Biko, Mandela & Obama Hero: Psych: Frantz Fanon: Breivik's violence liberated his colonized mind, upon the rotting corpses of the settlers?
“Violence is man re-creating himself.” ― Frantz Fanon
“Mastery of language affords remarkable power.” ― Frantz Fanon
Norway's Support for ANC's Right to Violent Liberation: ‘Nationalists Fighting for the Right to Rule their Country’
Andrea Muhrrteyn | Norway v. Breivik | 17 June 2012
Frantz Fanon (July 20, 1925 – December 6, 1961) was a Martinique-born French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. Fanon is known as a radical existential humanist thinker on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization.
Fanon supported the Algerian struggle for independence and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. His life and works have incited and inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.
For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based on sheer military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the only 'language' the colonizer speaks. Thus, violent resistance is a necessity imposed by the colonists upon the colonized. The relevance of language and the reformation of discourse pervades much of his work, which is why it is so interdisciplinary, spanning psychiatric concerns to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature
Frantz Fanon inspired among others Mandela (A Land Ruled by the Gun) and Steve Biko's concepts of Black Consciousness. Fanon is considered one of the twentieth century's most important theorists of revolution, colonialism, and racial differences. His book Wretched of the Earth was considered the Handbook for the Black Revolution, and considered a classic alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Wretched of the Earth provides an analysis of the psychology of the native: or as Fanon refers to the 'colonized mind' and how liberation can only occur by means of “violence on the rotting corpse of the settler”. Wretched of the Earth had a major impact on the anticolonialism and black-consciousness movements around the world.
American president Barack Obama cites Fanon as an intellectual influence in Dreams from My Father (pg 100-101): “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night,in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.”
