American hedonism closes its eyes to death, and has been
incapable of exorcising the destructive power of the moment
with a wisdom like that of the Epicureans of antiquity.

- Octavio Paz
Death is un-American, and an affront to every citizen's inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

- Arnold Toynbee
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"As long as such self-serving hypocrisy
motivates America's response, Ukraine will
only sink further into needless bloodshed,
and that blood will be on America's head."
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In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards.

― Bertrand Russell
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"What those 'racists' are reflexively and rightly reacting
to is the soulless chill as the fire goes out beneath the
melting pot. Those who think America can thrive as a
'cultural mosaic' are worse than fools; they're Canadians."

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Global Coke
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster,
in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe
have grown to appalling dimensions.

― Frantz Fanon
What the United States does best is understand itself.
What it does worst is understand others.

- Carlos Fuentes
Poor Mexico, so far from God
and so close to the United States.

- Porfirio Diaz
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"Indeed, everything about the American southland was magical
and exotic to the young Canadian musicians, from the sights
and smells to the drawling manner of speech to, especially, the
central role that music played in people’s everyday lives."

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America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
- Auguste Bartholdi
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"This is the tone of the China Century, a subtle
mix of Nazi/Soviet bravado and 'oriental'
cunning -- easily misunderstood, and
never
heard before, in a real enemy, by the West."

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chimerica
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
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"And for the others who argued for English-only
patriotism, I note that there are more than
57 million Americans (about 20% of the nation)
whose first-language is not English...."

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Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
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"This is the behavior, and the fate, of paranoid
old-world tyrants like Hitler or Saddam, not liberal new-world democracies like America pretends to be."

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America is the only nation in history which
miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to
degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

- Georges Clemenceau
I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles–Maurice Talleyrand
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

- Edmund Burke
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
- Marshall McLuhan
"The removal of racist sports nicknames (and mascots) seems outrageously belated
-- why, exactly, has this civil rights cause
taken so long to gain momentum?"

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The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the
United States reactionaries use to scare people.
It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.

- Mao Tse-tung
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.

- Red Cloud
In America sex is an obsession,
in other parts of the world it is a fact.

- Marlene Dietrich
I would rather have a nod from an American,
than a snuff-box from an emperor.

- Lord Byron
One day the United States discovered it was an empire.
But it didn’t know what an empire was.
It thought that an empire was merely the biggest of all corporations.

- Roberto Calasso
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather
be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

- Alexis de Tocqueville
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"No one, I thought, could watch those scenes, of young children slaughtered en masse, and so many parents grieving, without thinking that this, finally, would tip some kind of balance in the country."
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If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams
then you must still regard America today with the same naive
enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.

- Jean Baudrillard
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
- Samuel Johnson
America, thou half brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.

- Philip Bailey
"What can be more powerful than disinformation in the Information Age?"
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England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
- Sir Walter Besant
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by
posterity because he was the last to discover America.

- James Joyce
Now, from America, empty indifferent things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity,
it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the "others"- the outcasts of the Western world.
- Octavio Paz
The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years.

- Oscar Wilde
"America really is, for most Americans, all things considered, a good place to be, and all they really want is for everyone to enjoy the same privilege and pleasure."
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When good Americans die they go to Paris;
when bad Americans die they go to America.

- Oscar Wilde
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They're nothing more than traffickers; and as the smart traffickers'll tell you, you don't use the merchandise. They are just inoculating their kids with a tech-drug serum, to immunize them against the very merchandise that put the **** bowling alley in their basement.
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America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

- Georg Friedrich Hegel
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

- Arnold Toynbee
Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
- Winston Churchill
The thing that impresses me most about Americans
is the way parents obey their children.

- Edward, Duke of Windsor
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering
what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

- John Maynard Keynes
Europe was created by history.
America was created by philosophy.

- Margaret Thatcher
America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.
He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.

- Israel Zangwill
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those
who have seen America only in their dreams.

- Pico Iyer
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
- Ringo Starr
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.

― D.H. Lawrence
I have two conflicting visions of America.
One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

― Bono
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror
of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis,
the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

― Roberto Bolaño

April 10, 2024

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Author Topic: Phillis Wheatley and the Islamic State


alana_rach-
el
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Phillis Wheatley and the Islamic State
on: December 7, 2015, 18:21

Phillis Wheatley was a black slave from Africa who was brought to America in the mid-eighteenth century and purchased by a white American family. In her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” she says that mercy brought her from Africa to America, because it allowed her to find God through Christ. She is trying to persuade African’s to convert to Christianity. At the same time, however, she says that it is not only enough to be a Christian but one must be a good Christian.

Wheatley’s attempt to persuade her readers to convert to Christianity is very similar to the ideas being used by the Islamic State to gain support. They believe that the only true way for salvation from God is through Islam. Not only that, but you must be a good Muslim. They preach that the only way to be a good Muslim is by following a literal interpretation of the Qur’an, which says that Muslims must be ruled by a Caliph and must engage in war against non-Muslims to spread the word of Allah. They are also using the oppression of Muslim’s as another tool to promote their beliefs.

The lesson here is: while religious ideas can be very important to one’s life, the idea that one religion is better than the other or that one is the only true religion can have disastrous results.



MPasha
Novice Their American
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Re: Phillis Wheatley and the Islamic State
on: December 8, 2015, 19:30

Phyllis Wheatley, as a slave brought over from Africa and forcefully converted was surely a victim of those who preached Christianity, but practised the cruelties of slavery? Her initial identity and beliefs were forcefully replaced by her captors. However, even after the bleakness of slavery, if she found comfort and beauty in the message of Christianity (over the previous "pagan beliefs" that she writes of) and encouraged other Africans to convert, is she the same as the Islamic state who primarily use violence and blackmail to coerce others to their system of belief? The parallel between the Islamic state and Wheatley's initial captors can perhaps be seen, but not with Wheatley herself. Wheatley's readers have the choice to ignore her message, as she passively spreads it through poetry and such. The victims of the Islamic State at gunpoint who have no choice but to comply? Not so much.

Everyone's beliefs are important to them, no matter the religion or lack thereof. In every person's mind, the belief system or religion they follow is the correct one, or the better one, otherwise they would not continue to support or follow it of their own free will. Yet the world is not full of warring and violent peoples. The idea in the superiority of their religion or belief system is not the driving force of violence. There are many debates amongst peoples and religions, but nobody is truly killing each other over those beliefs. I don't believe for a second that those in charge of the Islamic State actually believe what they preach, but hey, it sure is useful in brainwashing others to use as pawns in their schemes.

The root of the violence cannot therefore be the idea that one religion or belief system is better than the other.
Throughout history religion, or more specifically, carefully selected parts of religious and other teachings have been used to perpetuate violence in order to further political ambitions or economic goals. The world has seen all sorts of teachings and systems weaponized; Socialism, Communism, Monarchy, Capitalism, even Darwinism to harm others. They are used as mere tools for some material, political, or social gain.

The slave owners, as you seem to suggest, used Christianity as an excuse to enslave innocent people and assert dominance over them, but in reality, it was the promise of colonial expansion and economic advancement that led them to exploiting human lives. The industrial revolution may not have been possible were it not for the immense amounts of wealth being brought in from the colonies. Even now, many who claim to be concerned about human rights or the environment are silent in the face of the very real slavery and human exploitation occurring around the world today. Corporations benefit from it enough that they refuse to acknowledge it.

Any ideology can be twisted and thrown around to justify violence and cruelty, and while the strong belief in the superiority of an ideology can be used for mischief and harm, there are many other material motivations that they often disguise.



rizwanzara
Novice Their American
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Re: Phillis Wheatley and the Islamic State
on: February 2, 2016, 22:31

On Being Brought from Africa to America certainly overlooks the horrors of the slave trade but one must ask, would Wheatley be really be published if she wrote a poem highlighting the pain and suffering that black Americans experienced? Would she really have the liberty to express her true thoughts when she, at the time of writing this poem, had not been legally freed from slavery? Even after writing this poem which expressed thankfulness for being sold into slavery, she still had a great deal of difficulty becoming published. "Phillis Wheatley had gathered 28 poems and ran advertisements searching for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772 with the aid of her mistress, Mrs. Wheatley. Unable to find a publisher in the American colonies, as it was common among the white educated colonial elite in America to a perceive a racial superiority of whites over blacks." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poems_on_Various_Subjects,_Religious_and_Moral#Verification

This isn't to say that criticisms of this poem aren't valid, because the poem contains strong themes of internalized racism which should be acknowledged and discussed - but I don't find Wheatley's sentiments in this poem to be oppressive the way the Islamic State is oppressive. I see far more similarities when comparing Wheatley's poem to Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery." Both pieces are very non-confrontational, complacent to white supremacy, and hold the implication that the respective writers could not fully express their true thoughts.

As MPasha said, the Islamic State asserts their power through violence whereas Wheatley merely suggests conversion as a source of finding redemption. And so I feel that the comparison of Wheatley's poem to the Islamic State holds no water.



MoB
Novice Their American
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Re: Phillis Wheatley and the Islamic State
on: March 30, 2016, 09:50

I think it's also valuable to note that Wheatley engages christianity in "On Being Brought from Africa to America" to assert the equality of black people--I'm not totally convinced that the speaker of the poem is even promoting conversion. As has been said, the implications of the poem's first four lines are certainly problematic--the speaker exhibits internalized racism, interpreting the culture she was born into by the standards of the dominant culture that others her in her disdain for the "Pagan land" of her birth and her "benighted soul." But in the last four lines the speaker seems to be confronting the dominant white culture that marks her as other, reminding them of the christian idea ostensibly informing the culture that all people are created equal and are equally capable of pursuing salvation--even those the dominant culture takes for benighted pagans.

I really appreciate rizwanzara's point that Wheatley was unlikely to have found an audience for poetry depicting the pain and suffering of black Americans' experiences--we should consider this poem in context of its audience, which would have been comprised of mostly white christian members of the dominant culture. The speaker does not work to persuade other black people to convert to christianity, but to remind the dominant culture that its belief in universal equality is, well, universal. I think it's then also clear that Wheatley's project is quite the opposite of ISIS's: where Wheatley is trying to establish her relevance to and equality within the dominant culture, ISIS is trying to establish a movement that is counter to western culture and to present it as superior.

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