National Liberation Front
Political partyWikipedia
23
MENTIONS
8
EPISODES
7
PODCASTS
Search complete. 23 mentions across 8 episodes found for "National Liberation Front".
Oct 1, 2026
C. Derick VarnHOST
Okay.
C. Derick VarnHOST
But when everyone thinks of national fronts, what they actually think of is, uh, Viet Minh/National Liberation, uh, Front and Army in Vietnam, the FLN in Algeria, the F-R-E-L-I-M-O in Mozambique, and the MPLA in Angola.
Brandon LightlyGUEST
Mm-hmm.
C. Derick VarnHOST
And those are the national fronts.
Brandon LightlyGUEST
Yeah.
C. Derick VarnHOST
Um, but I'll just leave it at that.
C. Derick VarnHOST
Like, but so in the F- so the FLN you have so many things you have to deal with, 'cause you have religious tensions, you have how do you, what do you do with the descendants of the French who are not, who are willing to side with the FLN? You have both North African and I'm gonna put it in quotation marks, "Sub-Saharan," AKA Black-
Brandon LightlyGUEST
Mm-hmm
Mark PurcellGUEST
And really it does paragraph to paragraph, it can change.
Mark PurcellGUEST
And certainly this is more so true in both Black Skin and The Wretched of the Earth because those books are so much less tight than those FLN essays or the psychiatric work.
Mark PurcellGUEST
And, you know, of course, we have to do this rigorously.
Mark PurcellGUEST
And, you know, just because a text is being interpreted by the reader doesn't mean that we can say whatever we want.
16 MINS LATER
Mark PurcellGUEST
They are able to write and create and produce new things.
Mark PurcellGUEST
You know, similarly to the way Stephen asked about this in the questions, the way that Fanon characterizes the Algerians as producing a new Algeria at the same time that the colonial, the anti-colonial war was going on.
Mark PurcellGUEST
You know, I don't, I don't kind of, I don't take Fanon at his word there because I think the way the FLN thought about it was that the French had to be destroyed and then a new Algeria could come to exist.
Mark PurcellGUEST
But Fanon and the FLN together, the collective that they wrote under the name of, you know, very often would say these two things are happening at the same time.
John MerrimanHOST
Algeria was French.
John MerrimanHOST
They were opposed by the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale, which was very similar to the Viet Minh in Vietnam.
John MerrimanHOST
And the resistance was also very, as one would reasonably expect, with Islam, with the Muslim world.
John MerrimanHOST
Three events in 1956 hardened the lines between the colons, that is the settlers, and Algerians fighting for independence.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
It has a very special status since the Third Republic.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
And, um, and in 1954, when the, uh, FLN, the, um, the Algerian Liberation Army starts its rebellion against, against France, Algeria is part of France, right? Constitutionally speaking.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
So, uh, initially, it's three départements, so the same that were created under the revolution, and these three départements are constitutionally part of France.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
In a way, that's not true in, let's say, uh, Morocco or Tunisia, right? Morocco or Tunisia are ruled as territories, essentially colonial territories, but that's not the case in Algeria.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
I've been told that, you know, in Israeli academies, they watch the Battle of Algiers as a model for counterinsurgency because essentially it was working.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
Where it didn't work so well is, is, as you say, ni- in 1958.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
So the, the French bomb a, a village essentially in Tunisia that is training FLN members, so members of the Algerian Liberation Army, and, and this is catastrophic because many civilians die in the process.
Charles DevellennesGUEST
So after this, uh, this episode, we see, uh, a kind of an acceleration of, of the army's involvement in, in Algeria, and then it leads to the May 1958 events, which, you know, historians now agree.
Mikey MuhannaHOST
How did this fuel and shape the eventual war of independence and revolution internally? Like, was this, I mean, yeah, let me just ask it simply.
Mikey MuhannaHOST
Like, how did this basically shape the structure and sort of philosophy of the FLN and that moment of independence? And who were some of the key players it would be useful to talk about?
Muriam Haleh DavisGUEST
Sure.
Muriam Haleh DavisGUEST
In terms of the FLN, I think it's important to keep in mind that despite the FLN's own assertions, the FLN are not the first nationalists that are asking for separatism, that want a nation state.
Muriam Haleh DavisGUEST
And so the history of Marxist thought and communist thought is very imbricated in the early history of Algerian nationalism.
Muriam Haleh DavisGUEST
It's one strain.
Muriam Haleh DavisGUEST
So, for example, if you're thinking about the strand, the first strand I mentioned, Massali Hajj, who is considered the father of Algerian nationalism, and his first organizing attempts come in conjunction with the French Communist Party in France, right? So he is initially working in these Marxist communist circles of Algerian workers who had gone to the metropole to work in factories.
Muriam Haleh DavisGUEST
after World War I, but especially after World War II.
Gary ArndtHOST
For many Algerians, this led them to believe that only an armed struggle could end European rule.
Gary ArndtHOST
And this all came to a head in nineteen fifty-four when the Front de Liberation Nationale, or the FLN, began to prepare for the Algerian War of Independence.
Gary ArndtHOST
The Algerian War was a brutal fight between the FLN and France.
Gary ArndtHOST
It's considered to be one of the most important anti-colonial struggles in all of history.
Gary ArndtHOST
The FLN used guerrilla tactics and urban attacks against the French military and the Pied-Noirs.
Gary ArndtHOST
Since Algeria was considered a part of France, the fighting was fierce.
Gary ArndtHOST
The French government responded with heavy counterinsurgency measures, and many Europeans there saw independence as a betrayal.
Gary ArndtHOST
Both sides of the conflict committed serious war crimes.
Dalia GebrialHOST
And it's like, oh, it's like it's such a I think the depths of what the like we are shielded from the consequences of our politics a lot.
Dalia GebrialHOST
You know, it reminds me of and I'm going off tangent and I know that time is running out, but it reminds me of this brilliant scene in one of my favorite films of all time called The Battle of Algiers, which is about kind of the counterinsurgency against Algerian anti-colonialists in the FLN and the way that the French kind of tried to suppress and successfully did initially suppress the Algerian anti-colonial resistance.
Dalia GebrialHOST
And there's this scene where the man who is leading the counterinsurgency, you know, this French army officer, army general, let's say, of the colonial army is doing a press conference to the French, the world's press.
Dalia GebrialHOST
And, you know, these kind of like liberal like journalists put their hand up and they say like, oh, you know, there's been some concern at home about like human rights violations and maybe you're going a bit too far.
Samia HenniGUEST
It's covered from a sort of, you know, hero perspective.
Samia HenniGUEST
So the Algerian government or very specifically the Front de la Libération Nationale, so the National Liberation Front, has always been somehow celebrating itself, its victory against France.
Samia HenniGUEST
So we studied extensively the revolution, the revolutionary and mujahideen and mujahidat as well.
Samia HenniGUEST
So that's what I know, let's say, from a more kind of pedagogic or academic perspective.