G Steele > G's Quotes

“The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“for a language to acquire retroflexion is for it to become South Asian.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“In a grandiose sweep that demolished history itself, Sanskrit was put forward as the ancestor of not just this brand new ‘Shuddh’ Hindi, but the ‘Mother of all languages’. We still find otherwise thoughtful Indians asking: Well, if not Hindi, which other modern Indian language came directly from Sanskrit? It is hard to let go of a crutch we have grown up with—one every bit as powerful as the myth that all of us mixed people in the north are actually Ārya, or, more crudely put, The Master Race.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“More important than any ‘language problem’ is the need to protect the elite and keep it separate and more entitled than everyone else. English is the perfect tool for apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Nevertheless, Schlieffen decided, in the event of war, to attack France by way of Belgium.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“On the same day, the British chiefs were hurrying the BEF southward with such urgency that the soldiers were deprived of the rest they needed far more than they needed distance from the enemy. On that day, August 28, a day when von Kluck’s columns gave them no trouble, Sir John French and Wilson were in such anxiety to hasten the retreat that they ordered transport wagons to “throw overboard all ammunition and other impediments not absolutely required” and carry men instead. Discarding ammunition meant abandoning further battle. As the BEF was not fighting on British soil, its Commander was prepared to pull his forces out of the line regardless of the effect of withdrawal upon his ally. The French Army had lost the opening battle and was in a serious, even desperate, situation in which every division counted to prevent defeat. But it was neither broken through nor enveloped by the enemy; it was fighting hard, and Joffre was exhibiting every intention of fighting further. Nevertheless, Sir John French, succumbing to the belief that the danger was mortal, had determined that the BEF must be preserved from being involved in a French defeat.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August