But that, Fanon, would say, is precisely what the colonizers want the colonized to believe. Now I myself bristle a bit at the thought that values like equality or individualism are “alien.” They seem more like universal values to me. They have allowed their colonizers get so deep into the consciousness, that they endorse those alien values as if they were their own. He knows, though, that the colonized elites are unlikely to follow such advice. He would tell me to join with other colonized people who must create new values. He would tell me to reject the values of my white European colonizers. He would say that in valorizing these western values, I am speaking like another colonized black intellectual. Now such values strike me personally as quite important and well worth preserving. They do so because their colonization conditions them to see revolution as a threat to values like dignity, equality, individualism, reasonableness. When the colonizers sense that the jig is up, they co-opt the local elite-the intellectuals, priests or preachers, movers and shakers in the political class. These people are so deeply colonized that they collaborate with colonizers to keep a lid on things. So how can it possibly create the idea of nonviolence? Strikingly, though as far as I know Fanon never commented on Gandhi himself, he dismisses the very idea of non-violence as a creation of colonialism-which is a little paradoxical seeming at first glance, since Fanon sees colonialism itself is a system of violence, one that can only be maintained by the forces of “guns and bayonets,” as he puts it. And he resisted colonialism without violence. His anti-colonialist bona fides are just as strong as Fanon’s. For the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists.” He also said this: “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.” Personally, I prefer Gandhi’s model of resistance. In his most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon says that “Decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives. Frantz Fanon was quite a provocative fellow.
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