Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally...

She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the...

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy – how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy...

People like De Buys, they astonish me with their courage – or perhaps it is a lack in them; they cannot imagine. I think that is one way to be not afraid: in a covered...

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a...

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere ‘fringe’ elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—’The Bloc of...

I really knew nothing about the dancing habits of the Scottish. But I wanted to help. “I could teach them Indian folk dances,” I offered, scrounging my mind for school dances in gaudy garments.”Well, I’m...

ma chère penchons sur les filons géologiques (my dear let us lean on geographical veins)

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...

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does...

Self-government is our right,” [Roger Casement] declared. “A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to...

When the media is controlled by people who runs the world, you are only going to get news that they want you to know. They will paint anther’s man country’s hero a tyrant, a dictator...

He was enraged and bitter and hoped for a personal meeting with Sarkozy where he would recount to him France’s colonial history in Africa and make him see reasons why her policy of assimilation was...

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant...

Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aun las más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.

Gandhiji was not born in freedom. All his life, except for a few months. lay within the framework of colonial rule. A good part of that life lay buried in prison cells. Yet he was...

A person has to ignore the larger social, economic, political, and religious climate of early North American colonialism to advance the Christian nation myth.

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for...

In fact, the anti-Muslim stance of much of Hindu nationalism can be construed as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power which could not be expressed directly because of the new legitimacy created within...

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who...

According to Okonkwo, the British via its indirect rule system ensured that Africans saw their native leaders as the demons who betrayed their people. He called it a demonocracy

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for...

Her beauty cannot be measured with standards of a colonized mind

The colonialist’s existence is so closely aligned with that of the colonized that he will never be able to overcome the argument which states that misfortune is good for something. With all his power he...

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...

[Taken from a BBC documentary]Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his...

Strange things are happening to us.’‘To our children.’‘They sayhe is looking for the spirit of Independence.’‘They say he is looking for himself.’‘For his ownspirit.’‘Which he lost when the white man came.

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of...

…colonialism in Africa was inevitable since the fittest and most creative person was the one that would be destined to lead.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I...

Les personnages de nos autres vies sont des fantômes que la littérature fait revivre.

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...

In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts...

Empire always overreaches itself and thus dies by its own hand victim of its own ambitions

The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.

How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can’t see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through...

Europeans would like to escape from their history, a “great” history written in letters of blood. But others, by the hundreds of millions, are taking it up for the first time, or coming back to...

a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which...

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another...

Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so the army is present. There would be no contradiction in that, if terror reigned everywhere in the world, but the colonizer enjoys, in...

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is...

Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools....

When you look at it objectively, that’s what most colonists do—they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits...

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down...

The question shouldn’t be, ‘Are we guilty about our Colonial past?’ it should be, ‘Why aren’t we more guilty about our corporate present?

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and...

Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have...

The oppressed peoples of the earth are not objects for the exquisite turmoil of European consciences. They are subjects from which to learn how to exercise political intelligence and action. Obviously, colonial arrogance is a...

Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer’s model of the world.