#dying colonialism

[sissa-arrows]

“In a war of liberation, the colonized people must win, but they must do so cleanly, without "barbarity." The European nation that practices torture is a blighted nation, unfaithful to its history. The underdeveloped nation that practices torture thereby confirms its nature, plays the role of an underdeveloped people. If it does not wish to be morally condemned by the "Western nations," an underdeveloped nation is obliged to practice fairplay, even while its adversary ventures, with a clear conscience, into the unlimited exploration of new means of terror.”

A dying colonialism (L’an V de la révolution Algérienne) by Frantz Fanon.

In this part he explains how to colonized are forced to held themselves to a higher standard and are not allowed to be barbaric in their violence because it’s used to prove that they deserve oppression. So even in our violence we respect certain rules. He explains how in the very same region the French executed 30 Algerian who threw rocks… meanwhile an Algerian doctor sent men from the Algerian resistance get supplies and medicine to treat a French prisoner.

It was published in 1959 so in the middle of the war and that makes it so interesting. It’s also very very very relevant to the present. And it also shows that hope is very important because an army can take some of the land from the resistance but if the people don’t get back to their state of fear and despair it’s useless they will keep fighting. Hope is so much more important than we think. He wrote this in 1959 he didn’t know the outcome but he was convinced that the population in Algeria and in the world had reached the stage where France could take as much land as they wanted they would still end up losing Algeria it was only a matter of time.

[sadmages]

Rogier's no good very bad day.

[astradella]

The phrase “big brother shadow au” won’t leave my head

[stop-entropy-lie-down]

its actually freakish that the exploitative trade policies of the imperial core directly cause diseases like kwashiokor (abdominal distention after prolonged protein deficiency) and then we learn about them in school biology as unfortunate but unsolvable facts

[aru-art]

happy 2nd anniversary to what continues to be the game of all time!! 🪐

[dazedasian]

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[nando161mando]

1 in 5 seniors is working. Fuck this system and the politicians who prop up its dying corpse.

[pushing500]

Everyone say hello to the Jones Boys' new dog, Othello! He's a very big boy, and I love him ❤️

After we got Othello, a stranger showed up to hang out. If Mechi has anything to say about it, he probably won't be here for long.

YES!!! Finally!!! The first piece of the puzzle!! Time to scrounge up whatever social skills we can and make friends with Wasbum. We have to get that map piece!

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[thebeautifuldaughter]

fascinating to watch how hozier speaking Irish in his new music is making some people: 1. fetishise him further and/or 2. make 'fun' jokes about gaeilge/gaelic/'''garlic'''' bc like. babes. i can guarantee you neither of those actions are separable from the lingering impacts of colonialism.

[eclecticwordblender]

capitalism has made war so expensive that it has lead to a decline of warfare is a fucking lie.

A BIG FAT LIE the masculine militarised thinking wants you to believe.

capitalism has not eradicated warfare, it has only made warfare unequal. it has given warfare new forms such as genocide and conflict ridden zones.

wars don’t exist anymore because power is distributed so unequally. what is the problem with war after all? loss of human life? violence? capitalism has only aided those.

[sissa-arrows]

Let’s not forget Albert Camus’s final unfinished novel, The First Man. The book’s title is an appeal to a past of a different kind. The biblical connotations are evident, and it is interesting that Camus thought about naming the first character Adam. This is part of a pieds-noirs or colonialist fantasy that is unexpressed but present: the notion that no man was present on this land before him (“terra nullius”), much like Adam and Eve. This is a world vision that places European settlers and European myth respectively at the center of all things. For example, Camus describes the main character as being born “on a land with no ancestors and no memory … where old age found none of the succor from melancholy which it receives in civilized countries …”.

The First Man becomes a platform for the expression of the white settlers’ resentment. In particular, resentment against the metropole is present throughout, for example, in this exchange between the main character, Camus’s alter ego, Cormery, and a pied-noir farmer who tells him: “I have sent my family to Algiers [for safety] and I will die here. They don’t understand that in Paris.” The farmer’s hatred of the metropole is such that he expresses more respect for the Arabs who violently oppose his rule. The farm owner advises his Arab workers to join the Algerian resistance because “there are no men in France”, that is, the pieds-noirs will lose because of the weakness of the metropolitan French. This is the despair of the white settler; he feels abandoned by Paris and as a consequence, resigned to the rise of the Algerian resistance. The First Man reflects both an inchoate desire to negate this new reality (the coming of Algerian independence) and a long mourning of the old colonial order.

Camus does not challenge the racism of pieds-noirs in French Algeria but instead justifies it. He uses class concerns (unemployment) as an explanation for the xenophobic reaction of the settlers. Through the narrator, racism occurs here as part of human nature, as an understandable reaction from ultimately likeable characters. Camus also uses his modest origins like a weapon, at times inferring that these origins give him an awareness and an authenticity lacking in some of his other interlocutors with more privileged backgrounds.

Camus depicts the French settler as a tragic figure: an admirable hard-working man, an old pied-noir, one of those who “are being insulted in Paris.” In a telling passage, a settler who owns a vineyard is uprooting the vines in his property to ensure that Algerians will not be able to profit from them once they take back their land. When asked what he is doing by Cormery, the settler responds with what is meant to be bitter irony: “young man, since what we have done is a crime, we should erase it.” Yet this destruction of the vineyards harks back to one of the most somber hours of the French conquest of Algeria: in 1840 when General de LaMoricière and future governor-general of Algeria, Thomas Bugeaud, agreed to make the systematic destruction of Arab crops a policy to “prevent the Arabs from enjoying the fruits of their fields.” This uprooting of olive trees and the destruction or confiscation of fields were a crucial moment in France’s conquest of Algeria. Forced to leave that conquered territory, the French once again destroy cultivated land, but this time Camus describes them as being victims of an injustice.

I cannot testify about anything regarding this unfinished novel cause any work I read from Camus I did because I was forced to in school and this one wasn’t part of the « let’s study a book from a colonizer without even acknowledging any bias in it » package deal.

So first of all thank you for the informations you’re providing here.

That being said while I can’t say anything about the book itself I sure can talk about the historical context.

Settlers really have that thing where the pretend they discovered the land that the people there didn’t exist and if they did exist they weren’t indigenous anyway they came from somewhere else so it did not belong to them and if it did belong to them then they didn’t deserve it.

They point at roads and buildings saying « we built that so you owe us » except they never mention the roads and buildings that were there before and that they destroyed. They never mention that these roads and buildings were built by Algerians who were not allowed to use them afterwards. They never mention that building one single highway in order to make pillaging the country easier and destroying the beautiful historical building of Algiers to build something to their taste (aka something that didn’t look Muslim) will never make up for all the deaths they caused.

The settlers love their privileges and think they are above everyone else. They don’t love France they love living in a colony. When the settlers realized that France was losing they were hoping and fighting for an independence of Algeria similar to the fake independence of the US. Aka settlers kicking out mainland settlers and stealing Turtle Island from its rightful people. The settlers loved settler colonialism more than anything to the point where it legit broke families. One of my friend wasn’t allowed to talk to her uncle all her life. When she became an adult her mom told her the reason and it was because her uncle was a settler who didn’t want the independence and went as far as torturing Algerians but he had no regrets and to this day still wishes the settlers had taken Algeria from France for themselves and killed the Algerians.

The settlers in Algeria also stayed long enough that they created their own culture so coming back to France wasn’t an option in their mind.

In a Dying colonialism by Frantz Fanon a white settler in favor of the independence explains how him and some of his friends (Muslims, Jewish and Europeans) went to a conference where Camus was invited expecting him to take a stand as an older progressive and how disappointed they got by his both sidism that wasn’t even actual both sidism because he refused to let them collect money to help the Algerian political prisoners taken by France. Eventually in 1956 he felt useless to the revolution so he left and he came to Paris and that while in France he only felt guilt and disgust. He felt even more useless so he tried to raise awareness around him but people didn’t give a flying fuck. So he started hating them. Hating those French people who were sending their sons to torture and kill Algerians. He did meet good French leftist but he realized that he only felt at home when with Algerians. That he didn’t belong to France. Eventually he went back to Algeria but this time he joined the FLN. (He also says that at first he was scared to be treated differently and then he realized that for indigenous Algerians the fact that he was fighting for the liberation made him a brother just like any other Algerian)

Anyway I’m rambling back to the ask. (For more about the settlers I really suggest Fanon’s book mentioned earlier there’s also a testimony from a white cop who made the right decision and Fanon talks about the role of doctors in favor of colonialism and all for example)

Regarding Bugeaud and his “politique de la Terre brûlée” there’s so much to say. Even the livestock were not spared and were killed with the villagers during his infamous “enfumades”. I can say so much about this piece of shit and the fact that he has a statue in France saying “Loved, honored and missed by everyone he was a great man who pacified Algeria” makes me sick.

Anyway once again thank you for your ask I learned more about how much of a piece of shit Camus is.

[loveakii]

captruing arrakis.

[alienglowgarden]

misc IWATEX drabbles

Hi, so I've been writing a certain fic and have amassed quite a bit of different random scenes which I may or may not use... and I thought,,, it might be fun to share some. N if people like them I'd certainly love to do/share more uwu

1. In which Sol suffers a bad case of burn-out after facilitating peace with the gardeners and decides to take a sabbatical.

Anemone hears it from Tangent, who says it as matter-of-factly as anything: Sol has disappeared. To be fair to them, it was a planned, voluntary disappearance. Anemone hasn't seen Sol in 3 years, and yet the pang of hurt she feels is as fresh as the dew on her boots. Already impossibly far, they have moved into some new to her unreachable realm, drifting ever farther and farther away.

Sym never quite learns to lie outright, so he cannot tell them honestly if Sol is happy or not. Only that they are getting better. They are trying. They are trying to get back to everyone and themself. Even if to all of them it looks like doing the opposite.

Once, Sol uploads a 20 minute long soundscape to the holonet. It is entirely taken up by the sound of crashing waves. Something about it makes her realize its not an old recording of Earth- its Vertumna. Sol is at the ocean. Their voice hums underneath the nature sounds, going in and out at various intervals as it follows one pattern, then loses it only to start trailing another, lulling one into a sense of calm and just the lightest sting of loss. Reminds one, gently but insistently, of the vast distance between her and Sol.

Their voice is salt-cracked and hoarse. Now a stranger to language, their tongue bends only for the small, simple sounds.  Are they eating well? Their mouth cannot answer. It must be inferred from the thinness of their breath.

  Does salt crust the corners of their eyes?       There is no way of telling.       Are they cold?      Do they sleep?      Are they shivering?     Do they think of her?    Are their pets well-fed?       Do they miss their mother?     Are there holes in their shirt that need mending?      Does the scar still itch?       Have they shelter?  A home?     Does it get lonely?    Is she at fault?      Will they ever talk to her?        Did they catch Echinacea's first steps?       Do they watch the videos and follow along life at the colony?      Is their knife still sharp?      Are they drinking enough?     Do they sleep better now than they had before, at home?    Is it enough to keep them from the nightmares?

2. Dys & Sol

Where Dys was fearless, emotional, Sol was calm, always measured. Their conflicting natures again grinding against each other until they finally ground each others edges smooth. Eroded enough to stand beside one another. Shoulder to shoulder. A protrusion laid into the groove, spike fitted against spike closing into a gapless vice, puzzle piece in puzzle piece. Still not smooth enough to play well with the others.

Sol always wondered about that. How these two unlike objects could come so close and find what was lacking and what could be given in turn.

Belief the chiefest among those necessities. Belief was hard to come by from anyone else who was not the playground seer or the cryptid of stratospheric. They traded it between each other like tokens, like currency which once their ancestors had sought just to be able to survive. The stakes here were just as dire.

Belief was a powerful thing- it could make or break you. It could make you whole or leave you forever unfulfilled, left to feel around blindly for every shadow of its shape as it eludes you time and time again, as it is buried down deeper by the disappointment and the falsities.

"Fine, don't believe in the colony. Believe in me."

"I do, Sol. But you're just one person."

3. ...and another one why not.

He finds Sol balancing on the edge of a wall near their lookout tower. They grin at him, they're in a good mood. This might be bad. They  waggle their eyebrows in challenge, then extend one leg over the edge of the wall.

“Dare ya,”

They start and don't even finish the sentence. There’s no need. They already have Dys’ undivided attention.

He smirks and scoffs. “As if I’ve never jumped off the wall, please Sol. That’s baby stuff.”

For a moment he watches them  pause and look out across the Vertumnan wilds, tensing imperceptibly. Or, no, not quite. It looks more like they’re frozen in place, like none of their limbs were ever designed with movement in mind. Their pupils don't even twitch, they don't blink. The action is both painfully familiar and alien, as if they’re one of…

Then all at once, they’re alive again, interfacing with the physical world. Their body careens forward and their grin goes down, down, down…

He rushes forward. He’s just in time to jump off the ledge as the toes of Sol’s shoe leave solid ground. There's no way he can be outdone by Sol. Sol who by all accounts should be capable of experiencing fear but does not only on account of that they're totally and irreversibly insane. There’s nobody he’d want to be with more in this moment.

Sol, of course, knows they will be fine. They were careful, they checked. No bad feelings, no premonitions. Just tuck and roll.

4.[COULD YOU HELP ME RELAX?] (Sol x Sym)

"I'm just so tired Sym. I feel so old; barely like a person at all."

He pulls them down as he habitually does, using his arm as their headrest.

"No matter what, you'll always be the one I love," he says soothing.

"No, I know- its just-" they groan rubbing their face in frustration and exhaustion.

"Oh, should I be offended? Am I not enough for you, sugarbug?" Sym teases.

Sol grins in a kind of half-defeat, half-relief that he won't make them actually get into the meat of it. They're far too worn for that now.

"You know what I mean." This, they say with the smile still in their voice.

"I think I do. I'm sorry I cannot do more at this moment. But, when the time comes, you will make the right choice, I know it. I believe in you, my love."

Sym finds himself not for the first time feeling guilt over the clarity of purpose he has as opposed to his chaotic human friends.

Though maybe that's not the issue with Sol at all, maybe it's the opposite. Because they do have a purpose coded into them. It's simply too much for one person to bare. He knows he is part of that issue as much as he'd wish to remain a truly neutral party.

He can't do anything more than kiss their temple as he smooths back their hair, his helplessness expressed in this gesture oddly human. For all his vast knowledge, the soothing motions of a social pack animal is the best he can offer.

"That was just what I needed," they say too soon, tension pulling them up like a whip, as if the words themselves were some sort of trigger. They kept going regardless. Before he could have ever even administered his Gardener magic to them. Does this mean they don't feel its effects at all anymore? Could they not tell the difference between a comforting word and supercharged chemical reaction?

[muslimah-in-academia]

Now, more than ever, we need to read Fanon and remember the UN reaffirmation that those under illegal occupation have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary, including armed struggle.

On the other hand, it is illegal for the occupying force to retaliate with violence.

[rotzaprachim]

one of the most bitter ironies from a certain flavour of western (usually American, British, French) leftist who’se decided to comment on the Jews Writ large and just suggest that Israelis ought to have just gone back to where they come from if they didn’t want to be murdered is that the US, UK, and France been hugely culpable in forcing massive numbers of Jews, along with other middle eastern refugees, from their homelands through colonialism and interventionist and destabilizing policies in Iran, Afghanistan , Algeria, Lebanon, Yemen, and so forth. It’s downright ghoulish to refuse to wrestle with the history behind why the vast majority of the worlds’ middle eastern Jews live in the state of Israel when YOU, as the major colonial powers of the region, are culpable for it

[deoidesign]

Can you make a tutorial on how you world build and make ocs? I can't seem to make any people in my brain, but then when I try to come up with environments jobs, beliefs and little details to slowly come up with someone, I think: well I don't really know how people have influenced the world- it's a weird loop

To be honest, I don't think I can! Writing is an extremely personal process. The way I write is directly related to how I process things, what I find important in stories, years of my own analysis of my and other's writing, etc... The way you write will be unique to you, as well. But I can explain how I personally think of it.

The short answer:

Write. Write anything and everything, it's a tool to explore your ideas. Analyze your own writing, and write more. Then, as you discover which ideas you want to develop, write more to explore them more. You won't know what you want otherwise!

The long answer:

I think this kind of loop is common. It's easy to feel like everything needs to be done "at once," because our job as writers is to make elements logically fit with each other for our readers. But as you've discovered, developing multiple elements simultaneously isn't really possible, or at least is extremely difficult.

Personally, when I think of writing, I break it into three major elements; characters, world, and plot. As much as possible every scene explores one or more of these, and as much as possible these three things tie back into what I personally consider most important: theme.

Everything I do is in service of the themes I want to present. Without them my events feel aimless. It can take a while to discover them, but they're the core of my work. You will have to discover what you feel is the core of yours. Analyzing other media helps with this too.

Concepts in your brain exist in a state of infinite potential. But when you start writing you have to start making choices, which removes potential as you move forward... But you have to move forward anyways. If there's ideas you want to explore later, you can always explore them later.

What this ends up meaning, to answer your question, is that I don't think of my characters as "people in my brain" or my worlds as something people have influenced... Not at their core, at least. They are tools that I use to represent specific ideas. Obviously they're also my blorbos, but mostly they're serving a specific narrative purpose.

So above all else... Write. Write, and discover what you're writing about, and then start over and write with that in mind. Keep doing this. But you have to write!