[News] Remembering Algeria And Fanon

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Solidarity: Remembering Algeria And Fanon

Monday, 15 May 2006, 12:18 pm
Opinion: Toni Solo


Solidarity: Remembering Algeria And Fanon


by <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/print.html?path=HL0605/#a>Toni Solo

The Algerian war of independence probably provides the starkest 
archetype for the kind of arguments thrown up around acts of 
solidarity with victims of imperialism. The war dragged on for eight 
years, exacting perhaps over a million Algerian dead and bringing 
down the French fourth republic. In France itself, resistance to the 
war took many forms, from letter campaigns against torture, to 
refusal to serve in the military, to smuggling weapons and money for 
the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). It may be worth 
reviewing that experience in the context of what is happening in 
Iraq, Palestine, Colombia and other places whose peoples sustain 
determined anti-imperialist resistance against vicious military force.

Many moral and political obstacles made it hard for French citizens 
to define what they were prepared to do to resist the Algerian war. 
The French Communist Party supported the government on the 1956 vote 
giving the army "special powers" - in effect, blanket authorization 
to torture and murder Algerians at will. Religious and political 
opposition to the war coalesced most strongly around the routine use 
of horrific torture which took place both in Algeria and in France itself.

Anti-colonial critics of French opposition to the war tended to focus 
on that opposition's nationalism - the war was bad because it hurt 
France, not because it annihilated hundreds of thousands of 
Algerians. For a limited number of resisters, the adoption by the 
French Republic of policies used against World War Two resistance by 
Nazi Germany - torture, massacres, concentration camps - tipped them 
over into active resistance on Algeria. This was a prominent defence 
theme when members of the resistance network organized by Francis 
Jeanson were arrested and tried in 1960.



Moral dilemmas, practical action

Against that defence, mainstream opinion in France argued that 
support for the FLN was a betrayal of French troops, especially the 
conscripts and reservists. Torture was glossed over as a policy 
inevitable when faced with "terrorist" tactics. The war was never 
acknowledged as such at the time by the French authorities. So 
Algerians arrested by the army had no protection under the Geneva 
Conventions. Rather like the Bush regime's "unlawful enemy 
combatants", they suffered all the savagery of the "special powers". 
But in contrast to Guantanamo, US prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq and 
clandestine US detention centres elsewhere, individuals who survived 
interrogations in Algeria usually ended up in civilian courts.

The spiral of terror made it hard for most French people to 
sympathise with the FLN, who were thoroughly demonized in the French 
national media. Lack of sympathy for Algerians caused by the ferocity 
of FLN tactics was sharpened by the bitter civil war between the FLN 
and its rival the MNA. Many Algerians died in France during that 
power struggle. Likewise, many Algerians died during internal FLN 
purges in Algeria itself.

People's solidarity response to the moral dilemmas posed by this 
terrifying reality varied. Tasks undertaken ran from organizing 
protests and public meetings against the war to providing shelter for 
Algerians at risk and carrying out of the country money to fund the 
war, collected from the Algerian immigrant community in France. Some 
French opponents of the war became so alienated from their own 
country they moved to independent Algeria, being dubbed "pieds 
rouges" in opposition to French Algerian settlers, the "pieds noirs".



Fanon - relentless inquisitor

The most widely influential figure who symbolised the multi-faceted 
anguish of French solidarity with the cause of Algerian independence 
was the Martinican psychologist, Frantz Fanon. A decorated World War 
Two veteran, Fanon was working as a psychologist in Algeria when the 
war began in 1954. By 1956, he had resigned his post and moved with 
his French wife and their child to Tunisia. Based there, he worked 
for the FLN until his death from leukemia in 1961. Among many other 
things, his final book "The Wretched of the Earth" defined 
fundamental questions relevant to solidarity with movements in 
resistance to imperialism.

The power of Fanon's arguments derived from his experience of and 
reflections on racism and its role in imperial domination. The timely 
cooperation of Jean Paul Sartre with its clearly dying author helped 
extend the reach of "The Wretched of the Earth" to a large 
international readership. Sartre's preface to the book is one of his 
most controversial pieces of work, because he made a determined 
effort, unprecedented for a leading European philosopher, to put 
imperialist realities remorselessly from the side of a resisting, 
oppressed and dehumanised majority. (Subsequently his preface was 
repudiated by Fanon's widow, Josie, because Sartre supported Israel 
during the 1967 war.)

The book made people all over the world rethink the way they defined 
themselves and others. For some, the emphasis on the cathartic role 
of violence against oppression was overstated and repulsive. For 
others, the work suffered too much from over-generalisation and 
vagueness. Still others, argued that decolonization need not be 
accompanied invariably by violent insurrection, as Fanon was 
interpreted to argue. The fundamental move Fanon made was to place 
the colonial oppressors at the periphery and to focus on the humanity 
and the revolutionary political and moral potential of their victims.



 From Algeria to Iraq - doubletalk and legitimacy

In France, it was not until after six years of the Algerian war with 
the "Manifesto of the 121" in 1960 that influential public figures 
made a collective statement of opposition in terms that recognised 
the primacy of the needs of Algerians. It declared the cause of the 
Algerian people to be the cause of all free people. It insisted on 
the right of individuals to refuse to serve in the army and on 
respect for the conscientious actions of those who helped and 
protected Algerians resisting French military aggression. The 
Manifesto caused outrage in France and made signatories targets for 
murder by the pro-French Algeria Secret Army Organization, the OAS.

What French governments did in Algeria is being variously repeated 
now by the US and its allies and their proxies in Palestine, Iraq, 
Afghanistan, and Colombia. Over the last two years United Nations 
forces have used brutal, colonial-style murder and terror against 
people in Haiti. Constant threats and menaces are sustained by the 
same imperialist bloc against countries, like Iran, Cuba and 
Venezuela, that defend their national interests. Blatant intervention 
in countries with weak national governments is routine. International 
norms like the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremburg principles, human 
rights covenants as fundamental as that on the Rights of the Child, 
all have been effectively trashed.

But the criminal politicians who have wrecked those protective 
covenants and agreed rules declare constantly they are acting to 
defend the highest ideals of freedom, democracy and "civilization". 
They do this at the same time as they massacre civilians and pollute 
targeted countries with their poisons, be it depleted uranium in Iraq 
or glyphosate in Colombia. In the case of depleted uranium, they know 
very well they are slowly murdering their own troops who use such 
munitions and genetically damaging those troops' future children. 
Little compassion can be expected from such politicians and their 
military commanders for the occupied populations and none is shown. 
In accordance with the sadistic traditions of past colonialism, the 
contradiction between the rhetoric used to justify their crimes and 
the horrific barbarism of what they do is total .

Even so, the hypocrisy of politicans like Georeg W. Bush and Tony 
Blair and their colleagues is still capable of debilitating 
resistance in their own countries. Outright international solidarity 
support for the Iraqi resistance is rare, despite their legitimate 
fight against their country's brutal occupation. So is such support 
for the FARC guerrillas fighting the narco-paramilitary government of 
Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, although the FARC satisfy the conditions 
necessary for them to be recognised by national states as a 
legitimate party to an armed conflict. Both countries suffer terrible 
levels of violence that derive from deliberate policies of the United 
States and its allies. So does Palestine, now more than ever.

Solidarity with people resisting aggression or intervention from the 
US and its allies in these countries generates the same kinds of 
dilemmas as those facing French people during the Algerian war. Most 
people impelled to express that solidarity will work out for 
themselves what seems best to do. Sufficient normative structures, 
like the numerous international rights instruments, exist to provide 
clear guidance as to what previous generations have formulated by way 
of legally binding protections and remedies. That huge body of 
consensus implicitly condemns the terrorist aggression of the US 
government and its allies and legitimizes effective resistance to 
their crimes.



Implications for solidarity

The many varieties of conscientious resistance by individuals and 
networks in other conflicts, like the independence war in Algeria, 
are worth trying to remember and recover for solidarity purposes. 
Resolving contradictions between personal moral and political 
convictions and aggressive terrorist and interventionist policies 
enacted by governments and legislatures is usually painful and 
complicated. Working out differences and arguments, uncovering and 
rectifying mistakes, takes care, time and patience.

This process is made harder by the vast propaganda advantage enjoyed 
by governments and their collaborationist media. As in France over 
Algeria, criminal aggressor governments in the US and the UK have 
been able to set the terms in which their aggressions and 
interventions are defined and argued over. Even beyond the mainstream 
corporate media, solidarity and protest organizations commonly 
operate within that generally accepted framework. Non-governmental 
organizations necessarily do so because they aim to influence 
government policy by advocacy, generally assuming with little reason 
that their government is capable of acting in good faith.

few people want to be accused of supporting "terrorism" which has 
replaced "communism" as the all purpose bogey-label applied to people 
resisting imperialist crimes. In the case of the FARC, they are 
doubly tainted as targets of both the "war on terror" and "the war on 
drugs". People in solidarity can all too easily be lulled into 
adopting the bogus mantras of their governments, especially 
"democracy" or "democratic sectors" as if the words floated free of 
circumstances and conditions imposed by imperialist aggression and 
intervention. Solidarity-inspired interventions can readily assume 
the very characteristics of the imperialist interventions they seek 
to counter.



"...les zombies, c'est vous."

Most people involved in solidarity activities find them a liberating 
and enriching experience that helps us realise our potential as we 
work in support of people elsewhere who are determined to realise 
theirs. Sometimes the need to define ourselves can elide into a 
selfish assertion of our identity. We can be all too anxious about 
who we can work with and glib about what we really do. So we end up 
trying to identify who are suitable candidates for our solidarity and 
defending our choices rather than focusing on tasks we can usefully 
carry out to reject complicity in the crimes of our governments and 
resist them.

That variety of narcissism is both seductive and anaesthetic. It 
dulls critical faculties with reveries reflecting deceptively 
agreeable self-portraits. Efforts at solidarity are far from immune 
to complacency's all-too-human inhumanity. The self-evident fact that 
people in wealthy countries are better off than the people with whom 
they seek to demonstrate solidarity creates an inherent class 
relationship. The contradictions that class relation can provoke are 
usually compounded by the difficulty of translating assumptions from 
one cultural and political context to another.

When narcissism combines with the kinds of managerial structures 
generally adopted to mobilize resources collectively, the results can 
run even more deeply counter to solidarity motives. These dilemmas 
and contradictions are common, especially when the kind of 
anti-imperialist vision sketched out by writers like Frantz Fanon 
becomes merely ornamental. Current circumstances make his insistence 
on the centrality of peoples resisting imperialist aggression as 
vital and relevant as ever.

Main sources for this article were :

"The Memory of Resistance", Martin Evans, Berg, 1997 (ISBN 
(Paperback) 1 85973 927 X)

"Frantz Fanon : A Life" David Macey, Granta, 2000 (ISBN (Hardback) 1 
86207 168 3)

"La Force des Choses", Simone de Beauvoir, Gallimard, 1963 
(Translated as "Force of Circumstance" by Richard Howard, Penguin, 1968)

*************

toni solo is an activist based in Central America - contact via 
<http://www.tonisolo.net>www.tonisolo.net




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