National consciousness can become an empty travesty of people’s hopes.

Evidence

National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people… will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3405

Categorization

• XREF: Fanon quotation resonating with the Egyptian and postcolonial nationalism literature, and with the critique of the postcolonial state in Things Fall Apart-era discourse. — connects to: Fading hope breeds reverent repetition of emptied political slogans. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 143