Global South Quotes

“But the real danger is that liberal environmentalists and feminists will strengthen the right by lending credibility to reactionary arguments. Adopting the argument that population growth causes global warming endorses the strongest argument the right has against the social and economic changes that are really needed to stop climate change and environmental destruction.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence.

The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“Peace reigned in Europe, but this was because domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.”
― Utsa Patnaik, The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry

“Far from being just part of the problem, the people of the South are leading the global fight against ecological destruction. They are our allies, not our enemies, and if we are serious about working with them, then no part of our work should involve efforts to turn immigrants from their countries away at our borders.

Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“The aid program that I am suggesting must not be used by the wealthy nations as a surreptitious means to control the poor nations. Such an approach would lead to a new form of paternalism and a neocolonialism which no self-respecting nation could accept. Ultimately, foreign aid programs must be motivated by a compassionate and committed effort to wipe poverty, ignorance and disease from the face of the earth. Money devoid of genuine empathy is like salt devoid of savor, good for nothing except to be trodden under foot of men.

The West must enter into the program with humility and penitence and a sober realization that everything will not always “go our way.” It cannot be forgotten that the Western powers were but yesterday the colonial masters. The house of the West is far from in order, and its hands are far from clean.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Destruction of privacy via surveillance programs engineered by Great Powers widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling elite and everyone else. Its impact on global south will be colossal.”
― Arzak Khan

“Children of South (World Sonnet)

Africa is not a charity case,
Colombia is not a charity case,
Bolivia is not a charity case,
Venezuela is not a charity case,

Mexico is not a charity case,
Philippines is not a charity case,
Thailand is not a charity case,
India is not a charity case -

the global south is not a charity case,
it's rich with both mind and minerals.
Human poverty in the global south is
manufactured by the northern apes.

Awake, Arise, O Children of South,
you got more brain, heart and backbone
than all old and new colonials combined.
Humans of Earth everywhere, all rise 'n roar,
the first global goal is to fire the fascists.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Fully compatible with ballooning inequality, liberal feminism outsources oppression. It permits professional-managerial women to lean in precisely by enabling them to lean on the poorly paid migrant women to whom they subcontract their caregiving and housework.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“The time for building bridges is over. For the few that are willing to swim across to our side, we will welcome them with open arms. We’ll even dispatch life rafts. But we have entered a new phase where we should be prioritizing direct action.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“But wouldn’t it be more effective in the end to appeal to the moral consciousness of the citizens of the wealthy and powerful nations of the world, rather than antagonize them?”
“Sure, and I suppose the fly, in navigating the web so thoughtfully spun for it, should always take care to appeal to the spider’s moral sensibilities whenever it comes skittering around.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“South Earth Summon (Naskaristana 2800)

I am the Son of South Earth,
my spice-tolerance is superhuman,
but lies-tolerance is nonexistent -
my resilience knows no mortal limit,
but I have zero tolerance for intolerance.

I speak more languages than most northerners,
I've devoured more scriptures than most northerners,
I have assimilated more cultures and disciplines,
which is why I say, there is no north, no south,
when it comes to virtues and vices of human nature.

So I'm not saying South is better than the North,
but reparations are foundational to civilization;
enlightenment was born in the South of Earth -
math, medicine, poetry, philosophy, theology,
almost everything was invented in the South,
then the Northerners barged in,
and pretended they invented astrophysics.

I come from the other half of the world that
has been systematically reduced to footnotes
of northernized history normalized as world history,

now I am a bigger giant than
all your white giants combined,
now I speak, and you listen.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Whiteys on The Moon
(Naskar's Version, 2749-2750)

There is no orient,
there is no occident,
there is only consciousness -

there is no global south,
there is no global north,
there is only human race.

And now that we've established
the ultimate human truth of the future,
let's talk some facts of the present -

we cannot establish a theoretical future,
no matter how profound or spiritual it sounds,
without first actively making amends for the past -

we cannot say we're all equal,
when clearly the crimesheet of the north
is a hundred times bloodier than the south,

when the bloodlust of the occident
makes oriental villains look like pickpockets -

you can put a hundred whiteys on the moon,
still it won't make up for the countless holocausts
you withheld from the history books,
while cleverly cherrypicking one little cleansing
that photoshops the colonial numbskulls
as the saviors of the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“We cannot say we're all equal, when clearly the crimesheet of the north is a hundred times bloodier than the south, when the bloodlust of the occident makes oriental villains look like pickpockets - you can put a hundred whiteys on the moon, still it won't make up for the countless holocausts you withheld from the history books, while cleverly cherrypicking one little cleansing that photoshops the colonial numbskulls as the saviors of the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Autopsy of The West (Naskaristana 2754-2757)

Food just tastes better when you eat with hands, sitting on the floor, together with family - which goes against the artificial, life-wrecking lifestyle invented by the west -

in western narrative, isolation is liberation, the elderly is inconvenient, apathy is aesthetic - invasion is ambition, exploitation is exploration, indifference is etiquette, appropriation is innovation -

this is the autopsy of the west, not biopsy, because we do biopsy of the living, not the dead. We cannot establish proper, healthy human integration, without first decolonizing the world, which is why it is imperative, that the world outgrows the west, no matter the country -

in short, whether you're born in a first world civilization of the global south or a third world country of the north, like England or America, you must outgrow the west, if you want to be civilized, if you want to be human.

The American must stop being american, you must outgrow everything that the pilgrims held near and dear, because the pilgrims were among apekind's most grotesque offenders, second only to their own forefathers, the british empire and other euro imperials.

You cannot end dehumanization while abiding by the narrative established by the dehumanizers, you cannot end a pandemic while playing by the rules of the virus - you cannot heal a war-inflicted planet while studying from the rulebook of colonialism, that planted the germs of most of those wars in the first place - colonial history is not heritage, it's a crimescene.

Civilization is care over conquest, civilization is integration over isolation, civilization is belonging - to burn the bridges with dehumanizers is the first requirement of civilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace