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#frantz fanon
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heritageposts · 2 months
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In his seminal The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon could be writing about Gaza when he said: “In all armed struggles, there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by a huge and all-inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the colonial people.” In Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, that point has arrived. From Gaza to the Red Sea, on all fronts the West is now unmasked as a lawless killing machine in terror of losing control. Genocide, starvation and war, defended with Olympic-level diplomatic double-speak, are its only answers to the fact that the Global South, and the nations of the Middle East (if not their leaders) no longer wish to live under US hegemony. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Fanon's work, wrote of western colonialism: “Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force… the native has only one choice, between servitude and supremacy.” Fanon was a revolutionary thinker and a practising psychiatrist of colonial racism and its psychic impact on the colonised, and the coloniser. He and Sartre were writing about France’s imminent defeat in Algeria after seven years of brutal war. [...] Western powers are involved in conflicts thousands of miles from home, as they were in Fanon's time in Algeria, Congo and Indochina. Today the western political class has united behind Ukraine and Israel, but for millions of people it is no longer clear that the wars are worth fighting.  As Yemen’s spokesman, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, put it: “The war today is between Yemen which is struggling to stop the crimes of genocide, and the American and British coalition [who] support its perpetrators. Every party or individual in this world has two choices that have no thirds… who do you stand with as you watch these crimes?” Fanon, writing 63 years ago, agrees: “The colonial world is a Manichaean world… at times this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but the negation of values… he is the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. “The native knows all this, and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows he is not an animal, and it is precisely at the moment he realises his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure victory.”
. . . full article on MEE (1 Feb 2024)
You can also find a free copy of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth on the Internet Archive (available as a PDF, EPUB etc.)
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decolonize-the-left · 3 months
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Everyone asks what I read and truth be told I learned a lot of politics through experience and listening to Black revolutionaries.
There is nothing- nothing- that I say on my blog that Malcom X or James Baldwin or Frantz Fanon or Thomas Sankara or Frederick Douglass didn't say first (and much more eloquently)
Further, their words have given me the tools to think critically about not just my place, but everyone else's and what we owe each other.
I myself, wouldn't have a Lot of the politics I do had I not been exposed to the ideas they talked about with such knowledge and experience. Whether it was by following activists or looking up things up or learning about them myself, they're influential and I would even say foundational to decolonization and dismantling white supremacy.
My usual recs are Wretched of the Earth and Braiding Sweetgrass, but those are just starters since people just usually ask where to begin.
So I wanted to make this post and for them to be Very Much credited for the following I have and my politics since I don't often mention them.
For example, I talk a lot about how the comfort of the privileged is an obstacle that stems directly from their privilege. How libs who only conditionally support peaceful protests don't understand what's necessary; that challenging the status quo can't be done comfortably and it's never been "peaceful" for the oppressing classes. How it's detrimental to progress to compromise on how we fight for our rights and to have been liberals telling us we demand too much.
Frederick Douglass:
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Frantz Fanon:
Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs…Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth. The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilised.
Thomas Sankara:
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Malcom X:
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James Baldwin:
In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.
Bonus MLK Jr quote:
Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquillity to equality. In a sense the white liberal has been victimized with some of the same ambivalence that has been a constant part of our national heritage. Even in areas where liberals have great influence— labor unions, schools, churches and politics—the situation of the Negro is not much better than in areas where they are not dominant. This is why many liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing integration in merely aesthetic terms, where a token number of Negroes adds color to a white-dominated power structure."
Whether your medium is a PDF, a book, movie, clips, quotes, podcast, whatever. However you digest info easiest: learn about them and their words. Think about them. Talk about it and process it with friends.
That's how you shape your politics to be similar to the ones you find on my blog.
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tendermimi · 6 months
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Palestine will be free. (frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth)
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damnesdelamer · 11 months
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DECOLONIAL ACTION READING
I recently compiled these to add to a comrade’s post about Land Back, but actually I think they deserve their own post as well.
Amílcar Cabral - Return To The Source
Frantz Fanon - The Wretched Of The Earth
Hô Chí Minh - archive via Marxists.org
Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian
Abdullah Öcalan - Women’s Revolution & Democratic Confederalism
Edward Said - The Question Of Palestine
Thomas Sankara - archive via Marxists.org
Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang - Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor
Other key names in postcolonial theory and its practical application include:
Sara Ahmed
Homi K. Bhabha
Aimé Césaire
Albert Memmi
Jean-Paul Sartre
Léopold Séder Senghor
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
All of these will help you interpret and confront the realities of colonisation, and ideally help us understand and extend solidarity to comrades around the globe. Decolonise your mind, and don't stop there!
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sissa-arrows · 18 days
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Rereading Fanon’s speech at Accra in Ghana (March-April 1960) and I had completely forgotten that the French colonizers used the exact same argument as the Israeli colonizers. “They hate peace that’s why we have to fight them”
I love Fanon’s answer to that argument.
“No, the violence of the Algerian people is neither a hatred of peace nor a rejection of human relations nor a conviction that only war can put an end to the colonial regime in Algeria.
The Algerian people have chosen the unique solution that was left to them and this choice will hold firm for us.
De Gaulle said “We must break the Algerian people”. We reply “Let us negotiate, find a solution that is commensurate with contemporary history. But know that if you want to break the Algerian people, you will have to accept seeing your armies break themselves against the rampart of the glorious Algerian soldiers.””
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philosophybits · 1 year
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Colonialism almost never exploits the entire country. It is content with extracting natural resources and exporting them to the metropolitan industries thereby enabling a specific sector to grow relatively wealthy, while the rest of the colony continues, or rather sinks, into underdevelopment and poverty.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
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The settler's work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native's work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler.
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (trans. Constance Farrington)
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criptochecca · 6 months
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I do not want, you may well understand, to proceed today to a critique of the colonial system. I do not intend as a colonized man, speaking to colonized people, to demonstrate that the colonial state is an abnormal, inhuman and reprehensible state. It would be grotesque on my part to want to convince you of the unacceptable nature of colonial oppression. However, I would like to focus my reflections on the violence integral to colonial oppression.
The colonial regime is a regime instituted by violence. It is always by force that the colonial regime is established. It is against the will of the people that other peoples more advanced in the techniques of destruction or numerically more powerful have prevailed. I say that such a system established by violence can logically only be faithful to itself, and its duration in time depends on the continuation of violence.
But the violence which is in question here is not an abstract violence, it is not only a violence perceived by the spirit, it is also a violence manifested in the daily behaviour of the colonizer towards the colonized: apartheid in South Africa, forced labour in Angola, racism in Algeria. Contempt, a politics of hate, these are the manifestations of a very concrete and very painful violence.
Colonialism, however, is not satisfied by this violence against the present. The colonized people are presented ideologically as a people arrested in their evolution, impervious to reason, incapable of directing their own affairs, requiring the permanent presence of an external ruling power. The history of the colonized peoples is transformed into meaningless unrest, and as a result, one has the impression that for these people humanity began with the arrival of those brave settlers.
Violence in everyday behaviour, violence against the past that is emptied of all substance, violence against the future, for the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal. We see, therefore, that the colonized people, caught in a web of a three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences, are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary.
[...]
In certain colonies, the violence of the colonized is the last gesture of the hunted man, meaning that he is ready to defend his life. There are colonies which fight for freedom, independence, for the right to happiness. In 1954, the Algerian people took up arms because at that point the colonial prison became so oppressive that it was no longer tolerable, because the hunt was definitely on for Algerians in the streets and in the countryside and because, finally, it was no longer a question for the Algerian of giving a meaning to his life but rather of giving one to his death.
[...]
What we are saying is that we need to close our ranks. It is necessary that our voice should be powerful not only by being vigorous but also for the concrete measures that could be taken against this or that colonial state.
[...]
No, the violence of the Algerian people is neither a hatred of peace nor a rejection of human relations, nor a conviction that only war can put an end to the colonial regime in Algeria. The Algerian people have chosen the unique solution that was left to them and this choice will hold firm to us.
Frantz Fanon - Why We Use Violence, address to the Accra positive action conference, 1960 (translated by Robert J. C. Young)
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Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
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edwordsmyth · 2 months
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Frantz Fanon
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indizombie · 4 months
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Frantz Fanon is accurate to term decolonisation as a violent struggle to disrupt the colonial problem. The colonised are created by the coloniser. The response of the colonised therefore is determined by the conditions imposed by colonisation. The colonial suffocation is giving us no other option but to take arms and resist. In the language of the colonised therefore this is not violence. This is justice.
Pedro Mzileni, ‘Palestine Armed Struggle Is Justice, Not Violence’, Countercurrents
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radiofreederry · 8 months
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Happy birthday, Frantz Fanon! (July 20, 1925)
One of the most enduring and influential anti-colonial theorists of all time, Frantz Fanon became acquainted with racist colonial violence growing up on the French Caribbean colony of Martinique. During World War II, Fanon enlisted with the Free French forces, and experienced further racism from Europeans during his time fighting fascists on the continent. After the war, he studied psychiatry as his political consciousness continued to grow, and in 1952 he published Black Skin, White Masks, which discussed the psychological impact of colonialism on Black people. He worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria for a time before deciding that he could no longer support the French colonial project in Africa and defected to join Algeria's National Liberation Front in its struggle for freedom. He continued to put out a number of influential texts, including his last and most famous, The Wretched of the Earth. In poor health, Fanon died in 1961 at the tragically young age of 36, but his legacy is outsized for his age, having influenced a bevy of revolutionary figures, including Che Guevara, Malcom X, Kwame Ture, and Huey P. Newton.
“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”
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27-moons · 7 days
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𝑹𝑬𝑸𝑼𝑰𝑹𝑬𝑫 𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑫𝑰𝑵𝑮 - 𝑳𝑰𝑵𝑲 𝑻𝑶 𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑫
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holyfigtree · 4 months
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Colonialism only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat.
—Frantz Fanon
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sivavakkiyar · 20 days
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Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks
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