The Nomadic Alternative – Page 222

Inherent in the germ plasm. It stems from the fact that the British

have for centuries been able to deflect from their 'tight little
islands' the aspiring heroes whose need for danger would make life
intolerable. The exits of the West are now blocked.

Today's most insistent rite of passage is the Voyage to Indepen-
dence. The Revolution marks the narrow passage from bondage to
national manhood - a ritual catharsis which fills exactly the same
emotional gap as the spring migration for the nomad. Franz Fanon
wrote his Wretched of the Earth with great eloquence and a sense
of justice, but on a purely mythological plane. He exhorted oppressed
peoples to grab at their manhood with bloody sacrifice to themselves.

The nascent black nation must squeeze the life from the Capitalist
Beast, that it may live itself. Black is good. White is evil. And
the Blacks must make their choice. Black nations who avoid bloodshed
and true sacrifice are never truly born, and one is reminded of the
Laodicians in Dante's Inferno - a people who never made the choice,
"this scum who never lived".

[The 'revolution en permanance' tries to perpetuate the basic
human desire for constant motion.]The revolutionary is a traveller
and incurably restless." The Spanish Anarchist, Francisco Ascaso,
famous for his ruthless nihilism, was well aware of the connection
between the ideology of revolution and the ideology of the road.

"We are going away", he said, "to go away - according to the poets
- is to die a little. Yet for those of us who are not poets, departure
has always been a symbol of life. Constantly on the march, perma-
nently on the road like the eternal Jews without a country; outside
a society in which we find no environment to live; belonging to an
exploited class, without any place in the world, for us to travel
is always a sign of vitality." And just as the Muslim pilgrim washes
away the past consequences of sin, ritually stones the ancient
religion, and prepares fresh ground for a new start as he revolves
around the shrines of Mecca, the modern revolutionary hacks at the
foundations of the established pyramid to absolve the sins of the
*James Joll, The Anarchists*