Settlers Quotes

“Amerika is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities. Truly, a Babylon “whose life was death.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

“In 1858 Engels sarcastically described the tamed
British workers in the bluntest terms: "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so
that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming
ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and
a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a na- tion which exploits the whole world this is to a certain ex- tent justifiable." (2) Britain was the Imperial Rome, the
Amerikan Empire of that day - a nation which "feasted"
on the exploitation of colonies around the entire world.
Engels, as a communist, didn't make lame excuses for the
corrupted English workers, but exposed them. He held the
English workers accountable to the world proletariat for
their sorry political choices.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

“Like Bacon’s Rebellion, the “liberty” that the Amerikan Revolutionists of the 1770s fought for was in large part the freedom to conquer new Indian lands and profit from the commerce of the slave trade, without any restrictions or limitations.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw that the “mean whites” (as they called them) of the South were hopeless politically. They felt that nothing could be done with them but to render them powerless until they died out of old age. This was not a unique observation. Wendell Phillips, the great Radical abolitionist, bluntly pleaded in 1870: “Now is the time … to guarantee the South against the possible domination or the anger of the white race. We adhere to our opinion that nothing, or not much, except hostility, can be expected of two-thirds of the adult white men. They will go to their graves unchanged. No one of them should ever again be trusted with political rights. And all the elemental power of civilization should be combined and brought into play to counterwork the anger and plots of such foes.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

“It was this alone that drew so many Europeans to colonial North Amerika: the dream in the settler mind of each man becoming a petty lord of his own land. Thus, the tradition of individualism and egalitarianism in Amerika was rooted in the poisoned concept of equal privileges for a new nation of European conquerors.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

“Traditionally, European settler societies throw off the propaganda smokescreen that they didn't really conquer and dispossess other nations—they claim with false modesty that they merely moved into vacant territory! So the early English settlers depicted Amerika as empty—"a howling wilderness," "unsettled," "sparsely populated"—just waiting with a "VACANT" sign on the door for the first lucky civilization to walk in and claim it. Theodore Roosevelt wrote defensively in 1900: "...the settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages."

It is telling that this lie is precisely the same lie put forward by the white "Afrikaner" settlers, who claim that South Africa was literally totally uninhabited by any Afrikans when they arrived from Europe. To universal derision, these European settlers claim to be the only rightful, historic inhabitants of South Afrika. Or we can hear similar defenses put forward by European settlers of Israel, who claim that much of the Palestinian land and buildings they occupy are rightfully theirs, since the Arabs allegedly decided to voluntarily abandon it all during the 1948-49 war. Are these kind of tales any less preposterous when put forward by Euro-Amerikan settlers?”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

“There is nothing mystical, elusive or hidden about real working class consciousness. It is the political awareness that the exploiting class and its state must be fought, that the laboring masses of the world have unity in their need for socialism. The Red Army is class consciousness. An action for higher wages or better working conditions need not embody any real class consciousness whatsoever. Narrow self-interest is not the same as consciousness of class interests. "More for me" is not the same slogan as "liberate humanity.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

“Where land was not available, settlers refused to come. Period. This is why the British West Indies, with their favorable climate, were less attractive to these settlers than wintry New England.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

“Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn’t built, and “annex,” so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

“It was only possible for settler society to afford this best-paid, most bourgeoisified white workforce because they had also obtained the least-paid, most proletarian Afrikan colony to support it.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

“While the cream of the profits went to the planter and merchant capitalists, the entire settler economy was raised up on a foundation of slave labor, slave products, and the slave trade.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern