"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
Emile Zola.
"The umpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps."
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
"There should be equality among all people save only the king. There should be no serfdom and all men should be free and of one condition. We will be free forever, our heirs and our lands."
Wat Tyler.
"Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand."
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
"If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation."
Vaclav Havel.
"The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be."
Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth.
"Once the rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence,they experience self-knowledge through the reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become 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 killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free."
Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth.
"Although the scythe isn't pre-eminent among the weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end, of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome."
Terry Pratchett.
"Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists."
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of The Earth.
"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 thought, is governed by a thousand-year old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors."
There were questions my father found hard to answer:
"So God created everything?"
"Yes."
"And God created the Devil?"
"Yes."
"So God is responsible for all the evil in the world?"
"..."
I was never terribly convinced by my father's answer concerning God's responsiblility for evil.
I have long played Devil's advocate.
I much prefer kindness to killing.
I think it was Terry Elliott (him again) who introduced me to Voltaire.
I really must read Candide if I am going to quote from it.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme (/ˌkænˈdiːd/; French: [kɑ̃did]) is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: or, Optimism (1947).[5] It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenicparadise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply "optimism") by his mentor, Professor Pangloss.[6]
The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by
Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences
great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not
rejecting optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we
must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of
Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds".
That's it, that's what I believe:
"we must cultivate our garden."
I would say that I am intolerant of intolerance.
An easy catchprase...
An Englishman's garden.
I believe that we must enable people to find their way, to self-actualise...
This is all well and good.
There is a problem with this.
What must be our response to those who would trample on our garden, on the garden of others?
What must be our response to fascism?
What must be our response to those who have a very particular interpretation of their place in the world which includes a belief that they have the right to carry out acts of violence towards those that they disagree with, or to seize the gardens of others that they envy?
There are those who justify their acts with words from books.
Those acts include horrific, unimaginable acts: execution, torture, rape, infanticide, genocide, surgical strikes...
There are questions that I find hard to answer:
Am I prepared to fight?
"..."
What am I prepared to fight for?
" ..."
In what ways am I prepared to fight?
" ..."
“any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged”
