Americans as the Wretched of the Earth

Americans as the Wretched of the Earth

John Ensign headed the Republican effort to retain US Senate seats in 2008. They lost eight. It seems John was too busy chasing another man's wife. The couple extorted over $100,000 from Ensign in a rerun of Godfather II.

In our era of decadence, the C Street mentality rules the day. For our leaders, the rule of law and the Ten Commandments are relics fit for the American peasants groveling at their feet.

Barack Obama is not George Patton. We do not qualify as the Fifth Army. Our brightest and best sit before computer consoles in John Ensign's Las Vegas desert. They render Afghan women and children with remote control precision.

Much more personal, the French occupied and exploited Algeria for 130 years. They too felt above the law, with almost a Divine Right to rule inferior races and cultures.

One of those who disagreed with them was Frantz Fanon. He was born in the French colony of Martinique. He became a volunteer for the French army during World War II. After the war he went to France, where he studied medicine and psychiatry from 1945 to 1950. In 1953 he became the head of the psychiatric department of a government hospital in Algeria, then a French territory. A young black man searching for his own identity in a white colonial culture, he experienced racism. As a psychiatrist, he studied the dynamics of racism and its effects on the individual.

In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon examined the social and psychological processes by which the white colonizers alienated the black natives from any indigenous black culture; he showed that blacks were made to feel inferior because of their color and thus strove to emulate white culture and society. Fanon hoped that the old myths of superiority would be abandoned so that real equality and integration could be achieved.

Alienated from the dominant French culture, he gravitated towards the radical left then typified by Albert Camus and the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. All three deeply identified with Algeria's revolutionary struggle for independence. Fanon had secretly aided the rebels from 1954 to 1956, when he resigned from the hospital post to openly work for the Algerian revolutionaries' National Liberation Front (FLN) in Tunis. He worked on the revolutionaries' newspaper, becoming one of the leading ideologists of the revolution, and developed a theory of anti-colonial struggle in the "third world."

"Using Marxist, psychoanalytic, and sociological analysis, Fanon summed up his views in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), arguing that only a thorough, truly socialist revolution carried out by the oppressed peasantry (the wretched of the earth) could bring justice to the colonized. He believed that the revolution could only be carried out by violent armed conflict; only revolutionary violence could completely break the psychological and physical shackles of a racist colonialism. Violence would regenerate and unite the population by a "collective catharsis;" out of this violence a new, humane man would arise and create a new culture. Through all this Fanon stressed the need to reject Europe and its culture and accomplish the revolution alone." answers.com

Fanon, the antiracist and revolutionary prophet, never saw the end result of the process he described: full independence of his adopted Algeria. In 1960 he served as ambassador to Ghana for the Algerian provisional government, but it was soon discovered that he had leukemia. After treatment in the Soviet Union, he went to the United States to seek further treatment but died there in 1961.

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