Jean-Paul Sartre

On genocide

Ewolucja wojny

• Zmiana sposobu prowadzenia wojny: 'the structures of war change at the same time as those of society. From 1860 to this day, military motives and objectives have undergone a profound change and the end result of this metamorphosis is precisely the war of ‘example’ that the USA is waging in Vietnam.'
• Wojna totalna wyraża prawdziwą naturę społeczeństwa kapitalistycznego: 'Vladimir Dedijer has shown very well in his book On Military Conventions that capitalist societies were all simultaneously creating this monster, total war, which expresses their real nature.'
  • 'fighting over new markets engenders a permanent hostility'
  • 'the production of more and more massively lethal arms.'
  • 'less and less possible to distinguish the rear from the front line, between the civilian population and the soldiers.'
  • 'More military objectives appear, near to the cities'
  • 'The factories, even if they are not working for the armies, do comprise the economic potential of a country.'
  • 'everybody is mobilised'
  • 'the democratic evolution of the bourgeois countries interests the masses in politics'
  • 'When a war comes, they no longer feel detached. Thus, reappraised and often deformed by propaganda, war becomes an ethical decision of the whole community. In every nation engaged in war manipulation makes all, or nearly all, the citizens the enemies of the other nation. In this way war becomes total.'

Kolonizacja

• Francuska kolonizacja wymagała ludobójstwa: 'This easily conquered any regular armies that existed, but because such barefaced aggression provoked the hatred of the civilian populations, which is the reserve of manpower or soldiers, the colonial troops imposed themselves by the terror of constant massacres. These massacres had all the characteristics of genocide: they involved destruction of ‘one part of the group’ (ethnic, national, religious) to terrorise the rest and break down the indigenous social structure. When the French had made a bloodbath of Algeria during the nineteenth century, they imposed on this tribal society – where every community possessed its own indivisible lands – the Code Civile, which consists of bourgeois jurisdiction with regard to the division of inherited property. Thus, they systematically destroyed the economic structure of the country. The land soon passed from the peasant tribes into the hands of merchants who had come from France. In fact, colonialisation is not just a simple conquest – as was the case in 1870 when Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine – it is necessarily a cultural genocide'
• Ekonomiczna logika kolonii: 'One cannot colonise without systematically destroying the particular character of the natives, at the same time denying them the right of integration with the mother country and of benefiting from its advantages. Colonialism is, in effect, a system: the colony sells raw materials and foodstuffs at a favourable price to the colonial power which then sells industrial goods back to them at world market prices'
• To wymaga jeszcze płacenia głodowych pensji: 'This peculiar method of exchange can only be established when the native labour is made to work for starvation wages.'

Przemilczane ludobójstwa

• Zaraz po procesach norymberskich Francuzi zmasakrowali 45000 Algierczyków: 'The Nuremberg Tribunal was fresh in the memory when the French, to make an example, massacred 45,000 Algerians at Sétif.'
• Ale w tym wypadku nikt nawet nie myślał o sądach: 'This was such a common occurrence that no one then thought of judging the French government as the Nazis had been judged.'
• Amerykanie walczyli w Wietnamie aby uniknąć III wojny światowej: 'That is why Dean Rusk says, with unconscious humour, that the armed forces of the United States are fighting in Vietnam ‘to avoid a Third World War’'
  • 'What must the Vietnamese people do to escape this atrocious death? Join the American armed forces or those of Saigon, or let themselves be enclosed in strategic hamlets or in those ‘new life’ compounds, which are two names for concentration camps.'
• Amerykańskie obozy koncentracyjne w Wietnamie: 'We know about these camps from numerous witnesses. They are surrounded by barbed wire. The most elementary needs are ignored. There is under-nourishment and complete lack of sanitation. The prisoners are packed into tents or primitive huts where they stifle. The social structure is destroyed. Husbands are separated from wives, mothers from their children, family life – so respected by the Vietnamese – no longer exists. As the homes are broken up, the birth rate diminishes; all possibility of cultural or religious life is abolished. Even work that will improve the standard of living is denied them. These unfortunates are not even slaves (the servile condition of the American Negroes has not stifled their own deep culture); this group is reduced to the state of an appendage, to the worst of vegetative lives.'
• USA miało intencje ludobójstwa: 'While the armed forces of the USA are digging deeper into Vietnam, intensifying the massacres and bombings, attempting to subject Laos and intending to invade Cambodia, there is no doubt that the government of the United States, despite all the hypocritical denials, has opted for genocide.'

Prawa człowieka w USA

• USA nie podpisało konwencji genewskiej: 'The proof lies in the United States government’s refusal to ratify the Geneva Convention on genocide.'
• Konwencja genewska nie zgadzałaby się z prawnymi regulacjami ze Stanów południowych: 'according to their own declaration, the Convention would have conflicted with the internal legislation of many of the American States. In other words, the present leaders consider themselves unshackled in Vietnam today thanks to their predecessors who had wanted to respect the anti-Negro racialism of the South. In any case, ever since 1965, the racialism of the Yankee soldiers from Saigon to the 17th parallel has increased. The young Americans torture without repugnance, shooting at unarmed women for the pleasure of completing a hat-trick: they kick the wounded Vietnamese in the testicles; they cut off the ears of the dead for trophies.'