Revolutionary actions renders colonized populations the oppressor and equates any negotiation with anti-revolutionary dooming revolutions to kill the very colonized populations they claim to protect.

But recall that Fanon does not raise the issue of violence only as a means of expelling the rule of an outsider. He attributes to violence a therapeutic and creative value: It liberates the colonized from inferiority complex and turns them into active makers of his- tory. My purpose is to question the alleged therapeutic and creative value of violence. Let me begin by saying that Fanon's rejection of the rehabilitation of the past sounds excessive. His position would have been correct if, instead of characterizing the rehabilitation of the past as a useless and detrimental attempt, he had implied that it was not enough to obtain liberation. What makes his argument against the rehabilitation of the past even less receivable is that more than any- body else, Fanon has studied the profound and devastating effects of inferiority complex on the colonized peoples. His study suggests that this sense of inferiority has been inculcated by a deliberately disparaging discourse on the history of these peoples. If so, it is not clear why the attempt to refute the colonial discourse would be without effect. The discredit of the legacy of the colonized peoples having induced the inferiority complex, its rehabilitation should act as an antidote. This is to say that Fanon's resolution to convince the colonized that they have no other option than recourse to violence is at best exaggerated and highly restrictive. True, the method of ethnophilosophy, notably the claim to Otherness and the subsequent endorsement of the notion of race, can be debilitating. Still, other ways than racial classification exist to defend pluralism. Such is the case, for instance, of cultural pluralism, which draws diversity from cultural rather than biological inheritances. This position is all the more consistent the more identities are ascribed to inventions, a case in point being Fanon himself. To say that the nigger does not exist any more than the White man is to hold that what distinguishes people is less their biological determinants than the way they choose to define themselves. This fact of identities being constructs allows the cultural approach to pluralism. Sure enough, human beings can define themselves in a beneficial or detrimental way. Fanon was quite within his rights when he maintained that rehabilitation cannot come from songs and poems or when he charged racial classification with detrimental outcomes. But it is one thing to say that cultural rehabilitation is not enough or misguided and quite another to suggest that the refutation of the colonial discourse is useless. At any rate, Fanon's opposition to cultural rehabilitation does not yet indicate why violence should take the lead. His argument that the rehabilitation drawn from the past is an illusory wealth that distracts the colonized from fully identifying with their wretchedness and hence from growing into a real revolutionary force can be seriously contested. More yet, the question of whether violence is an efficient and relevant response to the challenge posed by Western hegemony must be posed against the back- ground of economic power being the major driving force of the modern world. No response is really defiant of the West if it does not pave the way to economic power. This issue of economic power is how Hegel took his revenge on Fanon. Does it not point out that the mastery of nature is the only dialectical, progressive way to liberation? Unlike the dialectics of Hegel in which the slave submits and turns his attention to work, Fanon wanted the colonized to rebel. Without the episode of violent confrontation, Fanon maintained, the colonized will never gain freedom and self-respect. Freedom remains a mere grant of the col- onizers so long as it is not wrenched from them. Galvanizing and fulfilling however the snatching of freedom may appear to be, in the context of colonial and neocolonial domination, it overlooks one important aspect of the question: The colonized are yet to understand the real reason for their subordination. They will understand the real reason if they ascribe their inferiority to their inability to dominate nature. But then, the issue is not so much the violent expulsion of the colonizer as the resolution to rise to the economic challenge. So long as the economic handicap persists, independence remains illusory. Fanon was right when he stated that independence is not enough but wrong when he stipulated that regeneration cannot occur without the moment of violent confrontation If anything, the idealization of rebellious attitude has led a generation of Third World scholars and leaders to assert their freedom through the rejection of Western values. This defiant attitude refuses the patience of learning; it identifies it with submission. It goes without saying that the depiction of the problems of the Third World in terms of bravado has been detrimental to its real interest. It has caused the devalorization of bourgeois virtues as well as impatience with expectations. Most of all, it has served as a justification for those numerous regimes that presented dictatorship as the only appropriate defense against imperialism. Antagonism toward imperialism became a much-praised virtue, the mark of a progressive regime, even though the defiance was empty talk. We hear an echo of this orientation coming from Fanon (1982) himself when, speaking of African bourgeoisie, he stated, "The combined effort of the masses led by a party and of intellectuals who are highly con- scious and armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class" (p. 175). Yet, without economic power, the violence that the colonized brandish against the West is anything but frightening. It remains the violence of arrows and spears against missiles and jet fighters. So long as violence is not backed by science and technology, the whole idea of considering the Third World as a rising revolutionary force intent on toppling the developed world is nothing but laughable. Insofar as the poor world is granted with a power of violence that it does not yet possess, Fanon can be justifiably accused of putting the cart before the horse. In being technologically insignificant, the violence of the Third World will be countered by real violence, to paraphrase Fanon. If violence thus resolves nothing because it cannot even be real violence without the power of technology, the narrowing of the technological gap emerges as the only remedy for Western hegemony and, hence, the only dissolvent of the inferiority complex. Let alone curing the disease, the prescription of bravado retards the administration of the real remedy. But there is more to the matter than this. Fanon denounced Negritude and ethnophilosophy as an internalization of the colonial world. The whole question is to know whether the valorization of violence and the vision of human relationships in terms of violent confrontations are not themselves a projection of the violent colonial world.The question makes sense in view of the fact that Fanon endowed violence with a curative mission. If violence is an outcome of colonial rule, it is not clear how it can possess curative virtues. The attempt to decontaminate one's soul from such a perversion would be the right attitude. The point, one may object, is that the decontamination requires the phase of violent response, there being no doubt that for Fanon, the colonial neurosis will not dissipate unless the accumulated frustration is provided with an outlet. But then, this therapy of violence needs to explain how capitulation to an impulse amounts to a victory over that impulse. All ethical thinking teaches that resistance to impulses is the manner the will and the good triumph. Even those theories that resent resistance admit that the best way to deal with uncontrolled impulses is to sublimate them, that is, to channel them into superior and creative works. Fanon rightly took note of the accumulated anger of the colonized people but never shows how this immense anger could be transformed into a creative work. His proposal was not to sublimate anger; it was rather to let it explode. But is capitulation to anger likely to have a positive outcome when it is but providing an outlet to destructive impulses? What the Third World needs is to give in to its anger less and to channel it into con- structive works. The sublimation of violence, and that alone, would be the right therapy. Alluding to the curative and creative role of sublimation, the apostle of nonviolence, namely, Mahatma Gandhi, had the following words: I have learned by bitter experience, through a period of close upon thirty years, the one supreme lesson, namely, to conserve my anger, to control it, and just as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, so also our anger, conserved and controlled, can result in a power that becomes irresistible throughout the world. (Green, 1993, p. 230) When instead of being conserved and controlled, anger is given full vent, the outcome is rarely positive. History has repeatedly confirmed the sticking mania of violence. Guerilla movements interiorize violence so deeply that despite their often-generous goal, they end up by instituting violent regimes for the simple reason that they have lost the sense of true human relationships. In this regard, the Algerian case is instructive. As an active participant in the Algerian war of liberation, Fanon believed that the ideals of the war will preside over the emergence of a modem and peaceful Algerian society. That independent Algeria is still torn by violent conflicts and little engaged in a resolute process of modernization invalidates the alleged creative role of violence. This is the time to reflect on the theory of nonviolence as developed by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The main lesson is that no matter the degree of oppression, the best human response is never to imitate oppressors; it is rather to refuse their world, to decontaminate one's soul by the affirmation of positive human values. Opposition to oppression becomes redeeming only when it understands that as one Gandhi's commentator puts it, "To resist it violently would be to yield to the conquerors's ideology" (Green, 1993, p. 195). To tell the truth, the association of violence with the affirmation of humaneness sounds strange. Violence has more to do with animality than humanity. The affirmation of the human by way of violence, which is the value of the colonizer, is what the colonized should strongly reject. Because colonizers are acting like beasts, there is no reason to aspire after their values. Instead, one must refuse to become beasts like them. Once violence is internalized, it will sully all the behavior of the colonized, who would then behave in the same violent way vis-a- vis each other. This violent disposition has a hand in the failure of most Third World countries to institute democratic societies. Grant violence with the power to provide solutions, and no reason exists to assume that the problems of postcolonial societies do not fall under the same treatment. Viewed from this necessity of cleansing the colonized soul of the accumulated anger, Negritude's appeal to the particular essence of the Black soul appears as a protection against colonial contaminations, as an attempt to preserve a mea- sure of human countenance in a world disfigured by violence. The crux of the matter is that Fanon mistakes the refusal of contamination for submission. Yet, Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolent resistance is far from implying any attitude of submission. First, nonviolence implies courage, commitment, and willingness to risk one's life, in short, all the positive elements that make up the seduction of the violent option. It even reproduces them in a higher form because it urges for active disobedience and noncooperation in the face of injustice. The practice of such activism requires greater control on one's fear. To show that nonviolence squarely asserts what the violent option wants to assert-namely, dignity, courage, readiness to sacrifice one's life, and so on-a Gandhi's follower has this to say: For the majority of mankind, the heroic virtues of disdain of personal comforts, constant alertness, readiness to lose one's life for a cause transcending one's self, are forged on the anvil of the battle- field. But the believer in non-violent resistance can forge these same heroic virtues for himself on the anvil of a moral equivalent of war ... the substitution of non-violent non-cooperation or civil dis- obedience for violent warfare. (Muzumdar, 1952, p. 21) But in addition to proving courage and dignity, nonviolent resistance has the clear impact of denouncing the barbarism of the colonizer, thereby drawing a clear demarcation line between the values of the oppressor and the ideals of liberation. Most of all, in demystifying and rejecting violence, it graciously prepares a bright and democratic future, the very one where force will have no say. Whereas the myth of violence ends up by valorizing violence as a legitimate resource, Gandhi's nonviolent option banishes forever the use of force from human society. Not even against the colonizer was violence used: Such is the norm that it establishes.