When Is Political Violence Cool? Who's The Judge?

Who Got Assassinated? Lincoln, JFK, MLK, RFK, Gandhi… Not Hitler, Stalin, Trump

I think I was a high school freshman when Franz Fanon’s classic final book, The Wretched Of The Earth, was published. I read it for the first time it when I was still in high school. I was overjoyed when it was assigned in a college sociology class. I loved reading it both times— the psychology of colonial dehumanization and racism and the psychology of reclaiming that lost humanity. He was hardcore— the first section of the book was called “On Violence” and he wasn’t opposed— but before we get into it Let me pose a simplistic question often debated  by historians, ethicists and scholars— would it have been justified to assassinate Hitler? Some argue that assassinating Hitler would have prevented or shortened the World War II and the Holocaust, saving millions of lives. They contend that the extreme circumstances of Hitler's actions, including genocide and aggressive warfare, could have warranted such a drastic measure as a means of stopping further atrocities. Others raise concerns about the ethics of assassination— no, really— highlighting potential unintended consequences, such as retaliation, further destabilization or even the martyrdom of Hitler. Some also emphasize the importance of adhering to legal and moral norms, such as due process and the rule of law, even in extreme situations.

Thursday, The Atlantic published an essay about Fanon’s work by Gal Beckerman, The Patron Saint Of Political Violence. Right off the bat, he wanted to know what Franz would have to say about Gaza. For Fanon, wrote Beckerman “the world divided neatly into two groups, the colonized and the colonizer. Innocent civilians didn’t figure much into this dichotomy. When posters bearing photos of Israeli toddlers abducted to Gaza were vandalized and the word kidnapped replaced with occupier, that was pure Fanon. His argument, articulated in ‘On Violence,’ the provocative first chapter of his book The Wretched of the Earth, has the efficiency of a syllogism, as seemingly self-evident as an eye for an eye: The violence of colonialism has robbed the colonized of their humanity; to regain a sense of self, they must commit the same violence against the colonizer. ‘For the native,’ Fanon wrote at his bluntest, ‘life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.’”

For Fanon, “Armed resistance was a necessity for oppressed people— a perspective easy to agree with, especially when the oppression seems to foreclose any other option. But for Fanon, violence was not just about necessity; it was also positive in and of itself, serving a psychological end. Much like the electroshocks Fanon prescribed his patients, violence rebooted the consciousness of a colonized person by releasing him from his ‘inferiority complex and his passive or despairing attitude.’ This was not military strategy. This was therapy. And in its name, Fanon tacitly condoned a lot of killing, and not just of people in uniform. When the revolutionaries he had joined placed bombs in cafés where they murdered women and maimed children, he didn’t walk away. The oppressed needed violence in order to be made whole. Colonialism and its underlying racism had physical effects on its subjects. Achieving full humanity was possible only through an equivalently embodied act of overwhelming one’s oppressor.”

Despite the lurid visions of death, Fanon was an optimist who hoped that the necessary physical confrontation between colonized and colonizer would produce a “new man” and a fresh world of egalitarianism and individual freedom. Though he has been championed by movements of Black identity in his afterlife, Fanon himself did not draw his sense of self from a connection to his ancestors or the reclamation of an African past (he rejected, in fact, the Negritude movement, which sought to do just this). He didn’t believe that race could be ignored, but he emphatically did not want to be defined by it. He wanted race to be overcome. He looked instead to the future, to a postcolonial utopia that would level all the old power structures. “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?” he wrote. And in this future of inclusivity and justice, the lion would finally lie down with the lamb.

…One particular incident became an origin story of sorts, recounted in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s first book, published in 1952. Once the war was over, he remained in France and attended medical school in Lyon, a city with few Black people where he was continuously reminded of his difference. One day while riding the train, a little boy fearfully pointed at him and said to his mother, “Look, maman, a nègre!” Fanon tried to smile, to diffuse the awkwardness, but he felt rage well up inside him. When the mother tried to calm the scared boy by saying, “Look how handsome the nègre is,” Fanon couldn’t hold back any longer. “The handsome nègre says, fuck you, madame,” he burst out. The rupture with social norms felt freeing. “I was identifying my enemies and I was creating a scandal,” Fanon wrote about the moment. “Overjoyed. We could now have some fun.”

Fanon understood himself to be the other, and knew that he would never escape the limitations this imposed on him. “Whatever he did— take a stroll, dissect a corpse, make love, speak French— he did while being Black,” [biographer Adam] Shatz writes. “It felt like a curse, or a time bomb in his head.” The only way to overcome the feeling of being pinned down was to squirm, as he had done on the train— to refuse it. Existentialism, for this reason, served as a helpful philosophy for Fanon when he discovered and embraced it in the late 1940s. Sartre was concerned with the problem of human freedom and the ways we are being constantly hindered by the “gaze” of another, defining and thereby constraining us. His 1946 book Réflexions sur la Question Juive became a source text for Fanon: It explained how anti-Semites’ fears had effectively “created” the Jew, much as the psychological projections of the white world around him made Fanon Black in ways he detested and wanted to push back against.

…This pattern, of looking to the colonizer to justify the actions of the colonized, shows up consistently in these revolutionary years, as if Fanon, despite being once convinced by existentialism of his own boundless freedom, is trapped in a mirror. “The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force,” Fanon wrote. “To the expression: ‘All natives are the same,’ the colonized reply: ‘All colonists are the same.’” When Fanon began making connections among the independence movements of sub-Saharan Africa, he imagined a united force to help the Algerians, one that could “hurl a continent against the last ramparts of colonial power.” As Shatz notes, this was “anti-imperialist rhetoric” that “had the ring of colonial conquest.”

…For the oppressed, violence can feel like the only way out of a life that is otherwise encased by walls, like the only means of survival. And Fanon does understand, better than any other thinker, the vertiginous high of standing over your tormentor, of regaining a sense of agency. His solution feels like an unambiguous, cosmically just response to the day-to-day violence of colonialism, and it’s not hard to understand why it might feel like the only way toward freedom. After enough death, France did, in the end, leave Algeria. But if violence is also meant to be ennobling, this aspect of it is, as Shatz describes, “ephemeral at best.” What lasts longer— and Fanon the psychiatrist is keenly alert to this— is how permanently damaging violence is to whoever perpetrates it. Fanon's surreal denial of this knowledge, his belief that somehow slicing the throat of the colonizer will lead to a new, more equitable reality and not just more violence, is hard to comprehend.

The best case Shatz makes for not being repelled outright by Fanon’s bloody vision is his suggestion that The Wretched of the Earth be read “as literature”— in fact, this might be the key to understanding his continued appeal for readers, a narratively satisfying way of resolving the world’s wrongs with the slash of a sword. Fanon had a literary sensibility, and possibly, Shatz writes, it may have carried him into starker territory than he fully intended, producing an allegorical text that resembled something out of Samuel Beckett’s mind—with the colonized and colonizer as “archetypes locked together in fatal contradiction.” “On Violence” does contain some strikingly poetic passages. Fanon wrote, for example, about how the physical oppression of colonialism expresses itself in dreams:

The dreams of the native are muscular dreams, dreams of action, aggressive dreams. I dream that I am jumping, that I am swimming, that I am running, that I am climbing. I dream that I’m bursting out laughing, that I’m crossing the river in a single stride, that I’m being pursued by a pack of cars that will never catch me. During colonization, the colonized never ceases to liberate himself between the hours of nine in the evening and six in the morning.

Fanon evokes powerlessness and the anguish of trying to regain control of one’s own life. This makes The Wretched of the Earth “rich in dramatic potential,” as Shatz writes. If only Fanon’s book was meant to be read as a novel or as poetry— but it wasn’t. It was intended and understood as a prescription.

Violence felt inevitable to Fanon, but he lived in a moment when other possibilities existed. Gandhi’s Salt March took place within his lifetime, as did the Montgomery bus boycott. These movements, with stakes just as high as those of Algerian independence, self-consciously countered the brutality of the oppressor with humanistic tactics. Change came not from mimicking violent behavior but from deliberately, and with great discipline, avoiding it, breaking what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the chain reaction of evil.” Nonviolence had, of course, its own dangers and detractors— Fanon would probably agree with Malcolm X, who looked at children being attacked with fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham in 1963 and said, “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” But the approach of the civil-rights movement in these years achieved concrete victories against discrimination before it devolved into its own forms of militancy. In Africa, the majority of countries that became independent while hundreds of thousands were dying in Algeria did so through peaceful if tense negotiations with the colonial powers. Moreover, during Fanon’s life, the world had already seen what happens when violence is thought of as a “cleansing force.” Even the language Fanon used was somewhat familiar. “Only war knows how to rejuvenate, accelerate and sharpen human intelligence for the better,” wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of the Italian futurists (and an eventual fascist) in the first months of the bloodbath that was World War I.

And if armed conflict seemed the only way for Algerians to shake off France’s long domination, Fanon could have remained more intellectually honest, and less tangled in contradiction, by taking a critical stance. Others did just this. Albert Memmi was a Tunisian Jewish intellectual who, like Fanon, saw the harm caused by colonialism and racism to be “as unbearable as hunger.” But he understood that the militants fighting French rule were using means that represented a choice “not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness.” He supported armed resistance with open eyes about the consequences of all this killing and an awareness that the type of society the revolutionaries were fighting for would ultimately be inhospitable to him and his own marginalized identity as a Jew.

The Fanon of “On Violence” hardly blinks; no room for “uneasiness.” And this makes it nearly impossible for Shatz to grant the nuance he so desperately wants to accord Fanon. Alongside the intellectual drama, there is also a Freudian psychodrama that weaves its way through the biography, and it comes closest to explaining Fanon’s motives: a disgruntled son who came to detest what he saw as the passivity of his native Martinique, a land of formerly enslaved people whose freedom was granted to them by their colonizer; a man who chose France as his adopted father, but then decided to kill his connection to this father country when it betrayed him by making him feel he wasn’t a true son. When Fanon took up the Algerian cause, it was with the “zeal of a convert,” writes Shatz. An Algerian activist and historian, Mohammed Harbi, who knew Fanon, said he had “a very strong need to belong”; this is a quality that could easily drive someone to excesses of unquestioning loyalty. He wanted a home.

Yesterday Carl Gibson reported that “One of the coalition members of the far-right Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" presidential transition plan is proposing to overhaul the US Constitution to keep Trump in power beyond the eight-year limit. The American Conservative— one of the 100 advisory groups to Project 2025— recently published a call to repeal the 22nd Amendment as a means of allowing Trump to seek a "second consecutive term" in the White House if he wins in November. That amendment has been in place since 1951, and stipulates that presidents can't spend more than eight years in office, whether in two back-to-back terms or staggered between other administrations.”