Colonial Marines Quotes

You’re all crazy,’ he muttered. ‘You know that.’ ‘Man,’ Vasquez told him softly, ‘why else would anyone join the Colonial Marines?

The pelicans paddle in coils of waves and light. Low tide reveals fissures of saltwater and rock. From the smallest crevices color insists-colonies of jade anemones, a purple starfish harvest, barnacles hiding beaks of unbleached linen, black mussel bouquets. Between the air and sea, -this, one large prayer. I kneel.

Another marine example is the Portuguese man-of-war, which can measure more than 150 feet from its air bladder to the tips of its tentacles. Many think of it as a jellyfish, but in fact it is a siphonophore—a colony of minute individuals.

Henry Hudson was in his forties when he stepped into the light of history, a seasoned mariner, a man with a strong and resourceful wife and three sons, a man born and raised not only to the sea but to the quest for a northern passage to Asia, who, weaned from infancy on the legends of his predecessors, probably couldn't help but be obsessed by it.

This was not merely the cellar maze crafted by Ronny Jessup, but also the labyrinth below Crete, where the Minotaur prowled and ate the flesh of those who dared enter its realm, but also Grendel’s far northern lair where Beowulf ventured, also the huge catacombs beneath the Mountains of Madness, where the Old Ones of Lovecraft’s story still waited to be called out of the depths of time or from another dimension, and this was as well the tunnel system under the terraforming atmosphere factories where brave Ripley had gone with a team of high-tech colonial marines on a bug hunt, to learn what happened to the colonists on the planet called LV-426. This was both reality and myth, concrete and symbol, the maze of homicidal desires and lust and hunger for power that spiraled to infinity within the deepest darkness of the human heart, male and female alike, here given dimension and immediacy. It was inhabited by a Grendel named Ulrich and a would-be hero who knew himself to be no hero at all, but only an imperfect man with something to prove to himself.

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

Quando una balena cade sul fondo oceanico e il suo corpo si decompone, la sua carcassa inizia a rilasciare sostanze che possono alimentare intere colonie di batteri, creature marine e altri organismi in un processo di rifornimento che va avanti per decenni. L'animale reinventa l'oceano con la sua morte, ma a volte le carcasse dei cetacei spiaggiati vengono fatte esplodere perché pare che così sia più facile smaltirle. (...) Invece di procurare combustibile all'oceano e rigenerare la materia, i cetacei sacrificati al tritolo spargono detriti, sfondano i cofani delle macchine e riversano pezzi di cartilagine macilenta ovunque, ed è qui per me che un fenomeno oceanografico somiglia a certi periodi della storia: nella scelta tra l'inabissamento di un decennio e la sua deflagrazione perpetua, ra la malinconia dell'animale che si illanguidisce e decompone sul fondo e quello che viene sventrato per generare l'insostenibile frastuono del piombo più atroce.

The German economic system as it existed before the war depended on three main factors: I. Overseas commerce as represented by her mercantile marine, her colonies, her foreign investments, her exports, and the overseas connections of her merchants; II. The exploitation of her coal and iron and the industries built upon them; III. Her transport and tariff system. Of these the first, while not the least important, was certainly the most vulnerable. The Treaty aims at the systematic destruction of all three, but principally of the first two. I (1) Germany has ceded to the Allies all the vessels of her mercantile marine exceeding 1600 tons gross, half the vessels between 1000 tons and 1600 tons, and one quarter of her trawlers and other fishing boats.[9] The cession is comprehensive, including not only vessels flying the German flag, but also all vessels owned by Germans but flying other flags, and all vessels under construction as well as those afloat.[10] Further, Germany undertakes, if required, to build for the Allies such types of ships as they may specify up to 200,000 tons[11] annually for five years, the value of these ships being credited to Germany against what is due from her for Reparation.[12]

It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream lit up my own with a passion for the city that I’ve never lost nor ever will. I’m Charleston-born, and bred. The city’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula. I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael’s calling cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my bones, I knew early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures known as Charlestonians. It comes to me as a surprising form of knowledge that my time in the city is more vocation than gift; it is my destiny, not my choice. I consider it a high privilege to be a native of one of the loveliest American cities, not a high-kicking, glossy, or lipsticked city, not a city with bells on its fingers or brightly painted toenails, but a ruffled, low-slung city, understated and tolerant of nothing mismade or ostentatious. Though Charleston feels a seersuckered, tuxedoed view of itself, it approves of restraint far more than vainglory. As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied. In its shadows you can find metalwork as delicate as lace and spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter.

the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook was not only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded eighty-five well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder and other weaponry. Much of the information collected by the expedition – particularly the astronomical, geographical, meteorological and anthropological data – was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered’, most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.2 In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered. An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death. Alas,

La opresión del Estado moderno, nacido al rescoldo de la industrialización y el reparto colonial del planeta, siempre ha sido vista por los anarquistas como la forma más violenta de autoridad impuesta contra los individuos. Una autoridad que, apoyada en leyes, amenazas, ejércitos, burocracias kafkianas, ordenanzas cívicas, mass media o sistemas de pensamiento único, humilla y desorienta a sus ciudadanos. Ese es el gran núcleo del pensamiento anarquista y el origen de su lucha. Los anarquistas exponen su teoría, ya esbozada por Bakunin: «En la Humanidad hay dos tipos de personas: las que obedecen y aspiran a ser obedecidos, y las que desafían la autoridad, que ni obedecen, ni quieren ser obedecidos. Su máxima es la Libertad».

La opresión del Estado moderno, nacido al rescoldo de la industrialización y el reparto colonial del planeta, siempre ha sido vista por los anarquistas como la forma más violenta de autoridad impuesta contra los individuos. Una autoridad que, apoyada en leyes, amenazas, ejércitos, burocracias kafkianas, ordenanzas cívicas, mass media o sistemas de pensamiento único, humilla y desorienta a sus ciudadanos. Ese es el gran núcleo del pensamiento anarquista y el origen de su lucha. Los anarquistas exponen su teoría, ya esbozada por Bakunin:

bridge into mainland China. It was a pleasing message of ‘business as usual’ smartly tailored to the merchant princes of the Mandarin Oriental. Few would have predicted such Sino-British ‘harmony’ (a favoured Beijing phrase) when Hong Kong was handed back to China on 30 June 1997, after the ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories came to an end. Then, it was all tears and angst, pride and regret. At the stroke of midnight the Union Jack was lowered to the strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, the Hong Kong police ripped the royal insignia from their uniforms, and Red Army troops poured over the border. Britain’s last governor, former Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten, recorded the final, colonial swansong in all its lachrymose glory: its ‘kilted pipers and massed bands, drenching rain, cheering crowds, a banquet for the mighty and the not so mighty, a goose-stepping Chinese honour guard, a president and a prince’. Steaming out of Victoria Harbour, as the Royal Marines played ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and

In reality, Smith, the man of action who had won respect as a soldier in Europe, would not have had to expend much in the way of bribes or feasting to earn the mariners’ support. They certainly knew they had a better chance of surviving long enough to reboard their ships for the return voyage to England by following John Smith’s lead than by throwing their lot in with Archer, Ratcliffe, or John Martin. Whether by bribery or, more likely, simply by dint of his personality, Smith quickly garnered enough support to convince his opposition to leave him in control of the colony. With as much good grace as his enemies could muster, which was not much, they allowed Smith to remain in office as their soon-to-be-replaced leader.

The face of Capt. Daniel-Hyacinthe-Marie Liénard de Beaujeu is striped in war paint. Primeval forest conceals his French Marines, Canadian militia, and Indian allies as they maneuver into position. Hidden behind boulders and ancient oak trees, they await the massive combined force of the British and colonial armies now marching toward them. Beaujeu’s French and Indians are heavily outnumbered. Unlike the British, they don’t have cannon that can kill and maim dozens with a single blast of canister shot. Instead, their weapons are those of a nimble guerrilla fighting force: muskets, tomahawks, war clubs to bash skulls, and sharp knives for slicing the flesh and hair from a dying man’s head

When the British attacked Havana in 1762, Admiral de Hevia failed to scuttle the ships under his command. Thus, his ships fell into the hands of the British. The Admiral was returned to Spain where he was court-martialed, stripped of his titles and sentenced to house arrest for 10 years. Fortunately, he was pardoned three years later, on September 17, 1765. Reinstated he returned to active duty as the commander of the Marine Corps in Cadiz. He died seven years later on December 2, 1772, at Isla de León, Spain. Havana being under the rule of the British governor Sir George Keppel, the 3rd Earl of Albemarle, the British opened trade with their North American and Caribbean colonies, causing a dramatic transformation in the culture of Cuba, as well as bringing an increase to the population. Thousands of additional slaves were brought to the island under British rule, ostensibly to work on the new sugar plantations. The British occupation, however, didn’t last long, since the Seven Years’ War ended less than a year after the British arrived, and with the signing of the Peace of Paris Treaty the English agreed to surrender Cuba in exchange for Florida. In Britain, many people believed they could have done better, had they included Mexico and some of the colonies in South America, as part of the deal. The Florida Keys, not being directly connected to the Florida mainland, also remained in dispute, but it was not contested as long as free trade was permitted. After the deal was made with the British, Spain retained control of Cuba until after the secessionist movements were ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898. The United States Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899. In 1793, many more slaves were imported into Cuba when French slave owners fled from Haiti during the Slave Rebellion, also known as the Haitian Revolution. This brought 30,000 white refugees and their slaves into Cuba. With their knowledge of coffee and sugar processing, they founded many new plantations. This period of the English occupation and French influx, although chronologically short, was when the floodgates of slavery were opened wide. It was at this time that the largest numbers of black slaves ever, were imported into the country.

Castine is a quiet town with a population of about 1,500 people in Western Hancock County, Maine, named after John Hancock, when Maine was a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was the famous statesman, merchant and smuggler who signed the “Declaration of Independence” with a signature large enough so that the English monarch, King George, could read it without glasses. Every child in New England knows that John Hancock was a prominent activist and patriot during the colonial history of the United States and not just the name of a well-known Insurance Company. Just below the earthen remains of Fort George, on both sides of Pleasant Street, lays the campus of Maine Maritime Academy. Prior to World War II, this location was the home of the Eastern State Normal School, whose purpose was to train grade school teachers. Maine Maritime Academy has significantly grown over the years and is now a four-year college that graduates officers and engineers for the United States Merchant Marine, as well as educating students in marine-related industries such as yacht and small craft management. Bachelor Degrees are offered in Engineering, International Business and Logistics, Marine Transportation, and Ocean Studies. Graduate studies are offered in Global Logistics and Maritime Management, as well as in International Logistics Management. Presently there are approximately 1,030 students enrolled at the Academy. Maine Maritime Academy's ranking was 7th in the 2016 edition of Best Northern Regional Colleges by U.S. News and World Report. The school was named the Number One public college in the United States by Money Magazine. Photo Caption: Castine, Maine

While working at the Great Library, he grew fascinated by a manuscript left by an intrepid mariner named Pytheas from the Greek colony of Massalia (today’s Marseilles). Beginning around 320 BCE, Pytheas had made several voyages at the far end of the western Mediterranean, including beyond the famed Pillars of Hercules, or Strait of Gibraltar. Pytheas also sailed around the coast of Spain and made at least one trip across the English Channel, including circumnavigating the British Isles. In addition, he gathered what information he could about lands lying still farther west. Pytheas had published his extraordinary voyages as the History of the Ocean (now lost). His account fit none of the accepted conceptions about the shape of the world, and Aristotelian scholars in particular branded him a liar. Eratosthenes, however, instantly saw its value.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the English had been among the pioneers of Atlantic exploration, but during the long reign of Henry VIII (Queen Elizabeth’s father) merchants and mariners had turned away from distant horizons and focused instead on opportunities nearer to home, trading with Europe and countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Other

The Marbleheaders were one of the first and most diverse regiments in the colonies and, later, the army.

Hizballah, which grew out of the Lebanese maelstrom, became a deadly foe of the United States and Israel. In considering its rise, few have noted that many of the young men who founded the movement and carried out its lethal attacks on American and Israeli targets had fought alongside the PLO in 1982. They had remained after the PLO fighters left, only to see hundreds of their fellow Shi‘ites massacred alongside the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila. The people killed in the US Embassy bombing, the Marines who died in their barracks, and the many other Americans kidnapped or assassinated in Beirut—among them Malcolm Kerr and several of my colleagues and friends at the AUB—largely victims of attacks by the groups that became Hizballah, paid the price for the perceived collusion between their country and the Israeli occupier.

Most colony planets were like this, always raining. Maybe it had something to do with the ingredients for life or maybe it was because humans loved misery, but it rained a lot on most human-occupied planets.

The Mariner’s Officers Club was a classy place and much the same as the one I had heard about in Cape Town. Complete with “linen service” it was about as good as it gets. The Monkey Gland Steak… Not to worry, it’s only a name; no monkeys are a part of this tangy sauce that is a delicious blend of fruit and splices. The sauce can also be used as a marinade. As far as I know it is not on the market but can be made by frying minced onions, garlic and ginger in coconut oil until the onions are translucent. Pour this over your favorite steak or hamburger for an exciting taste treat. From here we took a taxi to the Smuggler’s Inn which was in a British Colonial Style building on Point Road. Although the area that the nightclub was in was considered part of the red light district it was a popular Avant guarde area where the younger in crowd of Durban would go. With upbeat music in the days prior to rock & roll it was a lot of fun. The bottom end of Point Road Mahatma Gandhi Road at night was always a hive of activity with Smugglers leading the way as an offbeat entertainment center. Before returning to Kerstin’s flat we had the driver take us to the end of the point where we could find the newest nightclubs with strip shows, music, dancing. We even witnessed a slug fest between some guys, known as a raut. For us it was a hoot and lots of fun but I’m certain that they were black & blue for days. Kerstin told me that many of the participants of these fights could be expected to show up at Dr. Acharya’s practice the following Monday. Returning to her apartment we enjoyed the rest of the evening in bed. At six o’clock the taxi I had called was waiting curbside. I considered how lucky I was to have connected with Kerstin but I still didn’t know much about her. Why did this beautiful girl come into my life? It was a mystery without an answer!

According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, 'There lies out in the deep off Libya [Africa] an island of considerable size, and situated as it is in the ocean it is a distant from Libya a voyage of a number of days to the west. Its land is fruitful, much of it being mountainous and not a little being a level plain of surpassing beauty. Through it flow navigable rivers ...' Diodorus goes on to tell us how Phoenician mariners, blown off course in a storm, had discovered this Atlantic island with navigable rivers quite by chance. Soon its value was recognized and its fate became the subject of dispute between Tyre and Carthage, two of the great Phoenician cities in the Mediterranean: 'The Tyrians ... purposed to dispatch a colony to it, but the Carthaginians prevented their doing so, partly out of concern lest many inhabitants of Carthage should remove there because of the excellence of the island, and partly in order to have ready in it a place in which to seek refuge against an incalculable turn of fortune, in case some total disaster should overtake Carthage. For it was their thought that since they were masters of the sea, they would thus be able to move, households and all, to an island which was unknown to their conquerors.' Since there are no navigable rivers anywhere to the west of Africa before the seafarer reaches Cuba, Haiti and the American continent, does this report by Diodorus rank as one of the earliest European notices of the New World?

Aphasia is a condition in which the occlusion of knowledge is at once a dismembering of words from the objects to which they refer, a difficulty retrieving both the semantic and lexical components of vocabularies, a loss of access that may verge on active dissociation, a difficulty comprehending what is seen and spoken. Colonial aphasia as conceived here is a political condition whose genealogy is embedded in the space that has allowed Marine Le Pen and her broad constituency to move from the margin and extreme—where her father was banished—to a normalized presence in contemporary France. But colonial aphasia is not peculiar to France.

I think often about the consequences of colonialism within a threatened group. The cost of losing almost everything. The impact of military normalcy. The multiple violences we endure. What if the path to conservation of any of species remaining on the planet is demilitarization? What is the solidarity, evolutionary sistering, ancestral imperative called for in this moment where US colonial territories are in active refusal? What does it look like to be intolerant of colonialism? What life would spring up, what recovery is possible if the colonial force actually shuts down? I’m asking for a sister of mine, wherever she is now. Three million years ago she taught me something about us. I haven’t forgotten. We deserve to be free.