In the past few decades, the world has watched a grim parade of attacks on ordinary people. Worshippers were murdered in churches in Sri Lanka and in mosques in New Zealand. Jews were killed while at prayer in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and even at a chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the aftermath, manifestos and online commentary frame such bloodshed as “defense,” “justice,” or “resistance.”
Moral responsibility is personal. However useful group categories may be for describing history or power, they cannot do the work of moral judgment. Treating people as guilty because they belong—to a race, class, religion, nation, party, or institution—turns justice into collective punishment, and it makes violence feel permissible against “representatives” rather than against perpetrators.
Why Justified Violence is Spreading
These examples reveal how dangerously blurred the moral line has become between justified violence and terrorism. Increasingly, those who commit crimes are excused, while ordinary law-abiding people, working unglamorous jobs in average towns or simply attending a place or worship are painted as guilty of society’s ills and, in some eyes, worthy of death. Such thinking only makes sense when guilt and innocence are determined not by individual actions but by membership in a group.
Under this logic, violence becomes a kind of moral accounting: if you belong to the wrong class, race, religion, or “side of history,” you are fair game. That logic did not arise in a vacuum. It can be traced through intellectual traditions that assign guilt and innocence categorically rather than personally.
This essay looks especially at one of the most influential theorists of “liberating” violence, Frantz Fanon, and argues that the Christian Just War tradition provides a much-needed antidote, restoring moral lines and individual responsibility.
Who is Frantz Fanon? Why He Matters Now
This logic of categorical guilt runs through modern theories that split humanity into two camps: the oppressors versus the oppressed in Marx, or the colonizers versus the colonized in Frantz Fanon.
Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” praised by Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornel West as a revolutionary manual, has become particularly influential. Written in the context of anti-colonial struggles, it presents decolonization as a total, existential confrontation in which violence is not merely permitted but celebrated as cleansing and necessary.
Today, its vision of collective struggle and sanctioned violence echoes in the defense of Hamas atrocities, in the celebration of political assassination, and in online rhetoric that treats whole populations as legitimate targets. When activists speak of “decolonization,” some use it as a euphemism for eliminating entire communities. Those who do follow Fanon’s thinking shift moral judgment from individual acts to group identity, whether they knowingly rely on him or not.
Fanon’s Case for Revolutionary Violence
The “Wretched of the Earth” both justifies and normalizes intense violence. The first line declares, “Decolonization is always a violent event.” A few pages later, Fanon says, “Decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives,” and he warns of a “human tide” that sounds eerily like the French Reign of Terror.
Fanon says the colonized are filled with “blood feuds” and “fratricidal blood bath(s).” Decolonization “is clearly and plainly an armed struggle.” Violence is not a tragic last resort but the very heart of liberation: “For the colonized, this violence represents the absolute praxis.” He even concludes that “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonialist.”
Moral responsibility is personal.
Fanon makes this explicit:
“If the act for which this man is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonial individual or colonial asset, then the demarcation line [between right and wrong] is clear and manifest.”
The moral line, in other words, is not drawn by what you do, but by whom you do it to.
Fanon Minimizes Religion and Classic Liberal Values
When Fanon does quote Christian teachings, he typically invalidates or twists them. Teachings of love and harmony, for example, are simply part of the “confusion mongers” that make exploitation easier in Fanon’s view.
In quoting Christian language about how “The last shall be first,” Fanon insists that “the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation.” In this view, love and reconciliation are not virtues, but obstacles to the necessary bloodshed.
Fanon also racializes Christianity, calling it the white man’s church. He treats broader values from the Christian moral tradition the same way. Without evidence, he asserts that “government agents use the language of pure violence.” Discussions of Western values supposedly cause the natives to tense their muscles, grab a machete and sharpen their weapons.
In this framing, appeals to rights, due process, mercy, or moral restraint are dismissed as hypocritical covers for domination. What Christians and many classical liberal thinkers defended as moral guardrails become, in Fanon’s hands, part of the enemy’s arsenal.
Where Categorical Guilt Leads
All this matters because the values Fanon ridicules helped establish the guardrails against the kind of bloodbath he justifies. Those same values also offered moral correction for the abuses that are often used to excuse violent outbursts.
When you shift from individual responsibility to collective guilt, those guardrails vanish. We saw this when Hutu extremists in Rwanda called Tutsi neighbors “cockroaches,” and ethnonationalist propagandists in the former Yugoslavia branded entire villages as traitors and thereby legitimate targets.
You are guilty—or innocent—based on what you actually do.
Fanon’s own words (that I repeat here for emphasis) make this logic clear:
“If the act for which this man is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonial individual or colonial asset, then the demarcation line is clear and manifest.”
Even when the violence is mass slaughter and rape against innocent families, Fanon’s reasoning can collapse moral distinctions to make all Jews guilty by association, and all terrorists as virtuous by category. It allows ISIS to massacre Yazidis.
That is why Americans witnessed some activist subcultures making gliders their logo. (Gliders are how the terrorists traveled to the massacre at the Nova music festival.) The same moral confusion produced social media posts insisting that the barbaric savagery of Hamas was simply “what decolonization looks like.”
The same collective guilt theory helps explain why some rationalized away the assassination of a health care executive, and others the assassination of a state House speaker. If “the system” is murderous and anyone associated with it is a “legitimate target,” then the ordinary moral prohibition against murder loses much of its force.
In short, the problem is the same one I have described elsewhere, writing about ”Visions of Glory”: once people begin labeling themselves as part of a righteous group and their opponents as zombies, it becomes easier to justify killing them. If the world is divided into saints and monsters, why not exterminate the monsters?
When Fanon describes decolonization as naturally violent and the colonized existing in an “atmosphere of violence,” it becomes natural to strike out—not as a tragic last resort, but as an almost automatic cleansing reaction.
The Just War Antidote
The antidote is not to pretend oppression doesn’t exist, nor to indulge in vague moralizing that condemns all force equally. The antidote is the clarity of Just War principles and the wisdom of earlier thinkers who took both justice and peace seriously.
Within the Christian West, the Just War tradition developed clear questions to distinguish between justified force and murder:
- Is there a genuinely just cause, not mere revenge or envy?
- Is force authorized by a legitimate authority?
- Is it a last resort, after less drastic means have been tried?
- Is the response proportionate to the wrong suffered?
- Are we carefully discriminating between combatants and noncombatants? (This is perhaps most crucial for our purposes.)
The Salamanca School was a 16th and 17th-century Iberian intellectual movement that developed ideas such as natural law, international law, human rights, and indigenous rights.
One scholar from this school, Francisco Suarez, wrote that violent revolt is only justified “if essential for liberty, because if there is any less drastic means of removing him (the tyrant) it is not lawful to kill him … always provided that there is no danger of the same or worse evils falling on [the] community as a result of the tyrant’s death.” Here, violence is only permitted under extreme conditions—and even then, only when it will not unleash still greater horrors.
Early modern thinker Hugo Grotius wrote about the same right to revolt if the king alienates his people, but also warned potential usurpers that it would lead to gory factionalism and “dangerous, bloody conflict.”
In similar language, the Book of Mormon prophet Mosiah recognized the danger of revolt when he argued for the end of the monarchy:
“Ye cannot dethrone an iniquitous king save it be through much contention, and the shedding of much blood.”
In contrast to Fanon, Christian thinkers who helped shape classic liberalism acknowledged both the danger in revolution and the rights of the oppressed. They tried to channel righteous anger into morally constrained resistance, not open-ended slaughter.
Fanon dismissed the talk of rights as the “ersatz,” or fake struggle of elites, something he described as ”insipid humanitarianism.” Yet those supposedly insipid beliefs are stronger than any of Fanon’s theories because they clearly address the morality of revolution and darken lines he blurs.
Historically, those principles often led to reform rather than repression. Salamanca School scholars advocated for the human rights of natives. The Grimké sisters and Christian abolitionist missionaries argued from biblical morality against slavery. Missionaries and reformers exposed the abuses in the Belgian Congo. Despite being minimized by Fanon as mere abstractions, these advances inspired by the Salamanca School (and their religious underpinnings) were often a reforming counteragent to colonialism.
We are judged by our own sins.
Just War thinking insists that you are not guilty merely for belonging to a category. You are guilty—or innocent—based on what you actually do.
Applying Just War to Today’s Cases
Once we recover Just War principles, recent cases of violence look very different from the narratives that excuse them.
Consider Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians. No grievance, however real, can justify intentionally targeting families at the Nova music festival or in their homes. A theory that calls this “decolonization” fails the most basic Just War tests of discrimination (you may not deliberately target noncombatants) and proportionality (you may not answer injustice with indiscriminate slaughter).
The same is true of the shooting at the Latter-day Saint chapel in Michigan, the attack on a Catholic church, the Buffalo supermarket mass shooting, and the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, Melissa Hortman, and Brian Thompson. In each case, the victims are treated not as human beings with their own moral status but as stand-ins for an entire allegedly guilty class—Latter-day Saints, Catholics, African Americans, conservatives, liberals, or corporate elites.
Just War criteria force us to ask simple but powerful questions:
- Are these particular people directly responsible for grave injustices?
- Is the danger that supposedly requires violence clear, immediate and grave? Can that danger or injustice be remedied using non violent, legal or civil means?
- Has every less drastic means of redress been exhausted?
- Will killing them likely avert greater evils, or will it unleash still more chaos and retaliation?
- Are we distinguishing between those actually doing harm and those who merely belong to the same profession, religion, racial, or social group?
In these modern cases, the answer to those questions is obviously no. They can only be justified inside a framework, like Fanon’s, that treats entire classes of people as guilty and their deaths as morally clarifying.
Recovering Individual Responsibility
The antidote to the recent uptick of violence is not to invent new theories or to indulge in vague moralizing, but to return to the clarity of Just War principles and the wisdom of earlier thinkers. As both Christian tradition and the Book of Mormon warn, revolution comes only “through much contention, and the shedding of much blood.” That is not a license to glorify violence, but a sober caution to resist collective guilt and hold fast to individual responsibility.
We are judged by our own sins, not by the accidents of class, race, or category. If we truly wish to resist the age of blurred lines and confused morality, we must recover the values of love, harmony, and conciliation that Fanon dismissed—and recognize that peace is found not in collective vengeance or random shootings, but in clear moral standards rooted in justice.
Collective punishment erases the very accountability that justice requires. To draw the line between justified defense and terror, we must recover the conviction that every human being is a moral agent, answerable for his or her own actions before God and neighbor.
