MAY 20: Toni Solo: Remembering Algeria And Fanon
…The most widely influential figure who symbolised the multi-faceted anguish of French solidarity with the cause of Algerian independence was the Martinican psychologist, Frantz Fanon. A decorated World War Two veteran, Fanon was working as a psychologist in Algeria when the war began in 1954. By 1956, he had resigned his post and moved with his French wife and their child to Tunisia. Based there, he worked for the FLN until his death from leukemia in 1961. Among many other things, his final book “The Wretched of the Earth” defined fundamental questions relevant to solidarity with movements in resistance to imperialism.
The power of Fanon’s arguments derived from his experience of and reflections on racism and its role in imperial domination. The timely cooperation of Jean Paul Sartre with its clearly dying author helped extend the reach of “The Wretched of the Earth” to a large international readership. Sartre’s preface to the book is one of his most controversial pieces of work, because he made a determined effort, unprecedented for a leading European philosopher, to put imperialist realities remorselessly from the side of a resisting, oppressed and dehumanised majority. (Subsequently his preface was repudiated by Fanon’s widow, Josie, because Sartre supported Israel during the 1967 war.)
The book made people all over the world rethink the way they defined themselves and others. For some, the emphasis on the cathartic role of violence against oppression was overstated and repulsive. For others, the work suffered too much from over-generalisation and vagueness. Still others, argued that decolonization need not be accompanied invariably by violent insurrection, as Fanon was interpreted to argue. The fundamental move Fanon made was to place the colonial oppressors at the periphery and to focus on the humanity and the revolutionary political and moral potential of their victims.
…What French governments did in Algeria is being variously repeated now by the US and its allies and their proxies in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia. Over the last two years United Nations forces have used brutal, colonial-style murder and terror against people in Haiti. Constant threats and menaces are sustained by the same imperialist bloc against countries, like Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, that defend their national interests. Blatant intervention in countries with weak national governments is routine. International norms like the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremburg principles, human rights covenants as fundamental as that on the Rights of the Child, all have been effectively trashed.
But the criminal politicians who have wrecked those protective covenants and agreed rules declare constantly they are acting to defend the highest ideals of freedom, democracy and “civilization”. They do this at the same time as they massacre civilians and pollute targeted countries with their poisons, be it depleted uranium in Iraq or glyphosate in Colombia. In the case of depleted uranium, they know very well they are slowly murdering their own troops who use such munitions and genetically damaging those troops’ future children. Little compassion can be expected from such politicians and their military commanders for the occupied populations and none is shown. In accordance with the sadistic traditions of past colonialism, the contradiction between the rhetoric used to justify their crimes and the horrific barbarism of what they do is total .
axisoflogic.com