#Anti Algerian racism

[sissa-arrows]

One day we will have to talk about how non Algerian PoC in France often use the horrors the French did to us as an insult…

I just saw a video in which a young Algerian made a meme where France is Algeria’s bitch and other people (white people but too many non Algerian French PoC to pretend it’s just white people) were like “your bodies are rotting in la Seine 😂” “we should do a remake of October 17 1961” “y’all are children of rape so you should shut up” “your ancestors’ bodies are polluting la Seine that’s why we can’t clean it 😂” “1961 best time for la Seine” “ask your ancestors we drowned who is the bitch” and many comments of people encouraging each others.

And then there’s the usual spineless bitches who are like “the comments are mean but saying France is your bitch is just as bad both sides should be condemned” like I think the video was stupid but saying France is a bitch is NOWHERE NEAR as bad as laughing about the greatest repression against a peaceful protest in modern history in Europe and laughing about the deaths of more than 200 people and saying we should do it again.

James Baldwin was right when he said “The Algerian in France are the n-word in America”.

(Sorry for the rambling but I’m honestly getting tired of the constant dehumanization and the constant insult. Wherever I look either I see Palestinians suffering and being dehumanized or people laughing at what my ancestors went through. All the fucking time. I’m tired of crying everyday but having to be strong cause I can’t give up and I still have hope and I’m not allowed to give up or feel tired because I still have a fairly good life despite everything so I can’t be ungrateful… but I needed to post this I might end up deleting it)

[documenting-apartheid]

MARCH 30th 2024- Moroccan writer Dounia El Barhdadi reflects on the cruelty her father faced under the French occupation of Algeria and it's parallels to the oppression and occupation of Palestinians by Israel.

"Just as previously and currently colonised communities are bonded by their bloodstained history, so too are their colonisers. There exists a unifying doctrine embedded in colonial history, one which has been weaponised to commit atrocities across the globe, and it has many names: the French ‘mission civilisatrice’, the British ‘white man’s burden’, and the German ‘Kulturmission’. The French justified their brutality in Algeria with claims that FLN activists, and Algerian civilians by extension, were ‘savages’ and ‘animals’, and that their subjugation was a ‘necessary evil’, just as Hitler denounced the Jewish people, and all non-Aryan people, as ‘Untermenschen’ - ‘subhumans’.

"The same ideology existed in Apartheid South Africa, where the social, economic and legal divide between black and white people was characterised and maintained for almost 50 years by the idea that the latter were intrinsically superior. The myth of intrinsic ethno-superiority can also be observed in comments made by Israeli officials since the inception of Israel, and even before; the most notable recent comments include Netanyahu's description of Palestinians as 'children of darkness', as well as Yoav Gallant's assertion that Israel is fighting 'human animals', when questioned about the ethics of disproportionate reprisals in Gaza."

"This kind of propaganda operates by dehumanising the colonised in the eyes of settlers, through portraying them as ‘Other’, as lesser, as alien. Even more than this, these doctrines portray the actions of the colonial power as a mercy to the colonised - the latter must be ‘civilised’, and if they do not respond to their education, then it is necessary to remove them altogether. George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ repackaged and weaponised this xenophobic ideology in order to profit from manufactured conflict in the Middle East after 9/11, and desensitise the global public to the suffering of Arab and Muslim civilians."

[battybiologist]

I hate how every time you have to stand against Palestinians being inhumanly slaughtered, someone pops up out of the woodwork to say "of course, but surely you must agree antisemitism is wrong"

I hate it because yeah, antisemitism is a plague on humanity, I wholeheartedly believe it. But opposing Israel isn't synonymous with antisemitism. In fact, Israel's attempts to make us believe so has done more to perpetuate antisemitism than anything pro-Palestinians (or anti-crimes against humanity, in my house) have done.

People have always fallen for Israeli propaganda. The consensus in the West for decades was "this conflict is extremely complicated, but in the end, Israel is in the right". It's not because of the prevalent racism in the West (although that certainly didn't help), but because the information was controlled by governments that had a vested interest in the existence of a Western-allied nation.

Now, with the decentralization of information, the October 7th attack brought the attention of many people towards Israel, much like the Bataclan attacks did, despite the fact that France was and still is doing far worse in Mali.

However, Israelis leaders, too busy relishing the opportunity to wipe out Gaza from history, launched their genocide while people's attention was still in Gaza's direction. And never as many people saw them for who they truly are: genocidal monsters

Then, they tried to peddle the same "antizionism is antisemitism" rhetoric. By doing that, they're forcing people into a choice: either support a genocide, or be branded an antisemite. A false dichotomy

Those who knew better, not least of which were the Palestinians, ignored this false dichotomy, but there are many people who don't know better, thanks to Israel's propaganda.

Some of the latter already didn't see us Arabs as humans, so it was thumbs-up for genocide, but for those who saw the brutality of the occupation, who felt the agony the Palestinian people were put under, they felt they had no choice but the non-genocide option.

I normally would blame those people for being ignorant dunces, and I partly do, but this ignorance was carefully cultivated by Israel and its allies, so the blame cannot rest on them themselves.

And I'm not just basing that on a couple of Internet dumbasses. I'm part of the Algerian diaspora, and I've seen so many other French-Arab people act exactly like I'm describing. Coincidentally, these people were almost always marginalized economically, culturally, legally, and most importantly, by the education system, all things that contribute to an inability to access the ressources necessary to learn more.

They were forbidden from educating themselves, so the lie that was ingrained in their brain is harder to fight (I know that, I tried to fight it locally for years and haven't succeeded yet)

And when you jump to condemn antisemitism in a conversation that didn't have anything to do with it, but did have a pro-Palestinian message, are you not contributing the perpetuation of the lie?

[rotzaprachim]

the thing about “secret israeli restaurants” is americans are generally more positive to israelis than arabs so a vague restaurant is more likely to be hiding arab origins than israeli

pretty sure the og tweet poster was Canadian but yeahhhhh I read it and blinked about the antisemitism but I also read it and blinked about the fact that like bro… are you…. are you that fucking unaware about the extent of anti-Arab and anti-middle eastern racism in the us&canada? Are you that fucking obtuse? Oh my god. It literally doesn’t fucking matter what “origins” the restaurants are “hinting at” but I couldn’t fucking process how a white Canadian would think that “people who simply describe themselves/their business establishment as “middle eastern” or “Mediterranean” are inherently sketchy” is in any way a productive idea to have for literally anyone

a) a restaurant/establishment describing themselves as “Mediterranean” or “middle eastern” would be inherently sketchy and suspicious (as loaded as “middle eastern” itself is, “Mediterranean” can often be taken more positively in the west and anglophone/francophone worlds, after all nutritionists have been going on about the “Mediterranean diet) for a while) but also

B) that those people would inherently be (in his opinion) Zionists and/or Israelis

also feel this person has big “have never interacted with middle eastern person in my life” because as much as xenophobia and various other issues pushes people to go for either the “Mediterranean/middle eastern” marker, there’s plenty of other reasons why establishments go for those identifiers like.

1) a lottttt of Mediterranean diaspora families, due to immigration and intermarriage, really are franco-lebanese, or palestinain-Greek, or Ashkenazi Jewish and Algerian, or Moroccan Spaniards, or something like that, (check the Arabs, Jews, and Italians of the greater nyc area lol) and

2) in diasporic situations one (1) grocery store or deli often services OR competes with others for a broader market share, I’ve lived places where I regularly shopped at a Turkish/greek/arab grocery store (Labelled itself “Mediterranean”) and a Persian/armenian/arab grocery store (Labelled itself “middle eastern groceries”) because it would be dishonest to say that these grocery stores are for any one “nationality!” Walk into many a Mediterranean or middle eastern grocery store or deli and you’ll see Turkish products from Germany, maghrebi Jewish products from France, halal versions of jamón and chorizo, and labneh from lebanon next to Greek and Persian yogurt. My favorite local market once had an entire NOT HALAL!!!!! Fridge Labelled in three languages to store the frozen pork products for the Greek and Romanian markets next to the general halal cheese boreks.

I’m not saying this is the case everywhere or like it’s all peachy perfect in diaspora but this just comes across as someone who has a lot of political Ideas about Mediterranean & middle eastern people but haven’t met them in real life. Also it’s a love letter to the diaspora grocery store with 6+ ethnicities inside them and an entire wall of tomato pastes. If there’s one in your city you should patronize them! (Also note the fantastic phenomenon of the “Black Sea” grocery, the mass halal Mart, and the particular greater London “Indian Bangladeshi Sri Lankan Persian Pakistani polish” mart

Also lol gonna have to lol at the “I’m so angry these diaspora Israelis would hide their nationality in order to avoid harassment because I want to boycott and harass them”

[justinssportscorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif opened up about the hate she’s received from the far-right during their “transvestigations” of her, focusing particularly on Elon Musk’s role in the hate mobs. [...] Khelif has been the victim of intense hate mobs directed at her solely on the basis of transphobia and racism. It started when she defeated her opponent, Italian boxer Angela Carini, in the first round of boxing at the Olympics. Carini dropped out after being punched in the face and anti-trans bigots began to accuse Khelif of being either a trans woman or a cis man, using an accusation made by an ally of Vladimir Putin on Telegram earlier this year. Algeria does not allow individuals to transition, and Khelif’s entire family has said that she was assigned female at birth. The International Olympics Committee has also confirmed her as cisgender.

Things only began to escalate when reference was made to when the Russia-based International Boxing Association disqualified Khelif after she defeated a Russian boxer, claiming she did not pass unspecified gender testing. However, the International Boxing Association has given no proof of the testing and has been banned from recognition by the International Olympic Committee due to instances of corruption and scandal.

Imane Khelif, the female Algerian boxer that was falsely accused of being a “male”, opens up about the experience of being a cyberbullying victim by anti-trans scum such as Elon Musk, JK Rowling, and Riley Gaines.

See Also:

The Advocate: Imane Khelif calls out Elon Musk for all the transphobic hate he sent her way

[fatehbaz]

Thinking about the Holocaust in Africa.

Here, European notions of anti-Blackness and antisemitism became intertwined.

There was a fusion between the dispossession and racism of European imperialism and colonization projects of the late nineteenth century, and the prison regimes imposed by European fascism in the early twentieth century.

Scholars Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum have recently written much about the importance of recognizing the trauma of labor and internment camps in North Africa during the second world war.

And I want to express my gratitude for their work. I want to share some of what they’ve written in a couple of recent articles.

In their words: “Nazism in Europe was underlaid by an intricate matrix of racist, eugenicist and nationalist ideas. But the war – and the Holocaust – appears even more complex if historians take into account the racist and violent color wheel that spun in North Africa.” [1]

France's prison camps in North Africa were filled with Algerians, local Jews, deported European Jews, Eastern European refugees, domestic political dissidents from France, people fleeing fascist Spain, Moroccan residents, Senegalese subjects of French rule, other West Africans displaced by French occupation, and more.

The anti-Blackness and antisemitism that had fueled Europe's colonial expansion was finding new expression in fascist Europe.

---

Seems France is a central antagonist in the story of evolving approaches to empire, racism, and resource extraction.

After their 1940 alliance with the Nazis, the Vichy French government maintained technical control of French colonies across Africa. Beginning in 1940, the French government “alone built nearly 70 such camps in the Sahara.” [1] This was in addition to another six labor camps which the French government built in West Africa (in Senegal, Guinea, and Mali).

---

By the beginning of the twentieth century, French-influenced or -controlled territory in North Africa was home to around 500,000 Jews, many of whom had been living in the region for centuries or millennia, speaking many languages, “reflecting their many different cultures and ethnicities: Arabic, French, Tamazight – a Berber language – and Haketia, a form of Judeo-Spanish spoken in northern Morocco.” [1] The Vichy French government officially stripped North African Jews of formal citizenship and seized their assets.

Then, deporting residents of Europe and political dissidents in “early 1941, the Vichy authorities transferred hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, including women and children, to the Saharan labor camps.” [2] Under French rule “in Algeria [...], it was estimated that 2,000-3,000 Jews were interned in camps [...] resulting in a total prisoner population of 15,000-20,000.” [2]  France pursued an “unrealized dream of the nineteenth century” [2]: the completion of the Mediterranean-Niger railroad line in the Sahara, a transportation route across the vast desert to connect the prosperous West African port of Dakar with the Mediterranean coast of Algeria.

Meanwhile the “Vichy regime [...] continued racist policies begun by France’s Third Republic, which pushed young Black men from the empire into forced military service,” including forced recruitment from “Senegal, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger and Mauritania; [...] Benin, Gambia and Burkina Faso; and Muslim men from Morocco and Algeria. In these ways, the French carried on a wartime campaign of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, pairing these forms of racialized hatred from the colonial era with antisemitism. Antisemitism had deep roots in French and colonial history, but it found new force in the era of fascism.” [1]

---

In late 1942, during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, the SS “imprisoned some 5,000 Jewish men in roughly 40 forced labor and detention camps on the front lines and in cities like Tunis.” [2] The fascist Italian government had been experimenting with racist and anti-Black policy in their colonization of East Africa; these policies were expanded in Libya. Here, “Mussolini ordered the Jews of Cyrenaica moved” as “most of the 2,600 Jews deported [...] were sent to the camp of Giado” while “other Libyan Jews were deported to the camps of Buqbuq and Sidi Azaz.” [2]

---

Stein and Boum describe the diversity of prisoner experience: “In these camps, [...] the complex racist logic of Nazism and fascism took vivid form. Muslims arrested for anti-colonial activities were pressed into back-breaking labor” and “broke bread with other forced workers” including ‘Ukrainians, Americans, Germans, Russian Jews and others [...] arrested, deported and imprisoned by the Vichy regime after fleeing Franco’s Spain. There were political enemies of the Vichy and Nazi regime too, including socialists, communists, union members [...] overseen by [...] forcibly recruited [...] Moroccan and Black Senegalese men, who were often little more than prisoners themselves.” [1]

As Stein and Boum describe it: “Vichy North Africa became a unique site [...] where colonialism and fascism co-existed and overlapped.” [2]

They write: “Together, we have spent a decade gathering the voices of the diverse peoples who endured World War II in North Africa, across lines of race, class, language and region. Their letters, diaries, memoirs, poetry and oral histories are both defiant and broken. They express both faith and despair. All in all, they understood themselves to be trapped in a monstrous machine of fascism, occupation, violence and racism.” [1]

---

[1]: Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum. “80 years ago, Nazi Germany occupied Tunisia - but North Africans’ experiences of World War II often go unheard.” The Conversation. 15 November 2022.

[2]: Sarah Arbevaya Stein and Aomar Boum. “Labor and Internment Camps in North Africa.” Holocaust Encyclopedia online. Last edited 13 May 2019.

[queersatanic]

you should do some research about the legality of transition in algeria before you claim an algerian cis women getting transvestigated at the olympics cant be tme. theres a whole lot of shit that algerian trans women go through that imane khelif simply does not. hell you should question why there are zero trans women competing in the olympics.

You’re responding to this post, and it sounds like you’re claiming that it’s not transmisogyny unless someone experiences every or maybe just the worst aspects of transmisogyny, even if they experience some aspects.

Because literally, news orgs are calling an Algerian cis woman "transgender," and she's receiving hatred from some of the most prominent transmisogynists worldwide on the false basis that she is trans.

Almost definitionally, this is a woman affected by transmisogyny despite being assigned female at birth and living her entire life as a girl and now woman. This is true even, as you point out, though Algerian trans women have a different experience in Algeria than she has and does.

Again, the original post you're replying to did not say that “transmisogyny-exempt” and “transmisogyny-affected” were useless categories, just that they aren’t essentialist, binary categories. They are not fixed. They are categories some people move back and forth between. The explicit point is that there is overlap especially in different contexts that makes it impossible to use TME/TMA as “legitimate trans women” and “everyone else”.

A skinny white trans fem in Los Angeles or London who has been on HRT for years and able to afford surgeries she wants won’t be exempt from every kind of transmisogyny in the world around her, but she likely would be exempt from some of them by virtue of meeting other standards of (white) femininity, so she might be able to more safely use bathrooms in public than a butch woman with a short hair cut, even if that butch woman is cis (or even straight!). That doesn't make the trans woman less trans or the cis woman more trans. It just means "transmisogyny" is a club and not a scalpel.

It's important to recognize that systems of oppression aren't concerned with locating something real or actual and punishing that real, actual thing; they're about enforcing hierarchies with arbitrary boundaries, and they don't bother to use any consistency or rigor because the whole point of having power is that you don't need to appeal to anything superior to exercise that power.

This is going to seem far afield, but about a decade ago, a man from India visited his son in Alabama and a cop put him into a coma by slamming him on his head into the sidewalk because neighbors had reported a “Black man” wandering suspiciously around in their neighborhood. The man "didn’t comply" because he didn't speak English, so naturally cops assumed he was intoxicated or combative. (From memory, the only person actually punished in that was the police chief who said the cop in question had done something wrong; the cop was cleared of all-wrongdoing.) In India, the father may have had a completely different social status, possibly even one that looked down on Black or African people. He certainly didn’t experience all of the worst elements of anti-Black racism in the white South. But in a white neighborhood in Alabama suburbia, he was dark enough to be treated like a Black man, dangerous and transgressive.

White supremacy, like transmisogyny, isn't concerned with whether you are the ultimate version of a thing just if you’re enough of a thing to be punished. Of course we need to recognize when other people have challenges that are different or more intense than we go through, but our coalition ought to be built on unified resistance to shared oppression rather than policing the boundaries of categories people who hate us aren't even bothered to learn or care about while they hurt us.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 20 July 1925, Frantz Omar Fanon, psychiatrist, revolutionary and pioneering anti-colonialist theorist was born in the French colony of Martinique. Fanon served in the Free French Army during World War II in North Africa, and like many Black colonial troops, experienced racism. Living in Algeria he supported the independence movement until he was forced to leave the country, at which point he became an ambassador for the Algerian National Liberation Front. His seminal works include 'Black Skin, White Masks' 'The Wretched of the Earth', and focused not just on the politics and economics of colonialism but also its internal and psychological effects. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9275/frantz-fanon-born https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=664955625677656&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[sissa-arrows]

Quick history lesson about how the very same police squads that are killing North African and Black men in France originate from a police squad meant against Algerians especially.

In 1923 an Algerian man is accused of killing two people. The medias make into a huge thing and claim that he did that because he is Algerian and that Algerians are dangerous. Because you know the countless white murderers were individuals but an Algerian alleged murderer has to represent ALL Algerians.

As an answer in 1925 the government decide to create the “BNA” la Brigade Nord-Africaine (The North African Squad) Their job is to control Algerians specifically (1), excessive identity check, excessive surveillance… they pressure employers into firing Algerian workers. Their goals is to make Algerians live Hell on earth and they their methods are illegal but they are left alone by the government. Almost all of the cops in said squad are white colonizers who used to work in the French police in Algeria to be sure they won’t see Algerians as humans.

WW2 starts and then the Nazis occupy France. This squad collaborate with the Nazis (2). WW2 ends and you know the fact that the squad collaborated with the Nazis added to white communists (white French communists used to be allies I know it’s crazy given how they behave nowadays) being like “you do realize that we just fought the Nazis we cannot have an anti Algerian police and pretend to be different from them” the BNA comes to an end in 1945. Algerians are still targeted by the police by there’s no squad dedicated to this.

1953 comes. On July 14th Algerians protest alongside white French communists. Asking for the independence. 6 Algerians and one communist are killed by the police. The government create the BAV “anti violence squad” their job is the same as the BNA but more violent and this time they pretend that their targets are not Algerians but all violent people and it’s not their fault if Algerians are violent. They target specifically Algerians who want the independence and equal rights. It’s dissolved in 1962 after the independence of Algeria (3).

1971. The prefect of Seine Saint Denis (the department with the most diversity in France and back then it was mostly Algerians) create the BAC “anti violence squad” to replace the BAV. The prefect is a senior official who did most of his work in the colonies and in 1967 he was responsible of the death of 100 people (majority of them Black) killed in Guadeloupe during a protest. At first the BAC only work in that department but then it extended to all of France or rather all of the neighborhoods with North African and Black people.

The BAC still exist and they are the one doing most of the killing and beating up against young men of color today.

The police is racist because of its history they were created to control colonial subjects and they see us as colonial subjects of the interior not as equal citizens. That’s why I talk about French colonialism because the current racism in France exist because they refuse to acknowledge what they did and they refuse to try and fix things.

One day I’ll talk about la Police Nationale and how it was created… spoiler alert it happened under Nazis occupations and French Nazis helped creating it.

If you want to read the notes they are under the cut.

(1) Despite its name the targets were not North Africans in general but Algerians specifically. There’s disgusting articles written before the independence and still available on Le Monde calling Algerians savages and dangerous. One of those articles regret the end of the BNA because “There’s a problem with North African violence” and say “When we say North African you have to understand Algerian. The Moroccan and the Tunisian stay in his country. He is a good established settled worker.” Before saying that the problem is that Algerians were given rights after WW2.

(2) For the record if you don’t know the history of the squad the name let people believe that it was a police squad with North African cops not that it was an anti North African squad. To these days some people say “the North African squad collaborated with Nazis” as a way to imply that Algerians were pro Nazis. Meanwhile historically the people who collaborated with the Nazis learned all they needed to know about oppressing a minority by doing it against Algerians. But we’re not supposed to talk about the overlap between white colonizers with leading position in Algeria and Nazis collaborators.

(3): They really think we are stupid they created it to replace the BNA after a protest for the independence of Algeria, dissolved it after the independence, but to these days they deny it was an anti Algerian police.

[mariacallous]

The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from the history of decolonization. It is almost impossible to speak of anti-colonial violence or the failings of postcolonial elites without referring to the figure who inspired generations of activists to revolt against colonialism. Since the publication of his seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth, in 1961, Fanon has been idealized by generations of activists in the global south and beyond. For them, the Black Martinican and Frenchman who devoted himself to Algerian independence is the fearless and uncompromising prophet of revolution.

The subtitle of Adam Shatz’s new biography, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, suggests that his life was not so simple. Shatz, the U.S. editor for the London Review of Books, is an expert guide through the thicket of Fanon-lore that has emerged since his death in 1961, and his book offers a compelling account of Fanon’s transformation from a medical student into a global icon of anti-colonial revolution.

But The Rebel’s Clinic tells another, more tragic story, too: the tale of a young Black man from the French colonies who never really belonged anywhere, no matter how closely he identified with a nation or cause. Despite his deep attachment to Algeria, he could never really embody the Algerian revolution, as hagiographic accounts of his life have suggested. His life and body of work were too complicated to be branded in this way. Although Fanon was a remarkable thinker, he could be conflicted and even contradictory, and simplifying him only simplifies the difficult and often fraught work that must go into anti-colonial movements.

The first words a young Fanon learned to spell were “Je suis français.” As a child in Fort-de-France, the capital of the French colony of Martinique, in the 1920s and ’30s, he enjoyed the privileges of a typical bourgeois family: servants, piano lessons, and a weekend home outside the city. This was not uncommon for Antillean évolués, or assimilated colonial subjects whose European education let them rise up the colonial hierarchy. Like many of their class, the Fanons looked down on the “nègres” from France’s African colonies, who they believed weren’t really French.

Fanon’s parents identified so deeply with the French Republic that they behaved “more French than the French,” Shatz writes. As for Fanon, whose father was largely absent, Shatz recounts that he would collect several adoptive fathers in his short life but the “symbolic father represented by France” was by far the most important. Fanon strongly believed in the universal values of the republic: liberty, equality, and fraternity.

It was not until Fanon joined the Free French Forces in World War II that his faith in European civilization was shaken. In the army, he witnessed the French generals’ racism; the rigid separation between white, Antillean, and African soldiers; and the horrors of trench warfare. “Yet the incident that seems to have hurt him most,” Shatz writes, “was returning to Toulon [in southern France], during the celebrations marking the liberation of France, and finding that no Frenchwoman was willing to share a dance with him.” Though Fanon had risked his life for France, it would never truly accept him, and he never recovered from the rejection he experienced when he finally arrived in the métropole.

After the war, he studied medicine in Lyon, a city Shatz describes as “notorious for its suspicion of outsiders,” and eventually practiced as a psychiatrist there. His first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), grew out of a period of intense frustration and suffering. He dictated the book to his fiancée, Josie, in a burst of anger and creativity. (Fanon never typed anything himself.) It was his reckoning with a city, and a country, that he was beginning to despise—an attempt to make sense of what he described as the “lived experience” of Black men in white society. The desire to “become” white, he concluded, alienated racialized people from themselves, and assimilation constrained their freedom. Today, the book is celebrated as a foundational text in the study of Blackness and of alienation. But at the time, few readers appreciated or understood Fanon’s methodology—a synthesis of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, memoir, and social theory.

As Fanon’s awareness of the appalling situation of Algerians in France grew, he gradually lost “interest in the psychological dilemmas of middle-class people of color like himself,” Shatz writes. His psychiatric study of the “North African syndrome”—a mysterious illness that plagued France’s Algerian population—was a turning point. Algerians kept going to French doctors saying they were in pain but without clear physical symptoms. Fanon discovered that their pain couldn’t simply be dismissed as “imaginary,” as most French doctors had done. The racism of French society was making Algerians sick, he believed, and their ailments could only be treated by addressing this uncomfortable truth. For Fanon, mental illness could never be divorced from social conditions. He considered himself an activist and, Shatz writes, “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.”

The Rebel’s Clinic is at its best when Shatz describes Fanon’s early efforts to develop an anti-colonial psychiatry. In 1953, Fanon was hired as the director of the French-run Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. His time there opened his eyes to the brutality of colonialism, and under his guidance, the hospital transformed into a center for experiments in social therapy. Initially, the Algerian Muslim patients regarded Fanon with suspicion. To them, his cultural attitudes represented those of France. But, as Shatz writes, Fanon had a plan:

Working with a team of Muslim nurses, he created a café maure, a traditional Moorish café where men drink coffee and play cards, and later an “Oriental salon” for the hospital’s small group of female Muslim patients. Muslim musicians and storytellers came to perform; Muslim festivals were celebrated; and, for the first time in the hospital’s history, the mufti of Blida paid a visit during the breaking of the Ramadan fast.

French colonialism dehumanized Algerians by destroying their culture. By reminding them of their culture, Fanon hoped to help his patients assert a collective identity, which would give them the confidence to undergo a process of “disalienation” and fight back against the French.

At Blida, the Algerian nurses shared Fanon’s radical politics, and together, they secretly treated fighters with the National Liberation Front (FLN), which sought to overthrow French colonial rule. The hospital staff formed a militant health care collective that challenged coercive approaches to psychiatry. For them, Blida wasn’t an isolated institution where patients were locked away to recover; rather, their work in the hospital was part of the struggle waged outside its grounds. Fanon and his staff even introduced day hospitalization so patients could maintain ties to their social environment.

In Shatz’s view, Fanon’s dedication to health care was perhaps his most important contribution to the Algerian revolution. (He never engaged in active combat during the war.) Providing health care remained a priority for the FLN throughout the years of fighting.

After the French discovered Fanon was secretly an FLN member, he fled to Tunis, Tunisia’s capital, where the FLN’s provisional government would be based, and took up a new role in the movement: He still treated patients traumatized by war but also worked as a propagandist championing the FLN’s armed struggle. Although his democratic vision of a people-led revolution clashed with the FLN’s authoritarianism, he dutifully justified its policies to an international audience. As Shatz points out, the strategic use of the phrase “we Algerians” in his articles for El Moudjahid, the FLN’s French-language newspaper, was a way to prove how closely he identified with the Algerian cause. His writing and speeches during this period helped create the myth of Fanon as a leader of the revolution.

The Rebel’s Clinic pushes back against this mythologizing. Fanon’s identification with Algeria grew as the war intensified, but he was an outsider: He spoke neither Arabic nor Berber, was not Muslim, and had come to Algeria as a representative of the colonial government. And while FLN leaders respected Fanon’s medical work, they never quite trusted him. Even as they presented him as a spokesperson of the movement to international audiences, Fanon had little influence over its direction and politics. When he learned that his close friend, key FLN figure Abane Ramdane, had been assassinated by another FLN faction, he was devastated. But he never questioned the leadership’s decision and refused to break ranks. Fanon had become a captive of the revolution he’d hoped to ignite.

Shatz notes that A Dying Colonialism, Fanon’s first book about Algeria, “reads like a record of revolutionary hopes soon to be dashed.” Written in Tunis in 1959, the book gives an idealized account of Algerian liberation, pieced together from his memories of the war’s early stages. But the social changes he praised—the emancipation of Algerian women (the subject of his famous essay “Algeria Unveiled”), the dissolution of classes, and the turn toward secularism—were never realized in practice.

Fanon never really understood his adopted home, especially when it came to religion. His belief in the revolution was so absolute that he failed to consider how the conservative, Islamist forces in the FLN might shape its outcome. Like Ramdane, Fanon argued for an independent Algeria that would welcome everyone who renounced their colonial privilege. He believed that the roles of “settler” and “native” ascribed by colonialism were never fixed. After independence, he hoped, Algerians would finally be able to “discover the man behind the colonizer,” as sympathetic Europeans too became equal citizens in a secular Algeria. But, as Shatz argues, these ideals clashed with the FLN leadership’s more narrowly Arab-Islamic vision of post-independence Algeria. Even the people Fanon had hoped would lead the revolution—Algeria’s poor peasants—embraced the FLN’s social conservatism.

To avoid conflict over its social policies, the provisional government promoted secular leftists to diplomatic positions in West Africa. In 1960, Fanon was stationed in Accra, and he soon came to share the Pan-Africanist views of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, who insisted that all Africans would be united by their common struggle against colonialism. Fanon was convinced that Algeria would lead the rest of the continent toward liberation. But ironically, his influence in the FLN waned as he became more famous, and he “would have little success in ‘Algerianizing’ the strategies of African liberation struggles,” Shatz writes.

Fanon wanted to convince African anti-colonial movements to engage in guerrilla warfare, as the FLN had done. But their leaders often chose peaceful organizing or negotiations as the preferred route to independence. Fanon rightly feared that this approach to decolonization would enable former colonial powers to “recolonize” Africa through favorable arrangements with compliant leaders. His evisceration of Africa’s post-independence bourgeoisie in The Wretched of the Earth was inspired by his work as a diplomat.

Fanon was not always prophetic about the future of African politics. As Shatz points out, he underestimated the impact of the Cold War on Africa, insisting that it was merely “a distraction from the larger drama of decolonization and the rise of the Third World.” Two of Fanon’s closest friends and political allies in sub-Saharan Africa—soon-to-be Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the Cameroonian communist Félix-Roland Moumié—would be assassinated in the early 1960s because of their leftist politics. (Fanon had himself survived an attempt on his life in Rome in 1959.) Another close friend, the Angolan Holden Roberto, turned out to be a CIA asset and was secretly working to undermine Lumumba, whom he described as a communist “puppet.”

The process of decolonization, then, was not only a struggle between anti-colonial movements and colonial powers but part of the global struggle among competing ideologies. As much as he tried to ignore it, the Cold War found Fanon, too. Following an FLN expedition to Mali to assess the possibility of a weapons corridor to southern Algeria, Fanon fell ill and was diagnosed with leukemia. In a show of “friendship” to the FLN, the CIA agreed to bring Fanon to the United States—a place he’d previously dismissed as “the country of lynchers”—for treatment. Fanon died in a hospital in Maryland in December 1961. A few months later, Algeria achieved its independence.

Today, various activist causes, from Black Lives Matter to the Palestinian solidarity movement, have again embraced Fanon as a leading thinker. But his work has also found favor with scholars in disciplines such as psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. In her recent interviews with Shatz, Fanon’s former secretary, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, mentioned that she didn’t like him “to be chopped into little pieces.” Manuellan insisted that Fanon’s “pamphlets” were “texts written in the service of a political movement, not works of philosophical reflection,” Shatz writes.

Yet this is precisely what the canonization of Fanon has too often done. Fanon’s psychiatric and philosophical writings merit renewed attention. But this attention should not come at the cost of gaining a fuller understanding of how Fanon’s anti-colonial thought builds on his earlier psychiatric studies or of his fraught and often conflicted role in the revolution. The Rebel’s Clinic is careful not to reduce Fanon’s life and thought to a single interpretation. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism. For him, violence was a necessary step in the struggle—a kind of “shock therapy” that would restore confidence to the colonized mind. But he also understood that the traumas of the war would not disappear at independence.

Shatz does suggest that one aspect of Fanon’s work is most relevant for our world today. Fanon knew very well that the struggle for decolonization was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity, which would allow both colonizer and colonized to finally be free. He never described exactly what the social revolution he so strongly believed in would look like, but he was certain that the poor and oppressed of the “Third World,” not liberals or the European working classes, would lead the way. This anti-colonial and universalist Fanon is, perhaps, the one Shatz would like us to remember most.

[stackslip]

A French police officer is being investigated for homicide over the fatal shooting a 17-year-old boy in the Paris suburb of Nanterre after he failed to comply with an order to stop his car, the local prosecutor’s office said. [...] The officer fired at the boy, who subsequently died from his wounds, the Nanterre prosecutor’s office said. A video shared on social media shows two police officers beside the car, a Mercedes AMG, one of whom shoots as the driver pulls away. After a record 13 deaths from police shootings in France during traffic stops last year, this was the second fatal incident in such circumstances in 2023. Three people were killed by police gunfire after refusing to comply with a traffic stop in 2021 and two in 2020. A Reuters tally of fatal shootings in 2021 and 2022 shows the majority of victims were black or Arabic origin. “As a mother from Nanterre, I have a feeling of insecurity for our children,” said Mornia Labssi, a local resident and anti-racism campaigner, who said she had spoken to the victim’s family, which she said was of Algerian origin.

[evilsoup]

Decolonisation is a term covering a wide variety of movements across the world that have acted in different ways, but for example in Algeria it very much did involve a race war that ended with kicking the whites out of the country. And I've seen people cite The Wretched of the Earth, a book written in the context of the Algerian national liberation struggle which argues for things like the necessity of killing settlers in order for colonised people to gain self-respect, when they advocate for "decolonisation" and "land back" with regards to the USA/Canada.

I've also read Decolonisation is not a metaphor, in which the authors boast about trying to sabotage Occupy Oakland in the name of Decolonisation.

I'm not trying to paint the whole Land Back thing as unreasonable or whatever. My general assumption is that this is mostly people online posting edgelord takes, and that there's a more healthy real movement that isn't captured by a few Tumblr posts. But what I am saying is that it's not necessarily anti-indigenous racism if people question the land back idea on the basis of the rhetoric used by some of its online proponents.

[plethoraworldatlas]

It doesn't surprise me that most of the accounts cheering the protests in France over the retirement age, going all "break out the guillotines" and "the US needs to riot like the French", have completely been silent on the more recent protests over the murder of an Algerian-Moroccan teen named Nahel by police who lied about him driving into cops and were proven to have been lying because of the video evidence. It also doesn't surprise me that a large number of the retirement age protesters, and even many of the Unions, have completely failed to support the protests against racist police killings; Some of the very same people cheering the earlier protests and making memes with photos from them have even Fully pivoted into "this is scary, violence isn't the answer" territory, if not having gone full "I hate other races more than I hate Macron". I wish it wasn't obvious that this was how it would go, but it was; You can talk about how "the oppressed are all one group/class/whatever and must fight together", you can share threads about intersectionality, but if when push comes to shove you don't show or even talk about racist police killings because it doesn't fit your "enlightened French protests" aesthetics, or if you have the audacity to start acting like the very moral guardians you mocked in previous riots, you can not be shocked when your demands of solidarity aren't made into the most important thing in the world. Racist Police Killings and riots over them should be all over this site!!! The cop who killed him has Frech people GIVING HIM A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF MONEY because "he's out of work" for killing someone! Support fights against police brutality and racism all of the world! Actually practice what you preach if you want it to have an effect! You can't be all "all leftists support minorities" and not be there when it actually matters! You can't demand or act entitled to the support and power of minority races/religions/etc for your leftism/activism/Unions/etc and ignore them or participate in the hatred of them when they aren't useful to you! You can talk about how leftists need to support people of color, but you have to actually Act on your words; You can talk about how westerners/white people/etc need to actively unlearn racism and their unconscious baises, but if you aren't actively doing that yourself when you can't get over your outdated and simplistic rose tinted view of the fantasy of "Perfect Leftist non-racist France", you aren't doing anything but trying to make yourself look good. Actually do what you say you do, actually join your leftist protests with anti-racism protests, actually BE anti-racist, actually do the intersectionalism you love talking about.

[lordzannis]

The nuclear weapons testing conducted by colonial powers like France, the United States, and others in occupied territories and indigenous lands represents a horrific chapter of colonial oppression, environmental destruction, and human rights abuses. Here are some key points based on the search results:

Nuclear Colonialism

France conducted 17 nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara between 1960-1966, even after Algeria gained independence, exposing local populations like the Tuareg people to radioactive fallout.[2]

The United States conducted numerous nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, vaporizing entire islands and rendering many uninhabitable due to radiation exposure for indigenous populations who were displaced.[3]

Nuclear testing by colonial powers has left a toxic legacy of radiation, cancer, birth defects and forced relocations for colonized peoples from the Pacific to North Africa.[2][3]

The impacts of uranium mining, nuclear testing, and radioactive waste disproportionately burden Black, Indigenous and communities of color as part of the broader violence of colonial occupation and resource extraction.[2]

Resisting Nuclear Colonialism

Colonized communities have resisted the environmental injustices of nuclear programs, like the Indigenous Diné people's struggles against uranium mining on their lands by the U.S. government.[3]

Anti-nuclear and anti-colonial movements have highlighted how nuclear weapons perpetuate the racist ideology and violent dispossession that enabled colonial domination.[2][3]

Calls for transparency, clean-up efforts, and reparations for those impacted by nuclear testing and waste continue, though colonial powers have been slow to take responsibility.[2]

The development of nuclear arsenals by colonial states was inextricably linked to the subjugation of indigenous lands and peoples. Abolishing nuclear weapons is crucial to ending this toxic legacy of colonial violence and environmental racism that continues to harm marginalized communities worldwide. Viva Palestina! Ending colonial fascism means dismantling all instruments of oppression, including nuclear arms.

Citations: [1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/accenture_israel_we-stand-united-in-grief-and-solidarity-with-activity-7117639310828318720-Ubeo [2] https://www.globalzero.org/updates/the-legacy-of-french-nuclear-testing-in-algeria-shows-how-nuclear-weapons-perpetuate-colonialism/index.html [3] https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/risk-and-militarization/nuclear-colonialism [4] https://www.mmm-online.com/home/channel/brands-stand-against-religious-hate-donate-relief-amidst-humanitarian-crisis-in-gaza/ [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/business/israel-palestine-google-employees.html

Someone Worte that he could not stand to see the Palestine flag anymore.

Sorry, but not sorry

Reblog daily

Free Palestine

I am not done yet

Only way to stop seeing this flag is when the oppression is over.

So you are tiered of this? you can end it, stop supporting Zionism!

[sissa-arrows]

What some bitch on French TV said: Maghrebis girls force themselves to have bad grades at school cause if they have good grades their brothers and parents beat them up telling them “You think you’re white?”

The reality: Algeria has the highest rate of women engineers in the world (48,5%). Tunisia and Morocco are also above 40% (France is at 26% and Canada is under 20%). In Algeria 51,7% of general practitioners are women. 49,7% of specialized doctors are women. 60 to 65% of the Algerian lawyers are women. 47% of the Algerian judges are women. Algerian women represent 63% of the students in university/college in Algeria. To compare it with the whole population of the country women represent 49,5% of the Algerian population.

So really it would be nice if Islamophobic pieces of shit could keep us out of their mouths. It’s not just white people it’s also diaspora from some non Maghrebi SWANA countries. I will support your fight against your extremist government but your parents being forced to leave Iran or Egypt because of the fucked up governments there doesn’t give you the right to spread Islamophobia in France. Especially not when you always make sure to name Maghrebi countries so the fall out is only on us and never on you.

Note: I’m mentioning Algeria specifically in my stats because we are the biggest diaspora in France. So when they target “Maghrebi” Algerians are the biggest targets.

[newsakd]

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