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Quote by Mouloud Benzadi

“history teaches us that wars are not fought with arms alone. In times of conflict and occupation, language can be a powerful weapon, where refusing the occupier’s words becomes an act of honor, dignity, and defiance. In this sense, every word spoken in a native language goes beyond the boundaries of the conventional concept of speech to become an instrument of boycott and resistance, a pursuit of self-expression, liberation, and survival, and a declaration of self-determination, freedom, and independence.”

Quote by Mouloud Benzadi

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Mouloud Benzadi

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“Working like automatons, the team of doomed spacetroopers attached themselves to the breached wall of the Death Star’s power core. Intense radiation spewed out, darkening their faceplates so they could barely see, slowly frying their life-support systems. Moving sluggishly as they weakened under the invisible onslaught, they wrestled thick sheets of plating in the low gravity. They used rapid laser welders to slap patches over the breach, reinforcing it to withstand an energy buildup. One of the spacetroopers, his control pack sparking with blue lightning as the suit’s circuits all broke down, thrashed about in eerie silence; his arm movements gradually slowed until he drifted free. One of the others took his place, ignoring the lost companion. Every one of them had already received a lethal dose of radiation. They knew it, but their training had been thorough: they lived to serve the Empire. One of the troopers completed a last weld at the hottest point of the breach. His skin blistered. His nerves were deadened. His eyes and lungs hemorrhaged blood. But he forced himself to finish his task. The cold vacuum of space solidified the welds instantly. With a gurgling voice filled with fluid, the spacetrooper gasped into his helmet radio, “Mission accomplished.” Then the remaining troopers, with failing life-support systems and bodies already savaged by the fatal radiation, released their hold on the power core in unison. They drifted free, dropping toward the brilliant energy discharge like shooting stars.”

“I do not attach too much attention to words. I enlisted, and as several times already in my life, I was prepared to follow the consequences of my actions. But I did not realize that the Legion would make me drink this chalice to the dregs and that these dregs would make me drunk, and that by taking a cynical pleasure in discrediting and debasing myself, I would end up by breaking free of everything to conquer my liberty as a man. To be. To be a man. And discover solitude. That is what I owe to the Legion, and to the old lascars of Africa, soldiers NCOs, officers, who came to lead us and mix with us as comrades, these desperadoes, these survivors of God knows what colonial epics, but who were all men, all. And that made it well worth the risk of death to meet these damned souls, who smelled of the galleys and were covered with tattoos. None of them ever let us down, and each one was willing to sacrifice himself, for nothing, for kudos, because he was drunk, for a challenge, for a laugh, to stick it to someone by God. They were tough and their discipline was of iron. These were professionals. And the profession of a man of war is an abominable thing and leaves scars, like poetry. You have it or you don’t. One cannot cheat because nothing wears out the soul more and stigmatizes the face (and secretly the heart) of man and is more vain than to kill, and to begin again.”