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[diaryofaphilosopher]

For those who see history as a competition, Latin America's backwardness and poverty are merely the result of its failure. We lost; others won. But the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing: the history of Latin America's underdevelopment is, as someone has said, an integral part of the history of world capitalism's development. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others— the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.

— Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.

— Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

Underdevelopment in Latin America is a consequence of development elsewhere, that we Latin Americans are poor because the ground we tread is rich, and that places privileged by nature have been cursed by history.

— Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

— T. S. Eliot, "Test of Time."

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

This book is an exile's book. For objective reasons that I had no control over, I grew up as an Arab with a Western education. Ever since I can remember, I have felt that I belonged to both worlds, without being completely of either one or the other [...] Yet when I say "exile" I do not mean something sad or deprived. On the contrary belonging, as it were, to both sides of the imperial divide enables you to understand them more easily.

— Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

[The] dual paradigm linking action on nature and civilization possesses its manifesto: Buffon’s Époques de la nature, one of the high points of the climatic hubris of the modern age [...] Armed with evidence of the warming of America and Europe, Buffon became the champion of a veritable climate utopia: were they to give up tearing one another apart, civilized nations could rationally transform the planet. For in planting and felling trees judiciously, man could ‘alter the influences of the climate he inhabits and fix, as it were, its temperature at the point that suits him’. And because, for Buffon, terrestrial temperatures were what determined the emergence over time of new living species, this geo-engineering would lead to the birth of a new vegetable and animal world fashioned by man.

— Jean-Baptiste Fressoz & Fabien Locher (translated by Gregory Elliott), Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

For the people living through it, the eighteenth century was an anthropocene: for them, the temporalities of the Earth and of society were one and the same. Human climate action was a modality of this intersection, an index of this temporal concordance.

— Jean-Baptiste Fressoz & Fabien Locher (translated by Gregory Elliott), Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

As far as we know, the first testimony of a change in climate in America comes from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, military governor in Santo Domingo and royal chronicler of the Indies. When he was writing, in 1548, the improvement of the American climate was no longer a mere hope, as in Columbus, but an attested, widely shared view [...] The basis of climate improvement, according to Oviedo, was political: desiccation and cooling were due to ‘Spanish sovereignty, which tames (doma) and mellows (aplaca) these regions and their rigours, just as it tames the Indians and animals inhabiting them.’ Climate change reflected, hallowed, and sanctified the transition from one sovereignty to another. If, in the initial stages of the conquest, Hispaniola was hot and humid, this was because it had been possessed ‘for so long by savage peoples’; because ‘neither trodden nor ploughed . . . the forests grew incessantly’; and because ‘its very few paths were like rabbit tracks.’ The non-domination of nature, and a relationship to the land akin to that of animals, invalidated Indian claims to sovereignty. Oviedo envisaged his natural history as a providentialist treatise on behalf of the global reign of Charles V. Climate improvement attested to a divine plan for Spanish sovereignty over the New World.

— Jean-Baptiste Fressoz & Fabien Locher (translated by Gregory Elliott), Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

With the ‘discovery’ of America, the idea took root that colonization was also a climatic normalization, a way of improving the continent’s climate by clearing and cultivating land. It was a promise to the colonists and a discourse of domination: a way of saying that native peoples had never really owned the New World. In the eighteenth century, acting on the climate served to rank societies and their historical trajectories hierarchically: Amerindian peoples still in the infancy of a savage climate; European peoples creating the mild climate of their continent; Oriental peoples destroying theirs. The Maghreb, India and, later, Black Africa: in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the French and British empires were built on accusing Blacks and Arabs, Islam, nomadism, and the ‘primitive’ mentality, of wrecking the climate. Colonization was conceived and presented as an attempt to restore Nature. The white man must mend the rains, make the seasons milder, push back the desert – and to that end command the natives.

— Jean-Baptiste Fressoz & Fabien Locher (translated by Gregory Elliott), Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

To speak a true word is to transform the world.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of dehumanization.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

The point of departure of the movement lies in the people themselves. But since people do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement must begin with the human-world relationship. Accordingly, the point of departure must always be with men and women in the "here and now," which constitutes the situation within which they are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by starting from this situation—which determines their perception of it—can they begin to move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state not as fated and unalterable, but merely as limiting—and therefore challenging.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside" -inside the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves."

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanises others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egotistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own "effort," with their "courage to take risks." If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the "generous gestures" of the dominant class. Precisely because they are "ungrateful" and "envious," the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. So often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything−that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive−that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor travelled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights−although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things". For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

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[diaryofaphilosopher]

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

— John Steinbeck, in a letter congratulating his former creative writing professor at Stanford, Edith Mirrielees, for the paperback publication of her book, Story Writing.

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