Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“A few years back, a bourgeois, and colonialist, commentator had only this to say in defense of the West: "We are no angels. But at least we have remorse." What an admission! In the past our continent had other life buoys: the Parthenon, Chartres, the Rights of Man, and the Swastika. We know now what they are worth. And now the only thing they claim can save us from shipwreck is the very Christian feeling of guilt.”

“We saw in the human species an abstract premise of universality that served as a pretext for concealing more concrete practices: there was a race of subhumans overseas who, thanks to us, might, in a thousand years perhaps, attain our status. In short, we took the human race to mean elite. ... Our beloved values are losing their feathers; if you take a closer look there is not one that isn't tainted with blood.”

“The pacifists are a fine sight: neither victims nor torturers! Come now! If you are not a victim when the government you voted for and the army your young brothers served in, commits "genocide," without hesitation or remorse, then, you are undoubtedly a torturer.”

“Let's take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let's see what has become of us. First of all we must confront an unexpected sight: the strip-tease of our humanism: Not a pretty sight in its nakedness. Nothing but a dishonest ideology, an exquisite justification for plundering; its tokens of sympathy and affectation, alibis for our acts of aggression.”

“We have sown the wind; he is the hurricane. Offspring of violence, he draws every moment of his humanity from it: we were men at his expense, he becomes a man at ours.”

“The status of "native" is a neurosis introduced and maintained by the colonist in the colonized with their consent. Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know.”

“For it is not first of all their violence, it is ours, on the rebound, that grows and tears them apart; and the first reaction by these oppressed people is to repress this shameful anger that is morally condemned by them and us, but that is the only refuge they have left for their humanity.”

“when they are taught shame, pain, and hunger, we will only be fueling in their bodies a volcanic fury whose power matches the pressure applied to them. They only understand the language of violence, you were saying? Of course; at first the only violence they understand is the colonist's, and then their own, reflecting back at us like our reflection bouncing back at us from a mirror.”

“He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never knew: we only become what we are by radically negating deep down what others have done to us.”

“How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it... and for which they can find no cure?...this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man... he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes.”

“Colonial violence not only aims at keeping these enslaved men at a respectful distance, it also seeks to dehumanize them. No effort is spared to demolish their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs, and to destroy their culture... We exhaust them into a mindless state. Ill fed and sick, if they resist, fear will finish the job: guns are pointed at the peasants; civilians come and settle on their land...”

“You warned them: if they shed too much blood you would pretend to disown them; the same way a State—no matter which one—maintains a mob of agitators, provocateurs, and spies abroad whom it disowns once they are caught. You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.”

“Europeans, open this book... Why bother to read it since it is not meant for us? For two reasons: first, because Fanon analyzes you for his brothers and demolishes for them the mechanism of our alienations. Take advantage of it to discover your true self as an object. Our victims know us by their wounds and shackles...They only need to know what we have done to them for us to realize what we have done to ourselves.”

“Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.”

“So let us perpetuate their misfortune; nothing will come out of it but hot air. If...there were the slightest hint of a demand in their lamentations, it would be for integration. Consenting to it, of course, would be out of the question: we would ruin the system, which, as you know, relies on gross exploitation. All we need do is dangle a carrot in front of their eyes and they will come running."”

“Then came another generation, which shifted the question. Its writers and poets took enormous pains to explain to us that our values poorly matched the reality of their lives and that they could neither quite reject them nor integrate them. Roughly, this meant: You are making monsters out of us; your humanism wants us to be universal and your racist practices are differentiating us.”

“There was no doubt in our minds they [the colonized] accepted our ideal since they were accusing us of not respecting it. Europe then really believed in its mission: it had Hellenized the Asians and created this new species, the Greco-Roman blacks. Pragmatic as ever, we added, quite among ourselves, "Oh let them shout, it will get it out of their system; their bark is worse than their bite."”

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”

“Fanon writes, "that the colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over [and this] periodically erupts into bloody fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals." ”

“He despised "this setting up on one side, those possessed of wealth, and branding another class as plebeians and poor." No law must shame people by branding them as paupers, not least because such public snobbery "has broken down the spirit of many of your young men, and lowered them in their own estimation." No, education "ought to be as free as the air to every human being in society."”

“By all accounts, Stevens's words strongly moved other legislators. The Pennsylvania House then rejected the attempt to replace the common schools with paupers-only schools by a nearly two-thirds majority, and the state Senate agreed." It was probably Stevens's defense of the public school system that cost him reelection to the legislature in 1836.”

“From the torqued mind and muscle of the colonized subject "on guard" emerges the nationalist agent as mujahid (FLN soldier) or fidayine (FLN guerrilla). There is, however, another scenario that runs through this
narrative of violence and is somewhat unsettling to its progress... Here the psycho-affective imagination of violence is a desperate act of survival on the part of the "object man," a struggle to keep alive”

“The colonized subject is always on his guard: confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line... 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. But deep down the colonized subject knows no authority. He is dominated but not domesticated.”

“Does the "guilt complex" lie at the very origins of violence, or does the struggle for liberation have to violently free itself of guilt in order to be effective? The double-edged nature of this question—guilt as a stimulant, or an obstacle to freedom, or possibly both—fulfills Fanon's wish (expressed to Sartre and Beauvoir) that “all political leaders should be psychiatrists as well."”

“Exploitation, tortures, raids, racism, collective liquidations... [all] make of the native an object in the hands of the occupying nation. This object man, without means of existing, without a raison d'être, is broken in the very depth of his substance.”

“For Arendt, Fanon's violence leads to the death of politics; for Sartre, it draws the fiery, first breath of human freedom. I propose a different reading. Fanonian violence, in my [Homi Bhabha's] view, is part of a struggle for psycho-affective survival and a search for human agency in the midst of the agony of oppression.”

“Those who adhere to principles of nonviolence in the face of colonial oppression are taunted with the ethical impossibility of their positions—“even your non-violent thoughts are a condition born of an age-old oppression..." Sartre pares away the pieties and vanities of Enlightenment universalism to reveal its tolerance of racist ideas and practices.”

“The colonialist declares the native to be "a corrosive element... distorting everything which involves aesthetics or morals... an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces." Such an ontological obliteration of the "other" results in "the colonized affectivity [being put] on edge "like a running sore flinching from a caustic agent" ”

“"On Violence" describes the struggle between brute realities and resistant bodies in a prose that rises off the page to take you by the hand, "to touch my reader affectively, or in other words irrationally or sensually. For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark." ”

“"One of the functions of racism is to compensate the latent universalism of bourgeois liberalism: since all human beings have the same rights, the Algerian will be made a subhuman." (Sartre) It is this anomalous and ambivalent situation of universality-with-racism, and formal citizenship- without-equality, that is an unresolvable embarrassment within the ideals and ideologies of the civilizing mission.”