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

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

To close out 2025, the 100th anniversary of Frantz Fanon's birth, we bring on Jonathan Turner of Al Fida'i Media Network to discuss how we should reclaim the revolutionary Fanon, and utilize his works when analyzing the situation in Gaza.  We hope that this conversation will be both useful to you, and also inspiring.  We also hope that you have a lovely New Year, and that 2026 will bring you all renewed vigor in the ongoing struggle.  Jonathan Turner is a writer for Al Fida'i Media Network.  We highly recommend not only checking out their work, but also supporting them on patreon. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember 10 Van Boop? They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, names to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckmacki,

joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's. University in Ontario, Canada. 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. 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 Hussein show, which ended at about after 1 a.m. my time. And so it's been, it's been well less than a day since I last saw you, but needless to say, still not enough. 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. Certainly is, and listeners, the primary topic of discussion for that, that discussion struggles session on Anadnan Hussein show was related to Gaza, which is going to be somewhat related to the topic today, pretty related, as a matter effect. 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 manage 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, E-E-R-R-I-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-F-D-I-E-M-A-M-N-N-N-A-F-M-A-F-M-N, 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. 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? Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, just thank you so much for inviting me on. It's humbling and, you know, a joy to be here long before being a part of AFMN. I remember working some tough kind of minimum wage. jobs and I would often kind of sneak headphones in under a hat to listen into, you know, podcasts like yours to help kind of get me through a long days and keep kind of my mind stimulated when you were forced to do very kind of difficult manual work. So, you know, it's it's humbling to now be invited on. So I really appreciate connecting with you to today.

But yeah, I do writing for AFMN. This is a Marxist, Marxist-Leninist media organization that puts out a combination of journalistic work essays, media content specifically geared toward Palestine and the Arab world and the Arab diaspora, right? This is an organization formerly known as Al-Falestina Media Network, and that has been international, having once had offices in Beirou, because of the U.S., Berlin, and Madrid. It's an organization that's gone through a number of different kind of stages in response to some repression that we've faced.

And yeah, now we're continuing to put out content. We've put out articles, podcasts, videos. We're working on a documentary at the moment that we hope to put out in the new year. And, yeah, you can find us on Twitter and Telegram, Patreon, Patreon and a website. And yeah, different, you know, we're always looking for new contributors 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 a great name, you mentioned that it was Al-Philistinia before, but now Al-Fiddae, 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, so for justice. So it's a great, great name. And I think the spirit of your piece really fits 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 Phenon's birth. There's been a lot of discussion about Franz Fanon and his work this particular year. But we might say even in the period since

October 2023, the salience of Fenon's thought became more evident. It was very much informing youth resistance on campuses. They were quoting a lot of than all, 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 shows 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 Phenon. And likewise, at the same time, there were a lot of attempts to reinterpret Phenon in a de-radicalizing way that were contemporaneous to the Alaksa flood and its aftermath and wrestling with the question of resistance to colonial. And so there was, for example, Adam Schatz's biography of France Phenon 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 Phenon 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 at the end of August, it was published, you know, why did you think it was needed to reclaim Phenon?

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 on his 100th anniversary of his birth? Yeah, I really appreciate him. Resonie for 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 kind of latest, you know, phase in this kind of long nach, the current kind of genocidal war, right? I remember being struck by the kind of, I happened to be rereading a lot of Fanon's political writings for the FLN, for the outside of his like four official op-texts, right, that people are more familiar with.

And it was really striking the immediate and obvious parallels between the ways of which he was describing the kind of particular mechanisms and strategies of French colonial occupying. and their own kind of genocide in Algeria, right? And what we're observing every day in Gaza. And so this was something that I'd wanted to kind of write about for a while. I want to get, you know, more into, like, what academia has done or not done with Phenon throughout the course of the conversation. But there's, it's, you know, fairly, fairly common criticism at this point that academia has left many parts of Phenon untouched or not as rich.

developed like it's kind of a cliche at this point that you know the whole era of post-colonial study is not getting affixated rather narrowly on his first most politically conservative were black skin's white masks right and we see you know many references to rush 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. And yeah, as you said, there was a flood, right around that time, just a big flood of tribute posts and statements about Phenon, celebrating Phon. And this was great in the sense, you know, 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 weight, and that was something that's exciting to see. But I also remember feeling a bit frustrated and that many of the kind of, you know, 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, a really explicitly connected Fanon to Gaza in any particularly deep way beyond like a superficial quote here there, on just like colonialism generally. And usually it was from, you know, fairly overused sections of either blackskins, white masks, or like from just the first chapter, a brush to the earth kind of amputated from the rest of Phenon, the complete Phonon beyond even just this one book. And to me, it kind of reflected a general problem of kind of a shallow nature, particularly like the Western political discourse that reduces people like Phelan 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,

like academic appropriation. And I found myself like actually thinking most about Lenin. So he, I sometimes I'm not 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 me just quote directly from the opening of that text that was kind of very profound in my own thinking about Phelan.

And he writes at the beginning of state and 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 happen 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 hollow 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. And these circumstances in view of the unprecedentedly widespread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to be established 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 Phelon, certainly in academia, right, but also within popular media spaces of kind of Western liberalistic activism, right? So while I can't pretend to any way have been successful like Lennon and reestablishing a, you know, Marxist theory of the state, I can't say that I did anything like that with any comprehensive phenonian theory of revolution, colonialism or anti-colonialism, fascism, torture, 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 phenon against the kind of shallow, what Lenin calls like the name hallowing and commodification and sterile iconography that we see in popular media, as well as in academia in general and post-colonial studies. in particular. Oh, pause there for a moment, but that was kind of the initial impulse behind. Well, 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 neocolonial structures around the world? We're talking about. We're talking about

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? Yeah, absolutely.

So I think one thing I say in like the kind of the abstract of the top of the article is that the essay is attempting to answer the call of others before us. And, you know, I'm in this sense only able to kind of less eloquently, you know, 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, you know, fairly, even though it's still outside of the norm in academia, there's a lot of, you know, scholars and activists who have, who have written about the appropriation of Phelonon for post-colonial studies in particular. And Cedric J. Robinson, who I'm referencing at an essay called the appropriation of Vance Thonon, I'm increasingly thinking we need an essay on the appropriation of Sajic Robinson as I see him being distorted and used in academia in quite bizarre ways at times. 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't.

But yeah, there's a tendency to reduce colonialism in these spaces to a mechanical thing rather than a flexible complex living in a time. 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 Klamian Krumah referred to as it's like second major thrust, right? It's what he calls it. It's a orthodox form in his handbook of Revolutionary Warfare. What others kind of think of is 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. It 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. the laws of motion of. And this then creates a situation where we can't recognize neo-colonialism, right? And the manner which colonialism has looked different in certain times and places, right? But one thing you just mentioned about the way in which, you know, academia has narrowed the historical scope, you might say, of colonialism to a particular era and period and then names, you know, the subsequent eras of history as polonialism. post-colonial and then, you know, deals with it more or less because the actual direct

military control occupation and political, well, 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, 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 they, 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 what's interesting and strange about the use of Phenon 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 and that there would be these, you know, chapter. I mean, I don't know how people ignore it. It says pitfalls of national. cultural. 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 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 one, 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 orientation. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about the counter-revolutionary dimensions of appropriations of Phenon 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 Shats' biography, clearly an attempt to kind of take him out of a revolution. Context, but it's almost like those in post-colonial studies can use Phenon 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, you know, kind of work and 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? Yeah, I appreciate, yeah, you referencing about like 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, an article to present him as like 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, Blackskins, White Mass, right? This is like the pre-revolutionary phenon.

He has profound criticisms and seeds of ideas that are, you know, 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 phenon, right? The phenom that 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 neo-colonialism, right, 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 this 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? Acumulation. And yeah, in this, there's, I think, another aspect as well where there's, like, this claim from certain kind of, like, ethnic studies, parts of academia that want to position him as, like, narrowly, like a scholar who things like separating him from Marxism, right? So there's this, you know, feeling that he, there's this line that is taken out, extracted from the first chapter of Russia to the Earth on Concerning Violence, where he talks about having to stretch Marxism in the context of, you know, 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 phenon, when you read Marx closely, right, you see a fundamental compatibility. an extension of his thought, right? And this is something that has been kind of famously talked about by, like, James Aki Sails comes to mind, who's book meditation on France Fanon's Wretch of the Earth is 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, like, narrow, like, identity politics lines that he largely rejected himself if you look at the evolution of his thought, right? and positions in this as a post-colonial scholar instead of a post-colonial figure instead of an active person of anti-colonial praxis who is a student of neocolonial colonialism, right, as much as traditional orthodox colonialism itself. Sorry, it was a bit of a sloppy answer there, sorry.

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, you know, 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 mention, 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 auvois 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 1 of Retched 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 at 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 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? Yeah. So yeah, there's a bunch of things that kind of that you touch you on that I wanted to do here.

And I think, yeah, the first that you mentioned is I didn't want to, number one, just like write a biography, you know, but also I wanted to situate myself in the actual written words and theory of phenones articulated across his complete works. And I wanted to avoid a strict sort of like chronological analysis of the foretext where it's like, okay, here's what he says. and black-skins white mass, then a dying colonialism.

I wanted to kind of weave organically between them and to demonstrate you kind of 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 text, right? So yeah, I wanted to engage with all of his books organically, as well as his extensive writings for the FLN. And yet, 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 Balah Khalili is. 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, our gaze solely to massacre,

but never to struggle, right? That leads kind of to an understanding that lacks like 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? So 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 described things for witnessing every day in Gaza in terms of the presive apparatus of settler colonialism, right? there's specific like, you know, attention.

I'd like drawn 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 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 a 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 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, to its opposite, its dialectical opposite, resistance or anti-colonial struggle. So beyond discussion of like genocidal parallels, right, I want to talk about how he conceptualizes colonial violence in general, right, and how he conceptualizes neo-colonialism. 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 rate. 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 and 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, you know, genocidal form, but also takes more nuanced and subtle forms, right, both within capitalist center, but also in kind of neo-colonial like periphery, right? And then against

that, he talks about the need for a kind of, uh, total anti-colonial countervirance in response, right, that understands the violence of colonialism against beyond just being the physical body, but against the mind, culture, past, and future, and necessitating counterviolence that is both physical, but also ideological, intellectual, cultural, and otherwise. 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 in recognizing conditions in Gaza techniques of colonialism today to formulate resistance, you know, to it. So one kind of major component besides what you talk about in terms of these buffer zones and and so on, you know, was torture. And I thought this was, of course, it's so important in understanding the Algerian, you know, 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 occupying. in Palestine and since the beginning, since the Nakaba, 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, you know, 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 Fenin, what do you see as the relevance of really emphasizing how important and significance torture is? in connect to. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that he says quite explicitly, and most famously

in this essay, Algeria, French, Algeria face-to-face with the French tortures that was a part of the collection and 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 a massacre. He describes it as a fundamental necessity of the colonial the 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, like, a supposedly scandalized French public, right? Which kind of, for me, neatly parallels this whole, you know, contemporary Zionist right to rape, you know, thing where they feel, they understand the French, the French police, as well as the Zionist occupation, understand fundamentally that torture is a part of colonialism and 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 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 is a fundamental

mechanism of colonialism. But he criticizes the fact that their protests were largely geared around how it 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 Fon'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, permanent accumulation, as Marx calls it, that is founded upon, right?

So, yeah, for him, there's no distinction between, or there's no contradiction between genocide and the Western values. Western values are genocide, right? Western values are torture and colonialism. 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, context.

It's, 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, 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, the gold of my year, you know, like we'll never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their babies, you know, 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 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 five, 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 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, 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 Fennell was describing. Yeah. 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, in some fashion. That's really, I don't know if you want to respond to that at all. And, you know, his chapter on, like, a colonial war mental disorder and talking about, yeah, the impact on the colonizer, too.

I mean, just think about the rise and suicides of Israeli soldiers, right? You know, being another expression of this in the present. 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, listening 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. 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. Yeah. No, absolutely. Yes, but 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, like as I was rereading Marx's Capital Volume 1 recently and toward the end of the book and talking about the 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 labor, right? not to speak even of the global terror of genocide and enslavement that was the foundation for capitalism in the first place. And, you know, he made this point about how incredible it is that this world system that wants to present itself as natural, inevitable, inevitable, permanent. The only rational way to organize society can only be built and only be maintained through such absolute terroristic violence, right? demonstrate in the way that it is entirely unnatural, right, and unsustainable on its own, right? And, you know, I think of that here in this context, this, you know, claim to this land, you know, only being propped up on this extreme terroristic and sexual violence and torture, right? You know, there's nothing natural or inevitable about this, really. 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 Alicadri. So in your article, you discuss the situation regarding the comprehensive, bourgeoisie within colonial and neo-colonial 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 Kadri, 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? Yeah, so yeah, this 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

words of encroachment is the subtitle. And yeah, in that he talks a lot about this kind of Comptor class of neo-colonial leaders in the Arab world and how they emulate the individual. private consumption patterns of Western bourgeoisie proper through kind of ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege, but that their own rule has been characterized by comparator consumption, but also

de-industrialization and de-development that is based on a relinquishing of sovereignty and a submission and pattern of kind of defeat and acquiescence to U.S.-led capital demands in a neo-colonial, neoliberal world order. And for me, when reading his book, it struck me as like an extended continuation of what Phelon 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 cast, right, the national bourgeoisie, who are really, as he refers to like a lump in bourgeoisie or a pseudo-bouchozy, they're like a colonel elite that mimics individual consumption and decadence of Western Bishwazi, but doesn't emulate the productive consumption, right, that could, would be involved or associated with accumulation

proper or via any form of production, development, industrialization. He says basically that they are not truly bourgeoisie, even as they uphold a global Bouchoir order of the White West and serve as intermediaries for it. Right. So in that chapter, he says that we know that the bourgeoisie and undeveloped countries are non-existent. He says, what creates a bourgeois is not 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 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 a single industry is set up in these neocolonial states. They continue to maintain all the same relations of domination where they send out raw materials and continue being Europe's small farmers and specialized in unfinished products while being a market for the manufactured goods of the West, right? and serving as like a mass reserve army of labor for the global West accumulation process, right? He talks about how nationalization in this context has meant not placing the whole economy of the service of the nation to satisfy the needs of the nation,

but to nationalize in the context of like a neo-colonial psychology means simply to transfer power into, transfer into, quote, native hands, those unfair advantages, which are the legacy. 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 these, 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 neo-colonial 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 as we might see an associate in the neo-colonial state. So, yeah, Phanon 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 like Ali Qadri's work and others, he kind of ends up perfectly describing many of the regimes we see in the region where that's Saudi Arabia, you saw on. And yeah, I'll pause there for a moment.

No, no, that's great. But I want to also ensure that we don't take a strictly 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 throughline 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 Comptuador bourgeoisie relate to the situation? in Gaza. 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 offense could probably be some of the substantiation of those relationships. So please, you know, to tell us about how you would think about this is working in the context of Gaza? Yeah, I mean, we obviously see this into kind of the general betrayal of all the Arab states and just kind of voting for this latest round of, you know, 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, you know, were once associated with the liberation era are sunk into an extraordinary lethargy, right? And there develops a pattern of corruption and moral decline, right, with a kind of vulturistic approach to,

appropriating the spoils of national wealth, right? And he describes in many ways the collapse and corruption and the development of the Palestinian authority, right? And retreat from resistance and into compromise and into this position where they are little more than like police or watchdog for a Zionist entity, right? And defined by corruption in 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 kind of the rule of the PA as a kind of collaborative

regime with the Zionist entity. Yeah, indeed. I mean, I think that's really what jumps out when we see, you know, what's been happening in Gaza. And, you know, that chapter is just so perfect for describing, you know, Mahmoud Abbas and this whole faction of people 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. of the neighboring, you know, Arab states. So, but, you know, I just also wanted, you know, 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 phen-en 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 phenonian anti-imperialist, anti-colonial approach towards resistance, is that some kind of quarters, particularly of the Western left, you know, have a real difficulty with Palestinian resistance because it takes on the form of religiously based or oriented. There's, you know, 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, adivistic, religious entities that have played out in the region for X,000 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 that somebody like, you know, Phenon 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 al-Ashariati Iranian sociologist and a kind of religiously oriented anti-imperialist thinker and his interest in Fanon's ideas and of. of an alleged correspond. I mean, I think there's still questions about whether these are real letters, but, you know, a correspondence between Fanon and Shariati, 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 Fanon'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. Yeah, absolutely. And I wouldn't say that it's, as you've, you know, suggested here, It's a full embrace, you know, so much as just a recognition of the anti-colonial capacity and potentialities, right, of Islamic resistance, right? And we see this a lot in his writings in a dying colonialism, particularly with this discussion of the veil in which, in the ways in which it was used strategically for specific guerrilla operations.

There are times where it became strategic to unveil and then to revail 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, you know, I say his letter can help anticipate the decedualization 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 more that it can help us to understand the progressive function and role in connection of Islamic anti-colonialism with secular anti-colonialism, right? And yeah, I think one thing that's been striking to me and trying to closely study the desecularization process

and the development of Hezbollah or Palestinian or Islamic Jihad or Hamas out of, you know, PLO, PFLP, is that they maintain much of the kind of actual substance of the resistance philosophy and analysis and praxis and well effectively just altering the the symbols and reference points now this is like you know a little bit reductionist in a lot of ways but um there is when you kind of look at the the history of desecualization there's often like a continuity of struggle right and the kind of the differences kind of between between some of these groups have often struck me as much more, you know, symbolic,

substantive in terms of, you're going to 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 there are kind of peak moments 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, you know, his preferred, you know, a 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 and Islamic resistance and often showed a preference toward, you know, kind of highlighting. and PFLP over Palestinian Islamic Jihad when they're putting together their kind of various 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 phenomenon's global impact that are much more well known and established. Yeah, just for its immediate kind of relevance here. I do find it always interesting when there's this shedding of the discussion of the importance of religious

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, you know, we can say that it's a secular case that's rooted in the philosophical teachings of Marx and Lenin and or Mao, you know, 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 the Haitian Revolution as an anti-colonial struggle, a successful anti-colonial struggle, an anti-slave struggle that resulted in independence for a country and dignity for the people until, you know, oppressive remuneration was required of them by the French and then ongoing neo-colonial 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 San Domain that was forged on the roots of voodoo. These people came from geographically 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 the 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 should be and must be secular movements if we're talking about an ideal case. And so with this, you know, 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 neocolial 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,

as well as, of course, letting the listeners know, again, where they can find your work about what AFMN is doing, maybe some things that you have in the works. But closing thoughts and anything that you wanted to say on that. Yeah, no, it's a really beautifully articulated point. And yeah, it's something we absolutely see with Western left. kind of like inability to really appreciate the evolution of the Palestinian arm 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?

With like without a recognition that it was, you know, Hezbollah as an Islamic resistance group that was the first who actually achieved any sort of liberation of territory against Zionism. But that all of these groups were, you know, again, there's interconnection and continuity between them and that, you know, the PIJ would not have been able to develop from more of what it started as in terms of like a study group almost into a good religious struggle if it weren't for the incorporation of former militants from PFL, I'm sorry, PLO or FATA as they came out of the prisons and were able to train.

on the actual guerrilla strategies and techniques and weaponry. So, yeah, there's a continuity that I always kind of want to emphasize, you know, in spite of the many differences between these different organizations. And, yeah, in terms of just wrapping up, I think one thing that I also, like, always want to reclaim with Phenon that some people are very dismissive of is his, like, revolutionary optimism, right? I think, you know, there, it's been criticized, certainly, that, you know, he's kind of an idealist in a number of ways, no doubt. But he's kind of firmly within a kind of 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.

the kind of psychological warfare of colonialism. And we see in a lot of thinking, particularly in the Western left, as I said, kind of at the top earlier, there's a tendency to fixate on massacre and tragedy and not resistance, right? And I think one thing that I always want to take from Phenonis is revolutionary optimism. And that, 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 two. There's obviously, you know, it's ongoing and horrific situation, but there's been a

re-centering of Palestine on a global agenda in a way where it was trying to be, it was locked previously in kind of like a deadlock siege, right? It was a normalization. was underway in such a way there was kind of like a race that attempted to erase Palestine, right? And it could reestablish the importance of this struggle and expose Zionism for 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 Phenon and carry 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 defeated, defeat us hopeless kind of, you know, place that we are encouraged to be in by, again, the kind of psychological propaganda. empire, right? No, okay, you could remind people where to find your work about AFMN. Yeah,

yes, we have a website, AFMN or alfidai Media Network. You can find us on X and Telegram shortly after this essay was posted, a meta shut down all of our platforms on Instagram, so we won't be able to find us there anymore, or at least for now. But yeah, you can find our website online. We also of a podcast you can find on, you know, every platform. Yeah, and there's

a number of projects on the way. I just released another essay on analyzing Yassin Noir'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. Well, I already told you that we definitely have to bring you on to talk about our 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. Yeah, thank you guys so much. This has been such a joy to talk with you. I really appreciate in time. Absolutely. Adnan, can you remind the listeners how they can find your other show and follow you on social media? 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 Left's inability, perhaps, to really appreciate, you know, kind of. know, what the role 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 it emphasizes a great point you made about the continuity between previous organizations, 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 in anti-colonial resistance, a kind of unified front of collaboration in Al-Axa 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 Bargutti, because we would, you know, accept, 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-skinned 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 Fennell. that will, you know, maybe connect to these parts of 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 Phenom'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, 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 Fenin 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-Mujahed are actually my faith. favorite. I mean, of course, I love Wretched of the Earth, but my favorite, because there are 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 Phenon as a revolutionary to us through those kinds of 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-Mujahed, 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 Fanon as a revolutionary. 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 Hussein show. You can find it on YouTube. You can find 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. Absolutely. And I just wanted to mention, since Adnan had brought up the fact that we also have an episode on Phonan 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 Blue Turner about Fanon, and I certainly highly recommend everyone check that out. 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, as of the time of recording. I think it was my second time on the show Adnan, but yeah, always a pleasure. And I certainly enjoy listening when I'm not on the show.

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, haven't been able to log in in months, but you know, you can follow me at Huck 1995. Maybe at some point I'll be back on. But as for guerrilla history, you 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-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 updates to the show soon. So you can just look for guerrilla history. Again, Gorilla with 2Rs 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 because I am unable to do so. myself at the moment in terms of social media related things. So 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.