I finished On Violence, the first chapter but I have a long flight ahead where I will probably finish the book. I’m considering what AP wrote and want to write up some replies this weekend. I also started reading The Black Jacobins and it is another really interesting work that probably deserves its own month. How are you all doing?
Finished “De la Violence” too. More than a justification of said violence or revolution, Fanon seems more to place himself as a “neutral” observer explaining the mechanisms through which decolonisation happens.
Seems extremely prescient too of the failed states which still stay subservient to their supposedly former metropolis, and of the troubles that entail for those states. The anarchist reading here seems quite self-evident.
Yeah, I’m struck with this too especially having another 50+ years of history since the struggle he is talking about. I mean it really reads as if he is talking about Palestine today so does that mean in 50 years they will be as subservient and corrupt as Algeria? They won every battle but then lost the war against western colonialism especially once it went to the post cold war era. It is really heart breaking in that way. The violence is a reaction to the violence the colonized experience every day but it didn’t actually work.
In a way you just need to look at the states surrounding Israel, and see that all those Arab states still act according to real politik and thus further the interests of Israel and then America.
I found more echoes - obviously - however in what happened to Françafrique in this past half century. Political pawns in service of French capital, in a way the final win of colonialism.
It seems that violence is all-encompassing and all-destroying, in that sense. There seems to be little hope of closure, which I think is where Fanon was more optimistic, with Marxist ideas of a great reversal looming. The great mystifiers, religion chief among them, yet still to win despite the innate praxis of violence Fanon describes.
I look forward to reading up the rest, however. Definitely a very interesting and enriching text.
