Systemic Oppression Quotes

There's no proof that Stalin ever said this, but if he did, he would likely have been quoting a 1932 essay on French humor by the German journalist, satirist, and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky who wrote in a fiction story: "The war? I cannot find it to be so bad! The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!".

Referring to President Ronald Reagan whose administration was very good for the wealthy and the large corporations but economically was the start of a downward spiral in the income of the lower middle and lower classes of the society. Reagan and many politicians of both parties were often oblivious to the lives of people not in the upper strata of society. It was not so much that they were against the middle class and poor; they just did not have much contact with them and their plight was list in the averaging of economic statistics that showed increasing income.

Alexie, an American Indian, studied wrote about the phenomenon whereby the Indians who were brutalized and attacked by whites with modern weapons and other technological advantages, in the process of defending themselves and their way of life became oppressors to whites in many situations where they could dominate a local scene. Likewise, the Israelis, who were totally oppressed in the Middle East for years and dominated by the more numerous Arabs with over a dozen established national armies attacking the Jewish civilian population when Israel first became a state. However the Jews survived and each time the Arabs attacked and further oppressed the Israelis, the Jews became stronger until at some point the became oppressors of many of the Arabs. The oppressors became the oppressed and vica versa.

Many people erroneously attribute this quotation to Margaret Sanger, who had observed that the upper class women generally knew how to practice birth control and could obtain the devices that were available at the time while the poor and uneducated knew very little and not only did not have the money to obtain birth control devices, but the laws made it illegal so that no one dared to promote it. Du Bois was in many ways, a Black elitist and this quotation reflects that.

This idea has been rejected by American Blacks from before the Civil War. There were many Black families that have been in America longer than Rockwell who always had the choice to go back to where they cam from if they were unhappy with America but they never did.

The increase compared to the rest of the world really occurred in the 1980s when The War on Drugs began jailing drug users and dealers and that accounts for the major difference. The 3000 different federal crimes, if an accurate number, is all the more remarkable because in America, the major part of law enforcement is handled by the state and local governments.

Johnson was then Vice President.

See Jonathan Swift {35359} and William Shenstone {642165} for a later expression of this notion.

There were almost no Blacks who agreed with him on this point. Nor do the vast majority of economists today. But Friedman believed that if there were no minimum wage scale, more lower wage workers would find jobs and learn skills to justify a higher wage later in their careers. To some extent, this used to be so for those occupations which require experience and/or apprenticeship. However, by the 21st century, people in minimum wage jobs can, from their jobs, rarely learn enough to economically justify a higher wage position. A minimum wage job became a dead end job for all but students and people in between other endeavors. Therefore the advocates of minimum wage argue that there should be a living wage so that as President Obama said, “No one should work full time, and not make enough to emerge from poverty.”

This quotation is significant. Ibn Khalodun was one of the great intellectual Arab scholars, yet he looked upon Blacks as subhuman and fit for slavery. While Islam preaches the equality of all people, the Arabs had and many still have a raciest view of Blacks. The Arabs were the leaders among the slave traders and many an American Captain of a slave trader bought his slaves from Arab slave traders. Saudi Arabia was the last nation to outlaw legal slavery (1963) and it is still illegally practiced in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states of the Middle East. The attitude can be seen in much of the Arab Middle East even today. For examples, the Muslim Arabs in Northern Sudan refer to the Black non-Islamic Southerners using a derogatory term that means slave.

He argues for example that in America we have vigorous and lively debate over should the rich pay higher taxes than the poor, but there is no debate over whether society should allow any people to become richer than others. That is off limits.

This absurd statement was made in the midst of the huge Black protests against the Apartheid regime. It was very similar to what the Southern racist, segregationist politicians of the American South used to say about the Southern Negroes who in their view were only unhappy when the “communist outsiders” talk to the them and incite them.

Abrams originated this famous phrase which many have been used subsequently for various “socialized” government benefits that were available to the rich but not the poor. He was referring to the fact that at the time, the government provided housing assistance to the rich by having federally insured mortgages and granting tax deductions for the interest in home mortgages, but there was no assistance to the poor who could only afford to rent and had no tax deductions nor was there any federal public housing assistance. During the Great Recession the phrase was often used when the government gave bail out money to General Motors and the largest banks who were close to bankruptcy, but the landscaping gardener or the hot dog vendor whose business was falling because of the recession were told that is the capitalist system—there are some winners and some losers. The government officials who advocated the bailout did not disagree about the fairness and appropriateness of the Abrams phrase but if they had not bailed the banks out, the entire economic system of the country would probably have collapsed and the ensuing depression would hurt the average worker and the poor even more. Related to the recent “too big to fail” concept.

The rich whites won the class war by splitting the poor and working class with race hatred and then coopting one half—the poor whites so that neither the poor whites or blacks obtained much and even into the 21st century the poor of the American South were the worst off of all the poor in America.