The March/April issue of Against the Current (ATC) features the essay by Alan Wald Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence. Wald is a member of ATC’s editorial board. The magazine describes itself as “the analytical and activist journal sponsored by Solidarity.”

Wald takes as his starting point two books by Adam Shatz, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

World-Outlook is reposting Wald’s essay with the author’s permission. Our views are not identical to all of those expressed in it. But we believe the main issues Wald raises deserve further discussion in light of the gruesome October 7 attack led by Hamas that targeted civilians in Israel and the genocidal war Israel unleashed in retaliation on the entire population of Gaza.

Wald writes:

The issue is not the validity of armed resistance in itself, but the policies, programs, ethics and culture of any revolutionary or nationalist organizations presently in contention to lead an anticolonial social transformation….

Joined by other factions and individuals, the Hamas-led raid spun into acts of gruesome counter-violence against everyone encountered, including defenseless and helpless victims. Scores of civilians, not just Israeli and other Jews (many attending a Peace music festival), but foreign workers and Arabs (especially Bedouin) were slaughtered or taken hostage, and women likely raped and tortured. Israeli soldiers became prisoners of war.

Many aspects of the bloody clash are still in dispute; Israeli state propaganda should not be automatically believed, especially since there have been lies about beheadings of babies and cover-ups of Israelis killed by crossfire of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force).

Nonetheless, October 7 was immediately exploited as a pretext for a dramatic intensification of Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on the far greater number of defenseless and helpless Palestinians in Gaza.

The whole lacerating sequence soon catapulted the problem of what constitutes politically effective resistance to colonial oppression to the foreground of debate and discussion.

World-Outlook has expressed our own views on these issues in several previous articles. These include The Palestinian Struggle and Lessons from South Africa, On the Character of the Oct. 7 Attack by Hamas, and others.

Oppressors are the main source of violence

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 employed extreme violence resulting in more than 700,000 Palestinians being expelled or fleeing from their homes. Israeli violence has been a brutal fact of life for Palestinians for more than 75 years since. Israel’s victory in the “Six-Day War” in 1967 resulted in its military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, institutionalizing a sharp escalation of daily violence against Palestinians.

In the face of violence by the oppressors — whether in Palestine or elsewhere — the oppressed have the right to defend themselves. It is the unrelenting violence of the oppressors that often dictates the need for armed actions in self-defense. The assertion of that right, however, does not settle the issue of what strategy and methods can lead the struggle for liberation to victory.

We believe political program, strategy, tactics, and methods are connected. World-Outlook’s view is that the lessons taught by Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), in the decades-long battle to overturn the apartheid regime in South Africa, have received insufficient attention by many who support Palestinian liberation today. Careful study of that history reveals that the example of both the political program and strategy advocated by Mandela, and put into practice in the South African struggle, offer a clear alternative to that of Hamas.

Those who led the struggle to overthrow apartheid insisted on complete equality for all who lived in South Africa and the need for a democratic republic. That was spelled out in the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955, which declared in its second sentence: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.”

From that starting point, as ANC leader Walter Sisulu explained in 1959, the ANC “has repudiated the idea of ‘driving the white man into the sea’ as futile and reactionary and accepted the fact that the various racial groups in South Africa have come to stay.”

While fully recognizing the legitimate anger Black South Africans felt towards European settlers, Sisulu argued that in the struggle for freedom, fighters would “rise to the broad non-racial humanism of the Congress movement.”

The strategy that was intimately connected to this program was concisely described by Mandela in a 1991 speech to a conference of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s military wing launched under Mandela’s leadership in 1961:

“The foundation stone of the ANC’s strategy, is that no group of revolutionaries, acting on their own, no matter how courageous, disciplined, and self-sacrificing, can hope to overthrow the system of oppression.

“Victory in the national liberation struggle is dependent upon the active and conscious participation of the masses of the oppressed people, determining their own destiny through struggle…. It was always our view therefore, that the armed liberation struggle was based on and grew out of the mass political struggles waged by the oppressed.” (Emphasis added.)

This is the opposite of the course taken by Hamas.

Algeria

In discussing the life and writings of Frantz Fanon, Wald refers to the Algerian struggle for independence from French colonialism (1954-1962), in which Fanon was deeply involved. “Too many of the pitiless deaths of civilians were due to internecine factional struggles among the Algerians,” Wald writes.

“Some sources estimate that 12,000 militants were killed in an internal purge, and another 70,000 in clashes between parties.”

Wald’s essay does not offer a full assessment of the Algerian revolution, nor do we offer one in this introduction. In that struggle Algerians confronted the murderous violence of French colonialism and ultimately won independence. The Algerian revolution brought to power a workers and farmers government, led by Ben Bella and the National Liberation Front (FLN, from its initials in French), which in 1965 was overthrown in a military coup by a faction of the FLN.

The use of violence against opponents within the national liberation movement is also part of the history of the Palestinian struggle. As World Outlook wrote in No to Israel’s New Nakba in Gaza (II), “In 2007 Hamas launched a war against Fatah and other Palestinians, executing some, taking some prisoner, and expelling others.”

Lessons from Grenada

In 1983, the revolution in Grenada, which had tossed out a brutal dictatorship and established a workers and farmers government in 1979, was overthrown. This defeat resulted from the execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and other leaders of the New Jewel Movement by a faction of that organization. These events opened the door to a U.S. invasion of the island nation.

Cuba’s revolutionary leadership was unequivocal in opposing the use of these methods. “No doctrine, no principle or position held up as revolutionary, and no internal division,” they said, in an October 20, 1983, statement, “justifies atrocious proceedings like the physical elimination of Bishop and the outstanding group of honest and worthy leaders killed yesterday.” The statement then concluded, “No crime must be committed in the name of the revolution and freedom.”

We believe these words also deserve study by those of us who support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination today. More is involved than avoiding violence within the movement, as important as that is. We believe the targeting of civilians, as Hamas and others did on October 7, is an example of crimes “committed in the name of the revolution and freedom,” as the Cuban leadership put it.

The Palestinian fight for national liberation is a just struggle that legitimately claims the support of millions committed to freedom and democracy worldwide. Methods like those used in the October 7 attack undermine that support and run counter to the goal of national liberation; they are reactionary.

Nelson Mandela and Cuba’s revolutionary leadership recognized that every popular struggle needs to take the moral high ground in fighting for its aims and objectives. Mandela gave an instructive example in 1985 when, after long years of imprisonment, the apartheid regime offered to release him if he “renounced violence” in the fight against apartheid.

Mandela seized the opportunity to explain the real issues involved. “I’m surprised at the conditions that the government wants to impose on me,” Mandela said in a statement read to a gathering of supporters of the liberation fight. “I am not a violent man. . . . It was only when all other forms of resistance were no longer open to us that we turned to armed struggle.

“I cherish my own freedom dearly,” Mandela said. “But I care even more for your freedom.” What is the point of accepting the government offer, he continued, when apartheid still effectively reduces freedom to almost nothing.

We believe all of these lessons are directly relevant to the discussion Wald addresses in his essay.

Due to its length, we are publishing Wald’s essay in two parts, the first of which follows. The headline, subheadings, photos, and footnotes below are from the original.

—World-Outlook Editors

*

Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence

(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

By Alan Wald

Writers and Missionaries:
Essays on the Radical Imagination
By Adam Shatz
New York: Verso, 2023, 357 pages,
$29 hardback.

The Rebel’s Clinic:
The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
By Adam Shatz
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2024, 451 pages, $32.00 hardback.

ARE YOU THE kind of socialist activist looking for easy answers to questions about revolutionary violence, or who hungers for uplifting political biographies of icons of radical commitment?

If so, Adam Shatz is a writer you should probably shun. His two recent books are testaments to a fierce curiosity that evokes the more perplexing and incongruous aspects of intellectuals and their social responsibility, often with a unique emphasis on anticolonialism.^[1]

Zealots, beware! It is his unblinking assessments of authors and activists, and the courage to zig where most choose to zag, that have become Shatz’s signature method in a quest to reveal the intricacies of theory and practice of avant-garde cultural figures in Europe and the Middle East.

Yet Shatz’s unsettling appraisals may be just what we require at this fraught political moment. They speak to several issues turbo-charged by the 7 October 2023 bloodshed in Israel, and the industrial-scale genocidal onslaught that has followed. His well-versed approach may help clarify long festering debates about what constitutes meaningful socialist commitment to Palestinian liberation and the indispensable eradication of Zionist settler-colonialism.^[2]

Adam Shatz is a middle-aged Jewish American radical journalist who came to political consciousness under the impact of the First Intifada (1987-93), and then educated himself by reading Jewish anarchist Noam Chomsky, Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher, and Palestinian radical scholar Edward Said.

Best-known today as the U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, he is also a contributor to prominent left-leaning intellectual publications such as the Nation, New Yorker, and New York Review of Books. Nevertheless, Shatz has no hesitancy about sharing information and offering interpretations that might upend practically any partisan narrative.

Writers and Missionaries, his scintillating collection of essays from Verso publishers, might be read as an appetite-whetter that explores a range of complex motivations and enigmatic affinities of a selection of writers, many of them leftwing. Then comes the main course, which takes his enterprise to a whole new level: The Rebel’s Clinic, a gobsmacking life story of Afro-Caribbean Marxist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961).

Fanon and Algeria in Context

It is when he turns to Fanon that Shatz situates the passionate calling of the biography’s beguiling protagonist in the context of the punishing paradoxes of the Algerian anticolonial resistance to French domination, and especially the staggering amount of violence during the decade of war (1954-1962).

A defiance of French colonial brutality was obligatory, and colonization is by and large to blame for the perhaps 1,500,000 Algerians who were killed along with 26,000 French soldiers and 6000 Europeans. Yet too many of the pitiless deaths of civilians were due to internecine factional struggles among the Algerians.

Some sources estimate that 12,000 militants were killed in an internal purge, and another 70,000 in clashes between parties. This practice of liquidating rival nationalists was even carried over into the Algerian population in France where it took another 5000 lives in the so-called “Café Wars” — bomb attacks and assassinations in coffee shops.^[3]

Unquestionably, for socialist-internationalists Algerian independence was a legitimate cause if there ever was one, with French Trotskyists and anarchists the honorable initiators of European support.^[4] In spite of that legitimacy, the victory was followed over decades by hundreds of thousands of more deaths of Arabs and Berbers due to the domestic tyranny of the post-colonial elite that had its roots in earlier repressive behavior.

Algeria today is a human rights disaster marked by restrictions on free speech and religion, mass arrests and torture, and a failure to implement laws to prevent feminicide.^[5] Unless one is an absolute determinist or fatalist, such a past record should cause today’s solidarity activists to ask conscientious questions.

The issue is not the validity of armed resistance in itself, but the policies, programs, ethics and culture of any revolutionary or nationalist organizations presently in contention to lead an anticolonial social transformation.

Certainly, the need to take action against colonial oppression can be exigent, and attention-grabbing exploits of armed resistance often demonstrate courage as well as conviction. All the same, daring feats recurrently overshadow attention to political program and a group’s history. A military success does not necessarily assure future liberation, and building a better society remains the real goal.

Can solidarity activism offer a blank check to any organization that comes to the fore in the name of “resistance”? All revolutionary acts advancing liberation should be supported, but what qualifies? Is every kind of rebellion productive? Should one organization alone be allocated a monopoly over the struggle?

From the outcome in Algeria and numerous other countries during the Post-colonial Age, we know that national liberation is demanded but that specific political movements can go utterly wrong.

Politically Effective Resistance

Issues arising from the Algerian political aspect of Fanon’s career explain why Shatz’s volume has received considerable attention in the press following the events of October 7. That was the day when the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas launched its own audacious act of anticolonial rebellion against a long-violent Israeli state by breaching the imprisoning sixteen-year blockade of Gaza.

Joined by other factions and individuals, the Hamas-led raid spun into acts of gruesome counter-violence against everyone encountered, including defenseless and helpless victims. Scores of civilians, not just Israeli and other Jews (many attending a Peace music festival), but foreign workers and Arabs (especially Bedouin) were slaughtered or taken hostage, and women likely raped and tortured.^[6] Israeli soldiers became prisoners of war.

Many aspects of the bloody clash are still in dispute; Israeli state propaganda should not be automatically believed, especially since there have been lies about beheadings of babies and cover-ups of Israelis killed by crossfire of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force).

Nonetheless, October 7 was immediately exploited as a pretext for a dramatic intensification of Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on the far greater number of defenseless and helpless Palestinians in Gaza.^[7]

The whole lacerating sequence soon catapulted the problem of what constitutes politically effective resistance to colonial oppression to the foreground of debate and discussion. How to achieve liberation in an asymmetrical situation of extreme inequality is especially problematic, more than ever when a stateless population faces a powerful state and the weaker side can’t fight with normal military means.

Among the anticolonial Left there was no disagreement about reaffirming support to the just cause of Palestinian liberation. Condemnation was focused on the Israeli carpet-bombing and invasion of Gaza that swiftly exposed the monstrous inhumanity of present-day political Zionism. Mass action for a permanent cease-fire became the immediate project, along with demanding the end of U.S aid to the Israeli state.

In distinction to liberal Zionists who may have been distressed by “excesses” of the Netanyahu government but who refused to address the root cause, socialist-internationalists persisted in making their long-standing argument for the thorough transformation of the ethno-religious Israeli state.

This solution must occur through the abolition of apartheid and colonial privilege, replacing these with a new multinational state or federation that secures the democratic rights and security of all people from the river to the sea. But how would that objective be achieved and who would carry it out?

Are the ideology and strategy of Hamas to be publicly embraced, passed over in silence, or cagily massaged by characterizing October 7 as a “military action” with “tactical” matters left to be discussed later?

What to make of the past history of Hamas rule in Gaza with no free political discussion, no freedom of the press or assembly, repression of gender equality, and antisemitic propaganda? Is there really a case for its liberating potential?

Along with mobilizing for action against Israeli state genocide, how does one also address these matters to build the critical-minded socialist movement needed here? Shouldn’t our stance be one that that maintains the right of anticolonial resistance but also listens to and learns from veterans of anticolonial struggle, and an assortment of Palestinian activists, to advance beyond errors of the past?

Of course, Shatz’s books were written before October 7 and hardly provide a blueprint for present-day policy.^[8] He is emphatically opposed to racism, colonialism and “actually existing Zionism,” and not unsympathetic to the right of armed resistance. Nevertheless, his research and writing (including many previously uncollected pieces) raise issues about troubling dimensions of heartfelt political commitment as well as the long-term consequences of revolutionary action.

Shatz accomplishes this not by political directives (I don’t know many of his specific views), but by excavating and probing the concrete circumstances of actors and social movements, often raising questions that haven’t been asked by others.

That’s why his work can be poison to those who are curiously incurious about the nuanced realities and shape-shifting nature of class and anti-imperialist struggles as they evolve over time, not to mention the frequently messy lives of even those who are heroically pledged to a liberatory future.

Shatz launched his career with certain principles that he has not abandoned; but through the years he has become increasingly a listener, especially to those with first-hand involvements and standpoints outside the United States and often the West.

Beyond this, Shatz is also a writer who has mastery over a dizzying array of topics such as modern Jazz, Marxist and postmodern theory, anthropology, creative literature, film, cooking, and much more. Since all Shatz’s work entreats us to think harder, I find it beneficial to start with a consideration of his essay collection before moving on to the more ambitious Fanon biography and the topic of anticolonial politics.

Realistically Imperfect Individuals

While Shatz edited a 2004 volume, Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel, demonstrating the disastrous consequences of Israeli state policy, Writers and Missionaries is the first selection of his own work.

The seventeen chapters are mostly from the London Review of Books starting in 2003 and are divided into four main parts that address complicated intellectuals from the Arab world, as well as African American writers in Paris, French cultural superstars, and various problems of commitment. The collection is capped off with an amusing but somewhat out-of-place memoir of Shatz’s culinary obsessions, “Kitchen Confidential.”

If, like me, you like your biographical portraits to be of realistically imperfect individuals whose fascinating flaws are effusively fleshed out, you will be speedily seduced by Shatz’s direct and engaging style: “But speaking truth to power, and aligning oneself with the oppressed, is less straightforward than it seems.” (10)

For starters, Shatz never clubs the reader over the head with a prowess at erudite allusions or an excess of cerebral witticisms. His portraits proceed with a galvanizing panache, far more than just journalistic competence: “the weapons of truth-telling could not protect the dreamer from his illusions, and defend him against his assassins, who had real weapons…” (11)

Shatz’s studies also exhibit a capacity to offer clear and compelling synopses of an extraordinary amount of historical background and often recondite intellectual material. Some of his subjects, regrettably, are poorly known in the West, such as the Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami (1945-2014), the Algerian journalist Kamal Daoud (b. 1970), and the assassinated Jewish-Palestinian actor/director Juliano Mer-Khamis (1958-2011).

These biographical investigations are largely derived from personal interviews in Middle Eastern countries as well as close readings of the written work. Far from aiming to present a catalogue of weaknesses and hypocrisy, Shatz sets out “to explore the difficult and sometimes perilous practice of the engaged intellectual: the wrenching demands that the world imposes on the mind as it seeks to liberate itself from various forms of captivity.” (7)

Other subjects are world-famous if not always widely understood, such as the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2008), deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), semiotic literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980), and novelist and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008).

I can’t claim expertise in all these figures but can attest to the lucidity with which Shatz unravels their achievements and activities. Lévi-Strauss, he demonstrates, cannot be understood without acknowledging his deep distaste for his status as a public figure. Robbe-Grillet, whose career was marked by a great renown and very few readers, was captive to a “literary imagination” serving as “a playpen for his criminal passions and victimless crimes.” (233)

On the other hand, the Black radical expatriate writers portrayed in the section called “Equal in Paris” are my specialty, so I can verify Shatz’s eerie accuracy apropos the quality of their work and the complications of their political thought.

The ordeal of Richard Wright (1908-1960) and his fraught relations with other African American writers has rarely been depicted with such subtlety and sympathy, and the “radical humanism” (166) of pro-Algerian William Gardner Smith (1927-74) is reclaimed with an intimate understanding of the challenges of exile.

Most intriguing, perhaps, is what Shatz provides about three French radicals who boil over with incongruities: documentary producer Claude Lanzman (1925-2018), New Wave filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73), and the existentialist philosopher and activist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).

The last comes in for an engrossing treatment in a two-fold narrative of Sartre’s unhappy estrangement from the Egyptian intellectual Left, which suffered from its own “conflicted attachment to [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser.” (302)

Shatz’s chronicle of Sartre’s failed balancing act between what seemed like hardcore values and the emotional force of a current friendship is a startling and edgy marvel. I am reminded, once again, that even though we radicals believe in the objectivity of our choice of ideology, its expression can also be tweaked by psychological and personal needs.

Not every subject of Writers and Missionaries could be called radical in a political sense, but Shatz sees all as expressing a “radical imagination” through “a style of thinking that seeks to penetrate the root of a problem and expose ‘what is fundamental.’” (9) This formulation, along with his guiding distinction between “Missionaries” and “Writers,” which came to him in a conversation with Trinidadian-born novelist V. S. Naipaul, remains a bit nebulous to me.

Perhaps this phrase and those terms are less clarifying for the general reader than they are functional for Shatz himself, as mechanisms to herd his heterogenous selection of writings under a common rubric. The volume’s all-male cast of characters is a more notable deficiency in an otherwise extraordinary survey.

(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

NOTES

[1] Definitions of political terms are always subject to change and debate. For purposes of this essay, I am using “anticolonial” to refer to political opposition to colonial rule and “post-colonial” to mean the temporal period after direct control. “Decolonial,” more controversial in applications, originated in Latin American scholarship and involves a focus on the lasting traces and legacies of colonialism.

[2] These debates can be found in dozens of publications, and the purpose of this essay is not to address any specific one. A sampling of views can be found in a series of articles published by Tempest magazine: Jonah ben Avraham, “Support Palestinians when they fight, Not just when they die,” 5 November 2023; Dan LaBotz and Stephen R. Shalom, “A Response to Jonah ben Avraham’s ‘Support Palestinians When They Fight,’” 24 November 2023; Sean Larson, “Against colonial narcissism: A response to Dan La Botz and Stephen R. Shalom,” 20 December 2023; and Dan LaBotz and Stephen R. Shalom, “Once More on Hamas: A Reply to Sean Larson,” 12 January 2024.

[3] The most esteemed book about the war is Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: New York Review Books, 2006). Horne presents his own figures for deaths on pp.537-38.

[4] Unfortunately, the French Socialists supported French colonial rule and the Communists, at best, were ambiguous. The most thorough record of Trotskyist and anarchist involvement available in English is Ian Birchall, ed., European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence, 1954-1962, Revolutionary History (2012), Vol. 10, no. 4.

[5] See the recent Amnesty International report: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/algeria/report-algeria/.

[6] Exactly what happened regarding rape and sexual abuse of both Israelis on October 7 and Palestinians by the IDF and settlers is still under dispute. The full story may never be known, but independent agencies are investigating, and facts must not be denied. As I write, the latest report available is by Farnaz Fassihi and Isabel Kershner, “U.N. Sees Signs of Sexual Abuse in Hamas Attack,” New York Times, 5 March 2024: 1, 9. At the same time, I recommend signing the “Open Letter” against the weaponization of sexual assault: https://stopmanipulatingsexualassault.org/#home.

[7] As many have observed, the history of European pogroms and the Holocaust were quickly exploited to make Israeli Jews appear victims as their state reigned down terror on the stateless in Gaza. For a brilliant refutation of this propaganda strategy, see Pankaj Mishra, “The Shoah After Gaza,” The London Review of Books, 7 March 2024: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza

To be sure, the Holocaust was real enough, and it is possible that the details of the horrors of the pogroms in Eastern Europe are not as well-known as they should be. For the latter, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-21 and the Onset of the Holocaust (New York: Metropolitan, 2021), by Jeffrey Veidlinger, is a must read.

[8] However, Shatz did publish a widely-discussed response to the October 7th events, “Vengeful Pathologies,” in the 2 November 2023 issue of The London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies.

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