Jarh L. Rodriguez’s Reviews > The Wretched of the Earth > Status Update

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

The army is never a school for war but a school for civics, a school for politics. The soldier in a mature nation is not a mercenary but a citizen who defends the nation by the use of arms. This is why it is paramount that the soldier knows he is at the service of his country and not of an officer, however illustrious he may be

To politicize the masses is not and cannot be to make a political speech. It means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, that if we progress they too are responsible. That there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone

Language's endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to this process. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand

But If we speak in plain language, if we are not obsessed with a perverse determination to confuse the issues and exclude the people, then it will be clear that the masses comprehend all the finer points and every artifice.

In the underdeveloped countries we have seen that there was no genuine bourgeoisie but rather an acquisitive, voracious, and ambitious petty caste dominated by a small-time racketeer mentality, content with the dividends paid out by the former colonial power. This short-sighted bourgeoisie lacks vision and inventiveness. It transforms itself not into a replica of Europe but rather its caricature

The former metropolis therefore governs indirectly through both the bourgeoisie it nurtures and the national army, which is trained and supervised by its experts to transfix, immobilize, and terrorize the people

We now know that the short-sighted fascism that has triumphed for half a century in Latin America is the dialectical result of the semi-colonial state which has prevailed since independence

Favors abound, corruption triumphs, and morals decline. Today the vultures are too numerous and too greedy, considering the meagerness of the national spoils. The Party, which has become a genuine instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the state apparatus and determines the containment and immobilization of the people. It is increasingly an instrument of coercion and clearly anti-democratic

Because it is lacking in ideas, because it is inward-looking, cut off from the people served by its congenital incapacity to evaluate issues on the basis of the nation as a whole, the national bourgeoisie assumes the role of manager for the companies of the West and turns this country virtually into a bordello for Europe