"...arriving just in time for the anticolonial war launched by Front de Liberation National guerrillas against France in 1954, Fanon, who would go on to become an FLN propagandist..."
The FLN did not exist in 1954. The "toussaints sanglant" was launched by the CRUA (comite revolutionnaire d'unité d'action), a group of young militants in the MTLD (mouvement pour la triomph des libertes democratiques) who had become impatient with what they saw as factional bickering, rather than a principled political struggle, between the overtly socialist followers of the imprisoned Messali Hadj, the historic leader of Algerian nationalism, and the majority of the MTLD central committee (the "centralists"), led by Ben Kedda and ensconsed in the Algiers municipal government. The provocative terrorist action worked as intended-- French violent repression precipitated a broadening guerrilla. In 1955 The FLN was established as a bloc between the CRUA and the Centralists, while the Messalists formed the MNA (mouvement nationale algerienne) . In the hexagon, where the algerian proletariat mainly worked, the split was reproduced on the trade union level between the trotskyist-influenced Messalist USTA and the stalinist influenced FLN-led UGTA. UGTA terrorism against the USTA succeeded in crushing the Algerian proletarian movement in the hexagon. Meanwhile the French kidnapped the most leftist of the CRUA leaders (Ait-Ahmed, Boudiaf, BenBella), confiding the FLN to the control of Ben Kedda and, over the Tunisian border, the fascist Boumedienne, who while the Algerian people were being bled white in a futile internecine struggle, involving the liquidation of the Messalists as well as such Berber FLN cadres as Ramdane Abbane, prepared his "Algerian National Army" to take over once deGaulle had crushed the French Algerian working class ("pieds noirs"). Thus the fascistic rule imposed by Boumedienne a couple of years after "full independence" and continuing under his military successors in slightly "liberalized" form until this day. The reponsibility of FLN apologists like Fanon, Pablo, Mandel, et. al. is crushing.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64 the trotskyist influenced -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040117/f5e9c0a8/attachment.htm>