This year's birthday with an article "reference date" (if you will): it is about riots in Tunisia, or more precisely a miners' strike in the region of Gafsa, which was crushed by the French Popular Front government's brutal. At the end of 17 dead were among the workers to complain. Simone Weil writes about this in the March issue of Feuilles libres de la Quinzaine of 1937: Le sang coule
en Tunisie
"Blood in a" newspaper workers. Blood flows in Tunisia. Who knows? We will perhaps remember that France is a small corner of a large empire, and that in this empire of millions and millions of workers suffer?
The Popular Front was in power for three quarters of the year, but either has not yet had time to think about them. That steelworkers Billancourt are in trouble, and a delegation will find the chair: he bothers to go harangue guys building and prepares a nice speech by radio while Express for officials who grumble. But the millions of workers who are suffering, despair and exhausted throughout the whole of the French Empire, they were forgotten. All, we had forgotten.
We had, indeed, good reasons for not thinking about them.
First they are away. Everyone knows the importance of the issues and men, the severity of injustice, pain intensity decreased because of the distance. A man just under the blows, exhausted by hunger, trembling before its leaders, as long as it happens in Indochina, the injustice is less metallo glaring that when bleach does not get his 15%, or an official decree abolishing lois.Il there is a phenomenon that could seek to establish the mathematical formula, no doubt, as the attraction , is it a variation inversely proportional to the square of the distance. The distance reduces the weight of the facts of injustice and oppression on our minds, just as it affects to the weight of objects.
Besides these people - yellow, black, "wog" - are not the same species as us. They are not made like us. Them, they usually to suffer and enslaved. It is well known. Since they are starving and are deprived of all rights, there they are accustomed. The best proof is that they do not complain. They are silent, so they are happy. Basically, they are made to the easement. They have a servile character. Otherwise they would resist.
There are some people who resist, but these, it's a handful of "leaders" of "agitators" of excited, probably operated by Franco and Hitler, and against which we can use measures strength, as the dissolution of the North African Star .
Moreover, the tragedy of these people is nothing spectacular. At least it did until the latest incident. Shootings, killings, these are things that speak to the imagination, which are sensation, which make noise. But the tears shed in silence, the mute despair, repressed revolts under the pressure of stress, overwhelmed resignation, exhaustion, slow death - does that count? The kids killed by bombs in Madrid caused a thrill of indignation and pity. But all the little ten or twelve years, starved and overworked, who died of exhaustion in the mines Indochina, we never thought of them, each of which our country has direct responsibility. They died without their blood flowing. Of such deaths do not count, they are not real deaths.
Without doubt, one of us has ever publicly expressed all these reasons for our indifference. But is that what was not there at the bottom of ourselves, our real reasons? We did no good.
Basically, we - and by we I mean all the People's Assembly members, without exception - we have the same mentality as the bourgeoisie. The citizens are not indifferent to poverty, they can be moved to a beggar met on their way, only the distance of the Champs-Elysees in Billancourt is beyond the power of their imagination, as for us, the distance from Paris to Saigon. Moreover, they regard the workers as beings of another species, born for fatigue, privations, obedience, and they find evidence that such a scheme is suitable for people in the fact that the people are silent, then themselves impose silence by force the most brutal and unforgiving rigor deal with those who dare speak out. Things went well in France before June [1936]. And we also of French "left" , we impose on the natives of the colonies the same constraint, the same terror they subsist for so many years and we believe in finding the silence that we impose and they observe by force, a sufficient excuse for not thinking about them.
It took the blood flowing. Until it had sunk, we have not given a thought to the millions of people who had given up hope that we, who from the depths of an abyss of slavery and misery turned their eyes towards us, and for nine months, without fuss, without noise, moving progressively of hope to despair.
Does the large and small bourgeoisie does not show his stupidity, his brutality, his spirit bounded mainly in that it focuses on a crime, suicide, accident, railway, and know that thousands of lives are slowly crushed, crushed and destroyed by the daily game of the social machine. For the bourgeois, the question begins to arise on the day it gives rise to new sensational enough to get the crimes on the second page.
And we too are exactly alike. We need to get our attention, the colonial tragedy takes the form of various makes, only accessible to our senses and our intelligence rudimentary. Now, we can no longer boast that "experience" proceeds without bloodshed. Blood was tainted.
It is easy to say you look responsibilities, talk of sabotage. There is need for investigation to determine where responsibility lies. That each of us looks in the mirror, he sees one of the leaders.
Undoubtedly, someone gave the order to march troops against our unfortunate fellow miners. But this order is not the only cause of the tragedy. There is a more general issue is that the Popular Front was not granted to indigenous workers colonies democratic freedoms that are essential for the organization and for the fight, is that it does has not extended to them the protection he gave to the French workers in their action.
This is not the Government that he is to blame. Our comrades in charge of government responsibilities are so overwhelmed, so overworked, so torn in all directions, that their activity depends largely concerns imposed on them. If, for example, Blum had the impression that we are more preoccupied with colonial slavery as staff salaries, he devoted to the colonial problem his time to prepare a nice speech to officials.
Anyway, we must recognize that the colonial government is reduced to little so far to the near dissolution of the Etoile Nord-Africaine. We say that the program's Popular Rally does not colonial reforms. The dissolution of the courageous unmotivated Star North Africa was not expected not more . The dead in Tunisia either, for that matter. They are dead outside the program.
When I think of a possible war, he mingles, I confess, with fear and horror of such an image, a thought somewhat comforting. Is that a European war might well serve as a signal to the high contrast of colonial peoples to punish our carelessness, our indifference and cruelty.
This is not a pleasant prospect, but the need for poetic justice there is a certain satisfaction.
(nach den Complete Works, II: Ecrits historiques et politiques , tome 3: Vers la guerre (1937-1940), 1989, p.128-131).
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