(It’s awesome in both the new and old meaning.)

Suggesting “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed” - several horror short stories, apparently a great read?

I think those are ideas driven by his background as a psychiatrist, yes. They do echo Marx’s “Opium of the masses” - religion or, here, superstition, as a pacifier. In that sense Fanon explains how those beliefs serve an integral part in upkeeping the status quo, how they detract from the material conditions of those people and the real oppression they’re suffering from.

The conclusion, I believe, is that belief can only impede the reversal of violence for so long before it reaches its end. There is a time where it isn’t enough, when the oppressed do rise up. So that ritual catalyst for violence or sexual desire or whatever else isn’t needed and dissolves.

In a way you just need to look at the states surrounding Israel, and see that all those Arab states still act according to real politik and thus further the interests of Israel and then America.

I found more echoes - obviously - however in what happened to Françafrique in this past half century. Political pawns in service of French capital, in a way the final win of colonialism.

It seems that violence is all-encompassing and all-destroying, in that sense. There seems to be little hope of closure, which I think is where Fanon was more optimistic, with Marxist ideas of a great reversal looming. The great mystifiers, religion chief among them, yet still to win despite the innate praxis of violence Fanon describes.

I look forward to reading up the rest, however. Definitely a very interesting and enriching text.

Finished “De la Violence” too. More than a justification of said violence or revolution, Fanon seems more to place himself as a “neutral” observer explaining the mechanisms through which decolonisation happens.

Seems extremely prescient too of the failed states which still stay subservient to their supposedly former metropolis, and of the troubles that entail for those states. The anarchist reading here seems quite self-evident.

Don’t you love nazi trolls coming onto vegan/leftist/queer/etc spaces and then going “look how dysgenic those people are.”

But yes, you’re a “comrade” alright.

Fascists like you really do love to imagine violent scenarios where you can both be the victim and the hero.

Would the Shoah be more excusable were the remains of its victims to be reused?

Sartre and signing horrible petitions go together like rice and beans.

Thanks!

Tomatoes! And thanks :)

Firm tofu and nooch for taste!