His superiors refused to give him sick leave, and since moreover the patient did not wish to have a psychiatrist’s certificate, we tried to give him treatment “while working full time.” The weaknesses of such a procedure may easily be imagined. This man knew perfectly well that his disorders were directly caused by the kind of activity that went on inside the rooms where interrogations were carried out, even though he tried to throw the responsibility totally upon “present troubles.” As he could not see his way to stopping torturing people (that made nonsense to him for in that case he would have to resign) he asked me without beating about the bush to help him to go on torturing Algerian patriots without any prickings of conscience, without any behavior problems, and with complete equanimity.
Many such cases. I’ve said it many times and will never stop, The Wretched of the Earth (pdfDLlink) is fundamental required reading for anyone in a colonialist or colonized country (or both, in the case of settler-colonies). It is absolutely critical for a material understanding, and Fanon being a professional doctor and psychologist as well as a Marxist gives incredibly valuable foundational insights to not only a dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the material conditions, relations, and struggles in and against colonialism, but also of the superstructural political, social, cultural, and psychological outcroppings from the colonial relation and their mutual interpenetration and cyclical reinforcement.
It is also the direct theoretical lineage of so many liberation struggles which came after, including in the US with the BPP and BLA; and so it is quite literally necessary, in general and in particular in the places which inherited the legacy of those Fanonist struggles, for one to engage with in order to not be speaking nonsense about colonialism and the colonial relations which exist, and the contradictions and struggles therein. Fanon is no lesser than what Malcolm X was to the heart of the struggle and its history and theoretical body of work.
From there the next step is reading the criticism and self-criticism and analytical adaptations from the experiences and lessons of those struggles (Huey Newton, George Jackson, Maroon Shoatz, and newer generations such as Kevin Rashid Johnson), which are also necessary because their knowledge derives from practice and its lessons better than anyone who has not this experience. As Mao wrote in On Practice:
Marxists hold that man’s social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man’s knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by “failure is the mother of success” and “a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit”. The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, "Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality." The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice. The truth of any knowledge or theory is determined not by subjective feelings, but by objective results in social practice. Only social practice can be the criterion of truth. The standpoint of practice is the primary and basic standpoint in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.
If one could hypothetically only read one thing about colonialism, the Wretched of the Earth would be firmly at the top of the list I give them. There is also Orientalism by Edward Said which is too invaluable for those in “the west”, but is more of a broad-focused general deconstruction of the historical notions of “the west” and “the east” and such politically-charged and inherently violent concepts as “western values” (as opposed to the values of these ‘others’) which Fanon touches on in its specific relations and expressions in colonialism, but Said does more broadly in its superstructure and relation to its base in the roots from whence it arose and was constructed out of the dialectical relationships of the history of europe, and of imperialism and colonialism, etc. It is more of a deconstruction through historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the broader history and concepts in and out-of-from “orientalism” than acting as a direct foundational analysis of and for the specific struggles which have been carried out as the Wretched of the Earth has.
![[CW: war crimes] CNN publishes article from sad zionazi🥺 traumatized from bulldozing human beings](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/11eaf1b2-d24a-4036-a616-c0ca32ffe750.jpeg){kind=link}
Fanon right again
Many such cases. I’ve said it many times and will never stop, The Wretched of the Earth (pdf DL link) is fundamental required reading for anyone in a colonialist or colonized country (or both, in the case of settler-colonies). It is absolutely critical for a material understanding, and Fanon being a professional doctor and psychologist as well as a Marxist gives incredibly valuable foundational insights to not only a dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the material conditions, relations, and struggles in and against colonialism, but also of the superstructural political, social, cultural, and psychological outcroppings from the colonial relation and their mutual interpenetration and cyclical reinforcement.
It is also the direct theoretical lineage of so many liberation struggles which came after, including in the US with the BPP and BLA; and so it is quite literally necessary, in general and in particular in the places which inherited the legacy of those Fanonist struggles, for one to engage with in order to not be speaking nonsense about colonialism and the colonial relations which exist, and the contradictions and struggles therein. Fanon is no lesser than what Malcolm X was to the heart of the struggle and its history and theoretical body of work.
From there the next step is reading the criticism and self-criticism and analytical adaptations from the experiences and lessons of those struggles (Huey Newton, George Jackson, Maroon Shoatz, and newer generations such as Kevin Rashid Johnson), which are also necessary because their knowledge derives from practice and its lessons better than anyone who has not this experience. As Mao wrote in On Practice:
If one could hypothetically only read one thing about colonialism, the Wretched of the Earth would be firmly at the top of the list I give them. There is also Orientalism by Edward Said which is too invaluable for those in “the west”, but is more of a broad-focused general deconstruction of the historical notions of “the west” and “the east” and such politically-charged and inherently violent concepts as “western values” (as opposed to the values of these ‘others’) which Fanon touches on in its specific relations and expressions in colonialism, but Said does more broadly in its superstructure and relation to its base in the roots from whence it arose and was constructed out of the dialectical relationships of the history of europe, and of imperialism and colonialism, etc. It is more of a deconstruction through historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the broader history and concepts in and out-of-from “orientalism” than acting as a direct foundational analysis of and for the specific struggles which have been carried out as the Wretched of the Earth has.