Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“At the core of the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries a hedonistic mentality prevails—because on a psychological level it identifies with the Western bourgeoisie from which it has slurped every lesson. It mimics the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decadent aspects without having accomplished the initial phases of exploration and invention that are the assets of this Western bourgeoisie...”

“The people who in the early days of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manichaeanism of the colonizer—Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel—realize enroute that some blacks can be whiter than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the population giving up their privileges and their interests.”

“But, day by day, leaders will come to realize that hatred is not an agenda. It would be perverse to count on the enemy who always manages to commit as many crimes as possible and can be relied upon to widen "the rift," thus driving the population as a whole to revolt.”

“the determination to defend one's skin... the colonized's response to colonial oppression...represent sufficient reasons to join the struggle. But one does not sustain a war, one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one's entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph. Racism, hatred, resentment, and “the legitimate desire for revenge" alone cannot nurture a war of liberation.”

“He could "never acknowledge the right of slavery" in moral terms, Stevens explained, and he would "bow down to no Deity however worshipped by professing Christians... whose footstool is the crushed necks of groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrant's lash, and the cries of his tortured victims." ”

“Stevens's committee also emphasized their own disgust with slavery itself. "To witness droves of human beings," they said, "bound together with iron fetters, and lashed forward to hopeless servitude," and to see that being done by free men even as they pontificated "loudly and boastfully on the blessings of liberty"— this was "a moral anomaly," one that "fails to shock only because of its familiarity." ”

“Virginia demanded that Pennsylvania punish any of its citizens found to be "forming associations for the abolition of slavery, [and] printing, publishing and circulating seditious or incendiary publications, designed, calculated, or having a tendency to operate on her population." Anti-abolitionist violence and the South's imperious diktats provoked...Stevens..."We are not slaves here in Pennsylvania," he growled”

“These men, forced off the family land by the growing population in the countryside and by colonial expropriation, circle the towns tirelessly, hoping that one day or another they will be let in. It is among these masses... that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. ...this cohort of starving men, ...constitutes one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.”

“These men discover a coherent people who survive... but keep intact their moral values and their attachment to the nation. They discover a generous people, prepared to make sacrifices, willing to give all they have, impatient, with an indestructible pride. Understandably, the encounter between these militants and these restless, instinctively rebellious masses can produce an explosive mixture of unexpected power.”

“Veritable exiles in their own country and severed from the urban milieu where they drew up the concepts of nation and political struggle, they take to the maquis.”

“Driven from the towns, these men first of all take refuge in the urban periphery. But the police network smokes them out and forces them to leave the towns for good and abandon the arena of political struggle.”

“The party machine tends to resist any innovation. The revolutionary minority finds itself isolated, confronted by a leadership, frightened and anguished at the idea it could be swept away in a whirlwind whose nature, strength and direction are beyond its imagining.”

“Abandoning the countryside and its insoluble problems of demography, the landless peasants, now a lumpenproletariat, are driven into the towns, crammed into shanty towns and endeavor to infiltrate the ports and cities... As for the mass of the peasantry, they continue to live in a petrified context, and those who cannot scrape a living in the countryside have no other choice but to emigrate to the cities.”

“It has been said many times that in colonial territories the proletariat is the kernel of the colonized people most pampered by the colonial regime. The embryonic urban proletariat is relatively privileged. In the capitalist countries, the proletariat has nothing to lose and possibly everything to gain. In the colonized countries, the proletariat has everything to lose.”

“In any union or political organization there is a... gap between the masses who demand an immediate... improvement of their situation, and the cadres who... put a restraint on their demands. Hence the oft-remarked tenacious discontent of the masses with regard to the cadres. After a day of demonstrations, while the cadres are celebrating victory, the masses well and truly get the feeling they have been betrayed.”

“And when we hear the head of a European nation declare with hand on heart that he must come to the aid of the unfortunate peoples of the underdeveloped world, we do not tremble with gratitude. On the contrary, we say among ourselves, "it is a just reparation we are getting." So we will not accept aid for the underdeveloped countries as "charity" ... they must pay up.”

“Moral reparation for national independence does not fool us and it doesn't feed us. The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. At a universal level, such a statement in no way means we feel implicated in the technical feats or artistic creations of the West. In concrete terms Europe has been bloated out of all proportions by the gold and raw materials from...colonial countries...”

“Deportation, massacres, forced labor, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power. Not so long ago, Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a genuine colony. The governments of various European nations demanded reparations and the restitution in money and kind for their stolen treasures.”

“Capitalist... cartels and monopolies, are the enemies of the underdeveloped countries... the choice of a socialist regime, of a regime entirely devoted to the people, based on the principle that man is the most precious asset, will allow us to progress faster in greater harmony, consequently ruling out the possibility of a caricature of society where a privileged few hold the reins of political and economic power”

“Now that the colonial countries have achieved their independence the world is faced with... the actual state of the liberated countries even more intolerable. The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth.”

“people who now have to work themselves to exhaustion while a contemptuous and bloated Europe looks on... these countries sign agreements... formerly colonized territory is now turned into an economically dependent country. The former colonizer, which has kept intact and... reinforced its colonial marketing channels, agrees to inject small doses into the independent nation's budget in order to sustain it.”

“The sweeping powers of coercion of the colonial authorities condemn the young nation to regression. In other words, the colonial power says: "If you want independence, take it and suffer the consequences." The nationalist leaders then are left with no other choice but to turn to their people and ask them to make a gigantic effort. These famished individuals are required to undergo a regime of austerity....”

“a world without doctors, without engineers, without administrators... European nations wallow in the most ostentatious opulence... a scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world. Europe's well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians.”

“Today, national independence and nation building in the underdeveloped regions take on an entirely new aspect. In these regions, except for some remarkable achievements, every country suffers from the same lack of infrastructure. The masses battle with the same poverty, wrestle with the same age-old gestures, and delineate what we could call the geography of hunger with their shrunken bellies.”

“The violence of the colonized, we have said, unifies the people, By its very structure colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism is not merely content to note the existence of tribes, it reinforces and differentiates them. The colonial system nurtures the chieftainships and revives the old marabout confraternities. Violence in its practice is totalizing and national.”

“The authorities of oppression can appoint as many commissions of inquiry and investigation as they like. In the eyes of the colonized, these commissions do not exist. And in fact, soon it will be seven years of crimes committed in Algeria and not a single Frenchman has been brought before a French court of justice for the murder of an Algerian.”

“Lacoste decrees that henceforth every European shall be armed and should fire on anybody appearing suspect... Let us systematize the repression, let us organize a manhunt of Algerians. And symbolically he hands over civilian power to the military and military power to the civilians. ... In the middle, the Algerian, disarmed, starved, hounded, jostled, struck, lynched and soon to be shot because he is a suspect.”

“In the armed struggle there is what we could call the point of no return. It is almost always attributable to the sweeping repression which encompasses every sector of the colonized population. This point was reached in Algeria in 1955 with the 12,000 victims of Philippeville and in 1956 by Lacoste's creation of rural and urban militias.”

“Once the colonized have opted for counterviolence, police reprisals automatically call for reprisals by the nationalist forces. The outcome, however, is profoundly unequal, for machine-gunning by planes or bombardments from naval vessels outweigh in horror and scope the response from the colonized.”

“Violence among the colonized will spread in proportion to the violence exerted by the colonial regime.”