Whites in Post-Colonial States & Nat Lib

In one book that I'm currently reading The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times the author claims that the MPLA actually had significant sympathy from a portion of white angolans (Portuguese settlers) and that some even went as far as joining the MPLA to fight against Portugal which still had a fascist government at the time.

According to wikipedia many whites fled the fighting during the 70s to Portugal but once they arrived in Portugal, they were given just a few weeks to choose whether they would take Portuguese or Angolan citizenship. Apparently a sizable minority of them chose Angolan citizenship and left the "mother country" to go home to live under a nominally "communist" government that experienced multiple bloody civil wars.

As of 2014, the white population in Angola is the second largest outside of SA according to wikipedia (est. 220,000).

The book in the second pic has an interesting thesis it argues that after WWII between 4-7 million "Europeans" re-immigrated from the former colonies. The largest sources of these were French-Algerians, Portuguese-Africans (largely from Angola), and Dutch-Indonesians. Many of these people were not "white" in the sense that racial fetishists use the term. I have a friend who is Dutch-Indonesian, his family fled the fighting that occurred under Sukarno, although he doesn't really bear any ill-will against Indonesia and even defended it when I said it was an Islamist shithole today.

I don't really agree with the discriminatory policies of bourgeois nationalists like Mugabe and the FLN against white-settlers but I don't defend Apartheid or colonial rule either. To me this is such a fascinating topic and its interesting to think about as an American with roots going back to the colonial era. Of course, its not just in acknowledged settler-colonies where "whites" have left a mark, in the Caribbean, Latin America, in small islands (particularly in Oceania and the Indian Ocean) across the world it can be said that people of European-descent have left their mark all over the world. Perhaps its unacknowledged ethnic pride thats behind my interest in this but what fascinates me about the subject intellectually is that "white people" are not a monolith and any determinist reading of history based on genetics is wrong.

Even some independence leaders like Castro and France-Albert René were of European descent. Hopefully we can discuss the topic without Holla Forums but I know that's not going to happen

Other urls found in this thread:

ciml.250x.com/africa/zimbabwe/zimbabwe_statement_comintern_sh_12_12_2012.html
truthdig.com/report/item/the_eternal_rebel_ronnie_kasrils_20130623
spiegel.de/international/europe/tens-of-thousands-of-portuguese-emigrate-to-fast-growing-angola-a-833360.html
nai.uu.se/news/articles/2017/04/11/105609/index.xml
imi.ox.ac.uk/files/events/akesson_moving-south_understanding-the-development-potential-of-the-new-portuguese-migration-to-angola.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugabe_and_the_White_African
youtube.com/watch?v=DV8Et55JxKM
youtube.com/watch?v=FaIwI3teVlU
youtube.com/watch?v=4Vzk5QBg9a8
suidlanders.org/white-privilege-south-africa-fact-fiction/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

I want minorities everywhere to be protected and to not have to live in fear of an oppressive majority. The fact that in some places the oppressed minority of today was the oppressive minority of yesterday does seem to change things a bit though. It makes the situation of (for example) Copts in Egypt who have been an oppressed minority for a millennia appear different from the descendants of white colonists who were the oppressors a couple generations ago. Forgive and forget I guess, what else can we do? I saddens me that many people who called the former colonies their homes felt the need to flee back to a mother country they never knew out of fear of oppression. Still, it seems a little deaf to the people's cries to say that "Hey, member how your entire way of life and culture was destroyed by the grandfathers of these guys that ruled you just a little while ago? Well, just forgive em! They're totally sorry about it I'm sure!"

If the descendants of former oppressors don't have much effective power anymore, hating on them makes as much sense as Germans hating Italians because of the Roman empire.

White's are duplicitous vessels of evil.

Ignore the apostrophe.

What is even the question? People don't want to be minorities unless they're part of a controlling elite? Yeah no fucking shit.

I repost this a lot but it essentially sums up my thoughts on the matter:


. In its “Resolution about the South African Question”, the former Comintern correctly stated:

“ (…) South Africa belongs to the native population. (…) In its propaganda among the native masses the Communist Party of South Africa must emphasize the class differences between the white capitalists and the white workers, the latter also being exploited by the bourgeoisie as wage slaves (…) black and white workers are not only allies, but are the leaders of the revolutionary struggle (…) intensive propagation of the chief slogan of a native republic will result not in the alienation of the white workers from the Communist Party, not in segregation of the natives, but, on the contrary, in the building up of a solid united front of all toilers against capitalism and imperialism.” (Documents of the former Comintern, Resolution about the South African Question, adopted by the Executive Committee of the Communist International following the Sixth Comintern congress in 1928, version in English language)
These words were about South Africa, but they are also totally applicable to Zimbabwe’s situation.

Therefore, if white Zimbabweans toilers are also exploited and subjected to wage slavery just like black Zimbabwean workers, there is no reason why they should not unite and seize power all together. Contrary to what ZANU’s leaders declare, this is not a question of sharing of power between different races. In the context of the struggle for socialism and communism there are no races, but only classes. So, instead of being so worried about preventing the share of power with whites, ZANU’s leaders should have strived for preventing the share of power with the exploitative elements – independently of their skin color. They should have fought for the union between both white and black repressed workers. But they could have done this only if they were true communists, if they were true Marxist-Leninists – and this was not the case. Consequently, they played racists’ game and ultimately defended the further division between native and white Zimbabwean toilers.

ZANU tends to see everything from a race perspective instead of from a class perspective:

“In Zimbabwe, (…) the exploiters (…) are exclusively white, while the exploited are all black Africans. The struggle in Zimbabwe is a racial war.” (H. Chitepo, Speech of the national chairman of ZANU to the 6th Panafrican Congress, Zimbabwe News, Volume 8, Noº 6 - June 1974, translated from version in German language)

If there were still doubts about ZANU’s anti-Marxist leanings, this statement dissipates all of them.
ciml.250x.com/africa/zimbabwe/zimbabwe_statement_comintern_sh_12_12_2012.html

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IIRC most of the "French" Algerians/Pied Noirs were actually the descendants of settlers from other southern European countries like Spain, Malta, Italy, etc with French citizens comprising a plurality if anything. Also the French government gave citizenship to every Jewish Algerian soon after the conquest.

Good point.

Mugabe started off as an anti-racis revolutionary, buolding cross-tribal and cross-racial ties, and had a bunch of radical Rhodesian whites as allies. The British state and the racist Rhodesian lobby however was successful in breaking up these early alliance by inserting as much paranoia into information war as possible and Mugabe fell for the bait. This always happens in colonial politics.
my greatest arguments against post-colonial theory that post-colonialism never really happened, capitalism just replaced its methods of rule over africa and asia, fanon wrote about that too

I'd like to hear more about this, maybe some part of this legacy carried over to the present as the article I posted earlier pointed out that Zimbabwe had only one white minister. Even he was fairly critical:

On a slightly related note, white-radical Ronnie Kasrils held a pretty high-position in the ANC government: truthdig.com/report/item/the_eternal_rebel_ronnie_kasrils_20130623

He's recently said he feels like they've betrayed their mission and their constituents.

Something I'm curious about since I'm a burger does anyone on the Left really defend the expulsion of the pied noirs by the Algerians? I realize that really only Frenchfags even give a shit and even DeGaulle was kinda meh about the whole French Algeria thing but the expulsion of one million people seems like a bit much?

What were the circumstances behind that? Could it be considered genocide?

bump

I wouldn't think so, since the terms of the agreement for Algeria's independence were that the pied noirs would be allowed to remain in Algeria without hassle. Unfortunately the French underestimated how Islamic Algerian nationalism and the FLN was

Islam was at best used as rallying grounds, overall Algerian nationalism and the FLN were pretty much secular. Not sure how this is supposed to play into all this anyway.

Why did they leave? Was it war? poor economic conditions? Or were they forced to leave? I've heard it said in history books in passing that they were forced to leave but it didn't see how, what the world reaction was, and how many pied-noirs were actually left to force out after independence.

Given the atrocities both the FLN, the OAS, and pied noir groups were committing in Algeria - and that the pied noirs were only something like ~10% of the population - I think the mass exodus was inevitable regardless of any agreement between the French government and the FLN.

Which is an interesting contrast to the Angolan situation which was less of a racial conflict then a proxy-battlefield for the super-powers. In both cases, the whites fled to the "home" country but in the Angolan case it was more from the peril of war then it was out of any kind of ethnic persecution or fear.

There seems to be no long-term enmity as job-less Portuguese have immigrated en masse to former Portuguese colonies like Mozambique and Angola (which still has a sizable "settler" population):
spiegel.de/international/europe/tens-of-thousands-of-portuguese-emigrate-to-fast-growing-angola-a-833360.html
nai.uu.se/news/articles/2017/04/11/105609/index.xml
imi.ox.ac.uk/files/events/akesson_moving-south_understanding-the-development-potential-of-the-new-portuguese-migration-to-angola.pdf

By contrast, I can't imagine a similar situation occurring with tens of thousands of French youth a year leaving to go to Algeria or the Ivory Coast.

The Évian accords did state that the pieds-noirs would be allowed to remain in Algeria. However, the relationship between Algerian natives and European settlers had deteriorated so badly that it showed no sign of recovering. The exodus of the pieds-noirs started even before the accords were signed as word got around among the community that eventually they'd have to choose between "la valise ou le cercueil" (the bags or the grave).

They weren't exactly wrong. The FLN-sponsored revenge killings of Harkis (pro-French Algerian natives) started as soon as the French army withdrew. Then there was the Oran massacre of 1962: a bunch of Europeans shot at FLN troops and the response was the mass lynchings of pieds-noirs — 700+ died during the course of savage killings. It was sort of a macabre echo to the Sétif massacre of 1945 and the Philippeville massacre of 1955, when European militias and the French military responded to attacks on pieds-noirs by the indiscriminate mass-murder of thousands upon thousands of Algerian civilians.

As if this was not enough, e right-wing paramilitary consisting mostly of renegade elements from the French army called the Organisation Armée Secrète (Secret Armed Organization) started a spiteful string of terror attacks around that time too — targeting not only alleged supporters of the FLN in metropolitan France (writers, journalists, communists, etc) but also random Algerians in the street. They killed more than 2,000 in the span of a year. It's also highly likely they're responsible for the 1961 Vitry-le-François train derailment which killed 24 and remained the most deadly terror attack in France until the 2015 Paris suicide bombings. And let's not forget that had their 1962 tank truck attack on a Algiers shantytown gone according to plan, it might have killed up to 3,000 by itself alone.

The Algerian War was absolutely hysterical.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul

tl;dr the Allied powers handed over tens of thousands of "Soviet" citizens after WW2 in exchange for Western POWs, many of the "Soviet" citizens handed over being White Russian emigres that had fled the Russian Civil War

I'm sure this thread will get swarmed by tankie apologists after posting that, but it was fucked up regardless, along with the attempts by Allied nations to write it off as a "necessary sacrifice" (given that practically every Allied nation just acquiesced to Stalin's demands without negotiation)

Fuck em

I skimmed this, and I'm not seeing the big sadness of it. They were civilians I guess, and it is ficked to ask for people to kill. Not as sad as brutally murdering the enemy imo, but still fucked. I love how every fucking liberal would be like "Wow duck the Soviets" even though the Americans played a huge part. Yet the blame would be on one side.

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I'm mad now.

holy fuck

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugabe_and_the_White_African
Is this actually a good movie? Or is it reactionary 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧propaganda🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧?

Holy shit user you discovered what the rest of the non-braindead non-burger world knew already. You want a medal for escaping Holla Forums?? What is truly intellectually fascinating is how people in current year can believe such retarded things in the first place.

propaganda is a hell of a drug. Don't act as though other nations don't have ridiculous ideology too.

Which is exactly why there are 'muh white race' nationalists all over Europe and its non-american off-shoots, right?

You don't have to be an asshole; I never came from Holla Forums I've always been left-wing ever since the time I became politically aware. Even before I was very political I'd say I was a essentially a left-liberal as a teenager without really knowing it. I've been left since before Holla Forums and Holla Forums even existed.


This.

This board needs to have a real discussion on what colonial systems were actually like, and what being a "white colonial" meant for those who lived it:

youtube.com/watch?v=DV8Et55JxKM

youtube.com/watch?v=FaIwI3teVlU

Here is the same woman critiquing postcolonial theory:

youtube.com/watch?v=4Vzk5QBg9a8

Her perspective is interesting but I'm not quite sure what she's trying to say. What do you think being a "white colonial" meant for those who lived it?

That white colonials weren't a bunch of self-absorbed fucks lounging around at the pool all day whilst being waited on hand and foot by indigenous servants.

Granted, her view is strictly limited to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe but it was no doubt also true of whites in Algeria, Angola, etc.

From what I can tell from the Andrea Smith book most of the white Angolans it seems were actually rather poor. They didn't break much back home with them and most Portuguese blamed them for the shortage of jobs in their country when they came "home". Amazingly, the influx of white Angolans was so large that it constituted a 10% increase in Portugal's population.

As far as Dutch Indonesia goes many people there had been there for centuries and research on it indicates that many white and mixed Indonesians were surprisingly poor prior to WWII. Dutch women were targeted for rape by the Japanese during the occupation and suffered other crimes done to them not unlike what the Japanese did to native Indonesians. I don't know much about their position during the independence wars and how they faired.

The fact that there are poor whites in the colonial world shouldn't be surprising. The class system has always been part of colonialism and imo it is both integral to and overshadows it.

Perhaps Kenya is the African nation where whites fit the stereotype that you allude to but this has to do with the fact that white immigration was both relatively small, and most importantly, it had the largest amount of settlement by British aristocrats of any colony in the British Empire.

If any group of whites deserved to be kicked out of Africa it was the Kenyan whites who brought on the gulag system in Kenya that killed 300,000 prisoners, incarcerated 2 million Kenyans and perpetrated the most barbaric tortures.

Louis Althusser mentioned how most of the pied-noirs had been Alsaciens and Mosellans who were deported to Algeria after the Franco-Prussian War for wanting to remain French after Prussia annexed said regions. They were definitely colonials but they weren't rich or powerful by any means.

That's interesting, I've heard it said that though most Pied Noirs were fairly poor and working class despite their relatively p.rivileged position in comparison to the average Arab.Looking at pictures of pied noir Algeria before the war is really like looking into another world..

Anybody got any good information on the white South African working class? I found this piece but nothing else really good or informative from a Marxist perspective.


hnedwinmason.typepad.com/john_edwin_mason_photogra/2010/04/south-africa-poor-whites.html

suidlanders.org/white-privilege-south-africa-fact-fiction/