Rousseau and Revolution

44 Rousseau and Revolution
replaced with the vocabulary of family and trusted friend. Fanon writes,
‘Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete
fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred
– or everyone will be saved’ (ibid., 47).
In such a context, truth is the property of the national cause. ‘Truth is that
which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes
the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and
ruins the foreigners’ (ibid., 50). In other words, the Manichaeism of colonial
society continues in the early stages of articulating the emergent general
will that demands and must culminate in the end of colonial relations.
The slogan of non-violence – an attempt ‘to settle the colonial problem
around a green baize table’ – is that of the colonized bourgeoisie who share
more with their colonial counterparts than with their mobilized, primarily
rural countrymen (ibid., 61). Ironically for those outlawed members of the
group, the lumpenproletariat, it is their willingness to fi ght violently that reintegrates
them into a community that has seen them as predatory pariahs.
Their violence now directed at shared enemies whose presence is fundamentally
a crime is, writes Fanon, their ‘royal pardon’ (ibid., 86).
This violence is constitutive; its practice binds them together as a whole,
since each individual forms a link in the great chain, a part of the great
organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s
violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the
future nation is already indivisible. The armed struggle mobilizes the
people; that is to say, it throws them in one way and in one direction.
(Ibid., 93)
This mass mobilization introduces into the consciousness of each person a
sense of common cause, a collective past, and a national destiny. This forms
a cement which, mixed with blood and anger, will be the basis for the building
up of a nation.
And yet Fanon’s discussion of violence is more pedagogical than romantic.
There is no alternative literally to seizing one’s freedom but many of its
consequences are tragic. Revolutions, even the most legitimate ones, involve
monstrous moments and highly imperfect decisions. There is absolutely no
doubt that the people responsible for the fi ghting will themselves be deeply
and irretrievably scarred. As Lewis Gordon has argued, they are a generation
comparable to Moses, ones that lead to a promised land that they
themselves cannot enter (Gordon, 2008). Many among them will wonder,