Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Jean Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon “Make people ashamed of their existence.” Make them “face the world.” “But to what does this shame amount? What is shame’s sociogenesis, especially in situations of colonial or racial violence? To what extent is the feeling revolutionary? How does it provide the means to solidarity?” Marx : “ Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring.” Mediating the error between class and race

“A society is not the temple of value-idols that figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitutional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon man’s relation to man. To understand and judge a society one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labour, ways of loving, living, and dying.” —The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty “What fiction reveals about the Algerian War”

This is a good long read.  I have a thought though on the last parargraph: the writer delves into what formed Fanon, especially the context of colonization and how it shaped the mind, pshycology and plight of the colonized. The author, I think, fails to use the same method when it comes to "Davos" and "Dabiq" or Globalisationa and the so-called Islamic State. Is not the latter a product of globalization (global capitalism and imperialism). Davos is the context, Dabiq was spawned by Davos like the violence directed by Algerians against the colonizers and the settlers was born in the context of colonisation. Is it not the context of global capitalism and its functions that creates wars, invasions, dictatorships, neoliberalism, power struggles, geopolitics, "civil wars", uneven-development, neofascism etc? Where Life is Seized

Culture and Imperialism

Concerning Violence ends on a powerful note bound to leave you with a knot in your stomach. Lest our daily brush with the news, with the forces of globalisation, consumerism and capital, with all this new inter-connectedness and our (however valid) criticism of the United States’s imperial ambitions distract us, Fanon reminds us that Europe is at the root of all our problems today, and it is Europe to which we are ideologically and materially enslaved. The camera moves swiftly through the centre of a massive gathering of people in tattered clothing, emaciated, looking expectantly into the camera – the wretched of the earth, literally – as Fanon’s most damning words appear on screen: "From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the third world. The wealth which smothers ...