Terra Nullius Quotes

In my dream I see the sea, the utterly calm sea. I see the coast, the utterly calm coast. When this utterly calm sea meets the utterly still coast, huge breakers are suddenly thrown up. Two sorts of stillness touch one and other and explode in roars and foam.

Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of ‘a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]’. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

The doppelganger nature of the country’s identity is embedded in the dualistic language used to describe it, in which everything is double and never singular: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Based on a fantasy of symmetrical power, this suturing together of two peoples implies conjoined twins in a state of unending struggle, an irresolvable sibling rivalry between the two peoples, both descended from Abraham. For Rooney, Israel as doppelganger exists on two levels. First, it is a doppelganger of the forms of chauvinistic European nationalisms that turned Jews into pariahs on the continent since well before the Inquisition. That was Zionism’s win-win pitch to anti-Semitic European powers: you get rid of your “Jewish problem” (i.e., Jews, who will leave your countries and migrate to Palestine), and Jews get a state of their own to mimic/twin the very forms of militant nationalism that had oppressed them for centuries. (This is why Zionism was so fiercely opposed by the members of the Bund, who believed that nationalism itself was their enemy and the wellspring of race hatred.) Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.

It is impossible to find a balance when you don’t even know the weights.

We have always been here We are still here We are not going anywhere

Can we feel contrition for other people's crimes? Can we feel contrition for crimes we have not committed personally, but have subsequently profited from? How can we formulate the criteria for contrition to make them applicable to collective responsibility for historical crimes? Perhaps like this: We freely admit that our predecessors have done wrong and that we are profiting from it. We ask forgiveness of those who were wronged and of their descendants. We promise to do our best to make amends to those who were wronged for the effects that still remain. The larger the collective, the more diluted the personal responsibility. The less intimate the contrition, the greater the risk that it will just be hollow ceremony.

You think you are smarter than us, you think your brains are bigger, you think we can't learn. We know more than you, we have stories and songs, we have art and culture. What do you have? You have guns and fury and hate. The war has so far been about guns and death. When you think we are defeated, the war will change. The next war will be about resilience and survival, culture and art. When that war begins you will discover you are not well armed. You have no art, your stories have no power.

He was not lost, he just didn't know where he was going; he was not lost, his destination was.

If a sigh is heard over a mobile phone anywhere on earth, it will also be heard in Alice Springs.

In the evening as I sit waiting for the news on the hotel owner’s radio, I hear a sea moving in the rise and fall of the interference. Above me, filled with a wonderful cool, roll the huge roaring breakers of space.

What souls they have, we will save. Whatever it is they use for brains we will educate it -' she smiled the self-satisfied smile the other sisters most likely hated though they should be scared to say it, '- whether they like it or not.

Characteristically contested and ambiguous, frontiers were zones of shifting alliance and unstable identity. Just as the spatial frontier was terra nullius to an imperial power and fit only for colonization, so the time frontier was a zone of worthless indolence in the eyes of moral reformer and capitalist alike. But to its inhabitants it was one in which economic activity yielded to an intensity of social life, of informal gatherings that reworked the multitude of networks and alliances on which life in small-scale communities depended.

A colonização britânica na Austrália foi justificada com a doutrina legal de terra nullius (“terra de ninguém”), que efetivamente apagou 50 mil anos de história aborígene.

Although the Calusas knew what to expect, Ponce de León knew very little about the land and people he meant to seize through the doctrine of terra nullius, “empty land” or “no-man’s-land.” In reality, Florida was home to some 350,000 Indians.1

I have walked my feet ragged to try to get home I have fought my heart broken to try to get home You took me from home you took me from me Because all that I am, I am in my country

Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.

Bannon pounds relentlessly at what he calls the Big Steal—the claim that Biden stole the 2020 election—while the Democrats call that the Big Lie. And it is a big lie, a dangerous one. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than “tax cuts create jobs”? Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher’s double whammy of “There is no alternative” and “There is no such thing as society”? Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest Destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery—the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia, and every other settler colonial state? If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes. It’s entirely possible that Bannon and Wolf’s war on reality is just what happens when so many of the big lies that built the modern world visibly crumble. As the house collapses, some people choose to take flight into full-blown fantasy, sure—but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us who were also born and raised in that house are guardians of the truth.

When Britain colonized Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it drew on a legal doctrine now known as terra nullius—“nobody’s land”—to justify its conquest and treat the indigenous population as if they didn’t exist or have any claims on the land.8 Today our societal attitude is one of tempus nullius: The future is seen as “nobody’s time,” an unclaimed territory that is similarly devoid of inhabitants.

In 1942 the Vatican issued bulls framing the Americas as terra nullius, and lands that were not under the control of the Christian faith were considered empty wastelands, up for grabs. This doctrine relied on the invention of Indigenous peoples as savages 'without society, sovereignty, or private property', too primitive to embody political authority, and justified European invasions. Terra nullius was a Christian 'law of nations', but it shaped the formation of international law, which has historically treated Indigenous peoples as sovereign nullius.

These supremacist ideas are not new; nor have they ever gone away. For those of us in the Anglosphere, they are deeply embedded in the legal basis for our nations’ very existence (from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to terra nullius). Their power has ebbed and flowed throughout our histories, depending on what immoral behaviors demanded ideological justification. And just as these toxic ideas surged when they were required to rationalize slavery, land theft, and segregation, they are surging once more now that they are needed to justify climate recalcitrance and the barbarism at our borders.

His last words were: “Oblivion that has no end.”135

I long for my mother’s smile. For one of my dad’s adventures. For my brother, my sister, my aunties, uncles and cousins. Friendliness and smiling are not part of the code of conduct here. There are no wall-to-wall smiles. Only the open-edged statement. Terra Nullius. I have got terra nullius of the brain. They have got terra nullius of the heart.