{"id":57250,"date":"2026-01-26T09:08:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T16:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/publicsquaremag.org\/?p=57250"},"modified":"2026-01-26T09:08:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T16:08:39","slug":"collective-punishment-erases-individual-responsibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/publicsquaremag.org\/politics-law\/foreign-affairs\/collective-punishment-erases-individual-responsibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Collective Punishment Erases Individual Responsibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cdefense,\u201d \u201cjustice,\u201d or \u201cresistance.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>belong<\/span><\/i>\u2014to a race, class, religion, nation, party, or institution\u2014turns justice into collective punishment, and it makes violence feel permissible against \u201crepresentatives\u201d rather than against perpetrators.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Justified Violence is Spreading<\/span><\/h3>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Under this logic, violence becomes a kind of moral accounting: if you belong to the wrong class, race, religion, or \u201cside of history,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This essay looks especially at one of the most influential theorists of \u201cliberating\u201d violence, Frantz Fanon, and argues that the Christian Just War tradition provides a much-needed antidote, restoring moral lines and individual responsibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Who is Frantz Fanon? Why He Matters Now<\/span><\/h3>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s \u201cThe Wretched of the Earth,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cdecolonization,\u201d some use it as a euphemism for eliminating entire communities. Those who do follow Fanon\u2019s thinking shift moral judgment from individual acts to group identity, whether they knowingly rely on him or not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s Case for Revolutionary Violence<\/span><\/h3>\n

The \u201cWretched of the Earth\u201d both justifies and normalizes intense violence. The first line declares, \u201cDecolonization is always a violent event.\u201d A few pages later, Fanon says, \u201cDecolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives,\u201d\u00a0 and he warns of a \u201chuman tide\u201d that sounds eerily like the French <\/span>Reign of Terror<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fanon says the colonized are filled with \u201cblood feuds\u201d and \u201cfratricidal blood bath(s).\u201d Decolonization \u201cis clearly and plainly an armed struggle.\u201d Violence is not a tragic last resort but the very heart of liberation:\u00a0 \u201cFor the colonized, this violence represents the absolute praxis.\u201d He even concludes that \u201cFor the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonialist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Moral responsibility is personal. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>His theories result in what he himself calls a Manichean view that erases individual moral virtue and justifies murder. In this worldview right and wrong are mapped onto collective identities. If a colonized person kills colonizer cops, he is a hero.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fanon makes this explicit:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The moral line, in other words, is not drawn by what you do, but by whom you do it to.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fanon Minimizes Religion and Classic Liberal Values\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

When Fanon does quote Christian teachings, he typically invalidates or twists them. Teachings of love and harmony, for example, are simply part of the \u201cconfusion mongers\u201d that make exploitation easier in Fanon\u2019s view.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In quoting Christian language about how \u201cThe last shall be first,\u201d Fanon insists that \u201cthe last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation.\u201d In this view, love and reconciliation are not virtues, but obstacles to the necessary bloodshed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fanon also racializes Christianity, calling it the white man\u2019s church. He treats broader values from the Christian moral tradition the same way. Without evidence, he asserts that \u201cgovernment agents use the language of pure violence.\u201d Discussions of Western values supposedly cause the natives to tense their muscles, grab a machete and sharpen their weapons.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s hands, part of the enemy\u2019s arsenal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where Categorical Guilt Leads<\/span><\/h3>\n

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 <\/span>excuse violent outbursts<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you shift from individual responsibility to collective guilt, those guardrails vanish. We saw this when Hutu extremists in Rwanda called Tutsi neighbors \u201ccockroaches,\u201d and ethnonationalist propagandists in the former Yugoslavia branded entire villages as traitors and thereby legitimate targets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You are guilty\u2014or innocent\u2014based on what you actually do.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>Today, using collective accusations that erase individual responsibility leads so easily to apologetics for terrorism. Cornel West has written that the \u201cspirit of Fanon\u201d is manifest in the Palestinian rights efforts. If that is the lens, then when Hamas terrorists massacre Israelis, they are not individual killers, but members of the oppressed colonized, and because their victims are merely members of the oppressor colonizers, the action of murder is transformed into an act of heroic resistance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s own words (that I repeat here for emphasis) make this logic clear:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even when the violence is mass slaughter and rape against innocent families, Fanon\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is why Americans witnessed some activist subcultures making <\/span>gliders<\/span><\/a> 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 \u201c<\/span>what decolonization looks like<\/span><\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe system\u201d is murderous and anyone associated with it is a \u201clegitimate target,\u201d then the ordinary moral prohibition against murder loses much of its force.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, the problem is the same one I have described elsewhere, writing about <\/span>\u201dVisions of Glory<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u201d: 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?<\/span><\/p>\n

When Fanon describes decolonization as naturally violent and the colonized existing in an \u201catmosphere of violence,\u201d it becomes natural to strike out\u2014not as a tragic last resort, but as an almost automatic cleansing reaction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Just War Antidote<\/span><\/h3>\n

The antidote is not to pretend oppression doesn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Within the Christian West, the Just War tradition developed clear questions to distinguish between justified force and murder:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Is there a genuinely just cause, not mere revenge or envy?<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Is force authorized by a legitimate authority?<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Is it a last resort, after less drastic means have been tried?<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Is the response proportionate to the wrong suffered?<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Are we carefully discriminating between combatants and noncombatants? (This is perhaps most crucial for our purposes.)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    One scholar from this school, <\/span>Francisco Suarez, wrote<\/span><\/a> that violent revolt is only justified \u201cif essential for liberty, because if there is any less drastic means of removing him (the tyrant) it is not lawful to kill him \u2026 always provided that there is no danger of the same or worse evils falling on [the] community as a result of the tyrant\u2019s death.\u201d Here, violence is only permitted under extreme conditions\u2014and even then, only when it will not unleash still greater horrors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    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 \u201c<\/span>dangerous, bloody conflict<\/span><\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

    In similar language, the Book of Mormon prophet Mosiah recognized the danger of revolt when he argued for <\/span>the end of the monarchy<\/span><\/a>:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u201cYe cannot dethrone an iniquitous king save it be through much contention, and the shedding of much blood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

    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.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Fanon dismissed the talk of rights as the \u201cersatz,\u201d or fake struggle of elites, something he described as \u201dinsipid humanitarianism.\u201d Yet those supposedly insipid beliefs are stronger than any of Fanon\u2019s theories because they clearly address the morality of revolution and darken lines he blurs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Historically, those principles often led to reform rather than repression. Salamanca School scholars advocated for the human rights of natives. The Grimk\u00e9 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

    We are judged by our own sins.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>A focus on individual morality instead of collective guilt allowed people to see sharp differences within the \u201cWest\u201d itself: between the philosophers who opposed colonization, and the politicians who wanted it; between ministers who built roads and bridges and rapacious tax collectors; between those in the Western concessions in Shanghai who shielded dissidents and those who handed them over.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Just War thinking insists that you are not guilty merely for belonging to a category. You are guilty\u2014or innocent\u2014based on what you actually do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Applying Just War to Today\u2019s Cases<\/span><\/h3>\n

    Once we recover Just War principles, recent cases of violence look very different from the narratives that excuse them.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Consider Hamas\u2019s 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 \u201cdecolonization\u201d 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).<\/span><\/p>\n

    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\u2014Latter-day Saints, Catholics, African Americans, conservatives, liberals, or corporate elites.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Just War criteria force us to ask simple but powerful questions:<\/span><\/p>\n

      \n
    • Are these particular people directly responsible for grave injustices?<\/span><\/li>\n
    • 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?<\/span><\/li>\n
    • Has every less drastic means of redress been exhausted?<\/span><\/li>\n
    • Will killing them likely avert greater evils, or will it unleash still more chaos and retaliation?<\/span><\/li>\n
    • Are we distinguishing between those actually doing harm and those who merely belong to the same profession, religion, racial, or social group?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      In these modern cases, the answer to those questions is obviously no. They can only be justified inside a framework, like Fanon\u2019s, that treats entire classes of people as guilty and their deaths as morally clarifying.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Recovering Individual Responsibility<\/span><\/h3>\n

      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 \u201cthrough much contention, and the shedding of much blood.\u201d That is not a license to glorify violence, but a sober caution to resist collective guilt and hold fast to individual responsibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

      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\u2014and recognize that peace is found not in collective vengeance or random shootings, but in clear moral standards rooted in justice.<\/span><\/p>\n

      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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Most agree violence is sometimes just. But what principles can help determine that justification?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":181,"featured_media":57256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2112],"tags":[],"coauthors":[900],"class_list":["post-57250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-foreign-affairs"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJust War Theory in an Age of Political Violence - Public Square Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Just War Theory challenges Fanon\u2019s cleansing violence, insisting guilt is personal, revolution is constrained, and civilians are never fair game.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/publicsquaremag.org\/politics-law\/foreign-affairs\/collective-punishment-erases-individual-responsibility\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Just War Theory in an Age of Political Violence - 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