#Algeria liberation

[sissa-arrows]

Rereading Fanon’s speech at Accra in Ghana (March-April 1960) and I had completely forgotten that the French colonizers used the exact same argument as the Israeli colonizers. “They hate peace that’s why we have to fight them”

I love Fanon’s answer to that argument.

“No, the violence of the Algerian people is neither a hatred of peace nor a rejection of human relations nor a conviction that only war can put an end to the colonial regime in Algeria.

The Algerian people have chosen the unique solution that was left to them and this choice will hold firm for us.

De Gaulle said “We must break the Algerian people”. We reply “Let us negotiate, find a solution that is commensurate with contemporary history. But know that if you want to break the Algerian people, you will have to accept seeing your armies break themselves against the rampart of the glorious Algerian soldiers.””

[towerofglass]

Emblem of the National Liberation Front

[ellisdee161]

Frantz Fanon - TWOTE

[robertogreco]

“Race Historicised: Fanon & Colonial Psychosis”:

Fanon is a short film by Marcela Pizarro, Heloise Dorsan-Rachet and Pomona Pictures that explores the fascinating story of Frantz Fanon, one of the first intellectuals to expose the effects of racism on the psyche. His writings on settler colonialism, resistance and revolutionary action remain seminal texts around the world. This film is part of an animation series: Race Historized. It reaches into the archives of Black intellectual thought and showcases the work of towering figures who have contributed to the anti-racist struggle in theory and in action.

[proustianlesbian]

doctor kenzo tenma from monster and my favorite singer both being born in 1958 is a coincidence but i take it as a sign that i really keep winning !!

[cardierreh15]

Tell me again how we don’t got nothing to do with “it”? 😐

Black Panthers & Palestinian delegation at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. July, 1969.

[sayruq]

Close to four months since the conflict between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas began on Oct. 7, 2023, participants in the demonstration in Hiroshima's Naka Ward called to "free Palestine." More than 50 people, including members of a citizens' group that stands daily in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome demanding an end to bloodshed and attacks, walked down Hondori street shouting "Stop the massacre" and "Ceasefire now" among other slogans. They then held a rally in front of the A-bomb Dome.

A farmer in his 30s from the Hiroshima Prefecture city of Shobara commented, "No matter how hard a day I have (here in Japan), it would probably seem like paradise to the people of Gaza. We must take action beyond calling for a cease-fire, to bring the occupation to an end." A woman from Algeria, which was under French colonial rule for 132 years from 1830, said she came to the event because she felt that Palestine was suffering the same fate as her country. Participants also voiced anger and questions about the Japanese government's decision to suspend funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Hiroshima City Council's lack of resolutions regarding a cease-fire and other issues.

[sissa-arrows]

“We are not satisfied with a land where we live remaining as slaves. We are not satisfied with mixing, we do not accept naturalization nor do we accept integration and we won’t speak French.”

I think about this Algerian song whenever people talk about Palestinians with the “Israeli citizenship”. Palestinians are not satisfied with living as second class citizens in their own land and they don’t want the colonizers to mix with them and to “Israelize them”. When you push for a 2 states solution that’s what you’re doing you’re asking at least part of the Palestinians to live as some sort of immigrants in their own land just so you can satisfy the colonizers. That’s just fucked up. That’s not the solution.

This song was written during French colonialism in Algeria. The Algerians didn’t want to mix or to be made French to fix the decades of oppression. They wanted their own land back just like Palestinians. Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Algeria. They tried to push a two states solution on us we refused and eventually we took back our land even if the cost was heavy. (The plan was called “Israelization of Algeria” and Israel was involved on how to do it and it required arming settlers en masse)

In our lifetime inch’Allah we will celebrate the liberation of Palestine as a single state from the river to the sea.

For those losing hope I will tell you what my grandpa told me last Eid after I mentioned Palestinians “In 1961 we were celebrating Eid as we could without being able to go in the streets and to celebrate properly we had to be discreet and we were grieving. In 1962, a bit less than a full year later, we were celebrating after a deal had been signed so we knew it was only a matter of time. In 1963 we were celebrating Eid in a free liberated country under the sovereignty of its own people without colonizers forcing us to be discreet. With support and Resistance Palestinians will be free it’s the natural order of things.”

[unionnutsbuster]

I’m gonna be 100% real while some of this is true there’s a fair amount of this that sounds like liberals coping with the fact that a lot of their “solutions” are not very efficient.

Yes armed resistance and revolution is never desirable and no it’s not enough on its own, but it is inevitably more direct then voting for “the lesser evil” that will do almost fuck all for you. It will do more then boycotting that brand that will supersede your morale compass, there’s a reason governments are so keen to stop direct resistance movements.

Yes armed resistance and revolution needs to be backed up with Actual sustainable backbones (the black panthers were largely held together by a lot of their community supportive programs not them walking around with guns) and yes seeing the apocalypse as all or nothing is wrong (as we’ve essentially been in an apocalypse for decades, it’s not a single point we will drop its gradual). However, calling violent revolution “evil” almost equates armed resistance to fucking decades and centuries of imperialism, fascism and exploitative capitalism amongst other systems that have shown nothing but harm and contempt for people everywhere. You realize many people would be starving and not have access to medications anyway if armed resistances didn’t happen right? Or are you too privileged for that to not already be an issue?

It’s a spit in the face to those who participated in peaceful protests and were met with slaughter (like the 2019 protests in Palestine). it’s spit in the face to past and current acts of armed resistance enacted to simply survive against imperialist and colonist forces.

Liberals really out here saying nonsense with fucking yoda pics huh?

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

[phobic-human]

Today 11/1/2024 is the seventieth anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of 1 November 1954 and beginning of the Algerian War of Independence.

The Algerian war was a landmark decolonization war. Algeria had been colonized in the mid 19th century by the French, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Algerians were killed out of 3 million. The following decades continued with brutal oppression, Algeria was unique because it was legally classified as an integral part of France

The aftermath of the Second World War provided a unique situation. The imperial powers had fought themselves to exhaustion, suddenly formely colonized nation's were able to rise up and begin to cast off the imperial yoke.

The conflict between The National Liberation Front (FLN) and France was incredibly violent. France responded to the revolt with extreme brutality and repression, utilizing mass killings, torture, and concentration camps, 8,000 villages were destroyed and between 500,000 and 1.5 million Algerians were killed. Ultimately the Algerian people prevailed and won independence in 1962. The Algerian War is an important reminder of the horrors of colonialism and the valiant struggle for freedom.

I highly recommend A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon as an excellent look into the Algerian struggle. Fanon once said "having a gun is the only chance you still have of giving a meaning to your death." These words ring especially true today for all people's engaged in a decolonization struggle.

May the independence struggle of the heroic Algerian people never be forgotten.

Long live Algeria

[heritageposts]

In his seminal The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon could be writing about Gaza when he said: “In all armed struggles, there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by a huge and all-inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the colonial people.” In Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, that point has arrived. From Gaza to the Red Sea, on all fronts the West is now unmasked as a lawless killing machine in terror of losing control. Genocide, starvation and war, defended with Olympic-level diplomatic double-speak, are its only answers to the fact that the Global South, and the nations of the Middle East (if not their leaders) no longer wish to live under US hegemony. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Fanon's work, wrote of western colonialism: “Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force… the native has only one choice, between servitude and supremacy.” Fanon was a revolutionary thinker and a practising psychiatrist of colonial racism and its psychic impact on the colonised, and the coloniser. He and Sartre were writing about France’s imminent defeat in Algeria after seven years of brutal war. [...] Western powers are involved in conflicts thousands of miles from home, as they were in Fanon's time in Algeria, Congo and Indochina. Today the western political class has united behind Ukraine and Israel, but for millions of people it is no longer clear that the wars are worth fighting.  As Yemen’s spokesman, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, put it: “The war today is between Yemen which is struggling to stop the crimes of genocide, and the American and British coalition [who] support its perpetrators. Every party or individual in this world has two choices that have no thirds… who do you stand with as you watch these crimes?” Fanon, writing 63 years ago, agrees: “The colonial world is a Manichaean world… at times this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but the negation of values… he is the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. “The native knows all this, and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows he is not an animal, and it is precisely at the moment he realises his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure victory.”

. . . full article on MEE (1 Feb 2024)

You can also find a free copy of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth on the Internet Archive (available as a PDF, EPUB etc.)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Fanon’s observations in Algeria and elsewhere underscore the fact that colonialism, like the men who run that violent machine, is impervious to appeals to reason and stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the humanity of the other, thereby engendering untold violence. Fanon not only demonstrates the ugly manifestations of violence, but he also explains its liberating role in situations in which all other means have failed. The colonizer depends on and understands only violence, and he has to be met with greater violence: “Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them.” During Algeria’s struggle for independence, it became clear to Fanon and the Algerian people that when all peaceful measures failed there remained only one recourse: to fight. Palestinians today are doing just that, with formidable courage and heroism but at an incredibly high cost. Fanon has been unfairly and wrongly accused of being the prophet of violence. In fact, what he does is describe and analyze the violence of the colonial system. Far from making an apology for violence, he judges it unavoidable as a response to the violence of colonization, of domination, of man’s exploitation of man.

28 June 2024

[milfstalin]

[...] I have been thinking about this for a long time. It is not my idea -- Domenico Losurdo and others have written about how the fetish for defeat is one of the fundamental characteristics of Western Marxism and how this is a misunderstood derivative of Christian culture.

Many Marxists act the same way. Their biggest worry is the purity of the doctrine. Every time that historical facts challenge the doctrine or show the complexity of the practical operationality of elements of the theory, they deny that these elements are part of the story of Marxist theory and doctrine. This is, for example, what doctrines of betrayal are built on. Every movement that appears to stray a bit from these “pure” models that were created a priori is explained through the concept of betrayal, or is explained as “state capitalism.” Therefore, nothing is socialism and everything is state capitalism. Nothing is socialist transition and everything is state capitalism. The revolution is only a revolution during that glorious moment of taking political power. Starting from the moment of building a new social order, its over. [...]

[...] The subject takes pride in not having any relationship with the entire historic concrete movement of the working class socialist and liberation revolutions. They take pride in not having any theoretical or political connection to the revolutions in China, Russia, Viet Nam, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola. They are, instead, proud of the supposed purity that their theory is not contaminated by the hardship of exercising power, by the contradictions of historical processes. [...] This kind of Marxism has no critical power. It can produce and does produce a lot of good analysis of reality but it is incapable of producing a movement that is strategic and revolutionary that aims to take political power. Therefore, the process of rebuilding a revolutionary Marxism in the West has to recognize these symbolic elements, which have become ingrained in Western Marxism, that were smuggled in as contraband from Christianity. These elements have to be submitted to radical criticism and surpassed.

[fairuzfan]

For Liefer to pull up a Camus quote like this is quite laughable because of how the dynamics mirror each other. In the modern day, we have a status quo where Palestinians continue to be imprisoned and murdered and raped and segregated, denied basic medical care for years on end, all on their own land — while Jewish Israelis (to make distinction from Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, as many liberal zionists love to point out) suffer no consequences for anything, even if they play a direct role in the continued erasure and genocide of Palestinians. So if given a choice between suffering no consequences while benefiting from the status quo (that will not change unless the oppressed take it upon themselves to change their circumstance) and suffering consequences in the form of direct personal loss (with the strategy of forcing things to change by ennacting the same type of violence that the occupied experience on a daily basis onto the occupiers), of course someone who stands to lose nothing from the continuation of the status quo would rather the status quo continue if he has something to lose otherwise. Camus, when he said this quote, was not being righteous or overly sensitive. If anything, it shows how little he understood at the time of saying this quote. Because he didn't understand that an Algerian will suffer in both scenarios even if he (Camus) is safe, and for him to say something like this when people lived generations worth of violence for his and his family's (social) benefit is annoying and just plain offensive. Who is he, as a Frenchman born in occupied Algeria, to say what is worth justice when he only stands to lose anything in one scenario but not the other? He did not experience life as an Algerian native in French occupation. He might have observed it, growing up poor, yes, but he never LIVED it. Liefer might have observed the horror of settler colonialism, but that's nothing like experiencing it firsthand. To be the object of hatred to people who have higher status and more rights than you. It's just not his place as a person with nothing to lose if the status quo continues to comment on anything like this. What's the underlying meaning of this quote? "I'd rather others continue to suffer than myself experiencing suffering once."

I'm not saying Liefer doesn't have a right to mourn whoever. Im not even saying he has a duty to accept the consequences he experiences. But to say something so heartless as "I prefer the safety of my own rather than justice" within the larger, nearly century worth of context, is just insensitive and really belies his true opinions of the liberation of Palestine if he's so comfortable saying this outloud with moral authority in the middle of what is an outright bloodbath of Palestinians across Palestine. It's the timing of saying something like this because to say it now of all times when the entire world ignores or even encourages the violence in Gaza but mourns the death of Israelis? An Algerian born Frenchman and Israeli are going to be mourned on an international scale... but Palestinian and Algerian natives? Their deaths are regarded as facts of life by the rest of the world.

This makes it seem like I hate Camus, but I honestly don't, but I think the way Leifer is holding this quote up at face value and as the height of reason really is annoying. People like to mention Camus' "if" in this case as proof that he's actually saying "this is not real justice so therefore I do not have to accept it," but who is he to say what is or is not justice? The point I'm getting at is the people who benefit from occupation, in this case, Camus and Liefer have no right to determine what is or is not justice, despite their personal beliefs. The occupier has no right to tell the occupied what they should do to get freed. That alone is an arrogance in assertion that is so offending — the assertion that the occupier knows how to free the occupied in what *he* considers justice and the occupied just need to do whatever the occupier tells them to do. Because whether they both like it or not, they still benefit from and are part of the occupying force, and therefore have no real reason to fight the occupation at their own expense — the occupation is a violence that they are alright with inflicting if it means they cannot lose anything or anyone.

Also the idea that liefer indirectly compares himself to Camus is a little funny to me.

[sissa-arrows]

Where can I learn more about the French communists in Algeria? I don't know if I'm a communist per se but abolishing privately-owned land, if not private property, seems inoffensive. But the idea of whites not sympathasing but throwing their hats in with Muslims amazes me.

France is super ashamed of these people existing. So it’s hard to find informations about them. Only reason I know is because sometimes they are quickly mentioned in books and documentaries about the war and because of a song about October 17 1961 in which the rapper end the song saying “Four months later a lynching in Charonne, the coco who help the b*******” coco being a way to say communist and the b-word is an anti Algerian (now anti Arab) slur. And I was like “wait a minute what does he mean?!” And I googled “Charonne Février 1962” and found out about those communists in France who protested in favor of Algeria and how the police killed them. (9 people were killed 250 were wounded that’s so much less violent than what they did when the protesters were Algerians but still). The full song with the translation are here

In A dying colonialism by Frantz Fanon there’s a whole chapter at the end dedicated to the “European minority in Algeria” about how they are mostly pieces of shit basically but he explains that there was a minority within the minority who considered themselves Algerians and were willing to fight alongside us. Some did it by giving informations and organizing protests some joined the ALN. I remember the testimony of one of them who came back to France during the war and he realized that he didn’t fit at all. He realized that he fit in more with Algerians that he wasn’t French he was Algerian. He says that he didn’t recognize French people as his people but he saw Algerians as his people. So for him the logical conclusion was to go back to Algeria and join the freedom fighters in the mountains.

And that was pretty much the discourse of the freedom fighters in the FLN and the ALN. “You’re fighting for Algeria? You’re Algerian regardless if you are indigenous or not.” And those who fought for Algeria and died were buried in our martyr cemeteries. Shahid (martyr) is supposed to be a religious term but those men and women who were not Muslims still have the title of Shahid because they fought and died alongside indigenous people for Algeria to be free.

Anyway like I said it’s super complicated to find informations about them. But if you want to look into it the stories of Maurice Audin and Henri Maillot are a good start. You’ll have to Google their names cause there’s little ressources because France is ashamed and Algeria put all the moudjahid and shouhada on the same level so we don’t insist on the minority of Europeans who helped. There’s a good and fairly accurate movie about Henri Maillot called “Operation Maillot” but you might not find it. I suspect that it’s been censored cause it’s impossible to find it in France… no legal or illegal platform no way to buy it or rent it. It’s super weird how a movie can disappear that way…

Last thing: The French communists of 1954-1962 have nothing to do with the French communist party now. During the war they were willing to check their white privilege to question things and to help. Now they follow their leader like a bunch of dogs and are often racists and refuse to properly call out police violences.

[metamatar]

ok. so. baby's first moral philosophy in war. moral consequentialism apparently demands not fighting any war where you don’t have as many weapons as the other side. but first of all that denies like? actual history especially because we have a history of so called unwinnable wars where under resourced sides beat more powerful ones, specifically in anti colonial contexts vietnam, algeria etc. there is a whole philosophy and history of tactics for the underdog which even dilettantes like me know. like you can do a careful analysis of palestinian firepower and conclude that now was not the right time, but you certainly cannot conclude that the time for palestine is never. if you choose to only fight when you can match in conventional firepower, you also lose the opportunity to economically weaken the powerful state. holding fire till you believe you can win every objective is a very short termist view. war is a long theater.

not all people who recognise the value of anti colonial liberation movements do it bc they're idealists who valorise the power of doing the right thing. conceding the possibility of winning before trying to win is conceding that the powerful only get more powerful and we should just leave them to it. sadly for you nietschzean freaks, history proved you false. why don't you advocate for the rights of kings?