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Macron arrives in New Caledonia amid calls for France to drop voting changes
(www.theguardian.com)
It's so easy to forget that the colonial empires of France, UK, US, etc. live on to this day. In The Wretched of the Earth, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon recounts treating a French policeman in Algeria during the Algerian fight for independence from French colonial rule circa 1962:
"Sometimes," he went on to explain, "you feel like telling them that if they had any consideration for us, they'd cough up and not force us to spend hours on end squeezing the information out of them word by word. But you might as well talk to the wall. Every question gets the answer: 'I don't know.' Even when we ask for their names. If we ask them where they live, they answer, 'I don't know.' So of course we had to give them the works. But they scream too much. At first it made me laugh. But then it began to unnerve me. Today I can tell just which stage the interrogation has reached by the sound of the screams. The guy who has been punched twice and given a blow behind the ear has a certain way of talking, screaming, and saying that he is innocent. After he has been hanging by his wrists for two hours, his voice changes. After the bathtub, a different voice. And so on. But it's after the electricity that it becomes unbearable. You'd think he was going to die at any moment. Of course there are those who don't scream: those are the hardliners. But they imagine we are going to kill them immediately. But we're not interested in killing them. What we want is information. We first try and get them to scream, and sooner or later they give in. That's already a victory. Then we continue. Mind you, we'd prefer not to. But they don't make things easy for us. Now I can hear those screams even at home. Especially the screams of the ones who died at the police headquarters.
Fanon also says that rape by French cops and soldiers was commonplace during the Algerian War of independence. This was in 1962, not the 1800's! France also continues to exploit many of the African countries that were once colonial subjects through currency manipulation and other mechanisms.