The last issue of The Week for 1965 is entirely given over to this moving text by Che Guevara, one of Cuba's pause heroes and certainly our Man of the Year.
Living in England, even. at the foggy end of a bleak year, in which the political climate has been even danker than the mouldering seasons, it is still difficult to imagine either the extreme, crippling misery of the majority of the oppressed peoples of the rest of the world, or its complement, the astonishing and giant courage it has engendered among the increasing numbers of people who have found the will to resist. The British appetite for moderation has, by imperceptible degrees, engendered an inescapable aptitude for nedioort ty» Faced with a prolonged but masked crisis, British institutions gather moss. Moderate squalor, moderate but insistent decline of public services, moderate but ominous loss of economic potency, moderate but menacing attacks upon the democratic powers of the people, moderate and suffocating servility to the American oligarchs, all combine to produce a persistent numbing of the feelings of the moderately unsensual mane Political life becomes a sludge of balked issues, dishonoured principles and caponised ideals. Politicians decline from Aldermaston marohers into policemen for colonialism, As the radical leaders of a former decade caricature their erstwhile opponents, so the condition of the people declines, at a moderate velocity, into a swampy and apathetic hopeless ness,, in which philistinism and cowardice can be accepted as the norms of public conduct, and no man may aspire to better things without at once accepting that he must politely gouge, claw and knife his way towards then. Such ccnditions produce the men they need to administer them, and the extreme moderation of Mr.Wilson personifies, with cruel and satirical accuracy, all the failure, loss and human waste that they represent.
The worm will turn, and it may turn soon, It is becoming impossible for an honest man to accept the limits imposed by institutionalised choices, delicately regulated though they be. 'Slight' attacks upon the standards of the people are producing sharp reactions. Continued lack of moderation of glaring injustices begins to be seen as the injustice it is. Perhaps 1966 may begin a process which will end in the dispersion of the fog, as bovine British complacency and phlegmatic drift give way to anger and irreconcilable insight.
As this begins, a new generation of Englishmen will go to school with Che Guevara. His voice is not only the clear voice of revolution, sharp to cut through all the lies and complacencies which keep mer from doing what they should. It is also the voice of humanism, at once of the poor people of the earth and the great poems of their unlimited potential; of the torments of hunger, cold, and lack of compassion, and the incredible, beautiful people men have it in themselves to be.
ae * * We ae * * The text of this pamphlet was translated by D.B,Pitt from La Gauche the Belgian socialist weekly.