Fanon: A critique of Gandhi or Against the principle of hope.

So the slave thought that the master's conscience would one day force him to make the bondsman a gift of liberty? Out of an overflowing human munificence of heart? A slave and a Candide? Splendid! Humanity shall one day wake up from its evil spawning slumber (For what are His dreams but good and evil dialecticising along the cobblestone of this world and leaving monuments and debris behind?) and universal brotherhood will replace judgement day and end of history or whatever other teloses the mystics and the realists might throw in the face of that most fundamental of human principles - hope.The fountain of this vision of human history is older than just some local intellectual tradition called European enlightenment. It is as primitive as human heart. It wells irresistibly out of the optimist and the soft hearted and that gushy flaw in the most pragmatic of souls. And eternal it does die. Hope that love is the reigning deity and hatred the barking dog. Hope is the anxious knowledge that human nature is underivatively humane and the world beautiful. To revolt against hope is to renounce one's humanity and be cast aside as a heretic and traitor to all that is or could possibly be well with the world. But hope is also enslaving. The knowledge bred by hope is consoling but solipsistic and, therefore, imprisoning. Necessarily and inevitably, human history since its origin has been the captive of hope. A prison very real and brutally enshackling, erected out of a community of souls overgorged on idealistic love and visionary humanism.

A nation always explodes into liberation even though the spark was lit in an ancient recess of history and the fire had to burn a long rope before reaching the threshold of detonation. Sleep does not taper off, but terminates. And then there is disturbed, restless or troubled sleep populated by tense dreams and succeeded by awakening. But always awakening, always a termination. It is the dreAMS UNDERLYING sleep THAT PREPARE THE moment of awakening. The mind of humanity is never silenced by sleep. Its dream is only dormancy. It dreams, then it alternates between sleep and dreams before snapping violently awake. The individual may enjoy spells of dreamless sleep but not the collective. History is not dreamlessness but humanity dreaming. Always dreaming. All too often nightmaring. And no collective awakening is ever gentle. A mass of men dream the fulfilment of their long repressed freudian desires and the Oedipal pain is at last destroyed like a malign tissue by