Tuesday, September 29, 2009

"Many Mozambican citizens fought, not one side or the other, not the governments or the militaries, but violence itself...

People there told me that to take up arms against one side or the other was to play into the very hands they fought against. They would then be reproducing the same violent politics that oppressed them. Even the militaries they fought against won if they took up arms: for they followed the model of power those militaries had set into motion. Violence would continue to define their lives. To truly defeat someone, they said, is not to act by the oppressor's rules, but to institute another set of rules altogether."

4 comments:

renamaphone said...

Some words I just put up on my cork board.

They're Carolyn Nordstrom's, from a book she wrote called A Different Kind of War Story.

renamaphone said...

This book is actually all about a culture of war in Mozambique, and the creativity that it engendered as a means of survival, resistance, and cultural reconstruction.

My mind is racing with possibilities.

D. Sky Onosson said...

The scary thing is... how bad does it have to get before most people start thinking this way?

We humans have tendencies towards violence, peace... and complacency.

Lorne Roberts said...

this has been my argument against qualifying "lefty" revolutions (i.e. Cuba) as automatically being a success, or almost any revolution at all, for that matter.

it's also one of my arguments against people like the late pierre falardeau and les jeunes patriotes. with falardeau, and others of his ilk, i see only an envy of power, and a desire to have it for themselves, so that they can lord it over those who once lorded it over them.

i don't see that as being any kind of change, and in fact see it as a regression to the way QC was 50 or 60 years ago.

like this quote says, inventing a new set of rules is the only real solution.

or, like old jack kerouac said, "banishment of war and the bomb is only a negative answer, but a revolution of love is a positive answer. it's gotta be."