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an observer said:
The republican party is paying Jessie Jackson. Now I’m waiting for Al Sharpton to come out with some (censored). They both want to be spokesmen for the colored.
# 15 October 2008 at 11:03 am

Amadi said:
I hate Jesse Jackson. I swear I do. He is a hater. His time has come & gone and he like the other old Vanguard who cannot bear to not be the HNIC anymore just won’t let it go. SHUT UP ! SIT DOWN ! PLEASE !
# 15 October 2008 at 12:36 pm

Denise Perry said:
Bill,
You have a great show. I am tuned into five (5) days a week.
Thank you.
Denise
# 15 October 2008 at 1:22 pm

Pauline said:
Unbelieveable! Let them grasp at straws!! Jessee Jackson is an OLD has been. There is no legacy that he leaves for black people. He is a CRAB at the bottom of the basket..SOMEONE PLEASE TELL HIM TO SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!
BTW- did you notice the body language when he shook Barack’s hand and pointed at the mic…what arrogance!! He makes me sick!
Read or ask around about “Orders to Kill” by William F. Peppa (may be out of print) I bet Reggie Bryant has read it or has heard about it.
# 15 October 2008 at 2:09 pm

Hannibal Casanova said:
Reverend Jesse Jackson is a political antecedent of Obama who has paved the way as a Black civil rights activist for his (Obama)campaign today. Yes Reverend Jackson is sadly jealous of Obama’s recent presidential campaign, however, as we criticize him for his recent reckless statement, we should not dismiss his historical contribution to the civil rights movement. I encourage people to read Dr.Ronald Walter’s “Beyond The Boundaries:Reverend Jesse Jackson in International Affairs.” Let’s learn to seperate the indivduals self-centered personality disorder, from his civil rights contributions.
Furthermore, Reverend Jackson shows signs of exhibiting outward reflections of the “Histrionic Personality disorder” as classified by the Diagnostical Statistical Manual–number four(DSM-IV) under axis II. The histrionic personality disorder has an overwhelming desire to be noticed, and often behaves dramatically or inappropriately just to get attention.
Many of these individuals with this disorder, but not all, have an intense,unstable, and distorted self-image of themselves. Their self esteem many times is predicated on the approval of others and not from a selfworth value system. I am not saying Reverend Jackson is void of a value system, just showing repeated patterns of always seeking attention and getting the credit. So though the description doesn’t totally fit the personality of Jackson concerning values, the core symptoms of “attention seeker” most certainly do.
# 15 October 2008 at 3:10 pm

nean said:
Don’t kill the messenger!
From Ralph Nader
Regarding what Jesse had said
Many have been fooled by Obama’s rosy campaign rhetoric, particularly about ‘reaching across the aisle’ to wage bipartisan reform. But a real look at his actual platforms reveal striking similarities with Republicans. Reaching across the aisle is easy, it seems, when there is no aisle to reach across.
Meanwhile, Obama’s bipartisan rhetoric hides a host of bipartisan evils. In this article [below], one brave reporter is willing to give Obama’s Iraq and Palestinian platforms a hard look. His conclusion? Neither Obama nor McCain will get us out of Iraq, and neither will question the ongoing economic and military imperialism that allows the United States to perpetuate its own occupation of Iraq and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. [Isn't this what Jesse is saying?
Aside from that, each candidate, republican and Democrat, was secretly vetted by AIPAC to certify their undying loyalty to the war, to the aspirations of Israel, and to total support as President if they should win. ]
http://cityonahillpress.com/article.php?id=1320 below
From Israel to Iraq, Mideast Policies Spark Debate
Marc Abizeid, Investigative Reporter
As the U.S. occupation of Iraq enters into its sixth painful year and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict continues to flare with no end in sight, some feel that the presumptive Republican and Democratic presidential nominees — senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) — are offering the Middle East little hope for peace.
The presidential race has been surrounded by optimism by those who hope that a new administration will be better prepared to address the situation in Iraq and find an end to the decades-old Arab/Israeli conflict. But despite their hopes, prominent scholars, journalists, and other critics are predicting that the election will bring little change in terms of Middle East policy.
According to As’ad AbuKhalil, professor of politics at CSU Stanislaus, and author of the popular blog “Angry Arab News Service,” President George W. Bush’s Middle East policies are likely to be carried over to the next administration should McCain or Obama take office.
“The Bush doctrine, on the surface of it, was about the spread of democracy … but I think in reality, the Bush doctrine has been translated into the eruption of civil wars in places as far away as Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, [and] Iraq,” Abu Khalil said. “[McCain and Obama] are not going to end the empire but they’re going to make, in some ways more dangerous, the empire be more intelligently run and managed than it is now.”
Iraq
A study conducted by Just Foreign Policy estimates that five years of war have led to the deaths of over 1.2 million Iraqis. According to a July 2007 report by Oxfam International, another five million have been displaced inside Iraq or in neighboring countries. The report also reveals that 70 percent of Iraqis do not have access to an adequate water supply and the average Baghdad home receives about two hours of electricity per day.
At home, a majority of Americans are now calling for an end to the war after having sacrificed over 4,000 U.S. soldiers and spent at least half a trillion dollars, by the most conservative estimates.
McCain has been criticized by his Democratic rival for a comment he made in January stating that it would be “fine with [him]” if the U.S. remained in Iraq for 100 years. But Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who has spent a total of eight months covering the war in Iraq, said that Obama’s “phased withdrawal” plan for U.S. troops in Iraq will not bring an end to the occupation any time soon, either.
“Drawing down the number of soldiers is certainly not a bad thing. But still, it really kind of gets people’s eye off the ball which is total withdrawal, compensating Iraqis, and taking better care of the soldiers once they come home,” Jamail said. “[Neither] of them are talking about a strict timetable and exact numbers, and when there will be a total withdrawal.”
Though shunned from debates and ostracized by the two major parties, Ralph Nader has submitted his fourth bid for presidency with promises to “reverse” U.S. policy in the Middle East. In an interview with City on a Hill Press (CHP), he criticized his rivals’ positions on Iraq and said that either of the other two candidates would be likely to pursue a foreign policy similar to that of President Bush.
“I have a six-month negotiated withdrawal deadline which is the only thing that will give the Iraqis the feeling that our intentions are credible by giving their country back to them and their oil back to them,” Nader said. “Just saying ‘we’re going to draw down the soldiers, we’re going to keep some bases, we’re going to have some special forces,’ like the other candidates say, Iraqis are basically saying, ‘you’re going to be here for the duration, for years, for decades.’”
The McCain and Obama campaigns declined requests for interviews.
James Abourezk, a former Democratic U.S. senator from South Dakota and founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, faulted congressional Democrats for allowing the war to persist by using the excuse that Bush will veto legislation calling for its end. He believes that Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), speaker of the House of Representatives, worries that any move by them to end the war will hamper Obama’s chances of winning the November election.
“If the Democrats wanted to end the war, they control what legislation goes out to the House floor and the Senate floor,” Abourezk said. “And all they have to do is not bring up the funding bill, just [let] it sit. And that’s it. There’s no veto involved, no votes involved, no nothing … It’s really a phony issue saying that Bush would veto everything.”
Abourezk said that Democrats also fear Republican attacks accusing them of “losing Iraq.” McCain, who fought in the Vietnam War before being captured, touts his military record to depict himself as the most qualified candidate to achieve victory in Iraq — an idea ridiculed by Abourezk.
“How can they expect to win? They’d be dreaming. Winning means what, killing everybody in Iraq? Having them all dead, then we can walk away and say we’ve won? There’s no way to win a war like that,” Abourezk said. “… McCain’s strategy is to call it ‘surrender.’ Well, McCain’s the one who surrendered when he crash-landed his airplane in Vietnam. He didn’t die for his country, he surrendered.”
Corporate interests and Washington’s powerful lobby groups [the oil and bank moguls] are also believed to play a central role in this year’s presidential election. The main candidates, Jamail said, are heavily reliant on support from the pro-Israel lobby as well as weapons manufacturers who favor a continued occupation of Iraq.
According to a Huffington Post study published late last year, McCain had collected $19,200 in donations from weapons manufacturers while Obama had taken in $10,000.
Jamail, citing government-issued documents including the Department of Defense’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report and the U.S. National Security Strategy, said the occupation of Iraq will most likely continue well into the next administration in part because of what appears to be a growing threat posed by China.
“By reading these documents, it becomes clear that the U.S. has every intention of maintaining a robust military presence in Iraq and other places around the Middle East and to continue projecting that power into that region,” Jamail said. “When you look at where the U.S. bases are laid out around the globe, they’re basically slowly but surely encircling China and China’s energy reserves that lay outside of their own country.”
Palestine/Israel
Last month, Israelis celebrated the 60th anniversary of their country’s founding[or rip off], which they hoped would serve as a refuge for Jewish settlers escaping persecution.[a dream they had in mind since 1890 when none were escaping] But many Palestinians mourn that time as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, which has come to represent the period in 1948 when at least 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their towns and villages [because of scenes where towns were reduced and its inhabitants slaughtered by such luminaries as Ben Gurion , Menachem Begin, and Sharon].
Since that time, the region has been consumed with violence as Israel’s claims to Arab lands have led to wars that have defined the Arab/Israeli conflict. The main candidates say they support a peace initiative to create a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, but some critics are expressing skepticism that this will be done [In short, the cleanout (called genocide) has been ongoing since 1948 while the US and the UN look elsewhere].
Life has been especially difficult for Palestinians living in Gaza during the last year, ever since Israel’s decision to isolate the tiny strip of land. Israel’s siege came shortly after Hamas — an Islamist movement and enemy of Israel originally founded with Israeli support to battle secular resistance groups — took over Gaza in June 2007. The move by Hamas came more than one year after the group won a landslide victory in a 2006 parliamentary election but was denied power by the ruling Western-backed Fatah party.
A U.K.-based coalition of human rights organizations, which includes Amnesty International, Christian Aid and others, published a study in March revealing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to be at its worst level in 40 years. The Israeli siege on Gaza — which Israel says is necessary to discourage Palestinians from firing rockets into Israel — has led to severe shortages of food, fuel, medicine, electricity, and other necessities.
McCain and Obama have expressed unfledged support for the siege, mimicking Israel’s claims of necessity, while Nader heavily criticizes Israel’s policies in the occupied territories and calls Gaza “the world’s largest prison.”
“[Gaza has] a million and a half people. They can’t go in and out. They can’t trade, and the U.N. can’t even get its aid in to the starving or malnourished kids and other people,” Nader said. “[Israel] talks about the crude rockets that the Gazans are sending over to Israel and 99 percent of them fall with a big thud either in Gaza or on a desert on the other side. How many missiles, how many gun ships have the Israelis shot into crowded areas, into refugee areas? And by the way, who’s the occupier?”
Obama was a well-known supporter of Palestinian rights during his tenure as an Illinois state senator and was spotted mingling at events in Chicago with his friends Rashid Khalidi and the late Edward Sa’id, both prominent professors at Columbia University and harsh critics of Israel. Currently, he is in favor of a two-state solution.
“I have met many Arabs who support [Obama] on the assumption that because he was good on Palestine 15 years ago, that once he goes to the White House, he’s going to make things good,” AbuKhalil said. “I think once you’re in the White House you realize that the guiding principles of U.S. foreign policy are so well entrenched in unconditional support for Israeli aggression that even if it’s Obama, or whoever else, it’s gonna stick the same.” [Look at what happened to Rabin, and now Olmert? and they were true-blue zionists!]
Obama’s switch on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, like many others who spoke with sympathy for the Palestinians before aspiring to hold national office, is generally attributed to the massive influence of dominant pro-Israel lobby groups in Washington. [This influence can make or break a candidate and Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter are examples of their hidden powers.]
“Basically, he’s a coward,” Nader said of Obama. “About a year ago he said the Palestinians are among the most suffering people in the world. The Israeli lobby pounced on him and said ‘You better shut your mouth,’ and he shut his mouth.[sadly, words like this fall on ears that don't want to hear it. People here these words as a causas belli as in the case of Jesse Jackson.] That does not augur well for his pretense that there’s going to be change if he’s elected president.”
Abourezk, who served as a South Dakota congressman from 1971 to 1973, then as a U.S. Senator from 1973 to 1979, said that pro-Israel lobby groups like (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) AIPAC have come to dominate policies in Washington on matters concerning the Middle East. According to him, Congress often makes decisions against the U.S.’s own interests at the behest of the lobby. [Look at the AIPAC front, AIG, and their wall street entanglements. According to some, Abrahmof and covert Mosad operatives ran K-Street through AIG using blackmail AND extortion of congressmen and senators.]
“You should hear the senators in the cloakroom talking, criticizing the Israeli lobby saying ‘Jesus God, they walked us into this deal we shouldn’t have,’ and they go on and on and on,” he said. “Then they get out on the Senate floor and start making speeches praising Israel. It’s something to watch.”
AIPAC, which held its annual three-day conference earlier this week that featured appearances by McCain and Obama, declined a request to interview. However, spokesman Josh Block offered the two candidates praise in an e-mail to CHP.
“[McCain and Obama] have strong congressional voting records on issues of importance to the pro-Israel community,” Block wrote. “And [both] have demonstrated records of support for the special relationship between the United States and Israel based on shared values and common interests.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, recently established a new liberal pro-Israel political action committee and advocacy group called J-Street. According to him, J-Street is necessary in order to open debate in Washington that he says has been “locked down” by three main forces: neo-conservatives[Jewish-American politicians with a strong loyalty to Israel], the right-wing Christian Zionist movement, and the already established right-wing pro-Israel lobby.
“I think that when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the Israeli/Arab conflict, I really haven’t heard much that distinguishes the views of [McCain and Obama,]” Ben-Ami said. “[Neither] of them have really taken a tremendously off-the-usual page stance on these issues and frankly, given the current state of politics in Washington, I wouldn’t expect them to.”
Ben-Ami, Abourezk and others insist that the pro-Israel lobby in Washington does not represent mainstream Israeli opinion, but that American politicians vying for national office will have little choice but to go along with the lobby so long as they continue to dominate discourse.
“Most people in Israel are for a [Palestinian] settlement.[Like most people of America were against Slavery?] They want to get the conflict settled as soon as they can because they don’t like what they see is happening,” Abourezk said. “But the hardliners in this country are going to keep it going. Somebody at some point has got to stand up and say ‘Hey, this is against our interest.’”
# 15 October 2008 at 3:37 pm

Bev said:
Jesse Jackson still want’s to stay in the spotlight. He is fighting the fact that his time has come and gone. He won’t even behave with the grace of an elder statesman. I was finished with him when he fathered the little girl with a woman outside of his marriage.
His son Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. must have gone through the anger roof and soared up into the high heavens this time around. Previously, he publicly rebuked his father over the cutting off of Sen. Obama’a B#$$@ overheard comment.
Sen. Obama is not my candidate. But somebody needs to lock up Jesse Jackson sans any outside communication devices until the election is over.
# 15 October 2008 at 5:09 pm

Lil darris said:
Let me say this:
I appreciate the negotiating that Rev Jackson has done to free hostages and settle some disputes, however, I can’t really recall anything that he has done or said to support, advance or educate black people. He and Rev. Sharpton are not the same. Rev Sharpton is clearly and sincerely active in the cause to uplift black people.
Additionally, when the anchor discussed that Obama’s comment about a key Palestinian that said the Palestinian “opened his eyes to a new point of view”, he tried to make that statement sound like a dangerous thing, but to me, it sounds like a Palestinian who wants to find a new way towards peace.
I am not sure what motivates Rev Jackson to give the appearance of a saboteur. Jealousy maybe. I don’t know, but I bet Jesse Jackson Jr. is fuming at his dad right now.
# 15 October 2008 at 6:23 pm

nean said:
Hannibal:
Regarding your diagnosis, are you a psychologist of sorts? You say he has a defined disorder?…Is that the APA classification?
I agree with your sentiments and I think that there are very few people like Jesse who emerged from the 1960’s or the Dark Ages of America who helped forge a new paradyme. He is one of the last negroes who helped to make an historic change in American race relations and no matter how much he might puff, no matter how much he might fail, no matter how much he angers everyone, you have to accept that he is one of those brothers who forged a new day in this miserable nation of ours. This nation and this America has nothing but a legacy of disgrace going for it as Fred or Wayne might always point out. It’s history toward it’s people and other nations has been a dynamic history of terror, confiscation, colonialization, and rape as well as abuse;and, yet, we had a group of people like Jesse, Abernathy, the Birmingham crowd, Bill Cosby and others that took up arms and made a change. It never would have happened without them, the black Panthers, Black Rage and big mouths like Jesse. If he has a mental disorder as many old men like myself have, we have to forget about it. There has been much that was accomplished between these English Anglican boneheads and the black race. There needs to be another reformation of thier ideas toward other races and other peoples. They have a disgraceful history of abuse and we can now look down upon that era and wink at these discords instead of suffer under the tyrany of concocted laws that abridge your freedoms day in and day out. We need to never forget that tomorrow, it might all change if we are not alert.
Jesse has concerns, as I do, about this new leader of ours, Barak Obama. He appears to be the one who will be our next President. The past is hyped with other presidents who offered the hope of the world but gave us heartaches, broken promises and glitz. These leaders made everyone proud. For 300 years, we have been duped to think that we are a god-fearing nation that cares about justice and the rule of law. Nothing can be further from the truth and our history is an history of Presidents, one after another, who promised to be everything to everyone. It is a history of a people who accepted crime without blinking an eye. It is a 300 year history of people crying “God Bless America…” while she went on to rape one people after another over a pack of lies. Like Reggie always says, it is not the things you don’t know but things you think you know that gets you in a lot of trouble. If Jesse is speaking up about things that may wrong him, it could a personality disorder or it could be the same old same old that worries him?
# 15 October 2008 at 8:47 pm

Hannibal Casanova said:
Hello Nean, no I am not a psychologist. However, I am a trained behavioral health specialist(counselor)which has studied psychology,mental health disorders(mental illness),neurological disorders(nervous system), with a focus on personality disorders, etc., as defined and classified by the diagnostical statistical manual-IV, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). For me, counseling, treating, or assisting our people cope with their mental illness or behavioral disorders require not only an understanding of the theoretical and practical tradition of the counseling profession, but an appreciation of the dynamics of African-American culture and the societal forces which impinge upon their mental well-being.
Unfortunately most of the counselors and therapists which are African-American don’t have the backgound in African and African-American history which I have. Although they are encouraged by the radical school of Black Psychologist to use culture as a matrix for treating African and African American clients. Unfortunately many times they fall short. Moreover, a behavioral health counselor is guided by interpersonal, theory-based activities based on ethical and legal standards which focus on helping the client resolve situational and developmental problems. These problems many times are: educational problems; psychological disorders; mental illness; addiction (which is not my specialty) and careers (social working) but not limitd to just these.
Finally, I was very briefly explaining the core symptoms of the histrionic personality disorder, as partially reflected in the recent behavior of Jesse Jackson. Another sign of the disorder, is long as the individual is getting his/her attention they are okay going about business as usual when the focus is on themselves. However, once this is pattern is violated, their behavior becomes reckless in a attempt to retain attention through drama, etc. Who does that sound like?
# 16 October 2008 at 12:32 pm

Hannibal Casanova said:
Nean, one more point. I have been listening and reading your arguments which you prolifically always propagate over WURD or this blog. I encourage you to go read Franz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Mask.” Also, go read Daudi Azibo’s concept of “cultural Alienation,” I am sure after a healthy reading of those two text you would see someone you know.
# 16 October 2008 at 12:55 pm

carl said:
Bill what do you think of Nean’s and Ralph Nader’s comments? Is what Ralph Nader’s insight nonsense or does it have merit? I am not that informed on some issues but I try to keep an open mind and evaluate other points of view given other information. I listen to your show and WURD every day and respect your insight and opinions.
# 16 October 2008 at 5:22 pm

nean said:
Hannibal:
I once worked with white boys In a psychiatric ward who were messed up but not organically. I did this work while trying to make myself out to be a social scientist of sorts.
Anyway, it was nice to see all the kids become reborn, so to speak, and behave like brats and kids. After that, they were returned home for a short spell and most of them came back exhibiting the same disorders. Most of those kids were sexually abused by family members. Their extreme behaviors were a cry for “time out.” From that experience, I learned that a kids environment determines his behavior. BF Skinner tried to focus in on this idea in his many books which I can not cite for you. What’s her face, Margaret Meade, also tried to belabor the point. In any event, in my estimation, it is all about environment. And the kids…there is nothing wrong with them. They are the markers of the environment from whence they hail. There is nothing you can do for them. You have to change their environment. If you see screwed up kids, it is because they come from screwed up environments.
As for your evaluation of Jesse, I can only take your word for it. I don’t see anything wrong with him. Crying out for attention is not a problem for me. We all need attention.
As for black history, I think you mean the evil environment to which African-Americans were exposed in white America. I saw this first hand and I saw the appalling consequences of it on the eastern Seaboard. American’s are an evil race and what they got up to when they misused others like the black race is the cause of all sorts of psychological problems that probably will never be washed out. It is the reason why Reparations are in order. I myself am always fascinated by the blacks I encounter and their behavior. It has been a life long obsession of mine. I try to understand what is African and what is African-American. When I was at Temple, I met hundreds of Africans and experienced their grief with racism. I was also mindful of the cultural differences between them notwithstanding the real ordeal that African American’s experienced in the past.
As for your books, I’ll try to keep them in mind but I am on another track that interests me more. If you thought America was a devil to you, you couldn’t believe what they were like to other countries on the sly.
# 18 October 2008 at 1:18 am

nean said:
Hannibal:
The movie you referred is a composite so I looked up his works. Frantz died in 1961 but left this work, Wretched of the Earth which peaked Sartre’s radar. as for this movie, how do you get it?
I was wondering if you were paralleling his experience with ours. Existentially speaking, crime has it’s woes and sorrows and this nation lives by them. Sartre I think thought that rage and war and human dysfunction were only symptoms of man’s inhumanity. He seems to relish revolution and change and his classic works, Being and Nothingness expose his outrage at our constant struggle with doing the wrong things. Still, he loved those that spoke out like jesse and Franz here. He idolized the really wretched of the earth because they sang a song that told the story of life.
Jean-Paul Sartre 1961
Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”
NOT so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open … thenon! … therhood!’ It was the golden age.
It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed, the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that bark don’t bite.’
A new generation came on the scene, which changed the issue. With unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our values and the true facts of their lives did not hang together, and that they could neither reject them completely nor yet assimilate them. By and large, what they were saying was this: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart.’ Very much at our ease, we listened to them all; colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and for that matter they do not read much of him, but they do not need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy consciences are caught up in their own contradictions. They will not get anywhere; so, let us perpetuate their discomfort; nothing will come of it but talk. If they were, the experts told us, asking for anything at all precise in their wailing, it would be integration. Of course, there is no question of granting that; the system, which depends on over-exploitation, as you know, would be ruined. But it’s enough to hold the carrot in front of their noses, they’ll gallop all right. As to a revolt, we need not worry at all; what native in his senses would go off to massacre the fair sons of Europe simply to become European as they are? In short, we encouraged these disconsolate spirits and thought it not a bad idea for once to award the Prix Goncourt to a Negro. That was before ’39.
1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.’ The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds: ‘Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away from it.’ In other words, she’s done for. A truth which is not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced, are we not, fellow-Europeans, in the marrow of our bones?
We must however make one reservation. When a Frenchman, for example, says to other Frenchmen ‘The country is done for’ — which has happened, I should think, almost every day since 1930 — it is emotional talk; burning with love and fury, the speaker includes himself with his fellow-countrymen. And then, usually, he adds ‘Unless …’ His meaning is clear; no more mistakes must be made; if his instructions are not carried out to the letter, then and only then will the country go to pieces. In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice and these remarks are so much the less shocking in that they spring from a national intersubjectivity. But on the contrary when Fanon says of Europe that she is rushing to her doom, far from sounding the alarm he is merely setting out a diagnosis. This doctor neither claims that she is a hopeless case — miracles have been known to exist — nor does he give her the means to cure herself. He certifies that she is dying, on external evidence, founded on symptoms that he can observe. As to curing her, no; he has other things to think about; he does not give a damn whether she lives or dies. Because of this, his book is scandalous. And if you murmur, jokingly embarrassed, ‘He has it in for us!’ the true nature of the scandal escapes you; for Fanon has nothing in for you at all; his work — red-hot for some — in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, never to you. The black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished; the days of colonized laureats are over. An ex-native French-speaking, bends that language to new requirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized only: ‘Natives of an under-developed countries, unite!’ What a downfall! For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our well-known crimes: Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar: but he does not waste his time in condemning them; he uses them. If he demonstrates the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations which unite and oppose the colonists to the people of the mother country, it is for his brothers; his aim is to teach them to beat us at our own game.
In short, the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. We know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that enslaved peoples are still to be found there, together with some who have achieved a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who have obtained complete freedom but who live under the constant menace of imperialist aggression. These differences are born of colonial history, in other words of oppression. Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole. In the heat of battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns — all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists. The example of Katanga illustrates this quite well. Thus the unity of the Third World is not yet achieved. It is a work in progress, which begins by the union, in each country, after independence as before, of the whole of the colonized under the command of the peasant class. This is what Fanon explains to his brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America: we must achieve revolutionary socialism all together everywhere, or else one by one we will be defeated by our former masters. He hides nothing, neither weaknesses, nor discords, nor mystification. Here, the movement gets off to a bad start; then, after a striking initial success it loses momentum; elsewhere it has come to a standstill, and if it is to start again, the peasants must throw their bourgeoisie overboard. The reader is sternly put on his guard against the most dangerous will o’ the wisps: the cult of the leader and of personalities, Western culture, and what is equally to be feared, the withdrawal into the twilight of past African culture. For the only true culture is that of the Revolution; that is to say, it is constantly in the making. Fanon speaks out loud; we Europeans can hear him, as the fact that you hold this book in your hand proves; is he not then afraid that the colonial powers may take advantage of his sincerity?
No; he fears nothing. Our methods are out-of-date; they can sometimes delay emancipation, but not stop it. And do not think that we can change our ways; neo-colonialism, that idle dream of mother countries, is a lot of hot air; the ‘Third Forces’ don’t exist, or if they do they are only the tin-pot bourgeoisies that colonialism has already placed in the saddle. Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force, when he can command it; the native has only one choice, between servitude or supremacy. What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks, and he is sure we have no more up our sleeves. It is to them he says: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she lets go. It’s a good moment; nothing can happen at Bizerta, at Elizabethville or in the Algerian bled that the whole world does not hear about. The rival blocks take opposite sides, and hold each other in check; let us take advantage of this paralysis, let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we’ve no other arms, the waiting knife’s enough.’
Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.
In this case, you will say, let’s throw away this book. Why read it if it is not written for us? For two reasons; the first is that Fanon explains you to his brothers and shows them the mechanism by which we are estranged from ourselves; take advantage of this, and get to know yourselves seen in the light of truth, objectively. Our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable. It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realize what we have made of ourselves. But is it any use? Yes, for Europe is at death’s door. But, you will say, we live in the mother country, and we disapprove of her excesses. It is true, you are not settlers, but you are no better. For the pioneers belonged to you; you sent them overseas, and it was you they enriched. You warned them that if they shed too much blood you would disown them, or say you did, in something of the same way as any state maintains abroad a mob of agitators, agents provocateurs and spies whom it disowns when they are caught. You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades above all to some of them who are rather too Westernized — the solidarity of the people of the mother country and of their representatives in the colonies. Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment. You see, I, too, am incapable of ridding myself of subjective illusions; I, too, say to you: ‘All is lost, unless …’ As a European, I steal the enemy’s book, and out of it I fashion a remedy for Europe. Make the most of it.
And here is the second reason: if you set aside Sorel’s fascist utterances, you will find that Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day. Moreover, you need not think that hot-headedness or an unhappy childhood have given him some uncommon taste for violence; he acts as the interpreter of the situation, that’s all. But this is enough to enable him to constitute, step by step, the dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.
During the last century, the middle classes looked on the workers as covetous creatures, made lawless by their greedy desires; but they took care to include these great brutes in our own species, or at least they considered that they were free men — that is to say, free to sell their labour. In France, as in England, humanism claimed to be universal.
In the case of forced labour, it is quite the contrary. There is no contract; moreover, there must be intimidation and thus oppression grows. Our soldiers overseas, rejecting the universalism of the mother country, apply the ‘numerus clausus’ to the human race: since none may enslave, rob or kill his fellowman without committing a crime, they lay down the principle that the native is not one of our fellow-men. Our striking-power has been given the mission of changing this abstract certainty into reality: the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of the annexed country to the level of superior monkeys in order to justify the settler’s treatment of them as beasts of burden. Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job; guns are levelled at the peasant; civilians come to take over his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for them. If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his character and make his inmost self fall to pieces. The business is conducted with flying colours and by experts: the ‘psychological services’ weren’t established yesterday; nor was brain-washing. And yet, in spite of an these efforts, their ends are nowhere achieved: neither in the Congo, where Negroes’ hands were cut off, nor in Angola, where until very recently malcontents’ lips were pierced in order to shut them with padlocks. I do not say that it is impossible to change a Man into an animal I simply say that you won’t get there without weakening him considerably. Blows will never suffice; you have to push the starvation further, and that’s the trouble with slavery.
For when you domesticate a member of our own species, you reduce his output, and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes by costing more than he brings in. For this reason the settlers are obliged to stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor animal, is the native. Beaten, under-nourished, ill, terrified — but only up to a certain point — he has, whether he’s black, yellow or white, always the same traits of character: he’s a sly-boots, a lazybones and a thief, who lives on nothing, and who understands only violence.
Poor settler; here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He ought to kill those he plunders, as they say djinns do. Now, this is not possible, because he must exploit them as well. Because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization.
But it does not happen immediately. At first the European’s reign continues. He has already lost the battle, but this is not obvious; he does not yet know that the natives are only half-native; to hear him talk, it would seem that he ill-treats them in order to destroy or to repress the evil that they have rooted in them; and after three generations their pernicious instincts will reappear no more. What instincts does he mean? The instincts that urge slaves on to massacre their master? Can he not here recognize his own cruelty turned against himself? In the savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find his own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed through every pore and for which there is no cure? The reason is simple; this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of the ‘inferior races’ will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. Three generations did we say? Hardly has the second generation opened their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their fathers being flogged. In psychiatric terms, they are ‘traumatized’, for life. But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the European will pay for sooner or later. After that, when it is their turn to be broken in, when they are taught what shame and hunger and pain are, all that is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that of the pressure put upon them. You said they understand nothing but violence? Of course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror.
Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen, by their ever-present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men because of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of them — because of him, and against him. Hatred, blind hatred which is as yet an abstraction, is their only wealth; the Master calls it forth because he seeks to reduce them to animals, but he fails to break it down because his interests stop him half-way. Thus the ‘half-natives’ are still humans, through the power and the weakness of the oppressor which is transformed within them into a stubborn refusal of the animal condition. We realize what follows; they’re lazy: of course — it’s a form of sabotage. they’re sly and thieving; just imagine! But their petty thefts mark the beginning of a resistance which is still unorganized. That is not enough; there are those among them who assert themselves by throwing themselves barehanded against the guns; these are their heroes. Others make men of themselves by murdering Europeans, and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony exalts the terrified masses.
Yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the fear that they experience when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression but also that which their own fury produces in them. They are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of their humanity. Read Fanon: you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious.
If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy — and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood. They can only stop themselves from marching against the machine-guns by doing our work for us; of their own accord they will speed up the dehumanisation that they reject. Under the amused eye of the settler, they will take the greatest precautions against their own kind by setting up supernatural barriers, at times reviving old and terrible myths, at others binding themselves by scrupulous rites. It is in this way that an obsessed person flees from his deepest needs — by binding himself to certain observances which require his attention at every turn. They dance; that keeps them busy; it relaxes their painfully contracted muscles; and then the dance mimes secretly, often without their knowing, the refusal they cannot utter and the murders they dare not commit. In certain districts they make use of that last resort — possession by spirits. Formerly this was a religious experience in all its simplicity, a certain communion of the faithful with sacred things; now they make of it a weapon against humiliation and despair; Mumbo-Jumbo and all the idols of the tribe come down among them, rule over their violence and waste it in trances until it in exhausted. At the same time these high-placed, personages protect them; in other words the colonized people protect themselves against colonial estrangement by going one better in religious estrangement, with the unique result that finally they add the two estrangements together and each reinforces the other. Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by his demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays him compliments; but the jeers don’t stop for all that; only from then on, they alternate with congratulations. This is a defence, but it is also the end of the story; the self is disassociated, and the patient heads for madness. Let us add, for certain other carefully selected unfortunates, that other witchery of which I have already spoken: Western culture. If I were them, you may say, I’d prefer my mumbo-jumbo to their Acropolis. Very good: you’ve grasped the situation. But not altogether, because you aren’t them — or not yet. Otherwise you would know that they can’t choose; they must have both. Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens. Our enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same thing. The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.
Laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the contradiction is explosive. For that matter it does explode, you know as well as I do; and we are living at the moment when the match is put to the fuse. When the rising birthrate brings wider famine in its wake, when these newcomers have life to fear rather more than death, the torrent of violence sweeps away all barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it. The ‘liberals’ are stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough to the natives, that it would have been wiser and fairer to allow them certain rights in so far as this was possible; they ask nothing better than to admit them in batches and without sponsors to that very exclusive club, our species; and now this barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t spare them any more than the bad settlers. The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But, all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left scolds them … ‘you’re going too far; we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up their backsides. Once their war began, they saw this hard truth: that every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out of them; they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant favoured treatment to no one.
There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power. The more far-seeing among us will be, in the last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot help seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that these less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of humanity. Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest souls contain racial prejudice.
They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it — that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them. The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we consider it as a triumph of barbarism; but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter. You may fear or be feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the disassociations of a sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity. When the peasant takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten. The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot. At this moment the Nation does not shrink from him; wherever he goes, wherever he may be, she is; she follows, and is never lost to view, for she is one with his liberty. But, after the first surprise, the colonial army strikes; and then all must unite or be slaughtered. Tribal dissensions weaken and tend to disappear; in the first place because they endanger the Revolution, but for the more profound reason that they served no other purpose before than to divert violence against false foes. When they remain — as in the Congo — it’s because they are kept up by the agents of colonialism. The Nation marches forward; for each of her children she is to be found wherever his brothers are fighting. Their feeling for each other is the reverse of the hatred they feel for you; they are brothers inasmuch as each of them has killed and may at any moment have to kill again. Fanon shows his readers the limits of ‘spontaneity’ and the need for and dangers of ‘organization’. But however great may be the task at each turning of the way the revolutionary consciousness deepens. The last complexes flee away; no one need come to us talking of the ‘dependency’ complex of an A.L.N. soldier.
With his blinkers off, the peasant takes account of his real needs; before they were enough to kill him, but he tried to ignore them; now he sees them as infinitely great requirements. In this violence which springs from the people, which enables them to hold out for five years — for eight years as the Algerians have done — the military, political and social necessities cannot be separated. The war, by merely setting the question of command and responsibility, institutes new structures which will become the first institutions of peace. Here, then, is man even now established in new traditions, the future children of a horrible present; here then we see him legitimized by a law which will be born or is born each day under fire: once the last settler is killed, shipped home or assimilated, the minority breed disappears, to be replaced by socialism. And that’s not enough; the rebel does not stop there; for you can be quite sure that he is not risking his skin to find himself at the level of a former inhabitant of the old mother country. Look how patient he is! Perhaps he dreams of another Dien Bien Phu, but don’t think he’s really counting on it; he’s a beggar fighting, in his poverty, against rich men powerfully armed. While he is waiting for decisive victories, or even without expecting them at all, he tires out his adversaries until they are sick of him.
It will not be without fearful losses; the colonial army becomes ferocious; the country is marked out, there are mopping-up operations, transfers of population, reprisal expeditions, and they massacre women and children. He knows this; this new man begins his life as a man at the end of it; he considers himself as a potential corpse. He will be killed; not only does he accept this risk, he’s sure of it. This potential dead man has lost his wife and his children; he has seen so many dying men that he prefers victory to survival; others, not he, will have the fruits of victory; he is too weary of it all. But this weariness of the heart is the root of an unbelievable courage. We find our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond torture and death. We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind. The child of violence, at every moment he draws from it his humanity. We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of higher quality.
Here Fanon stops. He has shown the way forward: he is the spokesman of those who are fighting and he has called for union, that is to say the unity of the African continent against all dissensions and all particularisms. He has gained his end. If he had wished to describe in all its details the historical phenomenon of decolonization he would have to have spoken of us; this is not at all his intention. But, when we have closed the book, the argument continues within us, in spite of its author; for we feel the strength of the peoples in revolt and we answer by force. Thus there is a fresh moment of violence; and this time we ourselves are involved, for by its nature this violence is changing us, accordingly as the ‘half-native’ is changed. Everyone of us must think for himself — always provided that he thinks at all; for in Europe today, stunned as she is by the blows received by France, Belgium or England, even to allow your mind to be diverted, however slightly, is as good as being the accomplice in crime of colonialism. This book has not the slightest need of a preface, all the less because it is not addressed to us. Yet I have written one, in order to bring the argument to its conclusion; for we in Europe too are being decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners nor victims. Very well then; if you’re not victims when the government which you’ve voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of doubt, executioners. And if you chose to be victims and to risk being put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your irons out of the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out; they’ll have to stay there till the end. Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors.
You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new continents’, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the threat of a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation. This fat, pale continent ends by falling into what Fanon rightly calls narcissism. Cocteau became irritated with Paris — ‘that city which talks about itself the whole time’. Is Europe any different? And that super-European monstrosity, North America? Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour, patriotism and what have you. All this did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers, dirty Jews and dirty Arabs. High-minded people, liberal or just soft-hearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters. While there was a native population somewhere this imposture was not shown up; in the notion of the human race we found an abstract assumption of universality which served as cover for the most realistic practices. On the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-than-humans who, thanks to us, might reach our status a thousand years hence, perhaps; in short, we mistook the elite for the genus. Today, the native populations reveal their true nature, and at the same time our exclusive ‘club’ reveals its weakness — that it’s neither more nor less than a minority. Worse than that: since the others become men in name against us, it seems that we are the enemies of mankind; the élite shows itself in its true colours — it is nothing more than a gang. Our precious sets of values begin to moult; on closer scrutiny you won’t see one that isn’t stained with blood. If you are looking for an example, remember these fine words: ‘How generous France is!’ Us, generous? What about Sétif, then? And those eight years of ferocious war which have cost the lives of over a million Algerians? And the tortures?
But let it be understood that nobody reproaches us with having been false to such-and-such a mission — for the very good reason that we had no mission at all. It is generosity itself that’s in question; this fine melodious word has only one meaning: the granting of a statutory charter. For the folk across the water, new men, freed men, no one has the power nor the right to give anything to anybody; for each of them has every right, and the right to everything. And when one day our human kind becomes full-grown, it will not define itself as the sum total of the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of their mutual needs. Here I stop; you will have no trouble in finishing the job; all you have to do is to look our aristocratic virtues straight in the face, for the first and last time. They are cracking up; how could they survive the aristocracy of underlings who brought them into being? A few years ago, a bourgeois colonialist commentator found only this to say in defence of the West: ‘We aren’t angels. But we, at least, feel some remorse.’ What a confession! Formerly our continent was buoyed up by other means: the Parthenon, Chartres, the Rights of Man or the swastika. Now we know what these are worth; and the only chance of our being saved from, shipwreck is the very Christian sentiment of guilt. You can see it’s the end; Europe is springing leaks everywhere. What then has happened? It simply is that in the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The ratio of forces has been inverted; decolonization has begun; all that our hired soldiers can do is to delay its completion.
The old ‘mother countries’ have still to go the whole hog, still have to engage their entire forces in a battle which is lost before it has begun. At the end of the adventure we again find that colonial brutality which was Bugeaud’s doubtful but though it has been multiplied ten-fold, it’s still not enough. The national service units are sent to Algeria, and they remain there seven years with no result. Violence has changed its direction. When we were victorious we practised it without its seeming to alter us; it broke down the others, but for us men our humanism remained intact. United by their profits, the peoples of the mother countries baptized their commonwealth of crimes, calling them fraternity and love; today violence, blocked everywhere, comes back on us through our soldiers, comes inside and takes possession of us. Involution starts; the native re-creates himself, and we, settlers and Europeans, ultras and liberals we break up. Rage and fear are already blatant; they show themselves openly in the nigger-hunts in Algeria. Now, which side are the savages on? Where is barbarism? Nothing is missing, not even the tom-toms; the motor-horns beat out ‘Al-gér-ie fran-çaise’ while the Europeans burn Moslems alive. Fanon reminds us that not so very long ago, a congress of psychiatrists was distressed by the criminal propensities of the native population. ‘Those people kill each other,’ they said, ‘that isn’t normal. The Algerian’s cortex must be under-developed.’ In central Africa, others have established that ‘the African makes very little use of his frontal lobes’. These learned men would do well today to follow up their investigations in Europe, and particularly with regard to the French. For we, too, during the last few years, must be victims of ‘frontal sluggishness’ since our patriots do quite a bit of assassinating of their fellow-countrymen and if they’re not at home, they blow up their house and their concierge. This is only a beginning; civil war is forecast for the autumn, or for the spring of next year. Yet our lobes seem to be in perfect condition; is it not rather the case that, since we cannot crush the natives, violence comes back on its tracks, accumulates in the very depths of our nature and seeks a way out? The union of the Algerian people causes the disunion of the French people; throughout the whole territory of the ex-mother-country, the tribes are dancing their war-dances. The terror has left Africa, and is settling here; for quite obviously there are certain furious beings who want to make us Pay with our own blood for the shame of having been beaten by the native. Then too, there are the others, all the others who are equally guilty (for after Bizerta, after the lynchings of September, who among them came out into the streets to shout ‘We’ve had enough’?) but less spectacular — the liberals, and the toughs of the tender Left.
The fever is mounting amongst them too, and resentment at the same time. And they certainly have the wind up! They hide their rage in myths and complicated rites; in order to stave off the day of reckoning and the need for decision they have put at the head of our affairs a Grand Magician whose business it is to keep us all in the dark at all costs. Nothing is being done; violence, proclaimed by some, disowned by others, turns in a vacuum; one day it bursts out at Metz, the next at Bordeaux; it’s here, there and everywhere, like in a game of hunt the slipper. It’s our turn to tread the path, step by step, which leads down to native level. But to become natives altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger. This won’t happen; for it’s a discredited colonialism which is taking hold on us; this is the senile, arrogant master who will straddle us; here he comes, our mumbo-jumbo.
And when you have read Fanon’s last chapter, you will be convinced that it would be better for you to be a native at the uttermost depths of his misery than to be a former settler. It is not right for a police official to be obliged to torture for ten hours a day; at that rate, his nerves will fall to bits, unless the torturers are forbidden in their own interests to work overtime. When it is desirable that the morality of the Nation and the Army should be protected by the rigours of the law, it is not right that the former should systematically demoralize the latter, nor that a country with a Republican tradition should confide hundreds and thousands of its young folk to the care of putschist officers. It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name, it’s not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgement on yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues. Eight years of silence; what degradation! And your silence is all of no avail; today, the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that does not ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a single action that does hot betray our disgust, and our complicity. It is enough today for two French people to meet together for there to be a dead man between them. One dead man did I say? In other days France was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the name of a nervous disease.
Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted. Today, we are bound hand and foot, humiliated and sick with fear; we cannot fall lower. Happily this is not yet enough for the colonialist aristocracy; it cannot complete its delaying mission in Algeria until it has first finished colonizing the French. Every day we retreat in front of the battle, but you may be sure that we will not avoid it; the killers need it; they’ll go for us and hit out blindly to left and right.
Thus the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you will have to fight, or rot in concentration camps. This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters; never fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge. Then, perhaps, when your back is to the wall, you will let loose at last that new violence which is raised up in you by old, oft-repeated crimes. But, as they say, that’s another story: the history of mankind. The time is drawing near, I am sure, when we will join the ranks of those who make it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
# 18 October 2008 at 1:57 am

Cam said:
I found numerous copies of “Orders to Kill” by William F. Pepper (written by James Earl Ray’s attorney???) available on half.com (division of e-bay).
Great resource for older/obscure books you can’t find in stores. Tip: Find numerous books from one of the larger book vendors (Thrift Books, Better World Books, Alibris etc.) and save on shipping!
Another book on Jesse: “Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson” by Kenneth R. Timmerman. Have it, haven’t read it yet, however, just the title indicates to me that Timmerman might not be a Jackson fan.
There are numerous books about/by, pro/con Jesse available. Person-ally, I don’t like to form an opinion on someone based on any one book. I like to read and research different prespectives before reaching a conclusion.
Thank you Nean & Hannibal for your insight on Jesse. I agree, his numerous accomplishments certainly should not be written off. How-ever, right now he is looking and acting like McCain, a bitter, unhappy, old man who has seen/is seeing his quest for the Presidency slip away forever.
# 19 October 2008 at 1:14 pm

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