Frantz Fanon was a central figure to the anti-colonial movements that arose in the so-called third world in the latter part of the last century, in the countries that were at the tail end of the decolonization era. His influence as an inspirator can hardly be underestimated, and it spread to various anti-racist leftist movements in the co-called first world too.
He embodied the ideology that always arises where there is discernible injustices and oppression: that of opposing military might with military means, and with slight concern for the civilians that get caught in the middle. It is the streak in anti-oppression movements that loathe pacifism and the tactics of people like MLK and Gandhi. It was certainly an inspiration to Malcolm X, and the Black Panther movement. It is likely an inspiration for Hamas.
One might be tempted to approve of his thinking and the explicit condoning of violence, and argue that it no different that the violence perpetrated by the colonizers, occupiers, oppressors. But careful analysis seems to me indicate that there is a difference - the societies liberated by such ideologies become unruly as they essentially condone violence as means to an end, and might be why societies like South Africa are now riddled with violence like almost no other country in the world.
We need to get away from this endless downward spiral of violence. The only viable alternative seems to be appealing to the conscience of the honorable people that make up the bulk of any society, even though they might be caught up as cogs in an oppressive machinery. The powerful should be given the chance to demonstrate that they are not in fact the monsters that they may appear to be in the eyes of the oppressed. A revival of the philosophy of Gandhi and MLK for our age, in other words.
The South African situation is very nuanced. The ANC had a violent faction, and a more peaceful faction aimed at reconciliation. The well-known Nelson Mandela belonged to the latter faction. Note that I said "more peaceful" and not "peaceful." Nelson Mandela also participated in sabotage attacks during Apartheid.
Those two factions are still alive in the ANC now that it is the ruling party. It just takes a different shape now that violence isn't the modus operandi anymore. You could call it a far-left radical faction, and a moderate faction. The far-left radical faction is heavily influenced by Fanon, they openly admit it. Also on the far-left you have the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) who were kicked out of the ANC for being too far-left. They also claim to be Fanonian. They are openly calling for violence, while simultaneously denying that they are calling for violence.
The violence prevalent in South Africa is caused by a wide array of causes, of which I expect Fanonian thought to be one of the lesser causes (but a cause none-the-less). A bigger cause is an inept and corrupt government by a political party that is still stuck in revolutionary rhetoric 30 years after it's victory. Their inept and corrupt governance caused degradation in law-enforcement, to the point where it is almost non-existent. Pair this with the abject poverty and fatherlessness caused by Apartheid, and you have yourself an unruly and violent populace.
Fanonian thought only factors in when things get political. In my opinion that is less commonplace than the media (both mainstream and otherwise) suggests. Our violence is mostly just normal plain old crime.
Thanks, interesting. Agree, the violence in SA is largely a case of "plain old crime", and I wouldn't know how to prove that it was in some way connected to Fanonian thinking - except intuitively. And also intuitively, a corrupt government that has failed massively to fulfil the expectations of its people surely is a main reason. SA is none the less still an arena where these two philosophies vie for influence, long after independence.
To nuance it further: the ANC was, if I'm not mistaken, originally heavily influenced if not part and parcel of Gandhi's pacifist movement, only to break away through the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, i.e. the armed branch actually founded by Nelson Mandela in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre. That said, the ANC was (and maybe still is) influenced by Gandhian thinking, and never really implemented the policy of including "soft targets" in the tactics with any enthusiasm.
I believe Nelson Mandela embodied this conflict, and more than being clearly on one side tried to balance the factions, and did so with some success. His enduring legacy in my mind is his reconciliation efforts, clearly Gandhi inspired, without which South Africa would perhaps still be embroiled in violent political conflict, a la Palestine.
This seems like a really limited reading of Fanon tbh. His works basically address most of these arguments, which you can then disagree with or not but it's not like he doesn't have a refutation.
In fact at one point you're pointing a fanon-like argument back at him without acknowledging it or its original point:
> the societies liberated by such ideologies become unruly as they essentially condone violence as means to an end
Fanon's claims are consistent with this, he addresses it directly. Except he of course is talking about societies that use colonialist violence as a means to their ends, not those reaching for liberation through violence. Seems relevant here. If those who use violence for liberation are corrupted by it, what does it do to those of us who use it for no great purpose except our own benefit, as our societies certainly have?
You're also conflating military conflict with violence per se, an error that Fanon doesn't make. This elision allows you to draw distinctions between resistance and civilians that doesn't exist as we're seeing so so clearly in gaza right now.
And then, finally, this distinction between "good" peaceful nonviolent resistance and "bad" actively violent resistance is ahistorical. None of these groups or figures consistently considered themselves to be divided in this way. Malcolm X and MLK were allies, that disagreed and opposed each other on some issues, and respected and abetted on others. Successful nonviolent resistance movements generally, certainly the two you mention specifically, are effective because of a radical movement with the will to violence at its flank.
White people negotiate with MLK so that Malcolm X doesn't burn their businesses down. Look at the environmentalist movement for what you can accomplish through peaceful protest without the threat of violence behind it: global scale and decades of mobilization accomplishing almost nothing.
> Fanon's claims are consistent with this, he addresses it directly. Except he of course is talking about societies that use colonialist violence as a means to their ends, not those reaching for liberation through violence. Seems relevant here. If those who use violence for liberation are corrupted by it, what does it do to those of us who use it for no great purpose except our own benefit, as our societies certainly have?
Empirically, societies that employed violence for their own benefit (e.g. the British, the French, the Americans, the Israelis) seem to have suffered very few consequences, whereas the societies that have employed violence to remove them (e.g. the Chinese, the Haitians, the Iranians, the Palestinians) have done very poorly in the aftermath. While there are certainly some negative consequences for strong countries which violently impose themselves on the weak, (e.g. Americans pay for their Middle-East policy by having to take their shoes off at the airport), on the whole it seems like a successful invasion, however bloody it may be for the country invaded, tends to cause relatively few material problems for the invader. If there's any repayment for evil, it must happen in heaven and hell, because hardly anywhere is justice visible on Earth. Like Thucydides said, "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."
I agree that for example Malcolm X and MLK were in large part allies in the Civil Rights Movement, but that is no reason to gloss over their differences. There is obviously a marked difference between the expressed non-violence of Gandhi and MLK vs the militancy of Malcom X and Fanon, the latter who, among other things wrote how "at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force" [0].
He goes on to justify terrorism against civilians, simply for their inadvertent sharing in the profits of oppression. This line of argumentation did not only justify terrorism in the anti-colonial struggle, it is the hallmark of all terrorists everywhere.
I find it insidious, if not uncommon, to claim that pacifist struggle is somehow dependent on violence, that non-violent struggle is only "effective because of a radical movement with the will to violence at its flank". As if violence, or the threat of it, is the only force that can cause movement. There is no such requirement for a non-violent struggle, there are plenty of other pressures beyond violence that can be applied, as MLK demonstrated. Violence is in fact the laziest and most cowardly solution in comparison, one that gives up on human ingenuity and creativity and simply utilizes our basest instincts.
Fanon may or may not have addressed these points in his writing; I confess to having read only "The Wretched of the Earth", and that was quite a few years ago, and at the time bought his arguments, lock, stock, and barrel.
But regardless of his arguments, he was of a different age, one where armed struggle was a thing of outrage and awe. It is a different world now: an age where any teenager can, and do, start a murderous massacre without anyone hardly lifting as much as an eyebrow, and the whole world stands on the precipice of a disastrous nuclear war by pure accident because of our subservience to violence as the only way of solving conflict. The context has shifted and we need other methods than the barrel of a gun. I submit that Gandhi and MLK can be inspirations, if not directly copied.
Reading fanon today, the main thing I get from him that the colonized will lead the struggle for freedom. If we aren't going to help them we should at least get out of the way. Standing in safety and scolding them about their methods is nothing. Just nothing.
This brings up the classic idea of Gandhi and MLK as icons of peace, and the idea that this peace brought about respect and change.
This is only barely true. It's a very selective reading of history, that is very much in the benefit of people who would love it if we all believed in the ideals being espoused.
Furthermore, the statement that societies that are freed by violence then succumb to it, skips a very large part of the equation. Saying it sounds real nice and slots in very nicely with ideals many people want to hold, but it's just not true. Many factors play into the evolution of peoples and regions, and just laser-focusing on the violent means of freeing oneself, leaves behind the impression that only peaceful protest can work. Which never has been the case.
It blames the victims for trying to free themselves in a way that's not beneficial to the oppressor.
Let us not fall into the trap of thinking that peaceful protest actually achieves anything, which leads us nicely into MLK.
People often remember MLK's campaign in Birmingham. Lesser known and barely brought up is the campaign before that, in Albany, Georgia. A 9 month civil disobedience campaign, that achieved nothing, except getting a lot of peaceful protestors thrown in jail for arbitrary reasons. Then people got fed up, and got violent. Riots happened, and after 1 night the police completely retreated. This teaches people: nonviolence doesn't work. It clearly didn't. And violence clearly _did_.
The oppressed should not count on the goodwill of their oppressor. For the oppressor should not exist at all. If the oppressor exists, it is because the individual chose to become the oppressor. They didn't fumble into this without realizing. They did this because they wanted to, because it is in their interest. Miracle stories of historical figures abandoning their way are exactly that: miracles.
Go and tell a poor oppressed person: "tough luck for you, wait for a miracle, I guess".
The same thing happened in Birmingham. Peaceful protest was met with beatings by the police. People got fed up, and things turned violent. After 2 days, Birmingham agreed to desegregate, and the president backed this up with federal guarantees.
Again, counting on the goodwill of your oppressor, gets you nowhere. They have no interest in freeing you. Instead, they have great interest in abusing you. This gains them money and goods.
Same thing with Gandhi. Gandhi is paraded about as a grand example of peaceful protest eventually winning.
I'll just quote the book here:
> We realize this threat to be even more direct when we understand that the pacifist history of India’s independence movement is a selective and incomplete picture-nonviolence was not universal in India. Resistance to British colonialism included enough militancy that the Gandhian method can be viewed most accurately as one of several competing forms of popular resistance. As part of a disturbingly universal pattern, pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead and rudder of Indian resistance. Ignored are important militant leaders such as Chandrasekhar Azad,[6] who fought in armed struggle against the British colonizers, and revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, who won mass support for bombings and assassinations as part of a struggle to accomplish the “overthrow of both foreign and Indian capitalism.”[7] The pacifist history of India’s struggle cannot make any sense of the fact that Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant candidate, was twice elected president of the Indian National Congress, in 1938 and 1939.[8] While Gandhi was perhaps the most singularly influential and popular figure in India’s independence struggle, the leadership position he assumed did not always enjoy the consistent backing of the masses. Gandhi lost so much support from Indians when he “called off the movement” after the 1922 riot that when the British locked him up afterwards, “not a ripple of protest arose in India at his arrest.”[9] Significantly, history remembers Gandhi above all others not because he represented the unanimous voice of India, but because of all the attention he was given by the British press and the prominence he received from being included in important negotiations with the British colonial government. When we remember that history is written by the victors, another layer of the myth of Indian independence comes unraveled.
And end by saying the significant part again: "we understand that the pacifist history of India’s independence movement is a selective and incomplete picture"
Quite interesting perspectives but the actual article's title is named "The doctor who saw colonialism as a sickness". So the editorializing of the title is quite uncalled for.
Some notable takeaways (still applicable today albeit under different guises);
> As a pioneer of “social therapy,” an approach that classified personal pathologies as political symptoms,
> he grasped that racism was an abyss in its own right.
> the psychic distortions that imperialism inflicts on colonists and colonized alike.
> He saw firsthand that colonialism exiles us from ourselves:
> At the core of Fanon’s increasingly radical approach to mental health care was his conviction that, as Shatz puts it, “some forms of psychological suffering have their roots not in an individual’s psychic constitution but in oppressive social relations.”
> The forms that mental illness takes within a certain society are good guides to its neuroses, and Fanon knew well that the racist phobias and fantasies of his European patients functioned as windows onto the world that colonialism had wrought.
> But even the most innovative clinical techniques did not go far enough for Fanon, who knew that political solutions are the only long-term remedy for political diseases. Colonialism is “a system of pathological relations masquerading as normality,” Shatz eloquently writes,
> In his view, anti-colonial violence was “a kind of medicine, rekindling a sense of power and self-mastery” that allowed the colonized to recover their dignity by way of self-assertion.
> The abolition of imperialism was the best medicine, both for Algerians and for everyone else who lived under colonialism, but in the interim, its indignities smarted — and even after it was dismantled, its traumas would linger.
> At a conference in 1956, he warned against the “exoticism” that occupiers often adopt toward native populations,
> All of them were victims of what Fanon called the “mental disorders of colonial warfare,” which plagued him in equal measure. In a world so sick, no one could be cured, not even the doctors.
