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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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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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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"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

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Author Topic: "Native Americans Ask Museum to Return Scalps"


Geoff-
Hamilton
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"Native Americans Ask Museum to Return Scalps"
on: March 22, 2014, 13:21

from The Local: Germany's News in English

Members of a Native American tribe are working with the help of United States diplomats in Germany to try get a number of scalps returned to them from a Wild West museum in Eastern Germany.
The Karl May museum in Radebeul near Dresden has at least one scalp on display and an unknown number in storage.
So far the tribe's appeals for the remains to be returned have had no effect on managers of the museum dedicated to the work of May. He was the German author whose adventure books featuring Winnetou and Old Shatterhand shaped the Wild West in German imaginations from the late 1800s onwards.
The Ojibwa Tribe has written to the museum asking for the scalps to be returned. One on display is decorated with beads and bears a full braid of hair.
Cecil Pavlat, cultural repatriation specialist for the Ojibwe Nation told Deutsche Welle, "It's part of that human being. It'd be no different to cutting a hand off, or an arm and displaying that - it's just not culturally appropriate or even acceptable by most ethnic groups, whether they're Native Americans or not."

http://www.thelocal.de/20140321/native-americans-ask-karl-may-museum-for-scalps


liz.k
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Re: "Native Americans Ask Museum to Return Scalps"
on: November 25, 2014, 07:51

This is a crazy story which is interesting on both a specifically cultural level as well as a general human level. The fetishization of human torture, sacrifice, honour killings, etc. have always been a point of interest in human history as it is an indicate of specific cultural and social values, but also a trend in human cultural variation and cultural diffusionism. I believe that the museum failed to recognize the genuine symbolic value and meaning of the scalps, once again adding to the heaps of assumptions and false stereotypes that Native Americans are so notably and unfortunately stuck with. I would be curious in reading the description of these items within a museum display. Due to the presentation of these items, one can not help but gather that whatever the description did read, it was nothing short of a racist example of an oppressed minority. This story is a glistening example of how the "Indian" is portrayed in contemporary America. The "Indian" is a concept in America that is well overdue for an update. It is a shame and a disgrace to the nation that this is not surprising or really expected anytime soon.



Geoff-
Hamilton
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Re: "Native Americans Ask Museum to Return Scalps"
on: November 26, 2014, 23:48

I agree, though I reckon there's a place for displaying these gory historical artifacts: in museum displays organized and overseen by Native Americans, who can then tell and preserve the stories that have been silenced by Euro-American domination (my preference, in other words, would be for keeping historical horrors in sight and in mind as educative tools).

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