I've been reading Frantz Fanon and I feel both seen and condemned. Fanon describes a type of colonized intellectual, which was me once upon a time. He also describes a trajectory for their awakening, which I seem to be following. It's a bit annoying cause I could have just read this instead of making a fool of myself in public for decades.

The Colonized Intellectual

When I was 21, I returned to sender. I finished my education in Canada/America and moved 'back' to Sri Lanka. I put 'back' in quotes because I hadn't lived there since I was four. As a young man, I thought I knew it all, but I had no idea. I had an education but I didn't realize how much I had to unlearn, and how much sources I trusted were actively lying to me. It's only now, as an adult, finally reading Fanon at my wife's insistence, that I understand who I was. I was a certain sort of colonized man, and quite unconsciously. As Fanon said,

During decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have established a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country. During this period the indigenous population is seen as a blurred mass. The few “native” personalities whom the colonialist bourgeois have chanced to encounter have had insufficient impact to alter their current perception and nuance their thinking. During the period of liberation, however, the colonialist bourgeoisie frantically seeks contact with the colonized “elite.” It is with this elite that the famous dialogue on values is established.

This is the position I found myself in, in ‘dialogue’ with western embassies and foreign correspondents, going to cocktails and dinner parties, because I spoke the language of English and the dialect of human rights, democracy, and free markets fluently. I thought myself highly original, despite repeating paper-thin insights from The Economist from the same hymn book as everyone else. As Fanon said, “The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal.”

But I hadn't even read the classics, I just got those 'values' photocopied 10,000 times through the mass media, until they were a meaningless paste. This is what Fanon called “the famous dialogue on values.” It was really a monologue repeated between people at cocktail parties. I wish I'd read more widely back then, because I would have read my own story and perhaps skipped a few chapters. Back then, I was just a certain type of colonized man, the embarrassing one.

Fanon said, “When the colonialist bourgeoisie realizes it is impossible to maintain its domination over the colonies it decides to wage a rearguard campaign in the fields of culture, values, and technology, etc,” and I have seen all this in action. Those were precisely the points that I interfaced with the west. The US Embassy's cultural attaché invited me to do a photo exhibition (I declined because I couldn't afford printing anything), I did journalism training through the German Embassy, and I met people from Facebook, even after they'd killed people in my own country. This makes me cringe today, but at the time I was oblivious. I thought these were the good guys, because I still believed what they said and not what they did. Thus I feel both seen and condemned by Fanon when he says,

In its narcissistic monologue the colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized that the essential values—meaning Western values —remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man.

That really was the monologue implanted in my head. I remember having the shower thought, ‘well, America doesn't live up to its values, but it has them as a sort of map for the future.’ Like lying was important because it was at least aspirational. But I was being too clever by half. They were just lying, and I was lying to myself about it. I'd blame myself if I wasn't so utterly predictable.

The Color Revolutionary

Fanon said, “The intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world.” And, indeed, I unwittingly underwent training to be a color revolutionary.

One day, I was idly looking through some noticeboard for opportunities because journalists don't have many. I saw a free training trip to Spain, to study non-violent resistance. This was just after the Arab Spring and it was all very exciting. I applied, got in, and they paid my flight and hotel to Madrid, Spain. I could have never afforded this on my own and I felt quite lucky. In hindsight, I was just a mark.

That event was totally CIA, in hindsight. It was run by a guy from the US military and government, who was funded by some dodgy financier. As a journalist, did I look any of this up at the time? Uh, no, I was more interested in going to the Prado (which was excellent). At that training I met some cool people from Egypt and Yemen and Mexico (shout-out George Clooney), but in hindsight, holy shit! They were training sleeper cells for regime change, and they trained me! Writing all of this stuff is honestly quite implicating and embarrassing and my only excuse is that I wasn't thinking. All I really thought was a free trip to Madrid.

That's how they get you, they literally wine and dine you, and you think nothing's happening and then you're working for the CIA. Or they get you through your sins, through petty corruption, pedophilia, or other sinister proclivities. The carrot of flattery and the stick of blackmail, that's what the US calls this public diplomacy. Colonization has always been a resource light enterprise. They want the colonized to the colonizing.

The Colonial History

In 20/20 hindsight that's how it always was. We always colonized ourselves. As Ian Barrow says in his history of the East India Company, “It is one of the great ironies of the Company’s history that its Indian empire was effectively won by its Indian troops.” The corporate army's officers were all British and the grunts were Indian. We've been cucking ourselves since day one. India's population was nearly 200 million but it was oppressed by less than 45,000 Britishers. As Barrow said, “In 1830, for example, the Company garrisoned 36,409 British soldiers but employed only 3,500 civil servants and permitted just 2,149 businessmen and other Europeans to live in India.”

The colonizers of the Raj played political Jenga, corrupting local elites with imported goods, education for their children, and filthy lucre from the enslavement of their own people. Splinter colonization is still the policy of the day, divide and conquer the masses using local elites. It goes back to the great grand pappy of White Empire. As Cornell and Matthews write about the Romans, “The political organization of the developing provinces was achieved through the existing upper classes.” It is, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day.

That's how it worked in Sri Lanka. The noble families collaborated with the colonizers. They invited foreign guns in to settle petty scores against teach other and sold out the whole country. Those same ruling families are still ruling the country, and still ruining it. The British called this divide and conquer, and the Americans do the same thing with better marketing. They call the process democratizing, encouraging free speech, human rights, but it's really just divide and conquer. And colonized individuals like me were used to divide. I feel sick to be part of that history, but that was me.

Decolonization

But Fanon wrote about an arc for the colonized man, as the world decolonized around him. Fanon describes my own intellectual evolution when he says,

All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words. Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged.

Indeed, I have struggled with the western values I imbibed because they're so flagrantly violated now. As Assata Shakur said, “When times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler.” As times get hard and money gets tight, western liberals are literally committing genocide. They piously look down on Trump as the 'greater evil', while not looking in a mirror while they commit genocide. What are you going to tell me about lesser evil while I see kids with their heads and eyes blown off every day? When Democrats just continue Republican policies with more pious banalities? Just a jumble of words atop a mountain of dead bodies.

Fanon said, “The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal. But during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized intellectual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to smithereens.” I have truly felt this smashing in my mind. We have arrived at a point where the conmen of history no longer even pretend to believe in any values, but the colonized men actually do.

Asides

Today, as James Baldwin says, “All the Western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.” It cheers me to see such clarity but depresses me that Baldwin said this decades ago. How much time have we lost, how many lives, to see what was already seen?

Decolonization is not merely a political process, it's psychological. I don't even know if I'm better yet, the mind virus runs deep. When I read Fanon I feel both abominable and absolved. Abominable because I was a colonized intellectual for so long, and absolved because I can feel decolonization also coursing through me. I like to think I arrived at my own conclusions, but I increasingly think conclusions arrived at me.