Reading Group Week 34
Hi, this week we're continuing A Dying Colonialism with Chapter 4: "Medicine and Colonialism".
If you haven't bought the book yet, you can buy it here.
We're close to finishing, so if you want to get ready with the next book, then I'm pleased to say that our next book will be Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant.
If you can buy the book from Workshops4Gaza partner Open Books: A Poem Emporium, proceeds from books tagged "W4G" go to The Sameer Project, an initiative led by Palestinians around the world in diaspora, getting food and other basic resources to Palestinians in Gaza. If you're on Instagram, you can see their stories and posts here. You can also follow their work on Twitter/X.
Okay, that's all the admin for now.
Schedule and format
We're reading a chapter of A Dying Colonialism every 2 weeks. Here's where we are now:
| Week | Date | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | July 14 | Introduction + Preface |
| Week 2 | July 28 | Chapter 1: "Algeria Unveiled" |
| Week 3 | August 11 | Chapter 2: "This is the Voice of Algeria" |
| Week 4 | August 25 | Chapter 3: "The Algerian Family" |
| Week 5 | September 8 | Chapter 4: "Medicine and Colonialism" |
| Week 6 | September 22 | Chapter 5: "Algeria's European Minority" + Conclusion |
There are a few ways to follow along:
- follow these emails (which I send on Mondays)
- signal group chat, where we'll share links and chat about the readings
- video calls (Saturdays at 12pm ET, with email and link a few hours in advance)
- discuss on social media (you can find me on bluesky, mastodon, and twitter/x)
Readings
Chapter 4: Medicine and Colonialism
Acts of refusal or rejection of medical treatment are not a refusal of life, but a greater passivity before that close and contagious death. Seen from another angle, this absence of enlightened behavior reveals the colonized native's mistrust of the colonizing technician. The technician's words are always understood in a pejorative way. The truth objectively expressed is constantly vitiated by the lie of the colonial situation. (page 128)
The doctor who is killed in Algeria, in isolated cases, is always a war criminal. In a colonial situation there are special realities. In a given region, the doctor sometimes reveals himself as the most sanguinary of colonizers. His identity as a doctor no longer matters. Just as he was a doctor in addition to being a property owner, so he becomes the torturer who happens to be a doctor. (page 135)
Other doctors, attached to the various torture centers, intervene after every session in order to put the tortured back into condition for new sessions. Under the circumstances, the important thing is for the prisoner not to give the slip to the team in charge of the questioning: in other words, to remain alive. Everything-heart stimulants, massive doses of vitamins-is used before, during, and after the sessions to keep the Algerian hovering between life and death. Ten times the doctor intervenes, ten times he gives the prisoner back to the pack of torturers. (page 138)
The Algerian doctor, the native doctor who, as we have seen, was looked upon before the national combat as an ambassador of the occupier, was reintegrated into the group. Sleeping on the ground with the men and women of the mechtas, living the drama of the people, the Algerian doctor became a part of the Algerian body. There was no longer that reticence, so constant during the period of unchallenged oppression. He was no longer "the" doctor, but "our" doctor, "our" technician. (page 142)
I want to force myself to confront this argument Fanon is making, that I have to admit is making me kind of uncomfortable... but I think a productive kind of uncomfortable. Fanon points out and makes the case - contemporary to these crimes being committed - that doctors operating in Algeria are literally war criminals, violating the trust of their most vulnerable patients and committing heinous, gruesome violence upon Algerians to elicit confessions and information, or keeping Algerian patients alive through multiple rounds of torture to prolong their suffering and keep them speaking during brutal interrogations.
I'm also reminded that Fanon was trained as a psychiatrist and intimately knows the culture and community that European doctors tell themselves they are all joining when they enter the medical profession - his talk of "the protective circle that the principles and the values of the medical profession have woven around him" is not just literary (I mean, it is that); this is a tangible betrayal of commitments that he personally made as well. I can't help but feel that he's internalizing the gravity of these crimes in a personal way that I probably can't appreciate.
(I would be remiss if I didn't point out that in Gaza just in the last few months, emergency responders have recovered Palestinian bodies from mass graves, discovering "evidence of organ theft, including missing cochleas and corneas as well as other vital organs like livers, kidneys, and hearts". These events are not unprecedented, either; in the 90s Israeli doctors and later the Israeli government admitted to harvesting "organs, especially eyes and kidneys" from Palestinian prisoners. It probably goes without saying that people attempting to harvest human organs were almost certainly medically trained professionals, and so whoever they were, they probably went on to practice medicine afterward without facing any semblance of justice.)
Israel conducts medical, military, and technological experiments on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; and then they sell the products, that have been tested on Palestinians, around the world. They sell these products mostly to the US, who in turn provides diplomatic (and now military) cover for Israel in the international community. These are facts that basically nobody in the world disputes.
I'm stuck with a question as I read this chapter that basically swirls around what moral (if not legal) guilt rests on the shoulders of the "colonizing technicians" of our time. Tech workers can contribute to the ongoing domination and now the accelerating genocide of Palestine without ever setting foot in occupied Palestine in any capacity. Many of these tech workers are acutely aware that they are participating in a crime of such magnitude that they will never come out from that shadow. Some of them have protested and been fired; some of them have resigned. But the rest continue to do their work.
For that matter, the United States recently made several tech executives commissioned officers of the US Army. As if it's not sufficiently on the nose to say that these tech companies are in bed with the US military and US foreign policy, in both material and symbolic ways, tech companies are aligning themselves with the commission of the most heinous crimes against humanity we have seen in a generation. The US lumbers toward internalizing data centers and AI computing centers into the military interests of the United States. Executive orders out of the White House cast the acceleration permitting data center infrastructure as a matter of national security and military preparedness.
Reading Fanon's indictment of medical doctors and professionals in Algeria, I want an answer to the question of tech workers today. What distance is there between the doctors and the professionals (the "colonizing technician"), and the colonizing technicians today? Palestinians have an inalienable right to life, and they have a right not to assert that right meekly. Are engineers collaborating with the genocide war criminals along the same lines that Fanon takes when he lays out the case against the doctors who facilitated the torture and murder of countless Algerians?
... On a more positive note, reading the last quote about Algerian doctors who reintegrate into the group (into society, into humanity), I thought about a couple of things that are directly medicine-related (and one involves the author of Health Communism, so that's a fun coincidence):
- "The Hippocratic Underground" by Eric Reinhart (The Nation article)
- "Deny, Defend, Depose: Health Struggle After 'Luigi'" (podcast episode from the series Death Panel, but it's a recording of the speech given live at the 2025 Socialism Conference in Chicago a few months ago)
I've been in a pretty dark place emotionally, thinking about the role of engineers, designers, and technicians; I was slowly coming to realize that my issue isn't with technicians and engineers; it's with the technicians who won't (can't, or otherwise) set aside their professional interests and their colonial impulses. This chapter was a really sharp kick in that direction, making me feel much more confident about this thought; and it helped recontextualize a couple of things I had read and listened to that were swirling around in my head, insisting that they would be useful if I could just figure out how to apply them. So this chapter kind of unlocked an escape hatch for me that I badly needed.
Tell me your thoughts
If you have any thoughts about this chapter or about recent events, please don't hesitate to reach out and share them.
If you want, the Signal group chat is a great place to talk about grief or struggles reading or any articles that make you draw connections. The group chat is also where we're discussing Capital: Volume 1 by Karl Marx more or less in parallel to A Dying Colonialism.
All empires fall.