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</font><h1><b>Solidarity: Remembering Algeria And
Fanon</b></h1><font size=3><b>Monday, 15 May 2006, 12:18 pm<br>
Opinion: Toni Solo</b> <br><br>
</font><div align="center"><h3><b>Solidarity: Remembering Algeria And
Fanon<br><br>
</b></h3></div>
<font size=3>by
<a href="http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/print.html?path=HL0605/#a">Toni
Solo </a><br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br>
</font><h3><b>Moral dilemmas, practical
action</b></h3><font size=3>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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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". <br><br>
<br>
</font><h3><b>Fanon - relentless inquisitor</b></h3><font size=3>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.
<br><br>
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.)
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br>
</font><h3><b>From Algeria to Iraq - doubletalk and
legitimacy</b></h3><font size=3>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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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 . <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br>
</font><h3><b>Implications for solidarity</b></h3><font size=3>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.
<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br>
</font><h3><b>"...les zombies, c'est
vous."</b></h3><font size=3>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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Main sources for this article were :</b> <br><br>
<dd>"The Memory of Resistance", Martin Evans, Berg, 1997 (ISBN
(Paperback) 1 85973 927 X) <br><br>
<dd>"Frantz Fanon : A Life" David Macey, Granta, 2000 (ISBN
(Hardback) 1 86207 168 3) <br><br>
<dd>"La Force des Choses", Simone de Beauvoir, Gallimard, 1963
(Translated as "Force of Circumstance" by Richard Howard,
Penguin, 1968) <br><br>
</dl><div align="center">*************<br><br>
</div>
toni solo is an activist based in Central America - contact via
<a href="http://www.tonisolo.net">www.tonisolo.net <br><br>
<br><br>
</a></i></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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