Fanon

Frantz Fanon's Condoning of Violence in the context of warfare: The Wretched of the Earth vs. their subjugators

In French-occupied Algeria, the Black author and French-born doctor France Fanon came to the conclusion that violence was justified and necessary to liberate the developing, colonized world from the tyranny of Europe. The torture of the French police and the selective use of assassination in the war for liberation, Fanon concluded, allowed for a no holds barred attitude to colonial rule. "National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth, whatever may be the new headings introduced, de-colonization is always a violent phenomenon," because it involves the substitution of one people, namely the oppressors, for another people. (35) Thus, Fanon saw the de-colonization process as wedded with, as well as parallel with, the Marxist philosophy of history, of dialectical materialism, whereby another class of persons replaced one class.

De-colonization is a program of "complete disorder," albeit a temporary one, for a positive goal of human liberation and restoration of native rule. "The settler owes his very existence, that is his property, to colonialism," and thus has no right to condemn warfare merely on the merits of its violence. (36) Frantz Fanon does not idealize violence, nor glory in its trappings but he feels that any system that was eked out in violence and warfare must be undone by the same means, as land will not be yielded willingly by those who profit from the colonialist system of rule. It is disingenuous for settlers or colonial, European residents of Africa to assume a moral superiority before the colonized warfare when it was by unbalanced means of warfare that their livelihoods in the colonies were won. After a successful period of de-colonization, "the first shall be last," and the first have never yielded to the last, says Fanon, without a bloody resistance.

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1965.