Hisham Matar Quotes
My father believed in armed struggle.
Matar, Hisham. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. Random House, 2016.
Mandela was the head of the African National Congress a revolutionary party fighting against the then dictatorial apartheid government. As the head of the ANC armed wing, after years of peaceful protests and suffering literal massacres of people for nothing other than protesting, Mandela embarked upon a program of sabotage of military and government facilities reserving guerrilla warfare if that failed. Mandela was arrested for the sabotage and served 27 years in jail. While Mandela was incarcerated, the government resorted to death squads and massacres and the ANC retaliated with counter terrorism—but Mandela was not a part of it. There were a number of communists in the ANC movement, but when Mandela, released from jail, became the President of the integrated country, he maintained supported a capitalistic system which it has been ever since. However his refusal to purge the ANC of communists when he needed all the help he could get, has been held against him by some arch conservatives. To many of them, a communist is a communist, a friend of a communist is a communist, a person who knowingly works with or associates with communists is a communist, a revolutionary is a communist, a person who advocates whatever communists advocate is a communist, a person who opposes the investigation of communists in any field of endeavor is a communist. Mandella opposed racial discrimination and the Communist party also did to embarrass the US and other capitalistic countries which then had legal discrimination. Therefore, Mandella was accused of being a communist early in his career. The same thing happened in the United States where anyone who advocated Civil Rights and racial equality was a communist because he/she was echoing the communist line.
This was a training manual for the conduct of Guerrilla wars in general and the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua.
Referring to then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey who was popular with the left wing of the Democratic party when Johnson was Majority Leader.
Hisham Matar (Arabic: هشام مطر) (born 1970) is an American born British-Libyan writer. His memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Matar's essays have appeared in the Asharq al-Awsat, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published to wide acclaim on 3 March 2011. He lives and writes in London.
