#title Election Eve Massacre
#subtitle Leaflet from France 1988
#author Fifth Estate Collective
#SORTauthors Fifth Estate Collective;
#date 1988
#source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/329-summer-1988/election-eve-massacre]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-11-17
#notes Fifth Estate #329, Summer, 1988

FE Note: The following is a reprint of a leaflet distributed in France following the pre-election May 5, 1988 massacre on New Caledonia which resulted in the release of 23 hostages, but left 19 native people, Kanaks, and two French gendarmes dead.

The French army has once again accomplished one of its familiar exploits: its shock troops spent eight hours massacring nineteen rebels. The electoral schemes of scoundrels have caused the deaths of yet more Kanaks.

They are dead because they did not want to be French.

How we identify with them! We don’t want to be French either. We don’t want to have anything, not even so much as a legal abstraction—nationality—in common with the assassins of the GIGN and the DGSE, nor with the Socialist or Chiracian chiefs. As immigrants of the second, third or twelfth generation, we don’t give a shit for the French national identity which the politicians are always jabbering about. Here in our part of the world, the Economy—Capitalism’s other name—drained all meaningful reality out of the concept of roots a long time ago.

Unlike us, the Kanaks have the sad privilege of living in a community which continues to rebel against modern—namely, capitalist—rationality. The neo-OAS gangsters and the scumbag soldiers massacring them are the vanguard of social relations organized around competition between individuals and universal submission to an abstract monster, the Economy.

The Kanaks’ lifestyle retains a quality that ours has abandoned: a way-of being together which avoids being marketed.

The men being massacred are our brothers. In these days which shame all humanity, we shout alongside them:

DOWN WITH FRANCE!

—Partisan of the Human Community