Frantz Fanon, born on this day in 1925, was a West Indian Pan-Africanist philosopher and Algerian revolutionary most known for his text The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon was born to an affluent family on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony which is still under French control today. As a teenager, he was taught by communist anti-colonial thinker Aimé Césaire (1913 - 2008).
Fanon was exposed to much European racism during World War II. After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, a Nazi government was set up in Martinique by French collaborators, whom he describedas taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists".
Fighting for the Allied forces, Fanon also observed European women liberated by black soldiers preferring to dance with fascist Italian prisoners rather than fraternize with their liberators.
While completing a residency in psychiatry in France completing, Fanon wrote and published his first book, "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952), an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon black people.
Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale, a nationalist Algerian party. Working at a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon became responsible for treating the psychological distress of the French troops who carried out torture to suppress anti-colonial resistance, as well as their Algerian victims.
While organizing for Algerian independence in Ghana, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia that would ultimately kill him. He spent the last year of his life writing his most famous work, "The Wretched of the Earth" (French: Les Damnés de la Terre). The text provides a psychiatric analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization and examines the possibilities of anti-colonial liberation
Following a trip to the Soviet Union to treat his leukemia, Fanon came to the U.S. in 1961 for further treatment in a visit arranged by the CIA. Fanon died in Bethesda, Maryland on December 6th, 1961 under the name of "Ibrahim Fanon", a Libyan nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital after being wounded during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.
"In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself."
Biography :fanon:
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Is matapacos down?
The actual domain is still up (you can go to just plain matapacos.dog, which I now learned redirects to readsettlers.org after 15 seconds), but the Mastodon instance doesn't seem to be reachable, at least not through a browser.
@PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net
Looks one of the processes got stuck. Possibly Redis. I rebooted the server and it ~~appears to be working now~~ is broken in a different way. I'll try to diagnose the problem.
Update: Tentatively, it seems to be working, but there is still a backlog of events that the server needs to catch up on. It looks like the Redis process got reaped by the OOM killer seconds after midnight, when some automated daily process was triggered.
Update 2: Sidekiq is reporting about 30 minutes latency on the pull queue, down from 23 hours. The number is climbing though. This means federated posts may only become visible to you after this delay. It should settle down in a couple hours.
It's back