Kanafani was born on April 8, 1936 in Acre, Palestine. He lived with his family in Jaffa until they were forced to leave during the Nakba ("catastrophe") of 1948 and finally settled in Damascus. After living in a refugee camp, he later began working as a teacher in a refugee camp for the UNRWA to help support his family and continue his studies. His experience in the refugee camps is reflected in much of his works.
While studying Arabic literature at the University of Damascus he became interested in politics and met the then leader of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) George Habash, with whom he began to work. After teaching several years in Kuwait, where he was diagnosed with acute diabetes, Kanafani moved to Beirut to work on al-Hurriyya ("Independence") magazine at the invitation of Habash.
In 1961 he married Danish professor Anni Hoover, who had come to Beirut to study the refugee situation and in 1962 he published his first major book, Men in the Sun *, immediately acclaimed throughout the Arab world. Both as a journalist and as a writer, Kanafani was very prolific in the 1960s when Palestinian resistance and armed struggle increased (the PLO was founded in 1965).
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was founded in 1967 to replace the Movement of Arab Nationalists and Kanafani became director of al-Hadaf, the party's organ. With a clear Marxist orientation, the PFLP pledged to resist the occupation of Palestine and establish in Palestine a single state with a new secular society based on social justice. The period between 1970 and 1972 was rich in political and armed activity, and at that time Kanafani was a member of the PFLP politburo in addition to being its spokesperson.
The PFLP considered the fight against the Israeli occupation to be anti-colonial resistance. After the defeats of 1948 and, especially, 1967, the struggle in the cultural sphere was fundamental to recover a daily Palestinian national identity that was in danger due to dispersion and ethnic and cultural cleansing. It was the first step to recover his country.
He was assassinated along with his 17-year-old niece Lamees on July 8, 1972 in Beirut by a car bomb planned by Mossad and very possibly with the collusion of the Lebanese authorities.
-- PFLP Ghassan Kanafani, Richard Carleton interview COMPLETE
-- The Dupes, 1973 Syrian Film based on the book by Kanafani "Men in the Sun"
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
- β€οΈFoundations of Leninism
- β€οΈAnarchism and Other Essays
Fun fact you learn about him in the school curriculum
What communist figures do westerners learn about ?
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Brezhnev, Castro, Guevara, Allende, Mao, Tito and I do recall getting some stuff about Lumumba. This was in Sweden.
I recall it being fairly positive about all of them other than Stalin and Brezhnev. Mao was pretty mixed. It is pretty interesting in that relations between China and Sweden have taken a nosedive since I left school, so I would guess it would be a lot less positive about Mao today.
The reason for Allende is that there are a lot of Chilean communists that fled to Sweden during the Pinochet years, third largest Chilean diaspora in the world behind Argentina and the US.
Forgot about Ho Chi Minh, he was also depicted very positively.
What was mixed about Mao that he did not experience the same treatment as Stalin
The winter war. Sweden paints Finland as the plucky little underdog the same way that Finland itself does, can hardly recall the Nazis even being mentioned during that module. Also some stuff about the Extradition of the Balts post ww2 which some nationalists see as a national sin, especially since it had come up again post dissolution of the USSR. We have a lot more anti communists that ran away from the USSR than China.
The standard teaching of WW2 also includes the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact but excludes that none of the Allies were willing to help the Soviet Union contain Hitler.
Mao is mostly just that he implemented some bad policies leading to a lot of death which was regrettable, but overall he vastly improved China. Stalin was painted as malicious whereas Mao was incompetent in some ways while still overall positive.
Thatβs a lot of people damn
In school ??
Yeah, they are part of the history module from elementary to high school. A lot of these are still in it from the Olof Palme days when Sweden was marginally cool.
Wonder how much it has changed now as the succdems have moved further right and the conservative bloc has been in power for the last couple of decades.
It was like being taught by Twitter liberals when I was at school. Mao was really bad of course. I had one teacher who praised communism, but said "it wasn't real communismβ’".
A funny anecdote is when my history teacher rattled off some 'communist dictators' and mentioned Tito. My Yugoslav immigrant friend's eyes lit up that moment, and after the lesson he went up to the teacher to sing the praises of Tito, while the teacher sat there looking puzzled.
Mostly about Fidel Castro in MΓ©xico
Good or bad ?
Good i would say, just how they are unjustly embargo by the US plus that we help them
π«‘
marx - head in the clouds idealist in the colloquial sense
lenin - good ideas bad execution
stalin - literally hitler
ulbricht - basically putin
edit: oh how also Liebknecht&Luxemburg but more as a footnote, unfortunate killings during a tumultuous time,
That's shocking tbh, even through university the entirety of the USSR was painted as cartoonishly evil in my experience
i think may depend on where in the west? perhaps its different in usamerica but here in
in high school we were pretty much taught that the USSR was a nice idea but the leftist infighting that left stalin in charge doomed everything
but then again my teacher was chill with us openly siding with the soviets, so maybe she was just particularly cool
Yeah pretty much this. Its the old "communism only works in theory" trope. Marx&Lenin -> the theory Stalin&Ulbricht -> the praxis.
It's no wonder we got the "China is capitalist because it works" school of thought
oh absolutely they would sooner cut their own tongue out than admit to a failure of capitalism. The runaway success of China can only be because they do capitalism better, the only thing left to solve is how we can do capitalism as good as china without becoming
AUTHORITARIAAAAAN
Who tf is Ulbricht ?
I think they are referring to Walter Ulbricht, a Weimar era German Communist.
first secretary of the socialist unity party the communist party of the GDR aka east germany. the guy behind the berlin wall
The thing is you cant look at tsarist russia and not think "wow thats really fucked up". Plus liberals hate monarchies as well and thats why the "good ideas" we are taught essentially boil down to "monarchy bad". Revolution is good if its against monarchies after all but then he just had to go One Step Too Far. In essence the narrative I got taught is february revolution good, but by october revolution things had gotten out of control, the unwashed masses were in control and open riot and poor war-torn russia (how did get this bad
) couldnt deal with the rabble in a Civilized Manner. Thats also how Stalin rose to power by feeding the mob-justice impulse of the stupid farmworkers.
I keep encountering liberals who are fine with monarchies >.>
What country are you from habibi ?
germany
Itβs interesting seeing other peopleβs experiences bc in my school in Texas I donβt feel like we ever really touched on specific communists, we just (briefly) talked about communism as a concept and how inferior it was to capitalism bc of who owns cows and such lol. There was like a foot note about Marx being the βfatherβ of communism but then we hurried on to American (revisionist) history
Well we never touched on his communism because we are usually focused on Palestinian history but he is a well known Arab communist and his literary work is taught
And itβs great
In Puerto Rico the education is so lackluster that not only do we not learn anything about the USSR, they couldn't even be bothered to give us a chapter of anti-Castro propaganda. People still generally hate Castro but it's a lot easier to turn that upside down when you help people realize they know literally nothing about Cuba.
What do they hate Castro ?
Most of them will only know about Castro from oral tradition passed down from the Red Scare days. It's just one of those things that is believed without questioning because until recently it was hard to get your hands on sources that would disprove the lies: Castro was a dictator because he was a dictator. In Cuba they get so hungry that they eat babies. In Venezuela the people have to eat their dogs because the government took all the food. Etc. etc.
You gotta remember that we're a US colony (not neocolony, a literal old school colony) and all our media is controlled by the US. We had particularly hot fighting between National Liberation groups and the colonial government in the 50s, 60s, and 70s during which time the US took full advantage of the mass media to demonize leftists. Imagine how effective Condor was in the rest of Latin America, but multiply it by 4 because they didn't even have to pretend to respect local sovereignty.
I'm from the Northeast US (demonrat blue state) and the woke liberal education I got was that communism starved people and everyone was poor because the communists used their authoritarianism to steal from the middle class and fund their vacations.
A lot of the anti-communist education was -> they had good ideas -> evil bad cult of personality comes in and quite literally enslaves everyone -> all the people are poor and sad.
Most of my peers know this is bullshit so they go on the internet to "discover" the true history but are funneled into the liberal zionism pipeline where they somehow love Cuba but think we should nuke China.
We learned about Stalin a lot during the 5 times we had Orwell books. All negative anticommunist drivel, nothing specific really