In The Penal Colony Quotes

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

You can never want too much. That’s how they silence us,” I said. “They told us we were lucky to be in the penal colony instead of the æther. Lucky to be murdered with NiteKind, not the noose. Lucky to be alive, even if we weren’t free. They told us to stop wanting more than what they gave us, because what they gave us was more than we deserved.” I picked up my jacket. “You’re not a prisoner any more, Arcturus.” Warden looked at me in silence. I left him in that ruined hall with the music echoing above him.

You've seen yourself how difficult the writing is to decipher with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.

Guilt is never to be doubted.

Many questions were troubling the explorer, but at the sight of the prisoner he asked only: "Does he know his sentence?" "No," said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted him: "He doesn't know the sentence that has been passed on him?" "No," said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: "There would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his body.

Human existence is a penal colony; a sexually transmitted disease; a disappointment; nothing but suffering; “a sky-dive: out of a cunt into the grave”; a one-way ticket to the crematorium. “Nobody gets out of here alive”. Every day is a grim passage, a struggle through moments and hours of loneliness, boredom, emptiness, and self-loathing. I count myself among the pessimists. I believe that life is suffering. I force myself (my contraself) to look at other positions, but this remains my default. More specifically, I am a depressive realist.

As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way. This outlook will enable us to view the so-called imperfections of the majority of men, i.e., their moral and intellectual shortcomings and the facial appearance resulting therefrom, without surprise and certainly without indignation: for we shall always bear in mind where we are and consequently regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.

This planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave.

Enlightenment comes to even the dimmest. It begins around the eyes, and it spreads outward from there- a sight that might tempt one to lie down under the harrow oneself.

It's always questionable to intervene decisively in strange circumstances.

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

The corpses in the wasteland of past and present haunt us. We are still in Eliot's land of the dead, imprisoned in Kafka's penal colony, running from the unexplained rage of the golem, listening to Lovecraft's drumbeat of horror, and shivering in the chilly shadow of Grau and Murnau's Nosferatu. We cannot awaken from history.

Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.

How could a man not be sickened when the felt in his mouth had been gnawed and drooled on by more than a hundred men as they lay dying?

India’s rape law, enshrined in the colonial-era Indian Penal Code, placed the burden of the victim to establish her ‘good character’ and prove that a rape had occurred, which left her open to discredit by opposing counsel. Many rapes were never reported as a result of the humiliation to which this system subjected the victims.

One of his favorites was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a novel about a lunar penal colony.

But the condemned man looked so submissively doglike that it seemed as if he might have been allowed to run free on the slopes and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin.

If there was a God up there, which there wasn’t, why was it that he worked so hard to identify whatever thing a man dreaded most, and, having identified it, why did he always, always, vindictively succeed in making that very thing come to pass?

He had never told her just what he thought of the value of prayer and all the rest of the self-deluding mumbo jumbo with which otherwise rational people tried to humanize the cosmos. Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around.

Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia ? I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.

Cascar una nuez no es realmente un arte, y en consecuencia nadie se atrevería a congregar un auditorio para entretenerle cascando nueces. Pero si lo hace y logra su propósito, entonces ya no se trata meramente de cascar nueces. O tal vez se trate meramente de cascar nueces, pero entonces descubrimos que nos hemos despreocupado totalmente de dicho arte porque lo dominábamos demasiado, y este nuevo cascador de nueces nos muestra por primera vez la esencia real del arte, al punto de que podría convenirle, para un mayor efecto, ser un poco menos hábil en cascar nueces que la mayoría de nosotros.

His wounds, incidentally, must have healed up by now, he felt no handicap anymore, which was astonishing; for, as recalled, after he had nicked his finger with a knife over a month ago, the injury had still been hurting the day before yesterday. "Am I less sensitive now?" he wondered, greedily sucking at the cheese, which had promptly exerted a more emphatic attraction on him than any of the other food. His eyes watered with contentment as he gulped down the cheese, the vegetables, and the sauce in rapid succession. By contrast, he did not relish the fresh foods, he could not even stand their smells, and he actually dragged the things he wanted to eat a short distance away.

Melesio tweezed his facial hairs, then ran ether-soaked cotton over his face, so his skin was the texture of silk; he took pains with his long-fingered, slender hands, and every night brushed his hair one hundred times. He was tall, with strong bones, but he moved with such delicacy that he gave the impression of being fragile. He never talked about his family and it would be years later, during his time in the penal colony on Santa María, that La Señora learned anything about his past. His father had been a bear of a man who had emigrated from Sicily and who every time he found his son playing with his sister’s toys gave him a beating accompanied by cries of Ricchione! Pederasta! Mascalzone!

So now you know what else existed in the world outside of you, before you knew only about yourself!

And Ireland itself? Is the largest open-air penal colony in history

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.

By his own account he had no real contact with the local colony of his countrymen and virtually no social intercourse with the Russian families and so resigned himself to becoming an incurable bachelor.

Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?

Chinese authorities have placed as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Hui into a system of medium- to maximum-security “reeducation” camps since 2017—making it the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II.

Well, anyway- then came the sixth hour! It was not possible to grant every request to watch from close-up. In his wisdom, the commandant decreed that children should be given first priority. By virtue of my office, of courser, I was always nearby; often I was squatting there with a small child in either arm. How we drank in the transfigured look on the sufferer's face, how we bathed our cheeks in the warmth of that justice- achieved at long last and fading quickly. What times those were, my comrade!

On the mainland he had always lived in the future, always looking forward to the completion of the project in hand. When he passed his exams, got the new contract, married Louise, paid off the mortgage: when, in turn, each of these dreams was realized, then, and only then, would he be happy. All were ends, to be reached by any means expedient or possible. He saw now that there were no such things as ends, only means: for ends were phantoms that melted away when approached, only to reform into other ends further off.

But Georg was not inclined to write of his commercial success to his friend, and were he to do so now, it would appear especially peculiar. So Georg always confined himself to relating the trivial matters that randomly arise from a disorganized memory on a reflective Sunday.

The chief care of the legislators [in the colonies of New England] was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: thus they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which was no subject to magisterial censure. The reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. The judge was empowered to inflict either a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage, on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not unfrequent. We find a sentence, bearing date the 1st of May, 1660, inflicting a fine and reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed. The Code of 1650 abounds in preventive measures. It punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity. Innkeepers were forbidden to furnish more than certain quantities of liquor to each customer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious, is checked by a fine or a flogging. In other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself demanded in Europe, makes attendance on divine service compulsory, and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment, and even with death, Christians who choose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own. Sometimes, indeed, the zeal for regulation induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco. It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested in them, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and puritanical than the laws.... These errors are no doubt discreditable to human reason; they attest the inferiority of our nature, which is incapable of laying firm hold upon what is true and just, and is often reduced to the alternative of two excesses. In strict connection with this penal legislation, which bears such striking marks of a narrow, sectarian spirit, and of those religious passions which had been warmed by persecution and were still fermenting among the people, a body of political laws is to be found, which, though written two hundred years ago, is still in advance of the liberties of our own age.

The man who exulted under torture, who hurled curses at God and beauty, who hardened himself in the harsh atmosphere of crime, now only wants to marry someone "with a future." The mage, the seer, the convict who lived perpetually in the shadow of the penal colony, the man-king on a godless earth, always carried seventeen pounds of gold in a belt worn uncomfortably round his stomach, which he complained gave him dysentery.

At this point, almost against his will, he looked at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in his life. He could discover no sign of the promised transfiguration. What all the others had found in the machine, the Officer had not. His lips were pressed firmly together, his eyes were open and looked as they had when he was alive, his gaze was calm and convinced. The tip of a large iron needle had gone through his forehead.

We may be able to filter out certain undesirable tendencies through genetics, chemical treatments, beta scans, we deter with penal colonies and the absence of freedom. But human nature remains human nature.” “Those basic motives for violence that science is unable to filter: love, hate, greed, envy, anger.” “They separate us from the droids, don’t they?” “And make us susceptible to joy, sorrow, and passion. That’s a debate for the scientists and the intellectuals.

Those who carry out the penalty tend to become an autonomous sector; justice is relieved of responsibility for it by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself. It is typical that in France the administration of the prisons should for so long have been the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior, while responsibility for the bagnes, for penal servitude in the convict ships and penal settlements, lay with the Ministry of the Navy or the Ministry of the Colonies.

The crimes with which they are charged—the crime of having lost one’s face, the crime of shutting off the roadway to others, the crime of having lost understanding of others’ agonies and joys, the crime of having lost the fear and joy of discovering unknown things in others, the crime of having forgotten one’s duty to create for others, the crime of having lost a music heard together—these are crimes which express contemporary human relations, and thus the whole world assumes the form of a single penal colony.

Should he be advised to come home, to transplant his life and resume all the old friendships- nothing prevented this- and generally rely on the help of friends? But all this would mean to him, and the more tactfully it was put the more offensive it would be, was that his every effort had been for naught, and he should finally abandon them, that he should return home and suffer being viewed by everyone as the prodigal returned forever, that only his friends had any understanding of things, and that he was a big child who must simply listen to those friends who had remained home and been successful.

Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading

So how did it come to this? Why did the Australian government have to provide a protection visa for José on the grounds that a religious organisation it deems a tax-exempt charity had trafficked him? How could a church that claims to believe in freedom and human rights enslave and traffic its members? How could a church that in its own religious creed says ‘that all men have inalienable rights to their own lives’ separate a loving couple who wanted to get married and have a child, and force the woman to have an abortion? How could a church use Australia as a penal colony in the 21st century? To understand the madness of modern-day Scientology, you need to go back to the source, and the thinking that marked its very beginning.

Mass culture is Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth.

It is a relic of colonialism. In many commonwealth countries, former colonies, and English protectorates, state homophobia was left over from the British Empire: Section 377 was a part of the penal code that England imposed on its colonies in 1860. It was a sort of umbrella crime covering everything, especially homosexuality and bestiality; it took into account neither the consent nor the age of the partners, which made it impossible to legitimately distinguish homosexuality, rape, and pedophilia. The British crudely implemented this provision first in India, where the Indian Penal Code would become the colonial matrix, and then, based on Indian law, throughout the British Empire in Asia, Australia, and Africa as the colonizers advanced. Today one can still find that famous Section 377 almost intact in ten Asian countries and fifteen Anglophone African countries.

Of course it was not only the Bourbons’ mistakes which helped decide Napoleon to risk everything to try to regain his throne. Emperor Francis’s refusal to allow his wife and son to rejoin him was another, and the fact that his expenses were running at two and a half times his income. There was also sheer ennui; he complained to Campbell of being ‘shut up in this cell of a house, separated from the world, with no interesting occupation, no savants with me, nor any variety in my society’.88† Another consideration was paragraphs in the newspapers and rumours from the Congress of Vienna that the Allies were planning forcibly to remove him from Elba. Joseph de Maistre, the French ambassador to St Petersburg, had nerve-wrackingly suggested the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay as a possible destination. The exceptionally remote British island of St Helena in the mid-Atlantic had also been mentioned.

Everything has already been caught, until my death, in an icefloe of being: my trembling when a piece of rough trade asks me to brown him (I discover that his desire is his trembling) during a Carnival night; at twilight, the view from a sand dune of Arab warriors surrendering to French generals; the back of my hand placed on a soldier's basket, but especially the sly way in which the soldier looked at it; suddenly I see the ocean between two houses in Biarritz; I am escaping from the reformatory, taking tiny steps, frightened not at the idea of being caught but of being the prey of freedom; straddling the enormous prick of a blond legionnaire, I am carried twenty yards along the ramparts; not the handsome football player, nor his foot, nor his shoe, but the ball, then ceasing to be the ball and becoming the “kick-off,” and I cease being that to become the idea that goes from the foot to the ball; in a cell, unknown thieves call me Jean; when at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind's heaven. Some negroes are giving me food on the Bordeaux docks; a distinguished poet raises my hands to his forehead; a German soldier is killed in the Russian snows and his brother writes to inform me; a boy from Toulouse helps me ransack the rooms of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers of my regiment in Brest: he dies in prison; I am talking of someone–and while doing so, the time to smell roses, to hear one evening in prison the gang bound for the penal colony singing, to fall in love with a white-gloved acrobat–dead since the beginning of time, that is, fixed, for I refuse to live for any other end than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext.

As in Kafka's "Penal Colony", the accused was in this case denied any clarification as to the nature of her offenses. This omission, however, contained a message: "If you don't even know why you have earned this punishment, then it is clear that you are quite without conscience. Look within. Search. Try. Then your conscience will tell you what guilt you have brought upon yourself. Only then can you try to excuse yourself. Then, if you are lucky, you may be forgiven. But that depends on the mood of the powers-that-be.

And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.

What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, ‘The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.’ We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty.” Nadya

The racism of the colonial state was also reflected in its penal code. The Criminal Tribes Legislation, 1911, gave authority to the British to restrict movement, search and even detain people from specific groups, because their members were deemed to be chronically engaging in ‘criminal’ activity. This was bad sociology and worse law, but it stayed on the books till after Independence. Worse, its effects were inhumane.

White women’s presence, coupled with repressive Victorian sexuality, ensured that there would be no shacking up with once-tantalizing Indian lovers. But for the Irish and working-class British sailors and soldiers who kept the Empire running, the administration allowed them sex to release their animal urges. Registers were created. Women and femmes were forced to reside in the Lal Bazaars, red-light districts organized around fucking British men. Damned by an extensive patramyth: literature, surveys, calls for social reform, colonial registers, and codified laws that policed Dalit and Muslim bodies. The 1868 Contagious Diseases Act gave authorities permission to go after women suspected as prostitutes—they could be gynecologically examined without consent, arrested, detained, sent away to be worked to death in a penal colony. An 1881 Census in Bengal declared all unmarried women fifteen and older prostitutes.

Page 311: Moreover, within the economic sphere there are no common standards of conduct beyond those prescribed by law. The European has his own standard of decency as to what, even in business, ‘is not done’; so also have the Chinese, the Indian and the native [of Burma]. All have their own ideas as to what is right and proper, but on this matter they have different ideas, and the only idea common to all members of all sections is the idea of gain. In a homogeneous society the desire of profit is controlled to some extent by social will, and if anyone makes profits by sharp practice, he will offend the social conscience and incur moral, and perhaps legal, penalties. If, for example, he employs sweated labour, the social conscience, if sufficiently alert and powerful, may penalize him because aware, either instinctively or by rational conviction, that such conduct cuts at the root of common social life. But in the tropics the European who, from humanitarian motives or through enlightened self-interest, treats his employees well, risks being forced out of business by Indians or Chinese with different standards. The only deterrent to unsocial conduct in production is the legal penalty to which those are liable who can be brought to trial and convicted according to the rules of evidence of infringing some positive law. In supply as in demand, in production as in consumption, the abnormal activity of economic forces, free of social restrictions, is an essential character of a plural society.

The Lord Ruler got that atium somewhere. What if he just goes and mines some more?” Ham nodded. “No one even knows where the atium mine is.” “I wouldn’t say no one,” Kelsier said with a smile. Breeze and Ham shared a look. “You know?” Ham asked. “Of course,” Kelsier said. “I spent a year of my life working there.” “The Pits?” Ham asked with surprise. Kelsier nodded. “That’s why the Lord Ruler makes certain nobody survives working there—he can’t afford to let his secret out. It’s not just a penal colony, not just a hellhole where skaa are sent to die. It’s a mine.

waivers so they could go, too." "Evensun? The penal colony

I can't fashion myself into a different person who might be better suited to be his friend.

Second, a large portion of the first generations of settlers were the criminal element of England who had a choice between immediate execution or exile in the wilderness of America. Georgia was a penal colony of the British crown and the first families of Georgia for many generations were descendants of whores and footpads of the Old World. There was not, therefore, an inbred respect for the law or human rights that we today attribute to the Founding Fathers. A

It was officially known as Kwan-li-so Number 18. That meant Penal Labor Colony in Korean. It was a concentration camp. It was a gulag. It actually was hell, near the Taedong River in North Korea's P'yongan-namdo province.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that then they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.

When you take all these voices together, the dimensions of the jail are no trifling matter. But that is to be expected. The crimes with which they are charged—the crime of having lost one’s face, the crime of shutting off the roadway to others, the crime of having lost understanding of others’ agonies and joys, the crime of having lost the fear and joy of discovering unknown things in others, the crime of having forgotten one’s duty to create for others, the crime of having lost a music heard together—these are crimes which express contemporary human relations, and thus the whole world assumes the form of a single penal colony. Even so, the anguish at my being a prisoner remains unchanged.

He realized that his appearance was still constantly intolerable and must remain intolerable in the future.

Was he really eager to let the warm room, comfortably furnished with pieces he had inherited, be turned into a cavern in which he would, of course, then be able to crawl about in all directions without disturbance, but at the same time with a quick and complete forgetting of his human past as well?

We can set up sun parasols over the chairs to shield us while we have our drinks.” “That sounds very nice.” Perveen would have preferred to speak to Cora away from the villa. She hadn’t felt safe when she’d met the nawab. “Shall we go up to the veranda and tell Oshadi?” “Just a sec.” Cora went back into the cabana through the open door and came out with the cowbell. Swiftly, she loped a hundred feet or so toward the house and rang the bell vigorously. After a moment, a young man in blue began running down the lawn toward them. Using her hands, Cora instructed him to drag the chairs close to where water lapped the sand and raise the umbrellas. The only words she spoke were about choices of drinks. To Perveen, she said, “I like my orange juice with a splash of champagne. How about you?” “I’m a dreadful bore,” Perveen apologized. “Because of this heat, I’m craving plain water.” “Any ice?” Cora asked. “A luxury indeed!” Perveen said with a nod, repeating the same to the young man. They settled in their chairs as the manservant went off. There was an awkward silence, so Perveen began. “Let me just say that I’m sorry about the last time we were together. I felt wretched after I spoke with you at my office.” “Have you changed your mind about representing me, then?” Perveen hesitated, because she couldn’t lie outright. “I would like to know more about the hospital committee from you. In the brief time I spoke with your husband, he mentioned that there wasn’t enough support from the women’s husbands. I want to know who is involved at this point.” And who might have attended the party where Sunanda was attacked. The begum bit her lip, smearing a bit of red onto the bottom of a front tooth. “You’ll have to ask them yourself, because they won’t answer my calls.” “Do you mean—the ladies on the committee?” “Of course!” Cora’s voice was impatient. “My title might be Princess, but the white ladies in this town have made it clear I’m from the wrong place.” “Australia is respected enough by Britain to have had dominion status since 1901!” Perveen didn’t add that she thought the privilege had been given to Australia, rather than India, because of racism. “I keep my mouth shut around them about my own family, just as I do about my dancing and singing career,” Cora said glumly. “So it must be that they are thinking about Australia being founded as a penal colony. Australia is where men are supposed to go for horses—but not wives.” “Look, there’s the bearer coming!” Perveen said. After the bearer had handed off their drinks, she told Cora, “I also felt like an outsider at the tea party. I heard

A French writer has paid the English a very well-deserved compliment. He says that they never commit a useless crime. When they hire a man to assassinate an Irish patriot, when they blow a Sepoy from the mouth of a cannon, when they produce a famine in one of their dependencies, they have always an ulterior motive. They do not do it for fun. Humorous as these crimes are, it is not the humour of them, but their utility, that appeals to the English. Unlike Gilbert’s Mikado, they would see nothing humorous in boiling oil. If they retained boiling oil in their penal code, they would retain it, as they retain flogging before execution in Egypt, strictly because it has been found useful. This observation will help one to an understanding of some portions of the English administration of Ireland. The English administration of Ireland has not been marked by any unnecessary cruelty. Every crime that the English have planned and carried out in Ireland has had a definite end. Every absurdity that they have set up has had a grave purpose. The Famine was not enacted merely from a love of horror. The Boards that rule Ireland were not contrived in order to add to the gaiety of nations. The Famine and the Boards are alike parts of a profound polity.

The system is premised on a rhetoric of a war on Muslim “terrorism” that the Chinese state has imported from the US and its allies post–September 11, 2001. As recently as 2017, Xinjiang authorities hosted British counter-terrorism experts as part of a diplomatic exchange called “Countering the root causes of violent extremism undermining growth and stability in China’s Xinjiang Region by sharing UK best practice.” In the Chinese context, countering violent extremism—something that British experts refer to simply as Prevent—is premised on detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims deemed “untrustworthy” in camps and prisons, and placing still other Muslim adults in jobs far from their homes.

What is happening in Northwest China is connected to camps at the southern border of the United States, digital control in Kashmir, and checkpoints in the West Bank, but its scale and cruelty takes it beyond those other sites of exceptional power over marginalized populations.

Chinese government documents show that in some Uyghur-majority areas, as many as 70 percent of children up through age five are now held in Mandarin-medium “Kindness Kindergartens” while their parents are in prisons, camps, or factories.

Because the authorities have forced all residents of Xinjiang to register for a new state-issued ID card, they have a base library of high-definition images of each person’s face, and in addition, they have collected tens of millions of images of the faces of residents who pass through the checkpoints. The Face++ and similar algorithms such as those from companies like YITU and Sensetime run extremely fast. As the Shawan study notes, in 0.8 seconds it can run a match of a face, and register and record notification alarms related to up to three hundred thousand targeted people.

They built an iron gate, high electric fence, and four watchtowers around the Kazakh school,” he recalled. “If we found anyone suspicious through the ID checks, they would send them to the Kazakh school. They had suddenly turned it into a prison. They forced all of the people who had been visiting mosques, praying, or wearing headscarves to go to that school.

Turkic Muslims understand that in a time of reeducation they are subject to the gaze of the system. Anyone can be an informant; no one is a guaranteed ally; and the algorithms of cameras and scanners are always on. In this context, for ethnoracial minorities, there appears to be no space that is fully outside state power.

Across the entire region, the Civil Affairs Ministry had embarked on a “Zero Illegal Births” campaign. She herself, at age forty-seven, was forced to have regular inspections of a new IUD that state workers had forced her to implant. State documents show that women of childbearing age who did not submit to surgical sterilization or IUD implantation and regular inspections would not be added to the list of “trustworthy” citizens. Illegal pregnancies were to be “disposed of early”—a reference to forced abortions.

Since the camp system began, in some areas of Southern Xinjiang, birth rates among Uyghurs have plummeted by between 50 and 80 percent due in part to these restrictions on Muslim reproductive rights.

An internal police report noted that visiting a mosque “more than two hundred times” would result in a Muslim being sent “for education” in the camps. In the mosque featured in the report, this threat—along with a face-scan checkpoint at the entrance of the mosque—had precipitated a 96 percent drop in attendance in a single year.

As I listened to them, I came to the unsettling conclusion that the dehumanization they experienced was created at least in part in computer labs from Seattle to Beijing.

The pioneers were prepared to suffer hardship in order to get a foothold in the Australia they were in the process of building... Within a half century of settlement, the foundations of a British civilization had been laid down on a continent which was months removed by sea from its cultural origins. The fact that one aspect of this civilization was that of a penal colony did not stop the determined drive of many citizens to shape a free society.

New South Wales did not begin as a penal colony; it is better to think of it beginning as a colony of convicts... Why wasn't early New South Wales a penal colony? The short answer is that British officials in 1786 could not conceive of such a beast: a society of wardens and prisoners designed for punishment and control, as the French ran much later on Devil's Island.

He wanted to push against the feet while the other two men grabbed the head at the opposite end so that the officer could be eased off the needles. But the two men could not make up their minds to come over; the prisoner even turned away. The traveler had to go over and violently shove them toward the officer’s head. In so doing, he reluctantly saw the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign of the promised redemption was perceptible; the officer has not found what all the others had found in the machine. His lips were squeezed tight, his eyes were open, with the same expression as in life, his gaze was calm and convinced, the point of the large iron spike had passed through his forehead.

But as the correspondence progresses, it becomes obvious that now, unlike earlier with his mother, he can perceive and articulate his needs more and more clearly, that although he is in constant danger of subordinating his need to be a writer and to be alone to bourgeois ideals of familial happiness, he never succumbs to this danger. In the end, he knows he can never give up his writing without giving up himself, and he accepts the consequences. Since it is not possible for him to go on writing in the world from which he comes without suffering from guilt feelings, he pays for his decision by becoming ill. 5. Kafka's insight into the origins of his tuberculosis can help us in our attempts to understand psychosomatic illnesses and their societal context. Don't we as therapists make it difficult for patients to live their own lives if we have preconceived ideas about what constitutes happiness, psychic health, social commitment, altruism and goodness in a person? According to these conventional standards, still very prevalent today, Franz Kafka was a neurotic or an eccentric, whom a psychotherapist would be tempted to "socialize" in order to enable him to marry Felice. One of my goals in this chapter is to make clear how absurd such an attempt would be. A visionary of rare greatness and dept came into being, and it is obvious that his attempts to adhere to bourgeois norms were bound to fail. Whether humankind cares to pay heed or not, the prophetic power of "In the Penal Colony" endures (...) because he took his own experiences seriously and thought them through to their bitter end. Advocates of manipulative strategies in psychotherapy could counter my views by saying that not everyone has the talent of a Franz Kafka and that most people seek help because they would like to get along better with others, because they suffer from their symptoms, want to improve their relationships, cannot being themselves to marry, and the like. I would reply that these were precisely the complains Kafka had. It would be disastrous, however, not to perceive the longing to find one's true self inherent in these complains.

In the last two decades, Stern and Helen had their share of friends relocate to Florida to escape state income and inheritance taxes up north. As far as Stern is concerned, no amount of money is worth the change. With swamps and alligators inland, and the gated communities and shopping malls in the traffic-clotted towns along the coasts, the state seems to Stern like a giant penal colony for America's elderly, where the residents--like characters in a famous play--have all been blinded by the sun and do not realize they are actually in hell.

Officially, Australia was begun as a penal colony, but I have long suspected this to be a lie. More likely, there was an extra question on the 1785 census: can you speak English? Any man who responded, 'Of course I can,' was welcome to stay. Any man who said, 'Wolla! Ronza turolla rei,' found himself with a bag over his head, being trotted onto a prison transport with no recourse to further appeal.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Page 311: Moreover, within the economic sphere there are no common standards of conduct beyond those prescribed by law. The European has his own standard of decency as to what, even in business, ‘is not done’; so also have the Chinese, the Indian and the native [of Burma]. All have their own ideas as to what is right and proper, but on this matter they have different ideas, and the only idea common to all members of all sections is the idea of gain. In a homogeneous society the desire of profit is controlled to some extent by social will, and if anyone makes profits by sharp practice he will offend the social conscience and incur moral, and perhaps legal, penalties. If, for example, he employs sweated labour, the social conscience, if sufficiently alert and powerful, may penalize him because aware, either instinctively or by rational conviction, that such conduct cuts at the root of common social life. But in the tropics the European who, from humanitarian motives or through enlightened self-interest, treats his employees well, risks being forced out of business by Indians or Chinese with different standards. The only deterrent to unsocial conduct in production is the legal penalty to which those are liable who can be brought to trial and convicted according to the rules of evidence of infringing some positive law. In supply as in demand, in production as in consumption, the abnormal activity of economic forces, free of social restrictions, is an essential character of a plural society.

... the Poor Laws institutionalized a distinction between the ‘impotent poor’, the ‘able-bodied poor’ and the ‘idle poor’. While the ‘impotent’ and ‘able-bodied poor’ were offered some means of either indoor or outdoor relief, the feared ‘idle poor’ were disciplined through a combination of physical punishment, incarceration in Houses of Correction or prisons, conscription into the military or navy, transportation to a penal colony, and/or other means.

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where “life” is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime. The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. You, not I, are being frightened and deprived of the will to resist. You are being forced to surrender your country without a fight to the gang of traitors, thieves, and scoundrels who have seized power. Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.