The poet Aime Cesaire (both quoted in the same passage by Fanon):
And then, one lovely day, the middle class is brought up short by a staggering
blow: The Gestapos are busy again, the prisons are filling up, the torturers
are once more inventing, perfecting, consulting over their workbenches.
People are astounded, they are angry. They say: "How strange that is.
But then it is only Nazism, it won't last." And they wait, and they hope; and
they hide the truth from themselves: It is savagery, the supreme savagery,
it crowns, it epitomizes the day-to-day savageries; yes, it is Nazism, but
before they became its victims, they were its accomplices; that Nazism they
tolerated before they succumbed to it, they exonerated it, they closed their
eyes to it, they legitimated it because until then it had been employed only
against non-European peoples; that Nazism they encouraged, they were
responsible for it, and it drips, it seeps, it wells from every crack in western
Christian civilization until it engulfs that civilization in a bloody sea.
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