September 22, 2025

Reading Group Week 36

Hi everyone. As with our previous books, I'd like to thank you for coming along with me during these past few weeks to read this book and to help raise money for Palestinians through the Workshops4Gaza bookstore/fundraiser. But I'll save my thoughts for the end of the email, so... read on.

This week we're finishing A Dying Colonialism, reading Chapter 5: "Algeria's European Minority" as well as the appendices, conclusion, and whatever other materials you want to look at before we literally and figuratively close the book on A Dying Colonialism.

Our next book will be Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant.

Here's an tweet from one of the authors, Artie Vierkant:

If you can buy the book from Workshops4Gaza partner Open Books: A Poem Emporium, the proceeds will go to The Sameer Project, an initiative led by Palestinians around the world to get 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.

If you can't buy the book from Open Books, or if you can't buy the book... I'll just say "do what you can". If you can donate to The Sameer Project directly, I would be tremendously grateful.

Please acquire the book as soon as you can, because we'll be starting Health Communism in 2 weeks (October 6).

Format

There are a few ways to follow along for this book and future books:

• 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).

Okay, with all that, let's return to Fanon...

---

Readings

Chapter 5: "Algeria's European Minority"

There  are, to be sure, the war criminals, all those torturers spawned by the civil strifes of Saigon, Tunis, or Meknès, and who today in Algiers or in Mascara, before the end of the colonial reign whose approach they sense, are bent on shedding the greatest possible amount of blood. Those men belong nowhere Now that the French colonial empire is being shaken by its last spasms, the French would do well to identify them. If they return to France, these men should be kept under surveillance. Jackals do not take to feeding on milk overnight. The taste of blood and of crime is deeply embedded in the very being of these creatures who, it should be said, must be retrieved by psychiatry.

(page 152)

the time when the French authorities decided to create urban and rural militias, the Jewish citizens wished to know what attitude to adopt in the face of this mobilization. A few of them did not hesitate to propose to the F.L.N. that, instead of responding to the requisition order, they join the nearest maquis. The Front as a whole advised caution, merely asking these Jews, within the framework of their professions, to become "the eyes and ears of the Revolution" inside the enemy apparatus.

(page 155)

The settler does his best, in fact, to make things uncomfortable for the French military, and in any case to communicate to the local chiefs of the F.L.N. detailed information as to the size and the morale of the unit posted on the farm.

(page 160)

The officer proceeded to lecture me: "You are the only Frenchman in the gang...." I broke in to remind him of the official position as formulated by the government: "Algeria is France, Algerians are Frenchmen." "You are from France, of course." "No, I was born in Algiers."

(page 165)

---

I found a lot of this chapter really motivating. I've been writing every other week about my anger at tech companies and with engineers as colonizers, and the violence that they continue to participate in committing against Palestinians and other groups around the world. And I truly expected this chapter to be about Fanon's indictments against European colonizers living in Algeria and the insidious roles they play as they stymie movements and undermine revolution.

Instead, Fanon talks about countless ways he saw European settlers contribute knowingly and willfully to the revolution and to Algeria's democratic struggle in myriad discreet, ostentatious, exceptional, and everyday ways - sometimes even being caught with guns in their cars that they had been smuggling for the FLN, and then lying to the soldiers, saying they're to kill the very revolutionary fighters for whom they're in fact trafficking weapons.

There are so many ways that we, within an empire committing genocide and attempting to assert domination over an oppressed group, can support our comrades. We must take every opportunity, fully apprised of the nature of the struggle that Palestinians and that people around the world are engaged in, and we must contribute to their struggle. Those of us in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in France, in Spain, in Germany, all over the world where weapons and other tools of domination originate or pass through on their way to Israel to annihilate Palestine, we must do everything we can to support the Palestinian cause.

It's worth saying that none of this is easy. Lying to the French military, or stowing armaments (or medical gear) and hiding it from the French soldiers, or providing refuge to liberation fighters... all of these were difficult and Fanon remarks at one point that no one was allowed to be left in the dark about the nature of their assistance, which must have been difficult in its own right.

I'm also thinking a lot about this passage Fanon wrote, about the jackal who does not take to feeding on milk overnight. After I read that paragraph, I came across a news story of yet another atrocity that Israel had committed, this time in Lebanon, killing three children. There are so many people living and moving around in society who have spent the last several years accommodating these grotesque crimes against humanity or in some cases directly participating in it. There are people walking around who pulled the triggers on sniper rifles to kill children. I don't know how Fanon manages to come to the compassionate conclusion that what these people need is to be "retrieved by psychiatry", but my instinct was simpler and maybe less compassionate: we must not allow these people near us.

People who made careers killing tens of thousands of children and denying freedom from millions of Palestinians cannot be allowed to trade anecdotes, present their research, commit code to our software, campaign for political office. Are we fully clear on that issue? Are we fully committed to that fact? Are we meek about refusing to welcome someone back into our social circles who casts aspersions about how hungry or skinny Palestinians look after months of imposed starvation? These people need help; Fanon is right. But in this moment I know that I do not have the convictions necessary to be a psychiatrist; the thought of engaging with these pathologies overwhelms me.

---

... I also want to talk about two other sets of quotations. The first is actually an extended section (with some intermediary text omitted):

Here in fact is a passage from the appeal addressed in the form of a tract to the Jews of Algeria, at the most difficult moments of the Revolution, that is, in the fall of 1956:

The Algerian people consider that it is their duty today to address themselves directly to the Jewish community in order to ask it solemnly to affirm its intention to belong to the Algerian Nation. This clearly affirmed choice will dissipate all misunderstandings and will root out the germs of the hatred maintained by French colonialism.

...

Various groups of the Jewish population of Algeria have likewise taken an official stand. In August 1956, a group of Jews in Constantine wrote:

One of the most pernicious maneuvers of colonialism in Algeria was and remains the division between Jews and Moslems.... The Jews have been in Algeria for more than two thousand years; they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people.... Moslems and Jews, children of the same earth, must not fall into the trap of provocation. Rather, they must make a common front against it, not letting themselves be duped by those who, not so long ago, were offhandedly contemplating the total extermination of the Jews as a salutary step in the evolution of humanity.

(pages 156-157)

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, and to that end I'd really appreciate hearing the perspective of Jewish readers (and particularly Jewish Algerian readers), but...

I kinda detest that this question was posed in the first place. We're talking about a community of people who have lived in this place for 2000 years. What kind of answer are you looking for? What if the Algerian liberation movement had not collectively felt satisfied by the answer by "the" Jewish community?

My reading of the Constantine letter in response was the Jewish community pushing through the implication of such a request by calling out that the _French colonizers'_maneuvers are designed to sow division between Jewish and Muslim people; rather than falling into the trap of provocation, they readily stand back-to-back with the FLN. Not surprising, but also I can't help but feel frustrated that Jewish Algerians were called upon with exception to affirm their commitment to Algeria.

As I said, maybe I'm reading too much into it, and to hear Fanon tell it, it wasn't received by Jewish communities in that way. But if it was me, I would be frustrated by the insinuation.

Maybe instead of saying all this, I should go and do some actual research and see if anyone has written about this specific moment of Algerian revolutionary history. But if you're reading this and you want to tell me that I'm wrong, or that there is indeed a whole discourse about this, please feel free to @ me (bluesky, twitter, mastodon, signal, etc). I would genuinely be grateful to learn more.

---

Also

We expected that [Albert] Camus would take a clear position on the Algerian problem. What we were treated to was a sweet-sister speech. He explained to us at length that the innocent civilian population must be protected, but he was categorically against fund raising in favor of the innocent families of political prisoners.

(page 172)

I'm going to file this under "never meet your heroes".

---

Tell me your thoughts

If you have any thoughts about this chapter about European Algerians, or about my questions about Jewish Algerians, or thoughts about the book as a whole, please let me know. I'd be really keen to hear them.

The Signal group chat is a great place to talk about grief or struggles reading or any articles that make you draw connections, or just to chat. I'd love to see you there, if you haven't joined yet.

---

Closing thoughts

This has been one of the more animating books for me, and it also loomed on the horizon to some extent, as did many books by significant thinkers of the 60s and 70s. I don't know why I was so apprehensive to read it until now, but I'm glad I waited, or to be more precise: I'm grateful I arrived at this book at this moment in my life.

In the (first) appendix, Fanon reflects on his journey toward his current political commitments.

(I'll take an aside and say that if you really couldn't keep up with the readings, I would emphatically beg you to read that appendix, even if you read nothing else.)

I wasn't born thinking about how I wanted to upend the world if the world couldn't bring itself away from genocide and oppression; I believed for so long that reforming the current system was possible, and that working within it was the best way to accomplish what I wanted.

If anything, I was dragged by the experiences in my life toward thoughts of revolution. Abject failures of institutions in which I had confidently invested my energy and labor left me initially disillusioned by moderate reforms, and eventually made me open to challenging structures of power. Institutions like universities can rise to the challenge, but the possibility of rising necessarily also means the possibility of falling.

In that way, I really felt a surprising closeness with the old beliefs that Fanon admits he needed to discard, that he had clung to early on in his adulthood up until he watched the state violently repress him and his comrades. His retort to the French soldier about whether he was French or Algerian, playing with exploiting the colonial idea that "Algeria is France", felt like overhearing a formative moment in the mind of someone who was jettisoning earnestly believing in colonial ideas, now holding them with arms outstretched, with dry sarcasm.

I really hope that you've been reading A Dying Colonialism and felt the righteousness of Algeria's fight for liberation. And I hope that you've been taking that feeling and that applying it to the struggles around the world that we're watching unfold today. In 1959 when this book was published, Fanon calls out to the Tunisian and to the Vietnamese people in solidarity. We have in all of our heads the capacity to pull together the common threads that link our fates, and to imagine a future where we are free.

In the last email, I said all empires fall. All empires fall together, or not at all. None of us is free until all of us are free.

Take care this week. And keep struggling.