What Is Frantz Fanon Ial Oppression

Throughout history, struggles for freedom, especially freedom for a colonized people, are very often characterized by violence. Frantz Fanon and Mahatma Gandhi had similar hopes: freedom, independence of colonized people, and restoration of dignity to the oppressed. However, they approached these goals with seemingly fundamentally opposing methods with regard to the use of violence, revolutionary counter-violence and nonviolent resistance. Fanon’s stance on violence was unyielding; he maintained that violence is the sole means of resistance the colonizer could understand, and the only means of redemption offered to those who have nothing. In contrast, for Gandhi, non-violence is the only acceptable method of anti-colonial struggle.
In Fanon’s
In contrast to Gandhi, Fanon believed nonviolence is way the bourgeois colonized elites, and is equal to political cooperation with the colonial oppressor. For Fanon, because colonization itself is inherently violent, and creates a distinction in society between oppressor and the oppressed, the sole manner in which the oppressed can regain their humanity is through “counter-violence”. He further believed that violence in the anti-colonial struggle is not only a method to achieve liberation from the colonizer and oppressor, but that violence is an end in itself. For Fanon, a psychiatrist, violence serves as a means of therapy and healing for the oppressed. Violence, in Fanon’s view, is what restores agency to the oppressed; it is what makes the colonized human. To be clear, Fanon is not glorifying violence for bloodshed, but rather he believes it is justified as a means of establishing political agency. Fanon is not interested in
In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi tried to show that the young Indian independence movement was “adopting a suicidal policy” in using “modern methods of violence” to drive the British out. He encourages a return to what he calls “Indian civilization”, or the Indian way of thinking and living. And thus, Gandhi develops his idea of Swaraj, that “home rule begins when we learn to rule ourselves”. Gandhi asserts that the revolution has to happen from within the individual. And the methods of anti-colonial struggle against the British cannot be those of violence of armed warfare, because that would mean westernizing this struggle. Gandhi argues that warfare and violence cannot be used to drive the British out, because they are part of the British way: for Gandhi if violence is utilized to oust the colonizer, one is simply establishing a system of violence. Gandhi highlights that there is an inherent connection between the means and end, the manner by which the fight is fought is important to its end. Gandhi goes into the concept of satyagraha, or “love-force” or soul-force” (commonly mistranslated as passive resistance): “securing rights by means of personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use