Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“And the world does not spare me.... There is not anywhere in the world a poor creature who's been lynched or tortured in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated.” (Césaire's "Les Armes Miraculeuses")

“Claiming responsibility for the violence also allows those members of the group who have strayed or have been outlawed to come back, to retake their place and be reintegrated. Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation. The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. This praxis enlightens the militant because it shows him the means and the end.”

“For the colonized, this violence represents the absolute praxis. The militant therefore is one who works. The questions which the organization asks the militant bear the mark of this vision of things: "Where have you worked? With whom? What have you accomplished?" The group requires each individual to have performed an irreversible act.”

“The nationalist leaders know that international opinion is forged solely by the Western press. When a Western journalist interviews us,... the most liberal-minded...reporters make constant use of ambiguous epithets to portray our struggle. When we reproach them for it, they reply in all sincerity they are being objective. For the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him.”

“...every act of repression reverberates around the international arena. The Sharpeville massacre shook public opinion for months. In the press, over the airwaves and in private conversations, Sharpeville has become a symbol. It is through Sharpeville that men and women addressed the problem of apartheid in South Africa.”

“What was the point of fighting if nothing was really destined to change? In 1789, after the bourgeois French Revolution, the humblest French peasant gained substantially from the upheaval. But...for 95 percent of the population in developing countries, independence has not brought any immediate change... a kind of latent discontent which like glowing embers constantly threatens to flare up again.”

“The peoples of the Third World are in the process of shattering their chains, and what is extraordinary is that they succeed. ... The truth is that no colonialist country today is capable of mounting the only form of repression which would have a chance of succeeding, i.e., a prolonged and large scale military occupation.”

“when the Angolan people, for instance, decide to take up arms, when the Algerians reject any method which does not include violence, this is proof that something has happened or is in the process of happening. The colonized peoples, these slaves of modern times, have run out of patience. They know that such madness alone can deliver them from colonial oppression.”

“they [colonized bourgeois] can be seen attempting the supreme imposture of a rearguard action by "speaking in the name of the muzzled nation." As a general rule, the colonial authorities jump at this piece of good fortune, transform these useless characters into spokesmen, and, in next to no time, grant them independence, leaving it up to them to restore law and order.”

“But in the interplay of colonial repression and the spontaneous reaction by the people, the parties find themselves outmaneuvered by their militants. The violence of the masses is pitted against the occupier's military forces; the situation deteriorates and festers. The leaders still at liberty are left on the sidelines. Suddenly [they] rendered helpless with their bureaucracy and their reason-based agenda...”

“Colonized peoples are not alone. Despite the efforts of colo their frontiers remain permeable to news and rumors.”

“What the metropolitan financiers and industrialists expect is not the devastation of the colonial population but the protection of their "legitimate interests" using economic agreements. Capitalism therefore objectively colludes with the forces of violence that erupt in colonial territories.”

“Their preoccupation with objectivity constitutes the legitimate excuse for their failure to act.”

“the colonialist bourgeoisie... introduce a new notion, in actual fact a creation of the colonial situation: nonviolence. In its raw state this nonviolence conveys to the colonized intellectual and business elite that their interests are identical to those of the colonialist bourgeoisie and it is therefore indispensable, a matter of urgency, to reach an agreement for the common good... before any bloodshed”

“The peasantry is systematically left out of most of the nationalist parties' propaganda. But it is obvious that in colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The underprivileged and starving peasant is the exploited who very soon discovers that only violence For him pays. there is no compromise, no possibility of concession.”

“The colonist keeps the colonized is a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over.”

“The colonized subject is constantly on his guard: Confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles.”

“ A world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip. That is the colonial world. The colonial subject is a man penned in; apartheid is but one method of compartmentalizing the colonial world. The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits.”

“Personal interests are now the collective interest because in reality everyone will be discovered by the French Legionnaires and consequently massacred or else everyone will be saved. In such a context, the "every man for himself", the atheist's form of salvation, is prohibited.”

“Confidence in a progressive human destiny and the enlightening effects of economic development may also have made him expect that slavery would before too long decline even without the need for a concerted political struggle. Like some other future Republicans, Stevens seemed not yet to grasp just how politically aggressive slave masters were and would soon become on behalf of their "peculiar institution." ”

“Thaddeus Stevens saw nothing inherently illegitimate about wealth inequality produced by the marketplace. But physically imposed and enforced servitude—and especially outright enslavement—was manifestly wrong and deplorable in his eyes. He had absorbed that belief... from his family's devotion to the Declaration of Independence, from his study of the classics, and through "the divine inspirations of Jesus."”

“Thaddeus Stevens opposed secrecy in politics, regarding it as a device for "keeping the people in total darkness, as to the affairs of the Commonwealth." Freemasons, he warned, "swear to promote one another's political preferment," and that secret alliance "corrupts the fountain of justice; stays the arm of the law; stops the regular action of government; binds the mind in darkness."”

“When Thaddeus Stevens graduated from college in 1814, he had branded loyalty to a political party as a mortal threat to the nation. "Party spirit is the nurse of treachery and revenge," the young man recited, "and the parent of corruption." It fomented political division among the citizenry, which "soon grows up into civil tumults, and worse. Then every tie which connects society is rent asunder."”

“the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word. This colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people's commissions and the extraordinary productiveness of neighborhood and section committee meetings.”

“Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged. And first among them is individualism. The colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. The colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals...”

“The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist.”

“For a colonized people, the most essential value...is...the land, which must provide bread and...dignity. But this...has nothing to do with "human" dignity. The colonized subject has never heard of such an ideal. All he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity; and no sermonizer on morals, no priest has ever stepped in to bear the blows in his place or share his bread.”

“reports by the missions in fact tell us how deep the seeds of alienation have been sown among the colonized. I am talking of Christianity...The Church in the colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor. And as we know, in this story many are called but few are chosen.”

“Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values. The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil.”

“The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier.”