WHITE NIGGERS OF AMERICA: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec ""Terrorist

by Pierre Vallieres ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 1971

Convicted in Quebec of terrorism in 1967 and again jailed under the War Measures Act in October 1970, Vallieres, now 30, here describes his childhood and the shaping of his political commitments. His father, a day laborer, hoped for a decent existence, his mother for a proper one for the children; they lived in a tenement and then a suburban shack surrounded by an incomplete sewer project. Alternately a rogue and model pupil, he wanted escape from school -- he makes a Joycean attempt to deal with Catholicism as a construct confining his existential searches, and recalls his entry at seventeen into Quebec cafe discussions, his Fanon-like pilgrimage to France only to meet ""the stupidest [leftwing] leaders in the world."" He discovers Marxism: his Marxism is chiliastic and moralistic, a vision of a universal hatred exploitation expressed in a revolutionary proletarian general will whose key ingredient is violence. He anticipates the implications of the Sorelian formulation with a warning that the fascists should not be allowed to pervert revolutionary violence into an instrument of further working-class defeat. Vallieres still upholds terrorism, the substitution of a small band of elect for class self-organization: his explosive, literate writing and the recent collapse of Canadian civil liberties allegedly because of terrorism make his credo and his autobiography important reading.

Pub Date: March 29, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION