Fanon, Violence, and Decolonization

"In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives.  For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between two protagonists." - Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Decolonization is messy.  Oppression, murder, and torture at the hands of colonial overlords generate a tidal wave of unrestrained violence among the masses.  For the last to become the first, the entire social order is turned on its head in a bloodstained confrontation.  By the same token, Franz Fannn's Wretched of the Earth shows that the unchecked violence of the masses is a symbol of an authentic struggle for liberation.

Because the colonized are infinitely repressed, their revolutionary violence takes a reckless form.  According to Fanon, "decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation."  These two forces are natural enemies in a zero-sum struggle for power and self-determination.  However, this antagonism is unnatural to their essence as individual people.  Only the system of colonialism can engender diametrically opposed interests among two groups of people.  As "things," or products of a particular mode of capitalist exploitation, the colonizers and colonized assume specific interests unique to their relationship.  These interests exist at birth.  Still, the colonizers need the colonized, but the opposite is not true.

The reification of the colonized is overcome only when the "thing" colonized becomes human through liberation.  Fanon argues that "To blow the colonial world to smithereens in henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject."  This imagined violence is liberating, and cathartic for the subaltern classes.  It is brutal, but its spontaneity decimates the authoritarian structure implanted by colonialism.

When the colonized view each other as things, their violence is individualistic and directed toward each other.  For the colonized, the urge to have the last word - a product of Western individualism - is suicidal.  Franz Fanon points out that "One of the ways the colonized subject releases his muscular tension through the very real collective self-destruction of these intercine feuds." The theory of the American inner city as a colony is debatable, but this form of self-slaughter is unmistakably apparent today.  Inner city minorities readily kill each other over gang violence or simple interpersonal feuds.  Fanon continues that:

At the individual level we witness a general negation of common sense.  Whereas the colonist police officer can beat the colonized subject day in and day out, insult him, shove him to his knees, it is not uncommon to see the colonized subject draw his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from another colonized subject.  For the colonized subject's last resort is to defend his personality against his fellow countrymen.

A "death wish in the face of danger," this catharsis is not only self destructive.  It reaffirms the colonizer's justification of his oppression.  He perceives this to be the basis of his moral and intellectual superiority.

The cooptation of the colonial intellectuals by the colonizers creates a dilemma for liberation.  According to the Europeans, their colonial subjects destroy and corrupt western values and represent the pinnacle of evil.  Still, once decolonization is on the horizon, the colonizer seeks to implant western values among the indigenous intellectuals.  The intellectual subjects will argue that nationalization, but only as the national theft of the land from the people.  Cooptation's primary aim is to secure the most important sector of the economy: the exploitation of the land.  Fanon argues that this can be prevented: "Whenever an authentic liberation struggle has been fought, wherever the blood of the people has been shed and the armed phase has lasted long enough to encourage the intellectuals to withdraw to their rank and file base, there is an effective eradication of the superstructure borrowed by these intellectuals from the colonialist bourgeois circles."  Individualism, the last hold out of western imperial values,  can be overcome by the spontaneous and collective violence.