Did you know it's illegal to say, "I want to kill the president of the United States of America?" Now, it's ok for me to say it just then, because it's like a public service, I'm just informing you that it's illegal to say, "

I want to kill the president of the United States of America.

" Now, what's interesting is that one thing that's not illegal to say is, "with a motor launcher," because that's it's own sentence, it's an incomplete sentence, but it might have nothing to do with the sentence before it.

What algorithm? I must be out of the loop...

It is understandable that in this atmosphere, daily life becomes quite simply impossible. You can no longer be a fellah, a pimp, or an alcoholic as before. The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. This reign of violence will be the more terrible in proportion to the size of the implantation from the mother country. The development of violence among the colonized people will be proportionate to the violence exercised by the threatened colonial regime. In the first phase of this insurrectional period, the home governments are the slaves of the settlers, and these settlers seek to intimidate the natives and their home governments at one and the same time. They use the same methods against both of them. The assassination of the Mayor of Evian, in its method and motivation, is identifiable with the assassination of Ali Boumendjel. For the settlers, the alternative is not between Algérie algérienne and Algérie française but between an independent Algeria and a colonial Algeria, and anything else is mere talk or attempts at treason. The settler's logic is implacable and one is only staggered by the counter-logic visible in the behavior of the native insofar as one has not clearly understood beforehand the mechanisms of the settler's ideas. From the moment that the native has chosen the methods of counter-violence, police reprisals automatically call forth reprisals on the side of the nationalists. However, the results are not equivalent, for machine-gunning from airplanes and bombardments from the fleet go far beyond in horror and magnitude any answer the natives can make. This recurring terror de-mystifies once and for all the most estranged members of the colonized race. They find out on the spot that all the piles of speeches on the equality of human beings do not hide the commonplace fact that the seven Frenchmen killed or wounded at the Col de Sakamody kindles the indignation of all civilized consciences, whereas the sack of the douars * of Guergour and of the dechras of Djerah and the massacre of whole populations--which had merely called forth the Sakamody ambush as a reprisal--all this is of not the slightest importance. Terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence: that is what observers bitterly record when they describe the circle of hate, which is so tenacious and so evident in Algeria.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

...Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly. A new star, nothing less noticeable. He leans on the parapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short vertical white line. It must be somewhere out over the North Sea... at least that far... icefields below and a cold smear of sun...

What is it? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after all. He has seen it in a film, just in the last fortnight... it's a vapor trail. Already a finger's width higher now. But not from an airplane. Airplanes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb.

He takes some time lighting a cigarette. He won't hear the thing come in. It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the sound of it coming in.

What if it should hit exactly--ahh, no--for a split second you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike the top of the skull...

Amerika was "spacious" and "sparsely populated" only because the European invaders destroyed whole civilizations and killed off millions of Native Amerikans to get the land and profits they wanted. We all know that when the English arrived in Virginia, for example, they encountered an urban, village-dwelling society far more skilled than they in the arts of medicine, agriculture, fishing-and government.*(10) [*The first government of the new U.S.A., that of the Articles of Confederation, was totally unlike any in autocratic Europe, and had been influenced by the Government of the Six-Nation Iroquois Confederation.] This civilization was reflected in a chain of three hundred Indian nations and peoples stretched from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America, many of whom had highly developed societies. There was, in fact, a greater population in these Indian nations in 1492 than in all of Western Europe. Recent scholarly estimates indicate that at the time of Columbus there were 100 million Indians in the Hemisphere: ten million in North America, twenty-five million in Central Mexico, with an additional sixty-five million elsewhere in Central and Southern America.(11)

These numbers have long been concealed, since they give rise to the logical question of what happened to this great mass of people. The European invaders — Spanish, Dutch, English, Portuguese, and French — simply killed off millions and millions to safeguard their conquest of the land and provide the disposable slave labor they needed to launch their "New World". Conservative Western historical estimates show that the Spanish "reduced" the Indian population of their colonies from some 50 million to only 4 million by the end of the 17th Century.(12)

And from the 10 million Indians that once inhabited North America, after four centuries of settler invasion and rule there were in 1900 perhaps 200,000-300,000 surviving descendants in the U.S.A.(13) That was the very substantial down-payment towards the continuing blood price that Third-World nations have to pay to sustain the Euro-Amerikan way of life.