David

“La conquista no ocurrió, sino que comenzó hace 500 años, cuando se impuso una lógica económica basada en el lucro que continúa avanzando hasta hoy. Nosotros mismos, no los españoles de hace 500 años, somos los protagonistas de un experimento completamente nuevo, y muy riesgoso, en el trópico suramericano: la reducción sistemática de la diversidad. Durante milenios, los indígenas se adaptaron a la diversidad, tanto desde el punto de vista cultural como económico. Cada uno de los señalamientos que solemos hacer a los conquistadores del siglo XVI podríamos hacerlo a nuestra propia sociedad. Incluso, podríamos multiplicarlos.”
― Carl Henrik Langebaek, Antes de Colombia (País 360): Los primeros 14.000 años

“The world looks on as the strongest military power in the region, with its Apache helicopters, tanks and bulldozers, attacks an unarmed and defenseless population of civilians and impoverished refugees among whom small groups of poorly equipped militias try to make a brave but ineffective stand.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“International law can be accurately and fairly described as a derivative of a colonial order and therefore structurally detrimental to former colonies, peoples still under colonial domination and individuals who lack nationality or who, like refugees, have been forcibly removed from their state and can no longer invoke its protection.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a “Third World” in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural “semi-proletarianization,” the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums