The Fruits of The Revolution
Decolonization, Fanon, and the FLN
Decolonization is an extremely fashionable concept right now. Like most of the terms of Critical Theory (intersectionality, heteronormativity, patriarchy, etc.) there’s often only a fuzzy sense of what it means. That vagueness is a feature though. The terms can be strictly applied when necessary and also stretched to include almost anything. Even the writers who coined the terms or first used them in their current contexts were not given to clear or precise writing.
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.
-The Wretched of The Earth, Frantz Fanon
Great. Thank you for that clarion explication, Dr. Fanon. There is honestly no greater depth or clarity to be found in the entire book-it is one vague and stylized celebration of violence after another. (I read this book in childhood after seeing that it was on one of my favorite band’s [Rage Against the Machine] reading list. I doubt most of the students active right now and publicly promoting ‘decolonization’ have actually read it. I think I digested it at age 12. It’s probably too advanced for them.) Fanon explores the relationship between colonizer and colonized (relentlessly, in general, figurative, poetic language) and the cleansing role of extreme violence in healing and empowering the psyche of the colonized. I find it extremely ironic that Fanon, who dedicated his life to liberation from the control of European political systems, could not liberate hs own writing from the fuzzy and impressionistic style of Sartre and Deleuze and Debord. There’s clear emotion behind Fanon’s words. He was not only a revolutionary himself but he treated many victims of trauma and repression connected to the Algerian War for independence, which was incredibly bloody. It has so many elements beloved by the Left: therapeutic language, elevation of the downtrodden, irresponsible but emotionally satisfying calls for violence, disregard for ethics or personal responsibility.
Fanon is accepted as a kind of oracle these days. His thought (especially the ideas laid out in the middle of his career, before wisdom and impending mortality gave his work a more measured and conciliatory tone) is the intellectual foundation for the current anti-Israel (and pro-Hamas) rhetoric and ‘activism’ which has broken out across the West like a rash of putrid boils.
We could spend all day diving into Fanon’s unclear and bloodthirsty ramblings. Indeed, many young Americans pay (rather, their parents pay) $40,000 per year to do just this. Instead, I want to do something that the decolonization and Critical Theory activists are always loathe to do (probably because it involves actual work, and is constrained by facts and data): I want to investigate the historical record of Fanon’s ideas, specifically how they worked out in his war.
Frantz Fanon was a Mauritian psychiatrist who lived and practiced in Algeria during its bloody independence struggle from France. The FLN (National Liberation Front) was, like dozens of other anti-colonial independence movements, a nationalist and socialist militant revolutionary organization. (Just an aside: for all those who understand the tragic folly and waste of socialism, which includes almost everyone who’s studied economics, and get discouraged just remember: 70 years ago socialism was ascendant and foundational to nearly every nationalist cause on Earth. Now it’s widely recognized as a winding path to waste and despotism. Humans can learn lessons, even if 100 million must die first.) Anyway, the FLN was founded (along with its military wing, the ALN or National Liberation Army) in 1954 and immediately began making war on the French administration and colonists. There was little distinction made between military and civilian targets and these acts brought massive reprisals from the French, who destroyed thousands of villages over the decade. Algeria was what Israel is not, i.e., a European possession controlled from outside the country and quickly being altered by massive influxes of white European colonists: farmers, bureaucrats, doctors, police, soldiers. Charles De Gaulle, the dictatorial president of the 4th Republic, initially committed to retaining Algeria (“l’Algerie est la France”) , convinced that its inclusion in the land under the direct control of L’Etat Francais was necessary to France’s future as a global power. This consideration has been inordinately important to French policymakers over the past 75 years. The independence struggle persisted for 8 dismal years and thousands of pages would be necessary to chart its course but I will make some general points.
This was not just a political or a religious conflict; it was racialized. The French settlers who had been arriving since the 1840’s (when the country was annexed to France) were mostly white Europeans and were often more prosperous than the native Algerians. Algerians (a mix of townspeople, subsistence farmers, and nomadic tribesmen living around the Atlas Mountains) increasingly found themselves to be farmhands and laborers and servants in their own country. During the war something like 2 MILLION Algerians were relocated or interned in concentration camps in the interests of counter-insurgency; something like 50-100 thousand European settlers were killed, the vast majority of them civilians.
The conflict was brutal. The French Foreign Legion (La Legion Etranger) and French police and regular army personnel and intelligence operatives became locked in a cycle of escalating brutality. Torture and rape were tools of war. Most of the initial responsibility for torture and indiscriminate bloodshed certainly lay in France’s hands, but the FLN raped women and killed children and bombed civilian targets with gusto. They weren’t quite as deranged as Hamas (and they actually had a coherent political aim) but they were pretty far along that path.
The independence struggle changed the politics and culture of the homeland forever. De Gaulle was almost deposed (in a coup planned by disgruntled legionnaires who wanted more resource commitment and martial brutality from the French in Algeria), the Right was divided and weakened, and the Left was emboldened in its criticisms of the French State and Society. France emerged doubtful, guilty, and riven by fault lines of belief.
It should be established, beyond any doubt, that the revolution effected by the FLN was a revolution along Fanon’s model. Atrocity answered atrocity. Entire villages were wiped out by the army, and then revolutionaries would stab housewives and bomb schoolchildren. It was a war that far transcended political program and affiliation. In the aftermath of French capitulation (and Algerian independence) in 1960 all the millions of pieds-noirs (French settlers) fled Algeria to escape the huge risk of death for them and their families.
So, when we see students putting the ideas and values of Fanon into practice today, we should ask how his revolution turned out. It always tickles me that students should confidently promote the ideas of Mao, Marcuse, Angela Davis, etc. without asking how those ideas have worked out in the past. I understand that they have an absolute faith in the program pushed by their professors but surely a few of them might see that ideas which have existed for 60-70 years and yet have no positive cases studies to display might incur some liability? I detect almost no curiosity about the workability and likely effects of their program… almost as if they’re play-acting.
Conservatives are suspicious of revolutions and in this I stand squarely in the conservative camp. Revolutions rarely change the power structure in society. At best they change some people at the top and a few of the stated values and priorities (and flags and holidays); at worst they cause the entire society to collapse with only the powerful avoiding complete catastrophe. Those post-revolutionary costs are separate from the cost of revolutionary violence and destruction itself, which is often 5-10% of the entire population killed (Cambodia approached 35%) and 10-20% of the nation’s wealth lost completely. My general rule of thumb is: only contemplate a revolution if it would be worth the death of half of your friends and family and a decade of poverty. If your situation is bad enough that this seems like a worthwhile trade then, by all means, revolt. Otherwise continue to build a productive reform movement. It’s not as emotionally satisfying for the proud and the angry but it’s far more likely to improve society in the final analysis.
Algeria was quickly placed under the dictatorial control of a revolutionary council. The structure of French administration remained in place and an election was held in 1962. The Pieds-Noirs had been some of the most educated and productive members of Algerian society, but they were gone. Nevertheless, the initial years after the revolution were the headiest and most hopeful for Algerians. Aside from the sense of possibility there were thousands of acres of land, apartments, cars, other possessions left by the colonists in their rush to leave. Ahmed Ben Bella was a former FLN leader now elected to the presidency, but his suspicious and authoritarian nature began to be felt instantly. At first, each political faction and community felt free to voice their ideas and their needs, convinced that without the brutal French military and its semi-genocidal operations the government would work for them.
That didn’t last very long. In 1965 the Algerian military (which reflected very closely the leadership structure of the old FLN and ALN) deposed the elected president and ruled by decree for 24 YEARS. Ben Bella was run out of office by his comrades who had become alienated by his dictatorial style. He spent the better part of a year imprisoned in a tiny cell underground and the next 14 years on house arrest. Algeria became a minor Soviet client and middling member of the Non-Aligned countries movement, with a sclerotic and corrupt economy. Its neighbors (Tunisia, Morocco) which spurned socialism and cultivated trade and cultural ties with Europe grew much faster. Youth unemployment often approached 50% and the government was infamous around the world for secrecy and opacity. Ben Bella had initiated a chaotic land reform which destroyed much of the agricultural productivity and much of the remaining agrarian value of the country was squandered by a collectivist scheme carried out by the military junta. The intelligence services disappeared thousands of people and Algerian prisons became notorious for their cruelty. Algeria became a supporter of the Leftist international terrorism which flared up briefly in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It fought a grinding war with its neighbor, Morocco and is still engaged in combat operations against the Polisario in Western Sahara.
Political parties finally became legal (although closely controlled) in 1989. The government had pursued a kind of secular socialist/nationalist path (like the Kemalists in Turkey) and the counterweight which quickly developed was Islamism, popular not necessarily due to the religiosity of the population but because such men were not associated with the government and had a reputation for thrift and honesty. Unfortunately they had no knowledge of economics or law or history or civil administration. The oil industry had been nationalized in the 1960’s, which led to huge amounts of state revenue (and also a great deal of waste and inefficiency) in the 1970’s, with the OPEC price controls keeping value artificially high for producers. That benefit had long since disappeared, though. Algeria partners with global energy firms to gain the capital and expertise necessary to keep its petroleum flowing and all reserves are still under the control of state-owned companies. It has the worst of both worlds: reliance on global firms AND the massive waste and inefficiencies of government management. Algeria remained basically untouched by the ‘Arab Spring’ unlike its neighbor, Tunisia (which has experienced a fractious and tumultuous decade but was the one Arab country to fully democratize de jure). Was this because Algeria is a socialist paradise? No. Algeria is a rickety, lower middle-income gerontocracy (a country ruled by the elderly). No one really knows who makes decisions in Algeria but most of the major players are still veterans of the war of independence, now getting into their 80’s and 90’s. People fear the military (one of the largest in the world) and (especially) the intelligence services too much for another revolution, and people are tired. Algeria achieved independence from French rule, but not from greed and ineptitude and despotism. The sad fact is that the citizens of Algeria would now benefit enormously from transferring government functions to the French civil service… but that ship has sailed.
Did Fanon’s cleansing, revolutionary violence and the hundreds of thousands of European colonists killed secure a just and happy society? Did the joy of their triumphant expulsion of all the French colons (along with their expertise and institutional knowledge) carry them into a place of just and sensible governance? If Hamas triumphed over Israel today and collapsed the only decent, capable, democratic state in the region-a refuge for religious and racial and sexual minorities-who exactly would benefit? Are any of the Hamas apologists-in the West and abroad-asking these questions? Why not?
Thanks for reading.
