Colonized civilians relied on defiant inner conviction against traumatizing French press

Evidence

During the first months of the war, it was by means of the press that the Algerian attempted to organize his own news distribution system. The democratic press still existing in Algeria and the newspapers with an anti-colonialist tradition or a policy of objectivity were then avidly read by the native. It was in this sector of news distribution that the Algerian found balance-restoring elements. The power of the colonialist message, the systems used to impose it and present it as the truth were such that most of the time the colonized had only his own increasingly overshadowed inner conviction to oppose to the eminently traumatizing offensives of the French press and the spectacular manifestations of the military and police power. Confronted daily with “the wiping out of the last remaining guerrilla bands,” the civilian could fight off despair only by an act of faith, by an obstinate belief. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 274

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165; Centuries of oppression produce physiological violence in the colonized — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 71; Colonial trauma produces a feeling of nonexistence, not mere inferiority — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 547 (+1 more)

Related

• Centuries of oppression produce physiological violence in the colonized (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial attacks on a cultural practice determine where resistance crystallizes (similarity 0.80)
• The colonized learned of the revolution’s gravity by reading the settler’s visible anxiety (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial press propaganda shaped even sympathetic settlers’ early views (similarity 0.79)
• Colonialism occupies the individual’s psyche, not merely the territory (similarity 0.79)
• Each Algerian generation grows harder rather than wearier against colonialism (similarity 0.79)
• Colonization is internalized into the most intimate private space (similarity 0.79)
• The colonized also wield knowledge-as-power discourses against those they colonize (similarity 0.79)
• French colonialism occupied the Algerian individual’s self, not merely the territory (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial utopias functioned as blueprints of distress, not conquest. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial violence created a spiritual void more powerful than class conflict. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance #exemplifies (0.55) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165
• Colonial trauma produces a feeling of nonexistence, not mere inferiority #expands (0.55) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 547
• Centuries of oppression produce physiological violence in the colonized #expands (0.50) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 71