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Part 2
And one can see a similar dynamic today. Here's a quote from Nathan Tankus, a think-tanker who is writing a book on the Federal Reserve and is very active on X. He tweeted a day after the Hamas pogrom: “I don’t want anyone to die but I also won’t participate in contextless haranguing of military strategy launched from a Ghetto. Whether it’s Jewish partisans during WWII or, yes, even Hamas.”
Let me translate. Tankus demonstrates the mindset that has resulted from years steeped in a simplistic notion of “decolonization.” Jews fighting for their lives during the Holocaust were allowed to use violence. But now that Israel exists, it deserves to be attacked. The powerful are guilty because they have power. In this sense, he elides any moral question about a deliberate massacre of Jews on October 7 by clinically referring to the pogrom as a “military strategy.” Fanon would be proud.
Fanon goes further in his analysis. He not only believes that violence is inevitable in a liberation struggle; he also writes that the act of killing purifies the killer in a war against a colonial oppressor. Fanon writes in the “On Violence” chapter: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence.”
In the rest of the book, however, Fanon does complicate his analysis. For example, he warns that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.
In 1961, it was easy to see how Fanon’s analysis would appeal to the left. But 62 years after its publication, there is ample reason to question his conclusions. Just look at what became of Algeria itself. Like the French before independence, the regime established intelligence services, a brutal military, and its leaders eventually became a new exploitive class.
During Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s, for example, the regime infiltrated the GIA, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that had been waging an insurgency. In the 2000s, a series of former officers wrote books that laid bare how many of the atrocities attributed to the resistance were provocations either known ahead of time or actively planned by the domestic security services.
None of this is to say that the French should reclaim Algeria as a colonial possession. Rather it is to say that the fetishization of violence as an overdue debt or as a process for emancipating the minds of the oppressed leads to more repression once independence is achieved. When the leader of a liberation movement can summon spectacular violence, it’s a great temptation to consolidate personal power. This is why so many third-world countries that gained independence through violent struggle suffer under autocracy today.
All this Fanonism, so popular in academia today, is being used to justify exterminationist rhetoric against the only Jewish state and against Jews anywhere. But Israel is not a colonial power. It is a safe haven. There is no mother country for Jews outside of Israel. The war in 1948 that broke out after Israel was recognized as an independent state was not a battle between colonizer and colonist. It was a struggle between a people who had survived a genocide and the entire Arab world.
In 1948, the goal for the Arab armies was to drive the Jews into the sea, same as it is today for Hamas, and same as it is for the intellectuals so exhilarated by the bloodlust of these fanatics. Celebrating the October 7 pogrom is not solidarity with the wretched of the earth. It is a demented excuse for the mass murder of Jews.
(full article online)
www.thefp.com
And one can see a similar dynamic today. Here's a quote from Nathan Tankus, a think-tanker who is writing a book on the Federal Reserve and is very active on X. He tweeted a day after the Hamas pogrom: “I don’t want anyone to die but I also won’t participate in contextless haranguing of military strategy launched from a Ghetto. Whether it’s Jewish partisans during WWII or, yes, even Hamas.”
Let me translate. Tankus demonstrates the mindset that has resulted from years steeped in a simplistic notion of “decolonization.” Jews fighting for their lives during the Holocaust were allowed to use violence. But now that Israel exists, it deserves to be attacked. The powerful are guilty because they have power. In this sense, he elides any moral question about a deliberate massacre of Jews on October 7 by clinically referring to the pogrom as a “military strategy.” Fanon would be proud.
Fanon goes further in his analysis. He not only believes that violence is inevitable in a liberation struggle; he also writes that the act of killing purifies the killer in a war against a colonial oppressor. Fanon writes in the “On Violence” chapter: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence.”
In the rest of the book, however, Fanon does complicate his analysis. For example, he warns that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.
In 1961, it was easy to see how Fanon’s analysis would appeal to the left. But 62 years after its publication, there is ample reason to question his conclusions. Just look at what became of Algeria itself. Like the French before independence, the regime established intelligence services, a brutal military, and its leaders eventually became a new exploitive class.
During Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s, for example, the regime infiltrated the GIA, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that had been waging an insurgency. In the 2000s, a series of former officers wrote books that laid bare how many of the atrocities attributed to the resistance were provocations either known ahead of time or actively planned by the domestic security services.
None of this is to say that the French should reclaim Algeria as a colonial possession. Rather it is to say that the fetishization of violence as an overdue debt or as a process for emancipating the minds of the oppressed leads to more repression once independence is achieved. When the leader of a liberation movement can summon spectacular violence, it’s a great temptation to consolidate personal power. This is why so many third-world countries that gained independence through violent struggle suffer under autocracy today.
All this Fanonism, so popular in academia today, is being used to justify exterminationist rhetoric against the only Jewish state and against Jews anywhere. But Israel is not a colonial power. It is a safe haven. There is no mother country for Jews outside of Israel. The war in 1948 that broke out after Israel was recognized as an independent state was not a battle between colonizer and colonist. It was a struggle between a people who had survived a genocide and the entire Arab world.
In 1948, the goal for the Arab armies was to drive the Jews into the sea, same as it is today for Hamas, and same as it is for the intellectuals so exhilarated by the bloodlust of these fanatics. Celebrating the October 7 pogrom is not solidarity with the wretched of the earth. It is a demented excuse for the mass murder of Jews.
(full article online)
Frantz Fanon, Oracle of Decolonization
The writer who coined the term “decolonization” thought he was talking to “the wretched of the earth.” Instead, his work was read by elites—to disastrous effect.
www.thefp.com
