Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion "natives." The first possessed the Word, the others borrowed it. In between, an array of corrupt petty kings, feudal lords, and a fake, fabricated bourgeoisie served as go betweens. In the colonies, truth displayed its nakedness; the metropolises preferred it clothed; they had to get the "natives" to love them. Like mothers, of sorts. The European decided to fabricate a native elite; they selected adolescents, branded the principles of Westem culture on their foreheads with a red-hot iron, and gagged their mouths with sounds, pompous awkward words that twisted their tongues. After a short stay the metropolis they were sent home, fully doctored. These walking lies had nothing more to say to their brothers; from Paris, London, and Amsterdam we yelled, "Parthenon! Fraternity!" and somewhere in Africa and Asia mouths echoed"... thenon! ... nity!" It was a golden age.
Then it was over: the mouths opened of their own accord; black and yellow voices still talked of our humanism, but it was to blame us for our inhumanity. We quite happily listened to these polite displays of bitterness. At first we were amazed and proud: "What? They can chat away all on their own? Look what we did with them!" There was no doubt in our minds they 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."
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 ofus; your humanism wants us to be universal and your racist practices are differentiating us. We listened to them, very nonchalantly. Colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, so he's seldom on their reading list, but they don't need this philosopher to tell them that unhappy consciences get tangled up in their contradictions. Ultimate end result: nil. So let us perpetuate their misfortune; nothing will come out of it but hot air. If, the experts told us, 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. As for anything like a revolt, we had absolutely nothing to worry about: what lucid "native" would set about ma**acring the dashing sons of Europe with the sole intention of becoming Europeans like them? In short, we encouraged their melancholic moods, and we thought it would not be bad, for once, to award the Goncourt Prize to a black. That was before 1939.
1961. Listen: "Let us not lose time in useless laments and sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet ma**acres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. For centuries it has stifled virtually the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called 'spiritual adventure.''' The tone is new. Who dares voice it? An Marian, a man from the Third World, a former colonized subject. "Europe," he adds, "has gained such a mad and reckless momentum ... that it is heading toward the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves." In other words, Europe is done for. A truth that is hard to swallow, but of which all of us are-are we not, fellow Europeans?-convinced deep down.
We must make one reservation, however. When one Frenchman, for example, says to another: "We're done for!" -which, to my knowledge, has happened practically every day since 1930-it's a pa**ionate discourse, burning with rage and love, where the speaker puts himself in the same boat as his fellow countrymen. And then as a rule he adds: "Unless ..." Everyone gets the message: one cannot afford to make a single mistake. If his recommendations are not followed to the letter, then and only then will the country be done for. In short, it's a threat, followed by a piece of advice, and such remarks shock even less because they spring from a national inter-subjectivity. When Fanon, on the contrary, says that Europe is heading for ruin, far from uttering a cry of alarm, he is offering a diagnostic. Dr. Fanon claims he neither considers it to be a hopeless case miracles have been known to exist-nor is he offering to cure it. He is stating the fact that it is in its d**h throes. As an outsider, he bases his diagnostic on the symptoms he has observed. As for treating it, no: he has other things to worry about. Whether it survives or perishes, that's not his problem. For this reason his book is scandalous. And if you mumble, sn******ging awkwardly: "He's really got it in for us!" you have missed the true nature of the scandal, for Fanon has got nothing "in for you" at all; his book, which is such a hot issue for others, leaves you out in the cold. It often talks about you, but never to you. Gone are the black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels: the days of the colonized prizewinners are over. A "French-speaking" ex-native bends the language to new requirements, fashions it for his own use, and speaks to the colonized alone: "Natives of all the underdeveloped countries unite!" What a downfall For the fathers, we were the only interlocutors; for the sons, we no longer count: we are the object of their discourse. Of course, Fanon mentions in pa**ing our infamous crimes at Set if, Hanoi, and Madagascar, but he does not waste time condemning them: he makes use of them. He demolishes the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations uniting and opposing the colonists and the "metropolitans." For the sake of his brothers, his aim is to teach them how to outwit us.
In short, the Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice. We know it is not a uniform world, and it still contains subjected peoples, some of whom have acquired a false independence, others who are fighting to conquer their sovereignty, and yet others who have won their freedom, but who live under the constant threat of imperialist aggression. These differences are born out of colonial history, in other words, oppression. In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has k**ed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation. Europe, therefore, has hardened the divisions and conflicts, forged cla**es, and in some cases, racism, and endeavored by every means to generate and deepen the stratification of colonized societies. Fanon hides nothing. In order to wage the struggle against us, the former colony must wage a struggle against itself. Or rather it is one and the same thing. In the heat of combat, all domestic barriers must be torn down,the powerless bourgeoisie of racketeers and compradores, the still privileged urban proletariat and the lumpenproletariat of the shanty towns, must all align with the positions of the rural ma**es, the true reservoir for the national and revolutionary army. In countries where colonialism has deliberately halted development, the peasantry, when it decides to revolt, very quickly emerges as the radical cla**. It is all too familiar with naked oppression, suffers far worse than the urban workers, and to prevent it from dying of hunger, nothing less will do than the demolition of every existing structure. If it triumphs, the national revolution will be socialist; if it is stopped in its momentum, if the colonized bourgeoisie takes over power, the new state, despite its official sovereignty, will remain in the hands of the imperialists. The case of Katanga illustrates this fairly well. The unity of the Third World, therefore, is not complete: it is a work in progress that begins with all the colonized in every pre-or post-independent country, united under the leadership of the peasant cla**. This is what Fanon explains to his brothers in Mrica, Asia, and Latin America: we shall achieve revolutionary socialism everywhere and all together or we shall be beaten one by one by our former tyrants. He hides nothing: neither the weaknesses nor the disagreements nor the mystification. In some places the government gets off to a bad start; in others, after a stunning success, it loses momenhlm; elsewhere, it has come to a halt. In order to revive it the peasants must drive their bourgeoisie into the ocean. The reader is sharply warned of the most dangerous types of alienation: the leader, the personality cult, Western culture, and equally so, the revival of Marian cui hue from a distant past. The true culture is the revolution, meaning it is forged while the iron is hot. Fanon speaks out loud and clear. We Europeans, we can hear him. The proof is you are holding this book. Isn't he afraid that the colonial powers will take advantage of his sincerity?
No, he is not afraid of anything. Our methods are outdated: they can sometimes delay emancipation, but they can't stop it. And don't believe we can readjust our methods: neocolonialism, that lazy dream of the metropolises, is a lot of hot air; the "Third Force" does not exist or if it does it is the phony bourgeoisie to which colonialism has already handed over power. Our Machiavellianism has little hold on this world, which is wide awake and hot on the trail of everyone of our lies. The colonist has but one recourse: force or whatever is left of it. The "native" has but one choice: servitude or sovereignty. What does Fanon care if you read or don't read his book? It is for his brothers he denounces our old box of mischief, positive we don't have anything else up our sleeve. It is to them he says: Europe has got its claws on our continents. they most he severed until she re. leases them The moment is right for us. Nothing can happen in Bizerte, Elizabethville, or the Algerian bledopen this hank, look inside After taking a short walk iir the night you will see strangers gathered around a fire. get closer and listen. They arc discussing the fate reserved for your trading pada and for the mercenaries defending them They might see you, but they will go on talking among themselves without even lowering their voices. Their indifference strikes home: their fathers. creatures Irving in the shadows, you, nentures, were dead, you afforded them light, you were their sole interlocutor, you did not take the trouble to answer the zom-bies. The sons ignore you. The fire that warms and enlightens then, is not yours. You, standing eta respectful distance, you now feel eclipsed, nocturnal, and numbed It's your turn now. In the darkness that will dawn into another day, you have turned into the zombie.
In that case, you say. let's throw this book not of the window Why bother to read it since it is not meant find us? For two mums,: first, herause Fanon an*lyzes you for his brothers and demolishes for them the mechanism of our alienations. Lake advantage of it to discover your hue self an object. Our victims know us by their wounds and shaillev Mal is what mates their testimony inefutable. They only need to know what we have done to them for us to realize what we have done to ourselves. Is this necessary? Yes. because Europe is doomed. But, you will say renewed live in die metropolis, and we disapprove of extremes. It's true, you are not colonists, but you are not much better. 'They were your pioneers, you sent them overseas, they made you rich.
You warned them. if they shed too much blood you would pre¬tend to disown them; the same way a Statenn 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 color ties where ma**acres are committed in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades especially to those who remain a little too Westernized the solidarity of the metropolitans with their colonial agents. Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Nlarzsaid. Is a revolutionary feeling. You see I, too, cannot lose my subjective illusion. I, too, say to you: "All is lost unless...*I, a European. am stealing my enemy's book and turning It Into a way of healing Emigre. Make the most of it.
And this is the second reason: aside from Sorel's fascist chat¬ter, you will find that Fanon is the first since Engels to fortis again on the midwife of history. And don't be led into believing that hotheadedness vi au unhappy childhood gave him some odd liking for violence. He has made himself spokesman for the situ¬ation. nothing more. But that is all he needs to do in order to constitute, step by step, the dialectic that liberal hypocrisy hides from you and that has produced in just as much as it has pro¬duced him.
In the last century, the bourgeoisie considered the workers an envious lot, unhinged by their uncouth appetites. but it was tare-fill to include these weal brutes in the human race. Unless they were men and free, how could they possiblysell their manpower? In France and England humanism claims to be universal.
Forced labor is quite the opposite: there is no contract; in addition it requires intimidation; the oppression, therefore, is visible. By rejecting metropolitan universalism, our soldiers overseas apply the nurnena clausue to the human species, since none can rob, enslave, nil k** his fellow man without committing a crime, they lay down the principle that the colonized subject is not a fellow man. Our military forces have received orders to change this abstract certainty into reality: orders are given to re-duce the inhabitants of the occupied territory to the level of a superior ape in order to justify the colonist's treatment of them as beasts of burden. 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 without giving them ours. 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 and force them to work for them under the whip. If they resist, the soldiers fire, and they are dead men; if they give in and degrade themselves, they are no longer men. Shame and fear warp their character and dislocate their personality. Such a business is conducted briskly by experts: psychological warfare was not born yesterday. Nor was brainwashing. And yet despite all their efforts, nowhere have they achieved their aim; no more in the Congo where they cut off the hands of the blacks than in Angola where quite recently they pierced the lips of the malcontents in order to padlock them. And I am not saying it is impossible to change a man into an animal. I am saying they can't do it without weakening him consider-ably: beating is never enough, pressure has to be brought by undemourishing him. That's the problem with servitude: when you domesticate a member of our species, you lower his productivity, and however little you give him, a barnyard being ends up costing more than he's worth. For this reason the colonists are forced to stop breaking Mei in halfway. The result: neither man nor beast, but the "native? Beaten, underfed, sick, and frightened, but only up to a certain point, yellow, black, or white he always has the same character traits lazy, sly, and thieving, who lives on nothing and understands only the language of violence.
Poor colonist his contradiction has been unmasked. He ought to k** those he plunders, like they say the Onus do, But that is now out of the question. Doesn't he have to exploit them as well? Failing to carry the ma**acre to the point of genocide, and servitude to a state of mindlessness, he cracks up, the situation is reversed, and an implacable logic leads to decolonization. Not right away. First of all the European reigns: he has already lost but doesn't realize it; he does not yet know that the "natives" are false "natives." He has to make them suffer, he claims, in order to destroy or repress the evil they have inside them; after three generations, their treacherous instincts will be stamped out. What instincts? Those that drive the slaves to ma**acre their masters? flow come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagely of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: 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 thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes. 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. Three generations? As early as the second, hardly had the sons opened their eyes than they saw their fathers being beaten. In psychiatric terms, they were "traumatized." For life. But these constant acts of repeated aggression, far from forcing them into submission, plunge them into an intolerable contradiction, which sooner or later the European will have to pay for. After that, when it is their turn to be broken in, 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. Don't be mistaken; it is through. this mad rage, this bile and venom, their constant desire to k** us, and the permanent contraction of powerful muscles, afraid to relax, that they become men. It is through the colonist, who wants to turn them into beasts of burden, and against him. Still blind and abstract, hatred is their only a**et. The master provokes it because he seeks to deaden their minds; he fails to break it because his interests stop him halfway. The false "natives," therefore, are still humans owing to the power and powerlessness of the oppressor that are transformed into the natives' stubborn rejection of their animal condition. As for the rest, the message is clear. They are lazy, of course they are: it's a form of sabotage. Sly and thieving: What did you expect? Their petty thieving marks the start of a still unorganized resistance. And if that is not enough there are those who a**ert themselves by hurling themselves with their bare hands against the guns; these are their heroes; and others turn into men by k**ing Europeans. They are shot: the sacrifice of these outlaws and martyrs exalts the terrified ma**es.
Terrified, yes. At this new stage colonial aggression is internalized by the colonized as a form of terror. By that I mean not only the fear they feel when faced with our limitless means of repression, but also the fear that their own fury inspires in them. They are trapped between our guns, which are pointing at them, and those frightening instincts, those murderous impulses, that emerge from the bottom of their hearts and that they don't al-ways recognize. 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 Read Fanon: you will see that in a time of helplessness, murderous rampage is the collective unconscious of the colonized.
This repressed rage, never managing to explode, goes round in circles and wreaks havoc on the oppressed themselves, In order to rid themselves of it they end up ma**acring each other, tribes battle one against the other since they cannot confront the real enemy and you can count on colonial policy to fuel rivalries; the brother raising his knife against his brother believes he is destroying once and for all the hated image of their common debasement. But these expiatory victims do not satisfy their thirst for blood, and the only way to stop themselves from marching against the machine guns is to become our accomplices: the very dehumanization process they are rejecting will be speeded up by their own initiative. Under the amused gaze of the colonist, they protect themselves with supernatural safeguards, sometimes reviving awesome old myths, at other times tying themselves to meticulous rituals'. The colonized, therefore, in his obsession, shuns his deep desires by inflicting on himself odd rites that monopolize him at every moment. They dance: that keeps them occupied; it relaxes their painfully contracted muscles, and what's more, the dance secretly mimes, often unbeknownst to them, the No they dare not voice, the murders they dare not commit. In some regions they use the last resort; possession. What was once quite simply a religious act, an exchange between the believer and the sacred, has been turned into a weapon against despair and humiliation: the zars, the bas, the Saints of Santeria possess them, take control of their violence and squander it in trances ending in exhaustion. At the same time their idols protect them: in other words the colonized protect themselves from colonial alienation by going one step better with religious alienation, with the ultimate end result of having accumulated two alienations, each of which reinforces the other. In certain psychoses, therefore, tired of being insulted day in arid day out, the hallucinating individual suddenly gets it into his head to hear an angel's voice complimenting him; this doesn't stop the jeering, but at least it gives him a break. It is a means of defense and the end of their story: the personality dislocates and the patient is a case for dementia. For a few rigorously selected unfortunates, there is that other possession I mentioned earlier: Western culture. In their shoes, you might say, I would prefer my zars to the Acropolis. Okay: you've got the message. Not quite, however, because you are not in their shoes. Not yet. Otherwise you'd know they have no choice: they accumulate. Two worlds, that makes two possessions: you dance all night long, at dawn you hurry to church to attend ma**. Day by day the crack widens. Our enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same. 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. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are ma**acred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. The "liberals" remain stunned: they admit we had not been polite enough to the "natives," that it would have been wiser and fairer to grant them certain rights, wherever possible; they would have been only too happy to admit them in batches without a sponsor to that exclusive club the human species; and now this barbaric explosion of madness is putting them in the same boat as the wretched colonists. 'Me metropolitan Left is in a quandary: it is well aware of the true fate of the "natives," the pitiless oppression they are subjected to, and does not condemn their revolt, knowing that we did everything to provoke it. But even so, it thinks, there are limits: these guerrillas should make every effort to show some chivalry; this would be the best way of proving they are men. Sometimes the left berates them "You're going too far; we cannot support you any longer." They don't care a sh** for its support; it can shove it up its a** for what it's worth. As soon as the war began, they realized the harsh truth: we are all equally as good as each other. We have all taken advantage of them, they have nothing to prove, they won't give anyone preferential treatment A single duty, a single objective: drive out colonialism by every means. And the most liberal among us would be prepared to accept this, at a pinch, but they cannot help seeing in this trial of strength a perfectly inhuman method used by subhimans to claim for themselves a charter for humanity: let them acquire it as quickly as possible, but in order to merit it, let them- use nonviolent methods. Our noble souls are racist.
They would do well to read franon; he shows perfectly clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither a storm in a teacup nor the reemergence of savage instincts nor even a consequence of resentment: it is man reconstructing himself. I believe we once knew, and have since forgotten, the truth that no indulgence can erase the marks of violence: violence alone can eliminate them. And the colonized are cured of colonial neurosis by driving the colonist out by force. Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coheience, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its 0,Arrl to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness in-side and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain tenified or becorne terrifying which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one's native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter's weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt k**ing is a necessity: k**ing a European is k**ing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free; for the first time the survivor feels a national soil under his feet. In that moment the nation does not forsake him: it is there wherever he goes and wherever he is always by his side, it merges with his freedom. But after the initial surprise the colonial army responds: one must unite or be ma**acred. Tribal conflicts diminish and tend to disappear: firstly, because they jeopardize the revolution, and more precisely because they had no other purpose but to shift the violence onto false enemies. When they persist like in the Congo it is because they are fueled by the agents of colonialism. The nation moves forward: every comrade in arms represents the nation for every other comrade. Their brotherly love is the reverse side of the hatred they feel for you; linked as brothers by the fact that each of them has k**ed and can at any moment k** again. Fanon shows his readers the limits of "spontaneity," the need for and the risks of "organization." But however immense the task, at each new stage of the undertaking, the revolutionary consciousness deepens. The last complexes are swept away: just let them try and talk about a "dependency complex" in an ALN soldier. Freed from his blinkers, the peasant becomes aware of his needs: these were k**ing him, but he tried to ignore them; now he discovers their infinite demands, In this atmosphere of ma** violence in order to hold out five or eight years, as the Algerians have done the military, social, and political demands are indistinguishable. The war if only the question of command and responsibilities establishes new structures that will be the first institutions of peace. Here then is man instated in new traditions even, future daughters of a horrible present; here he is legitimized by a right about to be born or born every day in the heat of combat: with the last of the colonists k**ed, re-embarked or a**imilated, the minority species disappears, giving way to socialist brotherhood. And this is still not enough; the fighter takes short cuts; you don't think he is risking his life to turn himself into an old "metropolitan." Look how patient he is: perhaps he dreams sometimes of another Dien Bien Phu; but don't believe he is really counting on it: he is a beggar who in his wretchedness is fighting the rich and their military might. In expectation of decisive victories, and very often expecting nothing, he works his enemies to distraction. This is not without terrifying losses; the colonial army turns savage: police checks, search operations, roundups, and punitive raids; they ma**acre women and children. This new man knows that his life as a man begins with d**h; he considers himself a potential candidate for d**h. He will be k**ed: it is not just that he accepts the risk of being k**ed, he is certain of it. This walking dead man has lost his wife and his sons; he has seen so much agony he prefers victory to survival; others will profit from the victory, not him; he is too weary. But this weariness of heart is the reason behind his incredible courage. We find our humanity this side of d**h and despair; he finds it on the other side of torture and d**h. 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. Another man: a man of higher quality.
Here Fanon stops, He has shown the way: as spokesman for the fighters, he has called for union, the unity of the African continent against every discord and every idiosyncrasy. He has achieved his purpose. If he had wanted to describe fully the historical phenomenon of colonization, he would have had to talk about us which was certainly not his intention. But when we have closed the book, it continues to haunt us, in spite of its author: for we sense the force of these peoples waging a revolution and our only response is violence. A new moment in violence, therefore, occurs, and this time it involves us because it is in the process of changing us to the same extent it changes the false 'native." Everyone can think what he likes, provided however that he thinks: in a Europe shinned by the blows it is receiving these days, the slightest distraction of thought in France, Belgium, and England amounts to a criminal complicity with colonialism. This book had certainly no need for a preface. Especially as it is not addressed to us. I have written one, however, to carry the dialectic through to its conclusion: we, too, peoples of Europe, we are being decolonized: meaning the colonist in-side every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation. 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 striptease 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. 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. And if you choose to be a victim, risking one or two days in prison, you are simply trying to take the easy way out. But you can't; there is no way out. Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might. relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your pa**iveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.
You know full well we are exploiters. You know full well we have taken the gold and minerals and then oil from the "new continents," and shipped them back to the old metropolises. Not without excellent results in the shape of palaces, cathedrals, and centers of industry; and then when crisis loomed, the colonial markets were there to cushion the blow or divert it. Stuffed with wealth, Europe granted humanity de jure to all its inhabitants: for us, a man means an accomplice, for we have all profited from colonial exploitation. This pale, bloated continent ended up by lapsing into what Ninon rightly calls "narcissism." Cocteau was irritated by Paris, "this city that never stops talking about herself.' And Europe, what else is it doing? And that super-European monster, North America? What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honor, country, and what else? This did not pre-vent us from making racist remarks at the same time: dirty n******g, filthy Jew, dirty Arab. Noble minds, liberal and sympathetic neocolonialists, in other words claimed to be shocked by this inconsistency, since the only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters. As long as the status of "native" existed, the imposture remained unmasked.
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. Today the "native" unmasks his truth; as a result, our exclusive club reveals its weakness: it was nothing more and nothing less than a minority. There is worse news: since the others are turning into men against us, apparently we are the enemy of the human race; the elite is revealing its true nature a gang. Our beloved values are losing their feathers; if you take a closer look there is not one that isn't tainted with blood. If you need plod, remember those noble words: How generous France is. Generous? Us? And what about Saif? And what about those eight years of fierce fighting that have cost the lives of over a million Algerians? And the torture by electricity? But you must understand we are not being blamed for having betrayed some mission or other: for the good reason we don't have any. It is our very generosity that is being challenged; such a beautiful, melodious word means only one thing: status granted. For the new men on the other side who have been set free, no-body has the power or the privilege to deny anybody anything. Everyone has every right. Over everything. And the day when our human race has fully matured, it will not define itself as the sum of the inhabitants of the globe, but as the infinite unity of their reciprocities. I shall stop here; you won't have trouble finishing the job; for the first and last time you only need to look our aristocratic virtues in the face: they are doomed; how could they survive the aristocracy of sub humans who engendered them? 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. It's the end; as you can see, Europe leaks like a sieve. What then has happened? Quite simply this: we were the subjects of history, and now we are the objects. The power struggle has been reversed, decolonization is in progress; all our mercenaries can try and do is delay its completion.
But in order to do that, the former metropolises would have to pull out all the stops and commit all their forces to a battle lost in advance. That old colonial brutality that made Bugeand a dubious hero, here it is at the end of the colonial venture applied tenfold yet still insufficient. The troops are dispatched to Algeria where they have held out for seven years with no result. The violence has changed direction; victorious, we enforced it without it ever seeming to affect us; it dislocated the other, whereas our humanism as men remained intact. United by profit, the metropolitans baptized their commonwealth of crimes Fraternity and Love. Today, the very same violence, blockaded every-where, comes back to us through our soldiers, internalizes itself and possesses us. Involution begins: the colonized reintegrate themselves, and we, the reactionaries and the liberals, the colonists and the metropolitans, disintegrate. Fury and fear are already stripped naked: they are laid bare in the brutal punitive raids in Algiers. Where are the savages now? Where is the barbarity? Nothing is missing, not even the drums: the car horns hammer out "Algeria for the French," while the Europeans burn the m**ms alive. Not so long ago, Fanon recalls, a congress of psychiatrists deplored Algerian criminality: these people are k**ing themselves, they said, it's not normal; the cortex of the Algerian must be underdeveloped. In Central Africa others established that "the African uses his frontal lobes very little." These scientists would do well to pursue their research in Europe, and especially among the French. For we, too, must be affected by frontal idleness for sorne time now: our patriots have been a**a**inating their fellow countrymen, and if they find no one home, they blow up the concierge and the house. This is only the beginning; civil war is predicted for autumn or next spring. Our lobes, however, seem perfectly normal: couldn't the reason be rather that, powerless in crush the "native," violence turns inward, bottles itself up deep inside us, and seeks an outlet? The unity of the Algerian people produces the disunity of the French: throughout the territories of the ex-metropolises the tribes are dancing and preparing to fight. Terror has left Africa to settle here; for there are raving fanatics who want to make us pay with our blood for the shame of having been beaten by the "native," and then there are the others, all the others, the liberals, the hardliners of the spine-less Left who are just as guilty (after Bizerte, after the September lynchings, who took to the streets to shout "Enough is enough"?), but more composed. The fever is mounting in them, too, as well as spiteful anger. But they're scared still They conceal their rage behind myths and complicated rituals. In order to delay the final reckoning and the hour of truth, they have given us a Grand Magician as our leader whose function is to keep us in the dark at any cost. To no effect; hailed by some, rejected by others, violence goes round in circles; one day it explodes in Metz, the next day in Bordeaux; now it's here, then it's there, like the game of pa** the slipper. Slowly but surely it is our turn to head down the road to "native" status. But in order to become genuine "natives" our territory would have to be occupied by the formerly colonized and we would have to be starving to d**h. This will not be the case; no, it is the demise of colonialism that possesses us; we shall soon be mounted by it in all its arrogance and senility; that is our zar, that is our loa. And you will be convinced on reading Fanon's last chapter that it is better to be a "native" in the pit of misery than an erstwhile colonist. It is not right that a police officer should be obliged to torture ten hours a day: at that rate his nerves will go to pieces, unless torturers are forbidden to work overtime in their own interest. When you want to safeguard the morale of the nation and the army under the rigor of the law, it is not right for the latter to systematically demoralize the former. Nor for a country with a republican tradition to entrust its young men by the hundreds of thousands to put schist officers. It is not right, my fellow countrymen, you who know all the crimes com-mitted in our name, it is really not right not to breathe a word about them to anybody, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to pa** judgment on yourselves. At first you had no idea, I am prepared to believe it, then you suspected, and now you know, Imityon still keep silent. Eight years of silence have a dam-aging effect And in vain: the blinding glare of torture is high in the sky, flooding the entire country; under this blaze of light, not a single laugh rings true any longer, not a single face that is not painted to mask the anger and the fear, no longer a single act that does not betray our d isgust and our complicity. Today when-ever two Frenchmen meet, there is a dead body between them. And did I say one. . ? France was once the name of a country; be careful lest it become the name of a neurosis in 1961.
Will we recover? Yes. Violence, like Achilles' spear, can heal the wounds it has inflicted. Today we are in chains, humiliated, sick with fear: at our lowest ebb. Fortunately for us, this is still not enough for the colonialist aristocracy: it cannot accomplish its rearguard mission in Algeria until it has first finished colonizing the French. Every day we shrink back from the tight, but rest a**ured it will be inevitable. The k**ers, they need it; they will swoop down on us and lash out haphazardly. The time for illusionists and wizardry is over: either you fight or rot in the camps, This is the last stage of the dialectic; you condemn this war but you don't yet dare declare your support for the Algerian fighters; have no fear, you can count on the colonists and mercenaries to help you make up your mind. Perhaps, then, with your back to the wall, you will finally unleash this new violence aroused in you by old, rehashed crimes. But, as they say, that is another story. The history of man. The time is coming, lam convinced, when we shall join the ranks of those who are making it.