The history of ideas and the role of violence: Frantz Fanon and the origin of postcolonialism

 When you want to study a group, a movement, a practice, or a trend, study the idea.  Trace the idea through history to its source.  You can learn much by tracing intellectual history.  Ideas and claims must be advocated and critiqued on their merits, to be sure, but you can learn by studying the roots of ideas.  When you observe violence, do not merely look at the circumstances in which violence occurs and impute your own ideas to the participants.  Do not simply observe the current expression of ideas, as that expression will be strategic.  Any movement, after all, must win allies.  Thus, no expression of an idea in a current conflict will be fully sincere.  Rather, trace history.  What is the origin of an idea?  The root?  The written word is a beautiful thing, or at least it can be, and even in its ugliness, its mere existence elucidates, that having the same root as whatshisname, Bringer of Light.  Almost no one is a true pacifist.  Most will justify violence at some point.  Here, though, is a question.  Once one advocates violence, does one advocate it as an unfortunate necessity, the lesser evil forced by the alternative of a greater evil?  Or is violence an intrinsic good?

If you think within the Western tradition, that latter notion will seem repulsive.  Good.  That reaction means two things.  First, you are not pure evil.  Second, if you trace violence from a group or movement to a positive normative evaluation of violence, and you adhere to consistency, you will be repulsed, whereas if you observe violence resulting from a philosophical belief that violence is bad, but on occasion, an unfortunate necessity, you may make a determination regarding whether or not the extent of violence is appropriate (e.g., shooting someone for a face slap is an obvious overreaction, but when faced with lethal force, the calculation changes), but you will not simply condemn it.  What you must not do is impute your belief that violence is not an intrinsic good to others on the basis of the belief that no one can believe otherwise.

Anyone who does not already understand how these principles apply to the Israeli-Palestinian War is willfully blind to moral logic, and there is no point reasoning with such a person.  I have another observation for this morning, upon which I will expand.

I regularly note Marx's fascination with violence, and the bloodlust one finds in his writings.  If you read his writings with a clear head, and then count the bodies, there is an obvious and unavoidable conclusion.  The death toll, beyond even Hitler's death toll, was not an accident because the ideology is one that treats violence not as an evil occasionally warranted in the face of necessity, but as an intrinsic good.  Marx was bloodthirsty.  Ideologies that elevate violence and murder to virtue are backwards, and always horrifying.  When the death toll is the point, you will see death tolls beyond your comprehension, and beyond anything anywhere else.

Consider, now, postcolonialism.  Modern, postcolonialist ideology comes to us most directly from Edward Said, so it is no coincidence that adherents' vitriol is directed primarily at Israel.  Israel cannot, by any reasonable definition, be called a colonialist power.  I have noted the definitional issue before, and I see no need to elaborate.  Whatever you think of its location on the good-to-evil scale, the definition simply does not apply.  But of course, Said was a follower of Michel Foucault, for whom there is no such thing as truth, and words are nothing more than weapons in a power struggle.  That is why the postcolonialist left does not care what colonialism actually is, nor what the definition of any word actually is.  It's all just a power game to them.  See: Foucault, Michel.

Yet to borrow an unfortunate phrase, Said did not occur in a vacuum.  Let us trace back his toxic and anti-intellectual ideology.  Said wrote Orientalism in 1978.  What came before that?  Frantz Fanon.  We can actually trace not only postcolonialism, but critical race theory to Fanon.  Derrick Bell, too, was influenced by Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks).  Said, though, was influenced by a 1961 book called The Wretched of the Earth.  Fanon preached violence, not as an occasionally necessary evil, but an intrinsic good.  Consider, too, my earlier statement that if you approach these questions from the Western tradition, you would recoil from such a value system.  You might even reject the notion that such a book could exist.  Read it.  From a Western perspective.

What would Fanon say to that?  Here's the quote:  "When the colonized hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his machete."  Bruce Gilley notes that Fanon intentionally echoes some guy named Goring.  "When I hear the word 'culture,' I unholster my Browning."  When you read those words, make sure that you read them with a German accent in your mind's ear.  The founder of postcolonialism glorifying violence in a direct threat and intentionally echoing a high ranking nazi...  Aren't leftists all over Trump for using the word, "vermin?"

Yes, but remember that it is opportunistic rather than sincere. 

I was repulsed by Trump, and I still am, but unlike leftists, I am consistent.  When someone invokes nazi language, I call "nazi."  A while back, I wrote a semi-joking post about "The Godwin Scale."  How Hitler-y is it?  Technically, Fanon was not being "Hitler-y," but Goring-y.  As far as I'm concerned, that's a distinction without a difference.  You cannot split hairs with a machete.

Fanon was the founder of postcolonialism, preceding and inspiring Edward Said.  And it is not a coincidence that Fanon had a nazi fetish.  He believed in purity, nationalism and violence.  His ideology-- postcolonialism-- is intrinsically violent.  Postcolonialism, from its origin, has seen violence as an intrinsic good, not as an occasionally necessary evil, but as an intrinsic good.  Apply your moral reasoning.  Observe proponents of postcolonialism in action.  (If you survive.)  Recall my questions from the beginning of this post.  How do you evaluate one who sees violence and murder, not as an occasionally necessary evil, forced by the alternative of a greater evil, but as intrinsically good?

You evaluate the person, the group, the movement, the ideology as the paragon of evil.  Because it is.

Trump is dangerous.  So is Fanon, and anyone who follows him.  That means Said and all of the little shits running around the world chanting "gas the Jews" because of the through-line running from Nazi Germany to Frantz Fanon to Edward Said.  It really is a straight line.  Logic matters.  Ideas matter.  Morality matters.

Yes, postcolonialism really is founded on a glorification of violence.  It is bloodlust.  After October 7, followers of this violent, bloodthirsty ideology started posting videos asking what you thought decolonization meant?  Professors cheered and raved about how wonderful it was to rape Jews to death.

Yes, October 7 was exactly what the ideology dictated, from Fanon onward.  It is what he wrote and what he preached.  It is a reversal of all morality.  Read Fanon.  Go read about his glorification of violence, and trace that through Said and that's how you get to where the global left is.

For what it is worth, the main entry for the book on Amazon has over 2000 reviews, 87% of which are 5 stars, for a 4.8 star average.  For, again, a man who preached mass murder for the sake of mass murder, and reveled in paraphrasing Goring.  This is the source, the wellspring of the left's core ideology.

Behold, the origins of postcolonialism.

The hippies were peaceniks, which created a distorted image in many peoples' minds about the relationship between leftism and violence.  The more I study the history of ideology, over the long term, the more I think the following.  The mid-to-late 20th Century was an anomaly for the left.  The peace movement and civil rights movement were based around passive resistance, tracing their origins to Gandhi, and then back to Henry David Thoreau, but that period of peaceful activism was anomalous for the left.

Whatever else one can say of hippies-- and I can say many things about hippies, from petty jokes about their hygiene to the stupidity of drugs and non-monogamy-- I still kinda dig Thoreau, even if Emerson was always more my guy.  Peaceful protest is pretty groovy, and if peace/violence were a consistent component of the left/right dimension over time, that would say something.

But it isn't.

The images of hippies and MLK-inspired civil rights activists and so forth?  They still leave the impression that leftism is the side of nonviolence.

Two things.  1)  Bull.  2)  Shit.

Look cross-nationally, and look across time.  From the Jacobins to Marx to Fanon to BLM burning down cities and killing people in the 2020 riots to the leftist embrace of Islamist terrorism with protesters chanting "gas the Jews" in Sydney, the Edmund Pettus Bridge starts to look like the anomaly rather than the norm.

Once upon a time in America.

Once upon a time in America, the left was nonviolent.  It was an anomaly, and it is important to recognize that the anomalous period ended.  The left is violent, and with the exception of the anomalous period of the '60s and early '70s, they always have been.  The right?  They're violent too.

Show us the way, Cato.  The whole damned place has gone crazy and we need the uncompromising man of principle.  Then again, my man Cato, ripped his own guts out when he lost, so maybe he isn't the hero we need.

He never sacrificed principle, though.  Win, lose, memento mori.  Will you die knowing that you adhered to principle?  At least Cato did.

And if you could not predict this morning's musical selection, you don't know jazz, and you don't know me, but since nobody is reading this, there is no "you," so hey.  I'll just get on with the typin' and embeddin'.  Charles Mingus, "Prayer for Passive Resistance."  From Mingus at Antibes.  Mingus is still top-five, all-time.