what france cannot forgive its citizens of algerian descent - and by extension its citizens of maghrebi descent at large - is their refusal to remain subjugated, then and now. the wound is old. it never quite closed.

but it also cannot forgive algiers for having been, in the second half of the 20th century, the revolutionary capital of africa - arguably at some point of the revolutionary capital of the global south.

(the city of pan-african summits, the city that welcomed exiled black panthers, the city fanon wrote thousands of words in and about. fidel didn't wear the algerian football jersey for nothing.)

and it certainly cannot forgive communists, including white communists, for the PCF being the only political party in france on the right side of history during the algerian war.

there is a lot of historical revisionism, and people forget too easily, but contrarily to what current debates would have you think, france didn't wait for 9/11 and "islamic terrorism" to viciously hate north-africans.

france didn't wait for the bataclan attack to drown 300 algerians in the seine.

a country that does not reckon with its colonial past (and present!) cannot demand of its colonial subjects and their descendants to simply accept their place as second class citizens in silence.

this is what you will not hear on bfmtv and cnews: to be muslim today in this country, to be maghrebi, mostly means to be proletarian. it imported our grandparents and our parents as cheap labor. it built itself on our resources and keeps building itself with our hands.

no one wants to talk about class and no one wants to talk about imperialism and its ongoing consequences. no one wants to go back to 1830 and ask the hard questions of colonial responsibility - it is much easier to spew bullshit about halal meat being the root of all evil.

no one, not even the supposed radical left of LFI, those "islamo-leftists" we hear so much about, dares raise the subject in the mainstream discourse. people hate speaking plainly in this country.

i'm glad some do insist on bringing up the fact we need to examine socioeconomic factors, and also financial links of the french state itself with saudi arabia, etc; but when will we start connecting the dots back to imperialism past and present?

when will we finally highlight france's role in the systematic destruction of arab socialism in africa and west asia, and how that reverberates on french soil, too?

when will we seriously analyze the right-wing obsession with the ~conspirational alliance between the left (communists) and muslims (immigrants)~ *in the context of anti-revolutionary propaganda*, as a rhetoric that is *fundamentally anti-worker*?