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

As he had no intention of giving up his job as a torturer, this would make no sense since he would then have to resign. He asked me in plain language to help him torture Algerian patriots without having a guilty conscience, without any behavioral problems, and with a total peace of mind

[French torturer in psychiatric sessions due to episodes of aggression towards his family]
The golden rule is to never give the guy the impression he won’t get out alive. He’ll then wonder what’s the use of talking if it won’t save his life. In that case you’ll have no chance at all of getting anything out of him. He has to go on hoping: It’s hope that makes them talk.

[French officer]
I can tell at which stage the interrogation has reached by the sound of the screams. The guy who has been punched twice and given a blow behind the ear has a certain way of talking, screaming, and saying that he is innocent. After he has been hanging by his wrist for two hours, his voice changes, after the bathtub, a different voice, and so on. It's after the electricity that it becomes unbearable

This struggle, which aims at a fundamental redistribution of relations between men, cannot leave intact either the form or substance of the people's culture. After the struggle is over that is not only the demise of colonialism but also the demise of the colonized

In the colonial context culture, when deprived of the twin supports of the nation and the state, perishes and dies. National liberation and the resurrection of the state are the preconditions for the very existence of culture

A culture is, first and foremost, the expression of a nation, its preferences, its taboos, and its models. Other taboos, other values, other models are formed at every level of the entire society. National culture is the sum of all these considerations, the outcome of tensions internal and external to society as a whole and its multiple layers

Culture never has the translucency of custom. Culture eminently eludes any form of simplification. In its essence it is the very opposite of custom, which is always a deterioration of culture. Seeking to stick to tradition or reviving neglected traditions is not only going against history but against one's people

Colonialism, with a kind of perverted logic, turns its attention to the past of the colonized people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it…The result was to hammer into the heads of the indigenous population that if the colonists were to leave they would regress into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality

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