CNV

“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

“Icelanders are grateful to meet foreigners who have heard of their country. And even more grateful to hear someone say it deserves better.”
― Halldór Laxness, Iceland's Bell

“Should I tell you about my life as the head of the Engels collective farm in the Samarkand region for the past twenty years as a mother who, besides raising six children of her own, adopted ten children of different nationalities during World War II, that having graduated from Samarkand Agricultural Institute, I am now working on a Master’s thesis on the selection of the new, very sweet variety of Sultana grapes. . . . My biography, the biography of an ordinary Uzbek woman, would be a vivid example of what Soviet power has given to the women of the East.”
― Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World