Review of Franz Fanon’s “This is the Voice of Algeria”
by Neil MacLean

In this essay Fanon succinctly states his belief that revolutionary conflict transforms traditional peoples into citizens of a new nation. A telling feature of this transformation is the interest in “news.” Initially, news about the struggle for independence, accounts of battles, casualties, victims and victories. The news also ushers a sense of the present as a national idea (allowing statements such as “x” or “y” are happening to the nation) and forms a domain of experience that is entirely new to traditional Algerians. We may see it as fortunate, temporary and specific to the Algerian 1950s, but Fanon sees it as natural that this domain of experience invites participation as soldiers, citizens, and liberated people who are members of a liberated nation, self governed and self defended.

Fanon carries his zealous glee for revolutionary wars of independence beyond the evidence in many instances. If he could now see the state of Algeria, having annulled an election because “Fundamentalist” (AP) Muslim’s would have been brought to power, having suffered more than ten years of civil war, having little development and huge out migration of its youth, what is there to say for the Algerian liberation movement? That is sheltered refugee Black Panthers and others and n that way remained a beacon into the 1970s? That we now hear reports of scattered anarchist communities taking hold in its mountains? That it competes with Morocco as a haven for “Raves?” That its Berbers may have successfully expanded the UN reparations discussions beyond the Americas to include native peoples in Africa and elsewhere?

Fanon himself points to many aberrant responses to the revolutionary situation: from imagined reports coming over the radio to walking dreams or deliriums about final victory elucidated on the street corners and health clinics. Yet Fanon’s authentic glee at witnessing the creation of a national identity convinces me to look further into war as a process in every national identity. He has observed and articulated a type of political transformation that bears comparison with every nationalizing episode, could it be a fundamental narrative of the nationalist experience?

The radio as an instrument plays roles both unusual and typical. The fifties were a window before Television but after world war II. It was widely known that Hitler would not have been nearly as successful without the radio as a form of “abstract intimacy.” Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France also formed a base of support for Algerian self governance within France. Fanon, through his relationship with Satre was a key voice articulating this internationalist, liberationist, de-colonizing perspective. That nationally liberated radio appeared inside a tribal culture whose previous alienation from radio labeled it the voice of Paris, offered the insurgents an imaginal equality that was not always reflected in its troop strength Yet it is precisely as an “objective, national voice” that it offered a kind of imaginal parity and contributed to revolutionary victory. Fanon was not one to adjure reports of bombings, torture nor to understate the depth of the French colonialist’s depravity. Yet his account leaves room for the right of conscience to supercede military force and locally, as nationalists, defeat an empire yet to beckon international revolutionary uprising.

McLuhan’s notion that radio brings us within “earshot” and creates the feeling of connectedness like a tribal story circle also may have a role in the portrait Fanon paints though Fanon does not theorize in this direction. An interesting dimension of radio I’ve observed is that it is all opinion. It’s all story and drama. Radio presents no coherence beyond narrative. No force beyond belief. Fanon is fortunate to have witnessed a time and place where it’s strengths led to the expression of conscience and liberty. I think there’s strong evidence that the anti-war Pacifica network played a similar role in supporting a sub-culture opposed to the war and the world that finds it just. A sub-world intimate with the activist despite the alienation from land, people, or external reference points for humanity. In that US desert, the anti-war voice also substantiated a national counter-conscience. McLuhan is right that such effects are instrumental in that white supremacists bond with the radio as strongly as anarchists. But Fanon is right that the psychic form created is distinctive and politically gigantic.

By contrast images give us the opportunity for irrefutable evidence. The AP distributed photo of the German Shepard salivating at the naked Iraqi prisoner is an example worth considering. The photo captions and the “official” story claimed the guards were merely frightening the prisoners. Seymore Hersch has confirmed that there are also photos taken a few moments after the famous photo of the salivating canine. The sequence continued with photos of the attack dog tearing chunks of flesh off the naked prisoner and another of the prisoner lying on the cement bleeding and wailing in pain. Congress was shown all three photographs and many more. The sequence captured our soldier undeniably as a torturer. Our government and AP was not permitted to see this evidence. Our leaders told us the unlikely story and we must have wanted to believe it, that the dog was soon pulled away from its victim and the poor Iraqi perhaps suffered only a bad night’s sleep.
What kind of secret society was created among our representatives in Congress that they know differently? Our congress has officially colluded in the obstruction of justice for crimes against humanity. This is not a new event, but it is a renewal with the particular evidence and its relevance to the conquest of Iraq as the storyline and content of our “indymedia” era manufacture of consent. Congress, like other secret societies, depend on renewing their commitments, forming legacies of deceit within cultures of justification for torture and war. Independently produced photographs, as undeniable evidence, sometimes have a public power to cut through these legacies of deceit. Controlling their distribution is the art and science of the elite.

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