Frantz Fanon

Dual economies create divided worlds in which uneven and unequal conditions of development can often mask the ubiquitous, underlying factors of persistent poverty and malnutrition, caste and racial injustice, the hidden injuries of class, the exploitation of women’s labor, and the victimization of minorities and refugees.

Fanon’s teleological belief that the whole process would end in a new humanism, a new planetary relation to freedom defined by the Third World

When Fanon, on the contrary, says that Europe is heading for ruin, far from uttering a cry of alarm, he is offering a diagnostic. Dr. Fanon claims he neither considers it to be a hopeless case —miracles have been known to exist—nor is he offering to cure it. He is stating the fact that it is in its death throes. As an outsider, he bases his diagnostic on the symptoms he has observed. As for treating it, no: he has other things to worry about.

How come he can’t see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the “inferior races” is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never knew: we only become what we are by radically negating deep down what others have done to us.

At the same time their idols protect them: in other words the colonized protect themselves from colonial alienation by going one step better with religious alienation, with the ultimate end result of having accumulated two alienations, each of which reinforces the other.

The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.

On November l, 1 954, the Revolution broke out.
Very quickly I came to realize that I belonged in the camp of those who fight for an Algerian nation. The countless tortures that I had occasion to wi tness in the exercise of my duties were to strengthen my hatred of colonialism : Algerians torn apart by two military trucks driven in opposite dire(!tions, classic tortures
ALGERIA'S EUROPEAN MINO RITY
1 77
by water, electricity, hanging by the thumbs or by the testicles.
One day my wife who had been kept awake all night, as she had for several weeks, by the cries of the tortured (we lived above one of the torture cham bers of Saint-Arnaud), unable to stand it any longer, went and violently protested to the soldiers and the C.R.S. responsible for these practices. She was led back to the house with two machine guns digging into her ribs.

to hear one of our elders and if need be protect h im from the fascists.
On this point we were not called on to intervene. Camus's audience had been carefully screened and the approaches to the hall were guarded by the helmeted C. R.S.27 We expected that Camus would take a clear postion on the Algerian problem.
\Vhat we were treated to was a sweet-sister speech. He explained to us at length that the innocent civilian population must be protected, but he was categorically against fund raising in favor of the innocent families of political prisoners. We in the hall 211 Hernu-a radical-socialist of the Mendes-France persuasion. Albert Camus-the Algerian-born French writer, Nobel prize-winner in J9!j7, Z'l C.R.S.-Compagnie Rtipublicaine de Sticuntti, a national constabulary army corps, independent of the regular army. (Translator's note)
ALGERIA'S EUR OPEAN MINORITY
1 75
were dumbfounded. Outside, the mob of fascists was rhythmically yelling: '"A lgerie fran�aise!" and screaming: "Camus to the gallows!"
But these demonstrations seemed to us to be the dying spasms of the colonialist beast.