Reclaiming a Living Fanon for Gaza w/ Jonathan Turner of Al Fida'i Media Network

Speaker 1: You remember Din-Din-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Huckamacki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckamacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

Adnan Hussain: Hello Adnan, how are you doing? I'm doing really well, Henry. I'm looking forward to this conversation and as ever, it's great to be with you.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, great to see you as well, even though it was not that long ago since I saw you last. We just recorded a session on the Adnan Hussain show, which ended at about after 1 a.m. my time. So it's been well less than a day since I last saw you, but needless to say, still not enough.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, it was great to have you on for that. And I'm glad we're just still keeping up with guerrilla history stuff too. So it's busy, busy.

Henry Huckamacki: Certainly is. And listeners, the primary topic of discussion for that discussion struggle session on the Adnan Hussain show was related to Gaza, which is going to be Somewhat related to the topic today. Pretty related, as a matter of fact. But before I introduce our guest and the topic at hand, I'd like to remind you listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. And you can also keep, I say you can keep up to date with the show on social media. That hasn't been true recently, but hopefully we'll... Managed to get back on social media at some point soon, but you can find Guerrilla History on the various social media platforms. Just whatever you use, search for Guerrilla History, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A History, and you'll probably find it. With that out of the way then, we are very happy to be joined by Jonathan Turner, who is a writer for Al-Fadai Media Network, AFMN, to discuss a really fascinating article that they recently wrote, 100 Years of Fanon, Reclaiming a Living Fanon for Gaza. A really terrific piece. Jonathan, great to have you on the show. Can you say a little bit about what you do for AFMN for the listeners? And then also, I know we've had representatives of AFMN on the show before, but can you also remind the listeners a little bit of the work that goes on there as well?

Jonathan Turner: yeah absolutely um well first off just thank you so much for inviting me on it's it's humbling and uh you know a joy to be here um long before being a part of afm and i remember working some uh tough kind of minimum wage jobs and i would often kind of sneak headphones in under a hat to listen into you know podcasts uh like yours uh to help kind of get me through long days and keep kind of my mind stimulated when you were forced to do very kind of difficult manual work.

Adnan Hussain: So, you know, it's humbling to now be invited on.

Jonathan Turner: So I really appreciate connecting with you two today. But yeah, I do writing for AFMN. This is a Marxist-Leninist media organization that puts out a combination of journalistic work essays, media content specifically geared toward Palestine and their world and their diaspora. This is an organization formerly known as Al-Palestina Media Network, and that has been international, having once had offices in Beirut, Gaza, the US, Berlin, and Madrid. It's an organization that's gone through a number of different stages in response to COVID. some repression that we've faced and uh um yeah now we're continuing to put out um content we've put out uh articles podcasts videos we're working on a documentary at the moment that we hope to put out in the new year and uh yeah you can find us on twitter and telegram patreon and a website and uh yeah different you know we're always looking for new contributors and and members so you know anyone who's interested check out our work and reach out that's terrific yeah it's a great resource and um

Adnan Hussain: A great name. You mentioned that it was Al-Philistinia before, but now Al-Fidai, which is, you know, like freedom fighter or, you know, guerrilla fighter, somebody who's taking up the struggle and putting themselves on the line, you know, for justice. So it's a great, great name. And I think the spirit of your piece really fits perfectly. with this kind of understanding of kind of guerrilla history and activating, you know, anti-colonial thought in actual struggle. And the reason why I wanted especially to talk to you about this is, of course, it is the 100th anniversary of Fanon's birth. There's been a lot of discussion about Frantz Fanon and his work this particular year. But we might say even in the period since October 2023, the salience of Fanon's thought became more evident. It was very much informing. Youth resistance on campuses, they were quoting a lot of Fanon. especially given the context where there was so much repression over expressing any kind of political solidarity with Palestinian resistance in Gaza. And especially early on, it's almost as if the only way you could show that kind of support for national liberation against settler colonialism was by kind of finding some authoritative sources that might have some purchase like a Fanon. And likewise, at the same time, there were a lot of attempts to reinterpret Fanon in a de-radicalizing way that were contemporaneous to the Al-Aqsa flood and its aftermath and wrestling with the question of resistance to colonialism. And so there was, for example, Adam Schatz's biography of Frantz Fanon that came out earlier that year, and then an article that he published. I forget if it was in The Nation or where it was, but he published an article that basically you know, tried to delegitimize the resistance in Gaza. And there were a lot of responses. And so Fanon and supposedly his endorsement of like, you know, in a kind of cartoonish sort of way and a way of trying to delegitimize leftist anti-imperialist adoption of Fanon as some kind of cartoonish, you know, glorification of violence created this discourse of discussion. And so I'm imagining that this is at least part of the context for why you wrote what you wrote. And so I wanted to ask you, you know, when you wrote this in at the end of August, it was published. You know, why did you think it was needed to reclaim Fanon? Like in some ways, Fanon had been being reclaimed, but also suppressed. And so, you know, what was it you were trying to do by writing something about Fanon on his 100th anniversary of his of his birth?

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, I really appreciate and resonate with that framing. Yeah, the first thing I'd say is that this is an essay that I wanted to write for a long time, actually. I remember in the early months of this latest phase in this Lang Nachbar, the current genocidal war, I remember being struck by the kind of, I happen to be rereading a lot of Fanon's political writings for the FLN, the outside of his like four official book texts, right, that people are more familiar with. And it was really striking the immediate and obvious parallels between the ways in which he was describing the kind of particular mechanisms and strategies of French colonial occupation and their own kind of genocide in Algeria, right? and what we're observing every day in Gaza. This was something that I'd wanted to write about for a while. I want to get more into what academia has done or not done with Fanon throughout the course of the conversation, but it's fairly common criticism at this point that academia has left many parts if untouched or not as richly developed. It's kind of a cliche at this point that the whole era of post-colonial studies not getting fixated rather narrowly on his first most politically conservative work, Black Skins, White Masks. And we see many references to Resh the Earth, of course, but we don't see as much to dying colonialism toward the African revolution, let alone the rest of his writings for FLN and others. So I wanted to kind of foreground a lot of these pieces for their immediate contemporary relevance. So this was a piece I've been thinking about for a while and really the centenary, the 100 year anniversary just kind of became the immediate sort of prompting to do it finally. Yeah, as you said, there was a flood right around that time, just a big flood of tribute posts and statements about Fanon, celebrating Fanon. And this was great in a sense. I think it signified the kind of ongoing and global resonance of his political and revolutionary thought and his importance as a contributor to the anti-colonial struggle over many decades, right? So his name continues to carry on. weight, and that was something that's exciting to see. But I also remember feeling a bit frustrated in that many of the kind of posts and forms of engagement that I saw felt largely superficial. They lacked a lot of substance, and few of them, from what I encountered, really explicitly connected Fanon to Gaza in any particularly deep way beyond a superficial quote here or there on just colonialism generally, and usually it was from you know uh fairly overused sections of either black skins white mass or like from just the first chapter of rush the earth kind of amputated from the the rest of phenom the complete phenom beyond even just this one book and to me it kind of reflected a general problem of a kind of shallow nature, particularly like the Western political discourse that reduces people like Fanon to kind of sterile icons, right? And just images that then curtail our ability to make meaningful use of their political thought beyond just sloganeering or careerist academic appropriation. And I found myself like actually thinking most about Lenin. So he, I sometimes find it annoying when people quote from Lenin's like state in revolution, like it was the only thing he ever wrote, but I was, you know, kind of nonetheless want to take a moment to just quote directly from the opening of that text. That was kind of very profound in like my own thinking about Fanon. And he writes at the beginning of State Revolution about the kind of vulgarization of Marxism, right? And he said, if you don't mind, just me quote him directly, that what is now happening to Marxist theory has in the course of history happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime, great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes, constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. But then after their death, attempts are made to canonize them, so to say, to hallow their names to a certain extent for the consolation of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it." Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in doctoring Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push it to the foreground and extol what seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. In these circumstances, in view of the unprecedentedly widespread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to reestablish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state. So, sorry for that kind of long block quote here, but I think this kind of perfectly, for me... summarizes what I feel has happened with Fanon, uh, in, uh, certainly in academia. Right. Um, but also within popular media spaces of kind of Western liberalistic activism. Right. So while I can't pretend to in any way have been successful like Lenin and, and, and reestablishing, uh, you know, Marxist theory of the state, I can't say that I did anything like that with, uh, any comprehensive Fanonian theory of revolution, colonialism, or anti-colonialism, uh, fascism, torture, or any subject that's touched on in this essay, I still wanted to make an initial sort of humble gesture toward reestablishing and reclaiming the revolutionary phenomenon against the kind of shallow, what Lenin calls like the name-hallowing commodification and sterile iconography that we see in popular media, as well as in academia in general and post-colonial studies in particular. I'll pause there for a moment, but that was kind of the initial impulse behind writing.

Henry Huckamacki: You said post-colonial studies at that last moment, and I wanted to just pull out one sentence from your essay, which I think drills down a little bit deeper into this discussion of how Fanon is being used and where he's being used and by whom he's being used within academia. And the sentence that you wrote is regarding what Fanon we are utilizing, what Fanon we are looking at, what Fanon we are analyzing. You say the anti-colonial rather than the post-colonial Fanon of the third world revolution is essentially what we should be looking for. And as you just mentioned in your last answer, where do we see Fanon actually being references within post-colonial spaces and not by people who are firm anti-colonialists and analyzing the existence of ongoing colonialism and neo-colonial structures around the world. We're talking primarily about scholars that are firmly rooted within the post-colonial tradition. And scholars who take that typical academic perspective that everything must be clean. And therefore, when we have scenes of violence, even though Fanon was the theorist of colonial and anti-colonial violence, both sides of that equation, they still see violence being used within a colonial situation and are appalled by this. The same people who are the bearers of Fanon's word to new students and universities and people who are able to read mainstream publications that would have the ability of getting Fanon's name written into them. So I'm wondering if you can dig a little bit deeper before we get into other analyses that you make within this article, which we're going to do. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about specifically this post-colonial space within academia that seems to have almost a monopoly at this point on the usage of fanon. Not that they're the only ones who are utilizing Fanon, but that is the only space really where Fanon is being then brought outside of academia to a more broad consciousness, whether that's through biographies, whether that's through articles in mainstream publications, or whether that's people who are able to teach undergraduates courses where they're allowed to talk about Fanon. So can you talk about that post-colonial space within academia?

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing I say in the abstract at the top of the article is that the essay is attempting to answer the call of others before us. And I'm, in this sense, only able to less eloquently restate what people before me like Cedric J. Robinson or Greg Thomas have said, who are in the footnotes of this essay. There's plenty of others, but this has been fairly... Even though it's still outside of the norm in academia, there's a lot of scholars and activists who have written about the appropriation of Fanon for postcolonial studies in particular. And Cedric J. Robinson, who I'm referencing, had an essay called The Appropriation of Vance Fanon. I'm increasingly thinking we need an essay on the appropriation of Cedric Robinson as I see him being distorted and used in academia in quite bizarre ways at times.

Adnan Hussain: So yeah, this is building on work that others have done that I encourage people to check out who can articulate this far better than I can. But

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, there's a tendency to reduce colonialism in these spaces to a mechanical thing rather than a flexible, complex, living and adaptive process that is in constant motion, right? That has many faces across time and space that defy the neat and problematic sort of periodization that we receive from academia. that really only ever seems to recognize colonialism in what Kwame Nkrumah referred to as its second major thrust. It's an orthodox form in his handbook of Revolutionary Warfare. what others kind of think of as like the high noon form that is like typically confined to like 19th century images of like direct rule right there's a general inability to recognize the fluid motion and internal laws of self-motion of imperialism such that again it gets narrowly confined to a particular time period and we lose all of the kind of political economy gets kind of reduced to just being almost like a rational act of like cultural, psychological violence or hatred that we don't understand the kind of laws of motion of. And this then creates a situation where we can't recognize neocolonialism, right? And the manner in which colonialism has looked different in certain times and places, right?

Adnan Hussain: But one thing you just mentioned about the way in which academia has narrowed the historical scope, you might say, of colonialism to a particular era and period and then names the subsequent eras of history as post-colonial and then deals with it more or less because the actual direct military control occupation and political economic exploitation in crude sort of terms isn't obvious. You know, it's possible under this other frame to divorce or, you know, occlude the perpetuation of political economic dependence and focus more fully on political cultural issues. psychic and psychological components and dimensions of the post-colonial condition. But I would say one thing that is also intriguing about this kind of work historically and theoretically on colonialism and its relationship to post-colonialism is that it goes hand in hand with also trying to make colonialism into a very complex, you know, phenomenon. And we have to see these things in a much more kind of, you know, complex and contextual way where it's not just, okay, there are these Europeans who are imposing control, but, you know, there's all these subaltern groups and they, you know, are... you know, kind of incorporated in various ways. And, you know, they try and make it seem as if, which, of course, any system for it to perdure has to appropriate and accrue supports, you know, from within a society. You know, it's not easy to dominate and control another society and you need collaborators and all that, but to try and turn that into, okay, it's not just a one-sided sort of story. So they're willing to do it there when it comes to historical studies of colonialism in the 19th century, you know, and then even you know, maybe talk about how, well, there were some good things that came out of colonial, you know, like, so you have this whole trend in the historiography, but when it comes to post-colonial, well, now they're on their own and anything that's happening, that's up to them and it doesn't have anything to do with, you know, corporations, you know, international structures that like the IMF and the World Bank and all these other things that perpetuate a certain form of domination, despite a new independent state, all the things that, of course, we would call neocolonialism. And yeah. What's interesting and strange about the use of Fanon in this context is that he actually was very prescient about how mere political independence itself would not undermine the colonial system as a whole because it was an international system. Um, and that there would be these, you know, chapter, I mean, I don't know how people ignore it. It says it's pitfalls of national culture. You know, I mean, it's like, okay, what will happen next is that you will create a possible bourgeoisie that, you know, is an indigenous bourgeoisie, but that their kind of class position is oriented towards its connection with, you you know, the former colony and the wider system and not to sovereignty and the development of the people. So it just seems to me that the academic kind of approach that you're critiquing has missed so much. Or maybe it's not that it's missed it, but that as you talk about it, it's counter-revolutionary in its... And maybe you could talk a little bit more about the counter-revolutionary dimensions of appropriations of Fanon that you've seen having to be confronted here. Because it's almost as if the biography, and there have been a lot of biographies recently, and the Schatz biography is clearly an attempt to kind of take him out of a revolutionary context. But it's almost like those in post-colonial studies can use Fanon iconically because he was a revolutionary in the sense that there is a biography there of having been involved with the FLN. But it's not like you would actually focus on those activities. Those just authorize the theoretical and conceptual appropriation with the sense that it's a very revolutionary kind of work and so on. So there's that... kind of odd way of framing him. And I'm wondering, you know, what else do you see operating there?

Jonathan Turner: Yeah. I appreciate you referencing about what texts that post-colonial studies engages with and which ones they don't. And yeah, there's a tendency within academia to, as I think I mentioned in an article, to present him as a psychiatrist from Martinique, a critic of colonial racism. There's a fixation on his first book, the most politically conservative of all of his writings, Black Skins, White Masks. This is the pre-revolutionary phenomenon. He has profound criticisms and seeds of ideas that are developed later on, no doubt. But this is a particular version of Fanon that becomes this kind of fetishized object within academia that is then propped up over and against the rest of his work that is the anti-colonial revolutionary Fanon. The Fanade does talk really explicitly about neocolonialism, especially, and you mentioned it in the chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness. He is explicitly defining the political economy of neocolonialism as it's unfolding before him. And in this way becomes kind of critically absurd to refer to him almost as like a post-colonial scholars if like colonialism ended at any point, right? It takes, as I said earlier, this very mechanical conception of colonialism, right? That really only recognizes it in its 19th century form, right? So, yeah, the bulk of his writings interrogate the self-motion, the mechanisms and the extreme flexibility and adaptability of colonialism as a world system of violence, exploitation, dispossession, right, accumulation. And yeah, in this, there's, I think another aspect as well, where there's like this claim from a certain kind of like ethnic studies, parts of academia that want to position him as like narrowly, like a scholar who thinks like separating him from Marxism. Right. So there's this line that is taken out, extracted from the first chapter of Rush to the Earth on Concerning Violence, where he talks about having to stretch Marxism in the context of the colonial world. And this line has been kind of taken out of context and used to kind of create this narrative that he is somehow anti-Marxist, right? That he's advocating for some sort of, you know, race as being a substitute for an economic base in our conception of how imperialism works, right? And this is like a largely imagined portrait of Fanon, right? That suggests he's basically incompatible with Marxist thought. And when you read The Complete Fanon, when you read Marx closely, right, you see a fundamental compatibility and extension of his thought, right? And this is something that has been kind of famously talked about by, like, James Aki Sayles comes to mind, who spoke meditation on Frantz Fanon's Wretch of the Earth. It's a good example of a kind of systematic criticism of this school of thought and its consequences that, as I said, removes political economy from the question, positions him along narrow identity politics lines that he largely rejected himself if you look at the evolution of his thought, and positions him as a post-colonial figure instead of an active person of anti-colonial praxis who is a student of neo-colonialism as much as traditional orthodox colonialism itself. Sorry, it was a bit of a sloppy answer there. Sorry.

Henry Huckamacki: Nothing sloppy at all about it. But one of the things that you had mentioned in this previous answer transitions me perfectly to what I wanted to discuss next. And that was that there's often this tendency to extract either quotes or sections from Fanon to get a specific reading on what Fanon is and then divorce the rest of his work as if it didn't exist. in order to avoid the analysis that Fanon's work throughout his time writing, which mostly took place after his psychiatric career ended. But throughout that period, and despite the various focuses, which are of course all related, but they do shift across his various works, whether that's the articles or whether it's the four books that you mentioned, you can utilize his works together. And you in this article utilize his books together in order, not an extract from the books, but the books in their entirety, the complete oeuvre of Fanon's book writing. for this article, Reclaiming a Living Fanon for Gaza. And so what is interesting to think about is the fact that you often have people who will pull just concerning violence, chapter one of Wretched of the Earth to discuss, okay, well, look, Fanon is completely relevant to the situation in Gaza because of this chapter. And then you also have people who say, well, you know, this chapter is not exactly relevant to Gaza. It's a different context. It's a different situation. And it's one chapter from his writing. So, you know, you shouldn't be taking Fanon as somebody who has deep insight into the condition of Gaza. But what you do within this article is you go through the entirety of Fanon's work and go through and show how these various analytics that Fanon carries out throughout his book writing are deeply entwined within not only the current situation within Gaza, but the colonial situation of Palestine and Gaza in particular, more generally. So the question that I have for you with this really long exposition out of the way is, You have gone about this project of rereading all of Fanon's books and then trying to show and demonstrate, and I believe quite successfully, how each of these works is related to the situation in Gaza and that it's not just one thing that you can clip out and either say, look, it's connected to Gaza or it's a different situation. You show that Fanon's analysis is directly applicable to the situation in Gaza. How did you come upon, so to open, how did you come upon this understanding that, well, these works are all deeply related to the situation of Gaza and that there is an analysis to be made here? And then also, what were some of the initial things that really jumped out to you when you were thinking about how Fanon was analyzing the colonial condition of his time and in his context and how each of these points is related to Gaza?

Jonathan Turner: Yeah. So yeah, there's a bunch of things that you're touching on that I wanted to do here. And I think, yeah, the first thing you mentioned is I didn't want to, number one, just write a biography, but also I wanted to situate myself in the actual written words and theory of Phenomenon as articulated across his complete works. And I wanted to avoid a strict sort of like chronological analysis of the four texts where it's like, okay, here's what he says in Black Skins, White Masks and A Dying Colonialism. I wanted to kind of weave organically between them and to demonstrate kind of the continuity of thought across these texts. Now, Fanon is obviously someone who evolves dramatically over the course of his political career and his thought, but there's nonetheless a certain line of continuity throughout, and we see the kind of rich development of ideas throughout his texts, right? So yeah, I wanted to engage with all of his books organically, as well as his extensive writings for FLN, for the FLN. And yeah, I also wanted to avoid So while the essay discusses kind of shared experiences of colonial repression, and it does seek to analyze some of the routine tools, mechanisms, and characteristics of repression, I also didn't want to participate in like what Bala Khalili has called the like trauma drama of like Western NGO liberalisms, right? That seeks to like perform like a drama of suffering and abject and often quite gendered victimization that is like liberalistically divorced from resistance in all forms and kind of fixates our gaze solely to massacre but never to struggle, right? That leads kind of to... an understanding that lacks sophistication or nuance and positions things, as I said earlier, it's almost like colonialism as being like an irrational evil or self-hatred with implied solutions of just being like education and reform within the overall structure of capitalist imperialism, right? While the essay does specifically look, there are, you know, when we talked about, you know, how it's selected different sections, there are essays that he wrote for the FLN that perfectly describe things we're witnessing every day in Gaza in terms of the oppressive apparatus of settler colonialism, right? There's specific, like... attention, I'd like to draw on the essay to the creation of buffer zones, right? And the kind of way in which they're used as a tool of kind of war against civilians, right? And the kind of pretexts that are used to create these buffer zones saying that they're to prevent weapons from being smuggled on when in both situations we have a reality of weapons being indigenously manufactured, right? And this is just kind of further tools to wage war on civilian population and to distract from the lack of actual military achievement on the ground. So yes, there's discussion of the kind of explicit parallels in the colonial repression, but really like what I wanted to think about in this essay and in How we use Fanon is, number one, again, the actual laws of motion of capitalist imperialism and its various tools, strategies, and disguises. And then number two, its opposite, its dialectical opposite, resistance or anti-colonial struggle. beyond discussion of like genocidal parallels, right? I want to talk about how he conceptualizes colonial violence in general, right? And how he conceptualizes neocolonialism. So he thinks of it in terms of being like a total violence, right? He says in dying colonialism that it's not kind of merely an occupation of land, but it's an atmospheric colonization that penetrates into the most intimate everyday spaces of life for the colonized, right? He describes it in extremely flexible terms and demands that we give up our much too simple conception of our overlords, as he said in the spontaneity chapter, fresh to the earth, and understand this dynamic kind of ability to reshape itself as he talks about, again, with his discussion of neocolonialism, particularly in the chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness, but throughout his works and especially toward the African Revolution as well. So yeah, he talks about the total violence of colonialism that both takes overt genocidal form, but also takes more nuanced and subtle forms, right? Both within the capitalist center, but also in kind of neocolonial-like periphery, right? And then against that, he talks about the need for a kind of total anti-colonial counter-violence in response, right? That understands the violence of colonialism against beyond just being the physical body, but against the Mayan culture, past and future, and necessitating a counter-violence that is both physical, but also ideological, intellectual, cultural, and otherwise. Yeah.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, I was wanting to come in on this. Well, firstly, because I think one thing that your essay does so well is remind us that Fanon's purpose was not studying colonialism. But it was ending colonialism and such a, you know, like there's a whole industry that has been turned into studying. And then you reminded us that. And that's, I think, how the kinds of connections that you make between, you know, his observations of colonialism in its era and how that could be understood and thought through. in recognizing conditions in Gaza, techniques of colonialism today to formulate resistance to it. So, One kind of major component besides what you talk about in terms of these buffer zones and so on, you know, was torture. And I thought this was, of course, it's so important in understanding the Algerian resistance and how colonial authorities responded to them. But what is often, you know, this is one of the ways in which contemporary apology for Zionism in various ways seems to work is really trying to de-emphasize this narrative about the fundamental necessity of torture to the colonial project, right? And I found this was very, very powerful in your essay connecting Fanon's discussion of this the expression and the means of the occupant-occupied relationship, you know, that colonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing. And then, you know, these contemporary narratives where we've seen so much sexual abuse, rape, torture in... you know, the history of Israeli occupation in Palestine and since the beginning, since the Nakba, you know, through the era of 67 and beyond, but especially also so vividly in its treatment of Gaza and the many, many people that the Israeli army has just simply grabbed from Gaza, thrown into their prisons. And so I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about You know, there's many connections, but it seems like you also wanted to point out that this is really fundamentally linking something inherent in colonialism in the case of Gaza and in the kind of work of Fanon. What do you see as the relevance of really emphasizing how important and significant torture is in connection to that?

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that he says quite explicitly, and most famously in this essay, Algeria face-to-face with the French torturers that was a part of the collection toward the African Revolution, he states really explicitly that torture in Algeria is not an accident, an error, or a fault, but that colonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing or violating or massacring. He describes it as a fundamental necessity of the colonial world, an inherent aspect of the whole colonialist configuration. And as you quoted from, it's an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship. He's basically making them synonymous. Colonialism is torture, right? You cannot have colonialism without acts of torture. This is the means in which colonial domination is maintained, right? He talks in that essay about how the French police agents were outraged to them, and it seemed paradoxical that they would have to justify their use of torture before a supposedly scandalized French public, right? Which kind of, for me, neatly parallels this whole contemporary Zionist right to rape thing where Uh, they feel, um, they understand the French police as well as the Zionist occupation understand fundamentally that torture is a part of colonialism. It is a necessary part of it. It can't be maintained without it. And if you are claiming a right to land, you are also claiming the right to how it's, uh, that domination of the land is maintained, which includes a right to rape, right? And a right to torture. So he talks more in that essay as well about the kind of, you know, the pseudo scandal among the French colonial, like the French public around the use of torture, not understanding it as a fundamental mechanism of colonialism. And, and, but he criticizes the fact that they're, protests were largely geared around how it um was damaging to the French youth who were participating in torture, right? It was like a scandal to their supposed values. But one thing that we see consistently throughout Fanon's work is not only making a synonymous colonialism and torture, but colonial genocide and torture as being synonymous with Western humanism itself, right? And how this entire system of values of the West is built up upon... original colonial violence of genocide expropriation accumulation permanent accumulation as Marx calls it that is founded upon right so yeah for him there's no distinction between there's no contradiction between genocide and Western values Western values are genocide right Western values are torture and colonialism and

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, well, in fact, in this context, you know, where people want to draw distinctions, you know, and say, oh, you know, the situation of Israel is so different from these other settler colonial, you know, contexts. You really can't apply this sort of settler colonial analysis. And it's definitely not phenomenon, the whole violence, you know, kind of theory, theory of violence. You know, in some ways, it's worse, you know, because as you're pointing out, there was at least something of a fake scandal like you could in the discourses of French values, Western humanistic culture, you know, raise this as a, you know, as a problem that then had to be processed in this particularly interesting way where You know, it's not framed in terms of empathy for the victims of torture and the barbarization of their and dehumanization of them, you know, but it is that it dehumanizes us and we can't be allowing that. And what's interesting in this current context you alluded to is the right to rape and torture these protests, this very public acclaim. and support for the idea that it has to be allowable. And in fact, what we might call this sort of fascistic, you know, there is an element of the sort of liberal, we hate, you know, what the gold of my year, you know, like, we'll never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their babies. Yeah, right. You know, this kind of thing. So that was You know, the liberal aversion, you might say, that's sort of gone now. And in fact, it's not just a kind of problem or a question of trying to critique it because like it might, you know, dehumanize us as people. colonizers, which is actually something in some ways that Fanon is actually quite interesting on, because he does seem to suggest, you know, in his Colonial Mental Disorders, Chapter 5, you know, this violent kind of condition actually destroys the humanity of both sides, you know, and, you know, it's not that we feel principally for the colonizer, but we have to recognize that part of the cost of of this whole horrible degrading system that requires us to have a new humanism is that in fact, no one can really be human in such a situation. But bracketing that, what we have is the fascistic sort of impulse that in fact, actually it is necessary. And in fact, our youth is, you know, need to be allowed to perform these acts of cruelty and violence so that they can be prepared to continue to suppress and subjugate, you know, the colonized, you know, the Palestinian. And so it's almost even worse than the situation, you know, that Fanon was describing. That just underscores, I think, even more how relevant his analysis is with a sense of the historical, you know, adaptation that's taken place is that there is such utter impunity. And because it is not recognized as colonialism, that it somehow actually warrants and allows, you know, completely unrestricted forms of barbarity in some fashion. That's really, I don't know if you want to respond to that at all.

Jonathan Turner: No, and I, you know, his chapter on like colonial war and mental disorder and talking about, yeah, the impact on the colonizer too. I mean, just think about the rise in suicides of Israeli soldiers, right? You know, being another expression of this in the present.

Henry Huckamacki: I just saw a statistic, not to jump in and interrupt you. You can feel free to carry on. I just saw a statistic two days ago at the time of recording. It's November 24th. Listen, as we're recording this, there was a statistic that came out two days ago. It was a poll that was done in the Zionist entity that showed that one in five Israelis is suffering from PTSD. Now that's not one in five IDF members. That's one in five Israelis generally currently is exhibiting signs of PTSD and I know we're all extremely sad about this situation, but that was the latest statistic that just came out, which I think underscores the point that you're going to continue to make.

Jonathan Turner: Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. So you see this rise of suicides and particularly like barbaric suicides too, in terms of like this self-immolation of like one soldier in their car and everything as well. They reflect the kind of barbarity of their acts of torture on Palestinians, right? But yeah, just thinking of it being, again, this inherent aspect of colonialism. I was rereading Marx's Capital Volume One recently and toward the end of the book and talking about in this section on primitive accumulation, He talks about the massive terroristic violence that was necessary to discipline the worker into creating the kind of spatio-temporal discipline necessary to become a wage laborer. Not to speak even of the global terror of genocide and enslavement that was the foundation for capitalism in the first place. He made this point about how incredible it is that this world system that wants to present itself as natural, inevitable, inescapable, permanent, the only rational way to organize society, can only be built and only be maintained through such absolute terroristic violence. in the way that it is entirely unnatural and unsustainable on its own. I think of that here in this context, this claim to this land only being propped up on this extreme terroristic and sexual violence and torture. There's nothing natural or inevitable about this really.

Henry Huckamacki: There's a lot more to say on torture, but there's also much to say on this essay more generally in light of us not wanting to have a five hour long discussion about it. I want to move to another topic that I think is quite interesting. And one that I was very happy to see a close personal friend of mine referenced within the work. And that, of course, is Ali Qadri. So in your article, you discuss torture. the situation regarding the comprador bourgeoisie within colonial and neocolonial contexts, Fanon's analysis of the comprador bourgeoisie and how that's echoed by Ali's contemporary work in the Middle East, looking at collaborationist regimes, looking at the comprador bourgeoisie within these Middle Eastern states. Can you talk a little bit about Fanon's analysis of the comprador bourgeoisie how that's relevant to the situation of Gaza and then also since everybody knows I love Ali Qadri Ali knows that better than anyone because I tell him that all the time but in light of this being something that he also analyzes can you talk about the, as you say, the echoes in Ali's work that you see Fanon linking to and how this is also relevant to the situation in Gaza.

Jonathan Turner: Yeah. So yeah, Ali's work is incredible. And I just, at the time of writing this happened, be reading his book, Arab Development Denied, these dynamics of accumulation and wars of encroachment is the subtitle. And yeah, in that he talks a lot about this kind of compadre class of neocolonial leaders in the Arab world and how They emulate the individual private consumption patterns of a kind of Western bourgeoisie proper through kind of ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege, but that their own rule has been characterized by, uh, yeah, comparable consumption, but also de-industrialization, uh, and de-development that is based on a relinquishing of sovereignty, uh, in a submission and pattern kind of defeat and acquiescence to us led capital demands in a neo-colonial neoliberal world order. Um, and for me, when looking at, when reading his book, it, it, it struck me as like a extended continuation of what Fanon talks about again throughout his writings, but particularly in the chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness and the rest of the earth, where he provides a, systematic demystification of what he calls this greedy little caste right the national bourgeoisie who are really as he refers to like a lump in bourgeoisie or a pseudo bourgeoisie they're like a colonial elite that minutes mimics individual consumption and decadence of western bourgeoisie but doesn't emulate the productive consumption right that could would be involved or associated with accumulation proper or via any form of, uh, production development, industrialization. Um, he says basically that they are not truly, uh, bourgeoisie, uh, even as they uphold a global bourgeois order of the white West and service intermediaries for it. Right. Uh, So in that chapter, he says that we know that the bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries are non-existent. He says what creates a bourgeois is not the spirit, taste, or manners, or even its aspiration. It's above all the direct product of precise economic conditions, right? This national middle class that he's criticizing has no real economic purpose. power. He says they're not financiers nor industrial magnates. They are not engaged in production, invention, building, or labor, but they are purely intermediaries, right? He says they are quite literally good for nothing, right? He describes their psychology as that of the businessman, not the captain of industry, that they're completely ignorant of the economy of their own countries and let them fall thus into deplorable stagnation, right? He talks about either deindustrialization or a non-industrialization and that not a single industry is set up in these neocolonial states. They continue to maintain all of the same relations of domination where they send out raw materials and continue being Europe's small farmers and specialize in unfinished products while being a market for the manufactured goods of the West, right? And serving as like a a mass reserve army of labor for the global Western accumulation process, right? he talks about how nationalization in this context has meant not placing the whole economy at the service of the nation, uh, to satisfy the needs of the nation, but to nationalize in the context of like a neocolonial psychology means simply to transfer, uh, power into transfer into quote native hands, those unfair advantages, which are the legacy of colonial period. They simply want to substitute, you know, the elites of the colonized country for the bourgeoisie proper. He talks about how through the kind of prestige they build up through the kind of consumption patterns that they have, it creates this kind of veil that creates an illusion of power, but fundamentally it demonstrates a lack of real substantive power. And yeah, he would distinguish the overt kind of militaristic violence we might associate with like a neocolonial regime with that of the more subtle economic coercion that we see in like imperial centers of the West that are based much on the economic security of those states that don't necessitate the same degree of overt kind of fascistic violence that we might see and associate in the neocolonial state. So, yeah, Fanon is able to kind of foresee all of these kind of betrayals and pitfalls and warn against them in a way that is funny considering the way he's often labeled as a post-colonialist, right? And as we see with Ali Qadri's work and others, he kind of ends up perfectly describing many of the... the regimes we see and, and the region when it's Saudi Arabia, you ate and so on. And, uh, yeah, I'll pause there for a moment.

Henry Huckamacki: No, no, that's, that's great. But I want to also ensure that we don't take a strictly conservative theoretical lens at this, but also examine the ongoing dynamics within Gaza using this theoretical dynamic that you just laid out very clearly for us. So if possible, can you talk just a little bit more concretely in terms of how this dynamic is playing out vis-a-vis Gaza, since again, the purpose of this article was not only to show that there was a theoretical through line throughout Fanon's work, but also that this theoretical through line is directly applicable from beginning to end to the current context of Gaza. So how does this analytic of the compradore bourgeoisie relate to the situation in Gaza?

Adnan Hussain: And you could see a bit like, you know, we had planned to have this conversation some weeks and so forth ago. But in fact, actually, very recent events, so maybe it was very helpful that this has taken place now at the time of recording. I mean, very recent events could probably be some of the... substantiation of those relationships. So please do tell us about how you would think about this working in the context of Gaza.

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, I mean, we obviously see this in the general betrayal of all the Arab states and just kind of voting for this latest round of colonial oversight of Gaza at the UN, right? But we also see it in the betrayals of the Palestinian Authority in particular, right? So in... This chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness, he talks about the way in which parties that were once associated with the liberation era are sunk into an extraordinary lethargy, right? And there develops a... a pattern of, uh, corruption and moral decline, right. With, uh, kind of a vulturistic, uh, approach to, um, appropriating the spoils of national wealth. Right. And he describes in, in many ways, the, the, the collapse and, and, and corruption of, uh, the, the, and the development of the Palestinian authority, right. And, and retreat from resistance and into compromise and into this position where they are, uh, little more than like a police or watchdog for a Zionist entity, right? And defined by corruption, this kind of long retention of power against the popular will of Palestinian people, right? He describes a kind of anti-democratic aspect to these parties that become accomplices of merchant bourgeoisie, right? And this... again, in many ways defines the rule of the PA as a collaborative regime with the Zionist entity.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, indeed. I mean, I think that's really what jumps out when we see what's been happening in Gaza. And that chapter is just so perfect for describing Mahmoud Abbas and this whole faction. Yeah. And also the regimes that have enabled it and to which the PA is really oriented towards, right? It's oriented towards collaboration along with its peer compradors from the rest of the neighboring Arab states. But I just also wanted, maybe by way of conclusion, come to one other really interesting topic that your essay touches upon that I think is really different from a lot of other ways of talking about Fanon and its relevance to the contemporary Gaza situation. And that is partly because one problem that the left, even if it adopts a kind of Fanonian approach, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial approach towards resistance is that some kind of quarters, particularly of the Western left, have a real difficulty with Palestinian resistance because it takes on the form of religiously based or oriented. There's something significant to them about being Muslim and Islam as a kind of revolutionary resistance tradition that is drawn upon by Palestinian resistance. And, you know, for so long, the whole character of the discussion about, you know, the question of Palestine has been trying to put it on kind of secular political terms and say, oh, no, this isn't just a question of, you know, atavistic religious entities that have played out in the region for X thousand years and so on in response to, you know, kind of propaganda about you know, the impossibility, basically, to try and demonstrate or ensure the impossibility that there could be political solutions because, of course, these are just hatreds that can't be, you know, negotiated or worked out. And yet, you know, what we see is with the, you know, resistance, you That somebody like, you know, Fanon may have begun to appreciate on some level the possibilities for how resistance would need perhaps to draw upon culturally relevant and specific resources, you know. And you talked a little bit here about correspondence between Ali Shariati, Iranian sociologist, and a kind of religiously oriented anti-imperialist thinker. and his interest in Fanon's ideas and of an alleged correspondence. I mean, I think there's still questions about whether these are real letters, but, you know, a correspondence between Fanon and Chariati, where you talk about it as anticipating, perhaps, desecularization. of the regional armed resistance to Zionism and U.S.-led imperialism. So how did you, you know, kind of think through Fernand's not quite embrace because he's not about to say, yes, we all need to be Muslims, but acknowledging and recognizing that this was important in some way as a possible tradition of effective anti-colonial resistance and how that bears upon you know, the situation of solidarity we can have in thinking about, you know, resistance in Gaza, Palestinian resistance in Gaza.

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, absolutely. And I wouldn't say that it's, as you've suggested here, it's a full embrace so much as just a recognition of the anti-colonial capacity and potentialities of Islamic resistance. And we see this a lot in his writings in Dying Colonialism, particularly with his discussion of the veil and the ways in which it was used strategically for specific guerrilla operations. There are times where it became strategic to unveil and then to reveal in the way in which there's this whole power struggle over this symbol of Islam, right? A certain form of Islam. And yeah, so I say his letter can help anticipate the de-secularization process. I wouldn't say that it's predicting it, you know what I mean? Or saying it's inevitable or anything. Not that you've suggested that, but but more that it can help us to understand the progressive function and role and connection of Islamic anti-colonialism with secular anti-colonialism, right? And yeah, I think one thing that's been striking to me in trying to closely study the desecularization process and the development of Hezbollah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hamas out of PLO, PFLP is that they maintain much of the kind of actual substance of the resistance philosophy and analysis and praxis. And while Effectively, just altering the symbols and reference points. Now, this is a little bit reductionist in a lot of ways, but when you look at the history of desecralization, there's often a continuity of struggle and the differences between some of these groups have often struck me as much more, you know, symbolic, substantive in terms of their points of reference. And I think their popularity has been often dictated less by, you know, any sort of natural affinity to secularism versus Islam, although there's certainly an element of that, but more based on like which organization has demonstrated the greatest fidelity to the resistance cause, right? And that's kind of determined their kind of peak moments of, of popularity more than their espoused ideology necessarily. So yeah, with Fanon, we see, you know, he in many places raises serious concerns for sectarianism, but he at the same time doesn't reject Islam outright, right? He sees within it these tools and potentials for developing a progressive anti-colonial resistance alongside his preferred secular version of things. But yeah, this was like a particular connection I wanted to highlight. I think like the Western left has really kind of struggled with understanding and analyzing Islamic resistance and often showed a preference toward, you know, kind of highlighting the PFLP over Palestinian Islamic Jihad when they're putting together their kind of various ideas symbols of resistance and whatnot. And yeah, I wanted to highlight this particular connection over, you know, many others that we could talk about in terms of finance global impact that are much more well known and established. Yeah, just for its immediate kind of relevance here.

Henry Huckamacki: I do find it always interesting when there's this shedding of the discussion of the importance of religion within specific anti-colonial, anti-imperialist contexts. Because, I mean, as you mentioned, there is this idea that If we're looking at what the ideal case is, we can say that it's a secular case that's rooted in the philosophical teachings of Marx and Lenin and or Mao, pick whatever political ideology you come along with. But there's this idea, particularly within the Western left, that religion has to be completely shorn from that. And so there's this idea then that we have to preference one specific movement based on their secular identity. over another group that is also as deeply or if not, you know, at various times more deeply engaged within actual resistance activities against colonialism and that we have to not look at that other force because there is a religious component to them. And on the other hand, this is something that I also find very interesting historically is that Very often we have anti-colonial movements in the further back history that also have religious components to them. And those religious components are either forgotten about or actively ignored. So thinking about the Haitian Revolution, for example. The Haitian Revolution, the religious component of it is never discussed. Even within left circles, you know, the Haitian Revolution is rarely discussed at all. But even amongst those on the political radical left that love to uphold Christianity. The Haitian Revolution is an anti-colonial struggle, a successful anti-colonial struggle, an anti-slave struggle that resulted in independence for our country and dignity for the people until, you know, oppressive remuneration was required of them by the French and then ongoing neocolonial and imperialist overtures against them over the course of centuries. But the point is, is that there was also a deep religious component to the Haitian revolution. There was a forged identity amongst the slaves, the enslaved people in Saint-Domingue that was forged on the roots of voodoo. These people came from geographically disparate places. across the African continent, linguistically extremely disparate as well. Most of the people could not fluently communicate with one another. And the religions that were coming in were also disparate. There was a forged identity that took place as the result of the adoption of voodoo amongst a large portion of those who were actively seeking to overthrow the slave regime that was taking place. And when there's analysis today, even radical analyses of the Haitian Revolution, there is a complete shearing off of this religious component because it doesn't comport to the narrative that these revolutionary, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movements, ideally imperialist, should be and must be secular movements if we're talking about an ideal case. And so with this really long digression out of the way, I just wanted to say that I think it's very interesting as well that when we're discussing anti-colonial movements, that we have to also acknowledge the specificities of a given anti-colonial case and not put an ideal type that is given to those in the West that are thinking about the situation, but rather acknowledging the realities in the colonial area or the neocolonial area. So with that being said, Jonathan, if you have any thoughts on that, feel free to go in. Otherwise, I'm going to give it to you for your closing remarks on this conversation. Uh, as well as of course, letting the listeners know again, where they can find your work about what, uh, AFMN is doing, maybe some things that you have in the works, but closing thoughts and anything that you wanted to say on that.

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, no, it's a really beautifully articulated point. And yeah, it's something we absolutely see with Western lefts kind of like inability to really appreciate the evolution of the Palestinian armed struggle, right? And kind of often a disproportionate sort of attention to, you know, again, specifically like a PFLP, right? Or PLO over, you know, analysis of PIJ or Hamas or Hezbollah, right? Without a recognition that it was Hezbollah, an Islamic resistance group that was the first to actually achieve any sort of liberation of territory against Zionism. But that all of these groups were, again, there's interconnection and continuity between them and that the PIJ would not have been able to developed from more of what it started as in terms of like a study group almost into a guerrilla struggle if it weren't for the incorporation of former militants from PLO as they came out of the prisons and were able to train them on the actual guerrilla strategies and techniques and weaponry. so yeah, there's, there's a continuity that I always kind of want to emphasize, you know, in spite of the many differences between these different organizations. Um, and yeah, in terms of just wrapping up, I think one thing that I also like always want to reclaim with Fanon that some people are very dismissive of is his like revolutionary optimism. Right. Um, I think, you know, there, uh, It's been criticized, certainly, that he's kind of an idealist in a number of ways, no doubt. But he's kind of firmly within African revolutionary tradition in that regard, in terms of maintaining this particular sort of optimism in his writing and thought. That avoids a lot of the kind of defeatist, pessimistic, kind of liberalistic attitudes that are manufactured through the kind of psychological warfare of colonialism. And we see in a lot of thinking, particularly in the Western left. uh, as I said, kind of at the top earlier, there's a tendency to fixate on, uh, massacre and, and tragedy and not resistance. Right. And I think one thing that I always want to like take from Fanon is his revolutionary optimism. Um, and that, uh, I mean, I end the essay by kind of quoting from him talking about the French revolution already being triumphant in many ways, the Palestinian one is too. There's obviously, you know, It's an ongoing and horrific situation, but there's been a re-centering of Palestine on a global agenda in a way where it was locked previously in kind of like a deadlock siege, right? It was a normalization process. was underway in such a way that was kind of like a race that attempted to erase Palestine, right? And to reestablish the importance of this struggle and expose Zionism and U.S. world imperialism for what it is and remain kind of steadfast over, you know, these years now of genocide and able to continue fighting and resisting and refuse disarmament and submission, right? So yeah, I think like Yeah, a key thing I always want to take from Fanon and Kerry into my own sort of like day-to-day is his revolutionary optimism and big picture conception of the long kind of movements of history to not get kind of locked into this defeatist, hopeless kind of place that we are encouraged to be in by, again, the kind of psychological propaganda of empire, right?

Adnan Hussain: No, you could remind people where to find your work about AFMN.

Jonathan Turner: Yeah. Uh, yes, we have a website, uh, AFMN or Alfie.E Media Network. Uh, you can find us on X and Telegram, uh, shortly after this essay was, uh, posted, uh, meta, uh, shut down all of our, our platforms on, on Instagram. So you won't be able to find us, uh, there anymore, or at least for now. Um, but yeah, you can find our website online. We also have a podcast, uh, you can find, um, you know, um, every, every platform, um, Yeah, and there's a number of projects on the way. I just released another essay analyzing Yaya Senwar's Thorne Incarnation. There's a translation in the works of Georges Ibrahim Adela's Affair, a book originally published in French that we're going to be putting out, an English translation of soon. But yeah, you can follow us on these platforms. And as I said, we're always looking for new contributors and members.

Henry Huckamacki: Well, I already told you that we definitely have to bring you on to talk about your incarnation, but once that other translation is also ready, you can expect further invitations to come back on if we can steal more of your time beyond just this conversation, Jonathan. But it's been a great pleasure to have you on today. I hope that you enjoyed the conversation yourself.

Jonathan Turner: Yeah, thank you guys so much. This has been such a joy to talk with you and I really appreciate the time.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. Adnan, can you remind the listeners how they can find your other show and follow you on social media?

Adnan Hussain: Sure. But I did just, you know, want to say that I thought just the final point on something we had been talking about before about Western lefts and ability perhaps to really appreciate, you know, kind of, you know, what the role is. of religious resistance is because of a certain secularized way of thinking about resistance and politics and so forth that is undermined by the actual behavior and emphasizes a great point you made about the continuity between previous But not even just continuity, but even current collaboration and unity of the resistance in Gaza is that, you know, despite it being, you know, different religious factions that might have their own kind of ideological rivalries with also then PFLP and other, you know, resistance factions and armed groups that they have forged together. In anti-colonial resistance, a kind of unified front of collaboration in Al-Aqsa flood and in subsequently resisting the genocide. So that's a kind of important lesson that I think we can learn historically for seeing, you know, and who is it that they've been asking for? They've said, hey, release Marwan Barghouti because we would, you know, accept that. you know, him as a, you know, unity symbol politically for a future, you know, Palestinian state. And just the other kind of point that, you know, you've said a couple of times that, you know, black skin, white masks is earlier pre-revolutionary and maybe more conservative work. Although I think You know, I mean, we do have an episode coming out with Professor Turner about Fanon that will, you know, maybe connect these parts much more. And I do feel like it's more the way people who receive that work try and bracket colonial and racism from colonialism, when in fact what Fanon's work shows is that you know, from the position where he begins with being a colonized racialized subject, he came to understand racial kind of consciousness, but in fact, actually race, racism and colonialism are really the same thing. You know, like they're so unified. You can't have a colonial regime that isn't racist and you can't have, you know, racism without kind of the experience of colonialism somewhere in the mix. And so one thing that his work did then, and I've noticed others who have written about the importance of racism. Fanon in this moment in the last couple of years is also the dignity, the self-respect that, you know, political action and resistance has given, you know, to people. And what else can we say about Palestinians during this time other than that they are the most, the greatest people of dignity, you know, in this situation. So... I so much appreciate this article and the work. And also just lastly about it is just I love because towards the African Revolution and the pieces from Al-Mujahid are actually my favorite. I mean, of course, I love Wretched of the Earth, but they're my favorite because they're these short pieces that are him as a revolutionary. and where he's less trying to work out the systematic abstract kind of theory of colonialism, but he's practically involved in applying it analytically to the world in order to change it. And I think it's so great that you mind some of the connections in there that restore Fanon as a revolutionary to us through those kinds of pieces and those kinds of writings, which I absolutely love. And so I've done a lot of readings of them for patrons, you know, in our... you know, in people who support. I've done many readings from Al-Mujahid, Fanon's essays there, and then given some commentary. And, you know, I think I should start doing that again, because, like, it's such a great resource. And you've reminded us all again about the So I thank you so much for that. But people, if they want to, like, you know, in addition to Guerrilla History, I have, you know, another podcast and YouTube show, just Adnan Hussain Show. You can find it on YouTube. You can find it on all the... usual podcast platforms in audio. And of course, you can support, you know, my work there. If you can, I'd rather you give to Gaza. But if you have extra support, you can always go to patreon.com slash Adnan Hussein. And of course, also, Henry will tell you about supporting guerrilla history.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. And I just wanted to mention, since Adnan had brought up the fact that we also have an episode on Fanon for our African Revolutions and Decolonization series with Professor Lou Turner, if you're tuning in for this episode, listeners, and you haven't heard that other one, it'll either be the episode just before this or possibly two before this. So just scroll back in the Guerrilla History feed, either one or two episodes, and you'll find that pretty excellent discussion that we had with Lou Turner about Fanon. And I certainly highly recommend everyone check that out uh probably listen to it more than once because it was that great of a conversation with that being said i also recommend you check out adnan's show like i said i had the pleasure of being on yesterday as well um as of the time of recording i think it was my second time on the show adnan but uh Always a pleasure, and I certainly enjoy listening when I'm not on the show. It gives me a break from having to try to rein myself in on a public platform. But as for me, listeners, I'm on Twitter. I haven't been able to log in in months, but you can follow me at Huck1995. Maybe at some point I'll be back. back on but as for guerrilla history it can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history that's g-u-e-r-r-i-l-l-a history and like I said the show is on various social media platforms hopefully we'll be able to get back in and start posting about guerrilla updates to the show soon um so you can just look for gorilla history again gorilla with two r's on whatever social media platforms are on and you should find the show but in the interim i would just like to let you know listeners that it would be very helpful if you helped share our episodes uh because i am unable to do so myself at the moment in terms of social media related things so if If you're listening to this conversation and finding it useful, it would be greatly appreciated for you to share it on social media and let others to know to check it out. So with that being said, and until next time, listeners, solidarity.