The governing elite of an established society both misunderstands and underrates an aspiring outsider. How could it be otherwise? His manners are coarse, his accent boorish, and his conduct violates all the rules. He is a low-born Corsican, a dirty coal miner, a carpenter’s bastard, a clown, a jailbird, a loudmouth, a crackpot. Maybe he can stir ignorant masses to riot and mayhem. Wait until he comes up against the real problems of running society! He knows nothing about economics or science or history . . .
So, in our time, went the judgment on the miner who undertook syndical organization of the working class; the crackpots who split dialectical hairs with Lenin and Trotsky; the fascist clown who marched on Rome or conquered beer halls. The backward Russians couldn’t make an A-bomb in a generation. The illiterate Egyptian will never be able to run the Suez Canal. What can a jungle bandit like Ho Chi Minh do against a half million soldiers of the world’s most civilized nation?
Comments