that unknown journey.
I fear oblivion,
I fear the oblivions that disappear from history and memories, as if they never were,
Like the meal of a Native American grandmother a thousand years ago,
Or the kiss of two lovers and the story of their union and parting, never recorded anywhere.
”
”
Arash Ghadir
“
British colonial disdain for human rights even left its mark on the English language. The word “coolie” was borrowed from a Chinese word that literally means “bitter labor.” The Romanized first syllable coo means “bitter” and the second syllable lie mimics the pronunciation of the Chinese logograph that means “labor.”
This Chinese word sprang into existence shortly after the Opium War in the nineteenth century when Britain annexed several territories along the eastern seaboard of China. Those territories included Hong Kong, parts of Shanghai, Canton city (Guangzhou) and parts of Tianjin, a seaport near Beijing.
In those newly acquired territories, the British employed a vast number of manual laborers who served as beasts of burden on the waterfront in factories and at train stations. The coolies’ compensation was opium, not money.
The British agency and officers that conceived this unusual scheme of compensation—opium for back-breaking hard labor—were as pernicious and ruthless as they were clever and calculating. Opium is a palliative drug. An addict becomes docile and inured to pain. He has no appetite and only craves the next fix. In the British colonies and concessions, the colonizers, by paying opium to the laborers for their long hours of inhumane, harsh labor, created a situation in which the Chinese laborers toiled obediently and never complained about the excessive workload or the physical devastation. Most important of all, the practice cost the employers next to nothing to feed and house the laborers, since opium suppressed the appetite of the addicts and made them oblivious to pain and discomfort. What could be better or more expedient for the British colonialists whose goal was to make a quick fortune?
They had invented the most efficient and effective way to accumulate capital at a negligible cost in a colony. The only consequence was the loss of lives among the colonial subjects—an irrelevant issue to the colonialists.
In addition to the advantages of this colonial practice, the British paid a pittance for the opium. In those days, opium was mostly produced in another British colony, Burma, not far from China. The exploitation of farmhands in one colony lubricated the wheels of commerce in another colony. On average, a coolie survived only a few months of the grim regime of harsh labor and opium addiction. Towards the end, as his body began to break down from malnutrition and overexertion, he was prone to cardiac arrest and sudden death. If, before his death, a coolie stumbled and hurt his back or broke a limb, he became unemployed. The employer simply recruited a replacement.
The death of coolies in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other coastal cities where the British had established their extraterritorial jurisdiction during the late 19th century was so common that the Chinese accepted the phenomenon as a routine matter of semi-colonial life. Neither injury nor death of a coolie triggered any compensation to his family.
The impoverished Chinese accepted injury and sudden death as part of the occupational hazard of a coolie, the “bitter labor.” “Bitter” because the labor and the opium sucked the life out of a laborer in a short span of time.
Once, a 19th-century British colonial officer, commenting on the sudden death syndrome among the coolies, remarked casually in his Queen’s English, “Yes, it is unfortunate, but the coolies are Chinese, and by God, there are so many of them.” Today, the word “coolie” remains in the English language, designating an over-exploited or abused unskilled laborer.
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Charles N. Li (The Turbulent Sea: Passage to a New World)
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After the fall of Atlantis and Lemuria, the elements of civilization were brought by survivors to the British Isles and Scandinavia, which, along with the Arctic, make up the remnants of what had once been. Due to the devastating after-effects of the Age of Catastrophe, the inhabitants of Britain were forced to vacate their habitats and flee for safety to the eastern climes. They crossed the land-bridge between Britain and Scandinavia, and ventured into lands less affected by the great cataclysm. Southward and eastward they went, taking their customs, religious rites, technology, language, art, music and symbolism. However, because these forced emigrations occurred before the official dates posited for civilization's rise, they have been deliberately ignored. Nevertheless, in 2008, new found evidence revealed that Egypt was indeed colonized by Westerners over fifteen thousand years ago. Wall paintings dating from this remote period have been found in southern Egypt bearing a striking resemblance to those found in the caves of Lascaux, France. As Comyns Beaumont said, this artwork is Nordic in origin. It belongs to travelers from the North-West who desperately sought refuge from the cataclysm that made their own homelands uninhabitable. The races of Egypt, Libya and India knew these handsome visitors as “Men of Gold,” “God Men,” “Good Men,” “Goat Men,” and “Stag Men.” In the Bible they are cryptically referred to as “Edomites” or "Red Men." This title - attributed to early Egyptians - simply denotes sunburn. Red is the color a fair Caucasian man’s skin turns when exposed to intense equatorial heat. It is singular to find a white
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Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
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They treated nine obese men with an infusion made up of stools collected from lean donors, and another nine obese men with an infusion of their own stools as a control. Remarkably, six weeks after their faecal transplants, the men who received the ‘lean’ microbiotas did indeed become more sensitive to insulin. Their cells were storing glucose nearly twice as quickly as they had been before, nearly matching the insulin sensitivity of the lean healthy donors. The obese men who had had their own stool put back into their colons stored glucose at exactly the same rate after the transplant as before – their insulin sensitivity remained as poor as it had ever been.
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Alanna Collen (10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness)
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The "aha" factor is when you have always felt something but couldn't articulate it until someone gives you a naming system that allows you to point at all the pieces. While in Gambia a couple of years after college, I was criticized at a market by a female merchant for being too aggressive when I negotiated the price. She said I acted like a man and I should remember that I am just a girl. I felt horrible and wondered if I had been rude when I realized her criticism that "I wasn't acting like a girl" came from her acceptance of gender roles and male privilege. By analyzing the incident this way, I was also creating a mental world where things can be different.
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Bushra Rehman (Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Live Girls))
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By 1980, this link between cancer and low cholesterol was appearing in study after study. The most consistent association was between colon cancer and low cholesterol in men.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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Influenza strains that colonize humans have a particular affinity for the epithelial cells that form the lining of the respiratory tract. Successful infection typically leads after a day or two to such classic symptoms as runny or stuffy nose, dry cough, chills, fever, aches, deep tiredness and loss of appetite. Historical descriptions based on symptoms indicate that flu epidemics have probably plagued human populations since well before the 5th century B.C.
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Scientific American (The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making)
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Four Months of War in Cuba
The Spanish-American War lasted less than four months for the United States; however for Cuba this was only a small part of their War of Independence from Spain, which went through many phases starting with the Ten Years’ War and lasted almost 20 years. The United States government originally was neutral, but became involved when the Spanish Governor forced thousands of Cubans into concentration camps. Americans joined the Cubans in their fight against the Spaniards after the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor. During those tumultuous years, 5,180 Cuban insurgents died in battle and over 40,000 died from various diseases such as Yellow Fever. Colon Cemetery in Havana is one of the great historical cemeteries of the world and was built just in time to receive the victims of the Cuban Wars of Independence.
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Hank Bracker
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The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson runs less than one hundred pages and ends when he becomes US secretary of state in 1790. In this work, Jefferson attempted once again to secure his antislavery credentials, after training for a lifetime as a slaveholder: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote. “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” In forty years, nothing had diminished his need to produce racist ideas—not the Black exhibits, uplift suasion, letters from abolitionists, Sally Hemings, or the loyalty or the resistance of enslaved Africans. Jefferson shared the same view in his Autobiography in 1821 that he had in Notes in 1781. He promoted the colonization idea, that freed Blacks be hauled away to Africa in the same manner that enslaved Blacks had been hauled to America.
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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Juan Ponce de León
On April 2, 1513, according to legend while searching for the Fountain of Youth, Ponce de León discovered Florida. In actual fact, it was more likely that he was out seeking the gold that the Indians were always talking about. The Indians encouraged this sort of talk, in the high hopes of keeping the conquistadors away from them as far as possible. Returning to Spain in 1514, Ponce de León was recognized for his service to the crown and was knighted. Given his own coat of arms, he became the first conquistador to be honored in this way.
Although Ponce de León did bring back a substantial amount of gold, much of it had been stolen from the Indians that he had enslaved. In 1521 Ponce de León set out from Puerto Rico to colonize Florida. He commanded a flotilla of two ships containing about 200 men. In this case his exploratory party was peaceful and included farmers, priests and craftsmen. However he was attacked by Calusa braves, a tribe of Indians who lived on the coast and along the rivers and inner waterways of Florida’s southwestern coast.
In the skirmish, Ponce de León was wounded when an arrow, believed to have been dipped into the sap of the “Manchineel Tree,” also called Poison Guava, pierced his thigh. After fending off this attack, he and the colonists retreated to Havana, where in July of 1521, he succumbed to his wound and died. In 1559 his body was moved from Cuba and taken to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he was interred in the crypt of San José Church. In 1836, his remains were exhumed and transferred to the larger, more impressive Cathedral of San Juan Bautista in San Juan. They have remained at this urban, hillside church until this day.
This information is from Captain Hank Bracker’s award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” available from Amazon.com and other fine book vendors. Follow, like and share Captain Hank Bracker’s daily blogs & commentaries.
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Hank Bracker
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By 1980, this link between cancer and low cholesterol was appearing in study after study. The most consistent association was between colon cancer and low cholesterol in men. In the Framingham Study those men whose total cholesterol levels were below 190 mg/dl were more than three times as likely to get colon cancer as those men with cholesterol greater than 220; they were almost twice as likely to contract any kind of cancer than those with cholesterol over 280 mg/dl.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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American schools in Guam, both before 1941 and after 1945, were established to eradicate the Chamoru, tongue and person. To educate the old Chamoru out of the new American. The native out of the patriot...But the nastier lesson their schools taught was that their dreams were ours. That indigenous knowledge had no place in the new world...As vehicles for our assimilation, American schools have attached to our longings alien aspirations for material wealth, money and power. How much of our creativity and our vision has already been laid to waste for the sake of these?
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Julian Aguon (The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation)
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Generally the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory. Texas was originally a state belonging to the republic of Mexico. It extended from the Sabine River on the east to the Rio Grande on the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south and east to the territory of the United States and New Mexico – another Mexican state at that time – on the north and west. An empire in territory, it had but a very sparse population, until settled by Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize. These colonists paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor does it now, sanction that institution. Soon they set up an independent government of their own, and war existed, between Texas and Mexico, in name from that time until 1836, when active hostilities very nearly ceased upon the capture of Santa Anna, the Mexican President. Before long, however, the same people – who with permission of Mexico had colonized Texas, and afterwards set up slavery there, and then seceded as soon as they felt strong enough to do so – offered themselves and the State to the United States, and in 1845 their offer was accepted. The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union. Even if the annexation itself could be justified, the manner in which the subsequent war was forced upon Mexico cannot. The fact is, annexationists wanted more territory than they could possibly lay any claim to, as part of the new acquisition. Texas, as an independent State, never had exercised jurisdiction over the territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Mexico had never recognized the independence of Texas, and maintained that, even if independent, the State had no claim south of the Nueces. I am aware that a treaty, made by the Texans with Santa Anna while he was under duress, ceded all the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande – , but he was a prisoner of war when the treaty was made, and his life was in jeopardy. He knew, too, that he deserved execution at the hands of the Texans, if they should ever capture him. The Texans, if they had taken his life, would have only followed the example set by Santa Anna himself a few years before, when he executed the entire garrison of the Alamo and the villagers of Goliad. In taking military possession of Texas after annexation, the army of occupation, under General Taylor, was directed to occupy the disputed territory. The army did not stop at the Nueces and offer to negotiate for a settlement of the boundary question, but went beyond, apparently in order to force Mexico to initiate war. It is to the credit of the American nation, however, that after conquering Mexico, and while practically holding the country in our possession, so that we could have retained the whole of it, or made any terms we chose, we paid a round sum for the additional territory taken; more than it was worth, or was likely to be, to Mexico. To us it was an empire and of incalculable value; but it might have been obtained by other means. The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive
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Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs)
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As I have argued in Chapter 1, to confuse the anti-colonialism of the 1950s and 1960s with the post-colonialism of the last decade of the twentieth century is to depoliticize Fanon to a disastrous extent. After all, no one is going to take to the streets in the name of post-colonalism. And no one is going to die for it.
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David Macey (Frantz Fanon: A Biography)
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American Casualties on the USS Maine
Two hundred & Sixty Six American sailors were killed when the American battleship, USS Maine, exploded and sank in Havana harbor after a massive explosion of undetermined origin. The first Board of Inquiry regarding the incident stated that a mine placed on or near the hull had sunk the ship. Later studies determined that it was more likely heat from smoldering coal in the ship’s bunker that set off the explosion in an adjoining ammunition locker.
In February 1898, the recovered bodies of the American sailors who died on the battleship were interred in the Colon Cemetery, in Havana. Nearly two years later they were exhumed and now 163 of the crew that were killed in 1898 are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, near the USS Maine Memorial.
The beautiful monument shown is located in Central Park West in New York City.
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Hank Bracker (The Exciting Story of Cuba: Understanding Cuba's Present by Knowing Its Past)
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Men were recruited—no women, for this initial attempt at colonization—and ships and supplies were obtained. In December of that year, a fleet of three vessels dropped down the Thames from London. For long weeks, the ships lay anchored in the Downs, just off the southeast coast of England, battered by terrible storms, waiting for favorable weather. Finally, in February 1607, the three ships set out across the wintry Atlantic. After crossing from England to the West Indies and then north along the Atlantic coast, the ships—the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed—dropped anchor in the Chesapeake on April 26, 1607.
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Kieran Doherty (Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown)