Chris Baterna’s Reviews > The Wretched of the Earth > Status Update

Reciprocal Bases...:
"...following forms of cultures which are already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of nationality; but...a throwback to the laws of inertia.."
"The struggle itself in its development and internal progression sends culture along different paths and traces out entirely new ones..."
"National consciousness... is the only thing that will give us an international dimension."

National Culture:
"the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people."
"Custom is always the deterioration of culture."
"A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence."

Pitfalls of National Consciousness:
The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands out the much greater business of plunder.
[Wealth is] the result of organised, protected robbery.
No leader... can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, out fight to give back their dignity to all citizens...

Spontaneity: its Strengths and Weaknesses
"If need be the native can accept a compromise with colonialism, but never a surrender of principle."
"Violence alone... committed by the people..., organized and educated makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the keys to them."

Maybe the real 'industrialised peasants of individualism, lack of discipline, liking to money, and propensities towards waves of rage and deep discouragement' were the Australians we made along the way

Sartre's Preface is brilliantly packed with confrontational ideas to get a taste of Fanon
"...this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man recreating himself."
"The child of violence, at every moment he draws from it humanity. We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of higher quality."