When asked if violence is justified in fighting against colonial rule, many people may say no. They would side with the better nature in humans that says non-violence is always better than violence. However, most of these same people, if they thought back to the history of their own nation—and for some it might not even be distant history—there was at least one violent overthrow of a colonial government in the past. They would surely think violence was justified because it ended the oppressive control. Yet, today, war weary people do not want violence. No one really ever has wanted violence, but they wanted to be free. Based on the collection of violent revolutions that have occurred in which people have overthrown oppressive imperialist governments, it seems violence is necessary and justified to accomplish that. This then leads one to question why violence is necessary. The answer may simply be because humans struggling against other humans to be free are violent, but so are humans conquering humans that want to be free.
Why do humans need to be violent? Why, when there is a threat of violence, does the oppressing nation not just leave, give back the land, give back the power, the resources, the infrastructure, and the institutions it has established and wish the country well? Of course, that sounds absurd. No nation would invade another, create a functioning government and methods to extract resources and then just return it to the people from whom they stole it when they realized that the conquered were unhappy. Even if that would be the morally right thing to do, it would not happen. It is a preposterous notion, and that is why there must be violence. The people from whom these things were taken, who have not benefited from these things in the same way their oppressor has see no other way to recover what is theirs than to forcefully oust those who stole it from them in the same way it was taken from them, and so there is violence.
When the American Revolutionary War occurred, Great Britain was the leading power in the world. It had control of most of North America and other regions as well. The eighteenth century was the beginning of their power. The nineteenth century saw India come under British rule, and by the early twentieth century, Great Britain had peaked. After two world wars in which Great Britain fought and lost many people, they began to relinquish their control and return countries, often seemingly without a great deal of violence, to the people they had ruled for so long. However, there was violence.
At the time Americans revolted against colonial rule, they were revolting against oppressive powers that demanded from them what they did not want to give. Of course, the Americans who lead the revolt were not natives. They were part of the colonization, so one could say that the Revolutionary War was violence between two colonizing powers. The American power won and for over 200 years now, they have oppressed the natives and the slaves and the descendants of slaves they kidnapped as laborers to build their country. One only needs to look as far as the reservations and the ghettos to see the truth in that. The Native Americans fought against the American colonial rule too. Framed as savages, they were made out to be the instigators of violence, and they often were, but they were fighting for decolonization.
White Americans made Native Americans out to be savages, nothing more than animals who would violently murder men, women and children who ventured into their land. Franz Fanon says, “The native knows all this and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory” (Fanon 43). The native knows that he will be slaughtered like an animal if he asserts his autonomy, so he prepares to defend himself. Unfortunately for Native Americans, they did not win their freedom from colonial rule. Instead the fighting between the two opposing forces turned into near genocide. The colonized people under British rule who successfully and violently fought the British for independence, wiped out the Natives when they sought to do the same against them. In the latter case, there could have been compromise, but violence was easier and gave the oppressors what they wanted without compromise.
In other situations, the Natives have successfully won back their nation from the British. India is a good example. Some would say that decolonization was not violent in India thanks to Gandhi’s non-violent methods, but the people of India fought for many years for independence under British colonization before Gandhi came along. Decolonization does not always take place rapidly. Fanon says,