Ethnic cleansing

“ Expresses concern over violation of human rights, including manifestations of racial discrimination, racism, apartheid, colonialism, foreign aggression and occupation, and the establishment of illegal settlements in occupied territories, as well as the recent resurgence of intolerance, neo-nazism, xenophobia and ethnic cleansing. ”

“ It must not be supposed that the natives are without a belief in personal cleanliness, but their notions on such matters are rather different to white people's opinions on the same subject. We were now and then asked for a piece of soap to wash an old cotton shirt which a native might have received as a present from a colonist; but for the face and hands oil or grease is much preferred as a cleansing medium, and, on all occasions when full dress is indispensable, a native never thinks himself thoroughly comme il faut unless his whole body shines with oil from head to foot. ”

“ Let the effort be to insist on cleanliness and sanitation in the villages as they are, and especially to train the Indians themselves to insist thereon; and to make it easier for them to get water. In insisting on cleanliness, remember that we preach a realizable ideal; our own ancestors lived in villages as filthy not three centuries ago. ”

“ Special consideration to the uplifting of the living conditions of station-bred aboriginals, half-castes and quadroons and provision of educational facilities. I think it is generally recognized that the care of the aboriginal, no matter what the breed, is, to a large degree, a health problem. The prevention of disease amongst these people is of vital importance to the welfare of the white community as well as a duty that may be owed to the natives themselves who are often victims of our own social vices. ”

“ It must also be remembered that the Hindu is given much more to seeking ceremonial than sanitary cleanliness. It matters not how filthy the water may be, chemically; if it be ceremonially clean, he uses it freely. If it be ceremonially polluting, it is eschewed. [268] As one sees a village community make all possible uses of the village pond, he wonders why the whole village has not been swept away by disease. ”

“ These articles have always held that the cleansing must come from within Judah itself. It is recognized that racial pride might prevent many improvements being attempted under fire, but American Jews cannot afford to be ruled by a false pride in this respect. ”

“ I have before remarked, that the natives of this part of Africa are extremely cleanly. This necessary habit of decency was with us a part of religion, and therefore we had many purifications and washings; indeed almost as many, and used on the same occasions, if my recollection does not fail me, as the Jews. Those that touched the dead at any time were obliged to wash and purify themselves before they could enter a dwelling-house. Every woman too, at certain times was forbidden to come into a dwelling-house, or touch any person, or any thing we eat. ”

“ Thanks to their wise measures pure water, pure air, wholesome food, the prompt eradication of all epidemics, and the segregation of the physically or morally unsound are gradually producing a race that for health and happiness has no parallel on our progressive democratic Earth, where the boasted advance of European civilisation only conveys in its train to healthy but nominally uncivilised tribes and nations every species of moral, physical and æsthetic evil that did not exist under the old conditions of isolation and ignorance. ”

“ The laws of the black fellow—in spite of the name he has for being at once dirty, primitive, and debased—are, particularly in dealing with all matters of sanitation, even more stringent than those of the Jew, and though the reason he will give you for destroying every scrap that remains over from any animal he has eaten will be that—if an enemy should get hold of it, he would cause him serious injury, or even loss of life; still, in all probability, it was the law of cleanliness which first gave rise to such a belief. ”

“ If, as the tribes of a people become settled and enter upon a national existence, there is no written code of law and custom, customs, he urged, which at their origin were socially advantageous tend to become extended by analogy to other fields of practice and to assume an excessive and senseless rigour; for example, the custom of cleanliness becomes the exceedingly elaborate ritual of purification, which among the Hindus limits and restrains social life at every point. ”

“ Our civilization is mere gloss, a thin coating of paint and varnish. Our methods of inflicting pain are more refined than those of the Indian, but no less cruel, while the number of the victims sacrificed to our greed and rapacity may even exceed the numbers fallen by the sword of the barbarian or by the torch of the fanatic. The slums in our cities are foul and filthy, teeming with deadly germs of disease where the mortality of our infants and children in some cases rises to the frightful figure of 204 per thousand! ”

“ Sometime before I got out of quarantine, there was a death in the Emeer family of this village; and, as is the custom, the people are not allowed to wash their clothes for forty days—as they are not much given to cleanliness at any time, this was an order grievously out of place. About the time I came up the people were most fearfully dirty. The days of restriction are, however, past, and it is thought the people have been using water. It is a rare evil for people to get habituated to—a disregard of cleanliness—for it is hard to correct the evil. ”

“ When their faces are washed, a circumstance of rare occurrence, they are as white as the average of white people who are exposed to an out-of-door life. It is not the practice of the aborigines of either sex to wash themselves with water. They are sometimes seen to besmear their faces and hands with oil, which they carefully wipe off with a wisp of dry grass, or other substitute for the towel of civilization. ”

“ Full of gratitude to the gods who had given them this land and this life, they looked with contempt on the unclean and perverse nations who dwelt beyond the valley of the Nile. To keep themselves clean from the unclean is the essential task of their lives. To the merely superficial [Pg 204] view, cleanliness of body and clothing seems cleanliness of soul and life. But this purity, which the law of the priests required from every Egyptian, and above all and in an especial degree from the priests, was not limited to simple and natural cleanliness. ”

“ What could better secure the sanitation of villages than the fear of ndrau-ni-kau, which taught the people to destroy or bury all offal and excreta for fear of affording an instrument for witchcraft to a secret enemy? The villages are no longer swept clean, for Christianity threatens the people with no immediate punishment for being dirty, and they have not yet come to believe that dirt produces the germs of disease. ”

“ Putting all question of humanity aside, can any sane civic policy permit negroes to crowd in their thousands into city slums, and there to die like flies in conditions “even more unwholesome and squalid” 194than those which at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro mortality so high? Simply because the black folk are less able than the whites to resist the poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as well as physical. But bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one race than to the other, inevitably takes its toll of both. ”

“ It seemed as though the entire population had been seized with a desire to wash. Negro nurses were bringing children of all ages and colors down to the beach, and washing them; infants in arms, and those who could just go alone; while men were washing horses, asses, and mules. ”

“ Whereas many of the most far-reaching victories for racial healing in the United States have been greatly enhanced by the involvement, support, and dedication of individuals from any and all racial groups; Whereas at the same time, much of the progress toward racial healing and racial equity in the United States has been limited or reversed by our failure to address the root cause of racism, the belief in the myth of a hierarchy of human value based on superficial physical characteristics such as skin color and facial features ”

“ We think really it is useful, by preventing dirty people in many cases from being eaten up by their own filth and vermin, particularly the Jews, the Tunisian Jews being the dirtiest persons in the Regency. The lime-wash is the grand sanitary instrument in North Africa. ”

“ The head of the family usually eats alone; his wives and slaves have also their separate tables. Before we taste food we always wash our hands: indeed our cleanliness on all occasions is extreme; but on this it is an indispensable ceremony. After washing, libation is made, by pouring out a small portion of the food, in a certain place, for the spirits of departed relations, which the natives suppose to preside over their conduct, and guard them from evil. ”

“ The uncleanliness of person and habits of the Negroes in their homes and in the homes of their employers tends to propagate diseases, and thus impairs the health and increases the death-rate of the whole population.
Again, the lack of refinement in intellect, manners, and dress among the Negroes is an obstacle to the cultivated life of the whites. Ignorance and the absence of taste and self-respect in servants result in badly kept homes and yards, destruction of furniture and ware, ill-prepared food, poor table service, and a general lowering of the standard of living. ”

“ On the other hand, so far as regards sanitary measures, that portion of the aboriginal population presents the most favourable results which is most intimately allied to the Europeans, and applies in its own case the precepts of modern civilization.
So soon as the natives are attacked by fever with any severity, they rapidly succumb. ”

“ The vulgar aim of reckless racial fertility is no longer within our reach and no longer commends itself as worthy. It is not consonant with the stage of civilization we are at the moment passing through. The higher task is now ours of the regeneration of the race, or, if we wish to express that betterment less questionably, the aggeneration of the race. ”

“ That is why the new science of eugenics or racial hygiene is acquiring so immense an importance. In the past racial selection has been carried out crudely by the destructive, wasteful, and expensive method of elimination, through death. ”

“ This brings it face to face with the problem of colonization and acclimatization—a problem which we have had to confront long ago and toward the solution of which we have ever since been slowly fighting our way by following on the lines of the best practical measures of hygiene known to us. 'The white man's burden' has proved a tragical one in its drain on the life of the young manhood of this country, notwithstanding the very large measure of success which has attended our sanitary efforts in this direction. ”

“ I scarcely need suggest the necessity of paying special attention to the comfort of the negroes in their houses, food, clothing, etc.
Unless we attend to the improvement of their physical condition, our efforts to improve their moral condition, will be very nearly abortive; for we shall practically deny what we preach. In order to this, we must moderate our desires for the accumulation of property, which is the sin of us all, and a sin, the indulgence of which carries no small discomfort to those through whose labour we obtain what we desire. ”

“ We are bound to remember that we are under the very gravest obligations toward them, and that the white race, in entering their country and requiring them to change their aboriginal mode of life, incurs the duty of providing for their future welfare and of taking care that in no respect whatsoever are their circumstances deteriorated by changes which are thus superinduced. ”

“ Driving in her car, she could remember the Vietnamese families clogging the sinks of the refugee houses with rice; the sight and smell of the blood of rotting vegetables in the refrigerators of those houses; the fire ants that stung her around the refugee houses; mowing the yards when she couldn't budge the refugees to do it; the disputes over whose food was in the refrigerators or how much clothing she was supposed to supply them with, and how the Ugandans tended to accumulate trash without ever emptying it. ”

“ Of their want of cleanliness we have had sufficient proofs, but I am of opinion, all the washing in the world would not render them two degrees less black than an African negro. At some of our first interviews, we had several droll instances of their mistaking the Africans we brought with us for their own countrymen. ”

“ When taken to live with white men, they have larger families, and at the same time are liable to more disease consequent upon it, than in their wild and wandering state. They have customs, such as separation for forty days at the birth of a child, setting apart the female in a separate lodge at peculiar seasons, and forbidding her to touch any articles in common use, which bear a strong resemblance to the laws of uncleanness, and separation commanded to be observed towards Jewish females. ”

“ It is a little remarkable that the proprietors of slaves do not more generally enforce cleanliness among them. This is the more to be regretted, as cleanliness conduces not only to the health and comfort of the body, but also to the purity of the mind. I am aware that it would in most cases be difficult to enforce cleanliness among them, as they seem to be constitutionally a filthy race. This may originate partly, however, from, the peculiar circumstances under which they live, their ignorance, degradation, &c. ”