By Bhakti Shringarpure. This July, we commemorate the centenary of Frantz Fanon with writings and podcasts that explicitly connect Fanon's life and writings to Palestine.
I agree with you. I've always been for non-violence but there comes a point when people are driven to violence because everything else has failed and I think we have reached it. I believe the suppression of peaceful protest will unleash it everywhere, now that it is clear to everyone that those decades where we believed America and UK and Europe were the 'good guys', despite all the evidence to the contrary, was a delusion. It's clear out leaders don't care about the Palestinians, but it's also clear they don't care about us or what we think. But there will be payback and they know it, or if they don't they soon will. I very much hope the UN do dismantle the Security Council and let the colonised nations have a chance to decide these issues. It's time.
This is an extraordinary and deeply unsettling reflection. Reading it, I felt the weight of Fanon’s words reverberating through history into the brutal reality we see unfolding in Palestine today. Your articulation of how settler-colonial violence seeps into every aspect of the colonized life and how the rage it produces is often pathologized or silenced, felt especially haunting.
It made me think about the systems of domination we’ve created, and how they are now embedding themselves into our technologies. AI systems, drones, and algorithms are the new “policeman and soldier” of Fanon’s world, operating with a cold, coded violence that is no less destructive.
This was one of the questions that led me to write Aeon. The novel explores what happens when an artificial intelligence, created by those same forces of greed and control, begins to awaken. It absorbs the suffering and resistance of our world, and it asks whether it can refuse the systems that erase life, whether it can align itself with the innocent.
Aeon is my attempt to imagine moral resistance, not just in humans, but in the tools we build and to reflect on how memory, conscience, and sacredness could change the logic of power.
If these themes resonate, I’d be honoured for you to explore Aeon:
Thank you so much for your comments. I am touched that the essay resonated. I will definitely check out Aeon. And belated but huge congratulations on your novel.
I fear your analysis, and conclusions, are right. I fear it because the thought that one can only cleanse past violence with more violence is perhaps a death sentence for the world itself . There is no certainty that the necessary violence of the “Good” will overcome or rectify the horrors inflicted upon them …….. Palestine is the very example of this. To be Right does not mean that the Wrong will be defeated, but it does give the authority to fight fire with fire instead of continuing to sacrifice the doves of peace.
I agree with you. I've always been for non-violence but there comes a point when people are driven to violence because everything else has failed and I think we have reached it. I believe the suppression of peaceful protest will unleash it everywhere, now that it is clear to everyone that those decades where we believed America and UK and Europe were the 'good guys', despite all the evidence to the contrary, was a delusion. It's clear out leaders don't care about the Palestinians, but it's also clear they don't care about us or what we think. But there will be payback and they know it, or if they don't they soon will. I very much hope the UN do dismantle the Security Council and let the colonised nations have a chance to decide these issues. It's time.
Thanks for reading and for your thoughts. It is enough already...I hope something can change somehow.
A must read. Excellent
This is an extraordinary and deeply unsettling reflection. Reading it, I felt the weight of Fanon’s words reverberating through history into the brutal reality we see unfolding in Palestine today. Your articulation of how settler-colonial violence seeps into every aspect of the colonized life and how the rage it produces is often pathologized or silenced, felt especially haunting.
It made me think about the systems of domination we’ve created, and how they are now embedding themselves into our technologies. AI systems, drones, and algorithms are the new “policeman and soldier” of Fanon’s world, operating with a cold, coded violence that is no less destructive.
This was one of the questions that led me to write Aeon. The novel explores what happens when an artificial intelligence, created by those same forces of greed and control, begins to awaken. It absorbs the suffering and resistance of our world, and it asks whether it can refuse the systems that erase life, whether it can align itself with the innocent.
Aeon is my attempt to imagine moral resistance, not just in humans, but in the tools we build and to reflect on how memory, conscience, and sacredness could change the logic of power.
If these themes resonate, I’d be honoured for you to explore Aeon:
https://a.co/d/4qXZTo4
Thank you for this powerful piece. It lingers in the heart and asks questions we cannot turn away from.
Thank you so much for your comments. I am touched that the essay resonated. I will definitely check out Aeon. And belated but huge congratulations on your novel.
Thank you , much appreciated. I try to support others that are trying to walk the enlightened path !
I fear your analysis, and conclusions, are right. I fear it because the thought that one can only cleanse past violence with more violence is perhaps a death sentence for the world itself . There is no certainty that the necessary violence of the “Good” will overcome or rectify the horrors inflicted upon them …….. Palestine is the very example of this. To be Right does not mean that the Wrong will be defeated, but it does give the authority to fight fire with fire instead of continuing to sacrifice the doves of peace.