Murderous Humanitarianism
by the Surrealist Group of France [1932]
For centuries the soldiers, priests and civil agents of imperialism, in
a welter of looting, outrage and wholesale murder, have with impunity
grown fat off the colored races. Now it is the turn of the demagogues,
with their counterfeit liberalism.
But the proletariat of today, whether metropolitan or colonial, is no
longer to be fooled by fine words as to the real end in view, which is
still, as it always was, the exploitation of the greatest number for the
benefit of a few slavers. Now these slavers, knowing their days to be
numbered and reading the doom of their system in the world crisis, fall
back on a gospel of mercy, whereas in reality they rely more than ever
on their traditional methods of slaughter to enforce their tyranny. No
great penetration is required to read between the lines of the news,
whether in print or on the screen: punitive expeditions, Blacks lynched
in America, the white scourge devastating town and country in our
parliamentary kingdoms and bourgeois republics.
War, that reliable colonial endemic, receives fresh impulse in the name
of "pacification." France may well be proud of having launched this
Godsent euphemism at the precise moment when, in throes of pacifism, she
sent forth her tried and trusty thugs with instructions to plunder all
those distant and defenseless peoples from whom the intercapitalistic
butchery had distracted her attentions for a space. The most scandalous
of these wars, that against the Riffians in 1925, stimulated a number of
intellectuals, investors in militarism, to assert their complicity with
the hangmen of jingo and capital.
Responding to the appeal of the Communist Party, we protested against
the war in Morocco and made our declaration in Revolution Now and Forever!
In a France hideously inflated from having dismembered Europe, made
mincemeat of Africa, polluted Oceania and ravaged whole tracts of Asia,
we surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist
war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed
our energies in the service of the revolution - of the proletariat and
its struggles - and defined our attitude toward the colonial problem,
and hence toward the color question.
Gone were the days when the delegates of this sniveling capitalism might
screen themselves in those abstractions which, in both secular and
religious mode, were invariably inspired by the Christian ignominy and
which strove on the most grossly interested grounds to masochize
whatever people had not yet been contaminated by the sordid moral and
religious codes in which men feign to find authority for the
exploitation of their fellows.
When whole peoples had been decimated with fire and sword it became
necessary to round up the survivors and domesticate them in such a cult
of labor as could only proceed from the notions of original sin and
atonement.
The clergy and professional philanthropists have always collaborated
with the army in this bloody exploitation. The colonial machinery that
extracts the last penny from natural advantages hammers away with the
joyful regularity of a pole ax. The white man preaches, doses,
vaccinates, assassinates and (from himself) receives absolution. With
his psalms, his speeches, his guarantees of liberty, equality and
fraternity, he seeks to drown the noise of his machine guns. It is no
good objecting that these periods of rapine are only a necessary phase
and pave the way, in the words of the time-honored formula, "for an era
of prosperity founded on a close and intelligent collaboration between
the natives and the metropolis!" It is no good trying to palliate
collective outrage and butchery by jury in the new colonies by inviting
us to consider the old, and the peace and prosperity they have so long
enjoyed. It is no good blustering about the Antilles and the "happy
evolution" that has enabled them to be assimilated, or very nearly, by
France.
In the Antilles, as in America, the fun began with the total
extermination of the natives, in spite of their having extended a most
cordial reception to the Christopher Columbian invaders. Were they now -
in the hour of triumph, and having come so far - to set out empty-handed
for home? Never! So they sailed on to Africa and stole men. These were
in due course promoted by our humanists to the ranks of slavery, but
were more or less exempted from the sadism of their masters by virtue of
the fact that they represented a capital which had to be safeguarded
like any other capital. Their descendants, long since reduced to
destitution (in the French Antilles they live on vegetables and salt cod
and are dependent in the matter of clothing on whatever old guano sacks
they are lucky enough to steal), constitute a Black proletariat whose
conditions of life are even more wretched than those of its European
equivalent and which is exploited by a colored bourgeoisie quite as
ferocious as any other. This bourgeoisie, covered by the machine guns of
culture, "elects" such perfectly adequate representatives as "Hard
Labor" Diagne and "Twister" Delmont.
The intellectuals of this new bourgeoisie, though they may not all be
specialists in parliamentary abuse, are no better than the experts when
they proclaim their devotion to the Spirit. The value of this idealism
is precisely given by the maneuvers of its doctrinaires who, in their
paradise of comfortable iniquity, have organized a system of poltroonery
proof against all the necessities of life and the urgent consequences of
dream. These gentlemen, votaries of corpses and theosophies, go to
ground in the past, vanish down the warrens of Himalayan monasteries.
Even for those whom a few last shreds of shame and intelligence dissuage
from invoking those current religions whose God is too frankly a God of
cash, there is the call of some "mystic Orient" or other. Our gallant
sailors, policemen and agents of imperialist thought, in league with
opium and literature, have swamped us with their irretentions of
nostalgia; the function of all these idyllic alarms among the dead and
gone being to distract our thoughts from the present, the abominations
of the present.
A holy-saint-faced international of hypocrites deprecates the material
progress foisted on the Blacks; protests, courteously, against the
importation not only of alcohol, syphilis and field artillery but also
of railways and printing. This comes well after the former rejoicings of
its evangelical spirit at the idea that the "spiritual values" current
in capitalist societies, and notably respect for human life and
property, would devolve naturally from enforced familiarity with
fermented drinks, firearms and disease. It is scarcely necessary to add
that the colonist demands this respect for property without reciprocity.
Those Blacks who have merely been compelled to distort in terms of
fashionable jazz the natural expression of their joy at finding
themselves partners of a universe from which Western peoples have
willfully withdrawn may consider themselves lucky to have suffered
nothing worse than degradation. The eighteenth century derived nothing
from China except a repertoire of frivolities to grace the alcove. In
the same way the whole object of our romantic exoticism and modern
travel lust is of use only in entertaining that class of blasé clients
sly enough to see an interest in deflecting to his own advantage the
torrent of those energies which soon, sooner than he thinks, will close
over his head.
ANDRÉ BRETON, ROGER CAILLOIS, RENÉ CHAR, RENÉ CREVEL, PAUL ELUARD, J.-M.
MONNEROT, BENJAMIN PÉRET, YVES TANGUY, ANDRÉ THIRION, PIERRE UNIK,
PIERRE YOYOTTE
This declaration, written in 1932, first appeared in Nancy Cunard's
Negro anthology (1934),
translated by Samuel Beckett.
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