Fln Quotes

As it turned out, Fanon would aid the FLN inside Algeria not as a fighter, but as a doctor. But to make himself useful, he first needed to establish contact with this clandestine and highly secretive organization.

Profitant de la crédulité de la population rurale, les agents du FLN firent circuler de fausses rumeurs : « Les avions de Nasser ont tué des milliers de soldats français ici et là » ; « Des volontaires russes (ou chinois) sont déjà en Tunisie » ; « Dans les écoles, les Français mettent du poison dans le lait qu’ils donnent à nos garçons pour les rendre impuissants. 

À la fin de 1955, les pieds-noirs étaient également las des continuelles attaques terroristes du FLN que du manque de fermeté du gouvernement français. 37 civils français, dont dix enfants, avaient été sauvagement massacrés à El Halia

La presse française attisait la colère des colons, surtout Le Monde, L’Express (un hebdomadaire pro-Mendès), le cryptocommuniste France Observateur, Témoignage chrétien (un hebdomadaire aux fortes tendances chrétiennes progressistes, proche des communistes), et même France-Soir. Ces journaux choisissaient de fermer les yeux sur les mauvais côtés du FLN, ils

En 1958, il ne fait aucun doute qu’une large majorité de Français voulait voir la guerre se terminer, mais se terminer avec la défaite du FLN. «

In the United States, civil rights workers did encounter terrible violence and the protests of the Black Panthers did meet with armed repression. But they were not faced with General Jacques Massu’s Tenth Parachute Division and the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion. When Fanon speaks of ‘violence’, he is speaking of the French army’s destruction of whole villages and of the FLN’s bombing of cafés, or in other words of total war and not of limited low-level conflict.

[...] Dans cette affaire, si j'avais agi par calcul, j'aurais laissé faire les choses, sans prendre parti. Mais j'avoue, et je l'affirme très sérieusement, que j'ai fait le lit du FLN, depuis Ben Bella jusqu'aux dernières années du président Chadli. Je ne peux pas tout révéler ; mais si à la parution de votre livre [celui là] il y avait la moindre suspicion à l'égard de ce que je viens de déclarer, à ce moment-là, j'ouvrirai toutes grandes les vannes pour expliquer comment, pourquoi et avec qui j'ai fait le lit du FLN. Pour l'instant il vaut mieux s'arrêter là. Q. - Alors, allons plus loin ? R. - Non, plus tard, si on n'est pas connect." p 84

Since Soviet “mistakes” (including the murder of millions of its own citizens) had ruined its chances for providing a haven for existentialist politics, Sartre was forced to take on the American juggernaut alone. America’s global empire, he warned, was being assembled by means of its control over a global mass communications and technological network and the “world economic system.” “This One World,” as Sartre described it, was actually a nightmare of American cultural and political hegemony, enabling six percent of the earth’s population to dominate the other ninety-four percent.41 He began looking desperately for humanist alternatives. He turned to other Marxist countries, including Tito’s Yugoslavia, Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam (declaring in 1967 that “the Vietnamese are fighting for all men, and the Americans against all men”), and still later Mao’s China.42 He also took up other anti-Western crusades. He led a host of leftist intellectuals in protests against France’s war in Algeria in 1954 to ’56 and embraced the cause of the Marxist FLN rebels—which led to his friendship with Frantz Fanon.

He was captured, tortured by the French, escaped, rejoined the F.L.N., and found himself torturing, under orders to do so, French prisoners. He knew that he should feel something about this that he did not in fact feel. He discussed his state of mind late one night with one of the French prisoners whom he had tortured. The French prisoner was a young intellectual, a student of philosophy. This young man (the two men were talking secretly in the prisoner’s cell) complained that he was in an intellectual prison-house. He recognised, had recognised for years, that he never had a thought, or an emotion, that didn’t instantly fall into pigeon-holes, one marked “Marx”and one marked “Freud.”His thoughts and emotions were like marbles rolling into predetermined slots, he complained. The young Algerian soldier found this interesting, he didn’t find that at all, he said, what troubled him—though of course it didn’t really trouble him, and he felt it should—was that nothing he thought or felt was what was expected of him. The Algerian soldier said he envied the Frenchman—or rather, he felt he ought to be envying him. While the French student said he envied the Algerian from the bottom of his heart: he wished that just once, just once in his life, he felt or thought something that was his own, spontaneous, undirected, not willed on him by Grandfathers Freud and Marx. The voices of the two young men had risen more than was wise, particularly that of the French student, crying out against his situation.

But there is a great difference between Fanon's bloody knives and Sartre's bloody scalpel. True decolonization movements, from the American Patriots of the 1770s to the FLN in the 1950s, used actual violence to drive out their oppressors. Intellectuals who use the language of settler colonialism to critique their own society, in contrast, have no mass movement at their back. That has been the predicament of the ideology of settler colonialism from the beginning: everyone knows that calls to "eradicate," "kill," or "cull" settlers can only be metaphorical, so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity. But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it--from "emptiness" to "not-enoughness" to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide--could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic possibility rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be a perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously--especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.