This post was originally published by the Institute of Art and Ideas and is republished here with permission as part of the Blog of APA’s partnership with the Institute.
The spirit of rebellion stirs. From Musk and Milei wielding chainsaws to Trump hanging his police mugshot outside the Oval Office, populists are embracing rebel aesthetics. Meanwhile, quite different sorts of rebellion against tyranny are intensifying from Myanmar to Serbia. Chilean-born philosopher Pedro Tabenksy, drawing on theorists of rebellion Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus, warns that all rebels—righteous or not—risk becoming the tyrants that they claim to resist if they adopt a cold, utilitarian ethics, indifferent to the suffering their victory requires. To resist this, rebellion must be tempered by regret, even when violence is necessary.
Rebellion is in the air. Elon Musk and Javier Milei wield chainsaws against established institutions like horror movie villains. Trump hangs his glowering police mugshot outside the Oval Office in open defiance of the rule of law. MAGA and populists around the world have wholeheartedly and flamboyantly adopted the seductive aesthetics and attitudes of rebellion. Meanwhile, quite different rebellions of various kinds against tyranny and anti-democratic politics intensify, from Myanmar, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine and Israel to Serbia, Georgia and Türkiye.
Two of the deepest theorists of rebellion were the twentieth-century intellectuals Frantz Fanon and Albert Camus. The former was a Martinican revolutionary psychiatrist; the latter a French-Algerian Nobel Literature Laureate, playwright, essayist, reporter, and reticent philosopher. They found themselves embroiled in one of the bloodiest anti-colonial wars of the twentieth century, the Algerian War of Independence from France (1954–62). Fanon joined the revolutionary movement against France in Algeria and became a loyal propagandist and diplomat until his untimely passing. Camus was despondent about both sides of the conflict, although he was stubbornly wedded to the idea that Algeria needed to remain part of France. His commitment to an Algérie française was questionable and inconsistent with his clearsighted views about France’s transgressions. But his ethics of rebellion, informed by his doctrine of moderation, nonetheless contains urgent lessons about both the potential and the dangers of rebellion.
A standard comforting narrative of the Algerian War is that Muslim Algeria fought a noble fight and defeated France, a Cyclopean foe many times more powerful. It would be nice if such narratives were true, but they rarely are. The power imbalances were extreme, to be sure, but the bloodletting competition from both sides extinguished the possibility of a democratic Algeria.
We are suckers for happy endings. It was an awful war that ultimately replaced one form of tyranny with another, for reasons explored by Camus in The Rebel. The revolutionary movement that freed Algeria from France—the Front de libération nationale (FLN)—inaugurated a dictatorship that remains in power to this day and is significantly responsible for the Algerian carnage of the late eighties and nineties, which at least partly motivated Josie Fanon, Frantz’s widow, to take her own life. Shortly before her suicide, she reportedly said, “Oh Frantz, the wretched of the earth again,” echoing the title of Fanon’s landmark book. One could say that French brutality brutalized Algeria and turned its revolutionary movement into another Cyclopean beast that seemed bent on rivaling France’s unremitting violence. As the Algerian writer Moulad Feraoun put it, “[T]oday’s executioners inescapably become tomorrow’s victims, and this, in turn, will call for another executioner.”
Fanon thought that revolutionary brutality, unlike counterrevolutionary brutality, could be emancipatory (though, strangely, he admitted that the two sorts of brutality are almost indistinguishable). In his words:
There is a brutality and contempt for subtleties and individual cases which is typically revolutionary, but there is another type of brutality with surprising resemblances to the first one which is typically counterrevolutionary, adventurist, and anarchist. If this pure, total brutality is not immediately contained it will, without fail, bring down the movement within a few weeks.
France, Fanon reasoned, had cornered Muslim Algeria for 130 years, and the famished and degraded population had no choice but to lash out or continue to suffer. Taking a leaf from Mao, Fanon argued that peasants, rather than Marx’s proletarian working class, were the true revolutionary force. This is because they had absolutely nothing to lose, and so could attack France’s presence in Algeria with single-minded determination. The FLN may have lacked France’s military might, but they had raw fury on their side, enabling the single-mindedness required for defeating a Goliath. Of the El Halia massacre of European and Muslim Algerians, to mention one example of many, Louis Arti reports, “Possessed by a furious madness, the assailants [led by FLN members] were running around, calling to one another, killing, coming and going, cutting throats, raping women, breaking things, burning, destroying things. Axes broke down doors, knives cut and let the red blood flow into the sand.”
This exemplifies the total suspension of ethical scruples during and in the immediate aftermath of the war. As Camus recognized, such a total suspension invariably leads to corruption. Fanon thought that raw fury, when organized, could establish the solidarity necessary for catalyzing a nation-building project after France’s departure. What he did not countenance, at least not consistently, is that those brutalized by war would not constitute a liberatory force with democratic aspirations. Historical examples abound. A fundamental historical principle that Fanon’s intellectual commitment to protracted armed struggle violated is that brutality brutalizes. At the same time, however, Fanon was surely right that France would only pay heed to unrestrained fury. The Algerian predicament was indeed tragic. Had Algeria capitulated to France, the likelihood of continued hell for much of the population was almost guaranteed. Yet the path the FLN chose was virtually guaranteed to end in tyranny.
Camus, while recognizing the importance of rebelling when warranted, also recognized that nothing good could be birthed from the kind of warfare going on in Algeria. He proposed a way to conduct rebellions, especially those involving violence, that would avoid the brutalizing tendency of unchecked violence. This is the central theme of The Rebel. Camus thought that basic human decency had to be maintained at every point of a rebellion. He was not blind to the necessity of violence but recognized its limitations and argued that murder must always be lamented, even if it is unavoidable. Genuine regret, even in the face of necessity, keeps the principle “Do not kill” alive while at the same time allowing it to be trumped by other principles (such as “Do not let others die”) in exceptional situations.
But for Camus, unlike the crude utilitarian, who is more accountant than ethicist, violating an ethical principle should never invalidate its force in our lives. Those who violate must, as a matter of basic human decency, carry the heavy burden of regret, even if the violation was unavoidable. This attitude moderates future actions and avoids the downward spiral typical of unchecked violence. Camus’s moderation sets parameters for just rebellions to remain so, even in the context of having to commit impermissible (yet in the circumstances justified) acts. An example illustrative of his ethics of moderation is killing in self-defense. There are circumstances where murdering or being killed are the only two alternatives, and, for Camus, if one chooses to live, one must recognize the sacrifice being made, namely, the extinguishing of a life. This recognition must be honored by the appropriate emotional response of regret and future behavior.
Camus’s ethical outlook, his doctrine of moderation, diverges sharply from crude utilitarianism, where the best possible option at a given moment is so, unqualifiedly. For Camus, by contrast, the best possible option may be regrettable. It is by regretting that one preserves the ethical order in a world that regularly challenges ethical integrity.
Brutality brutalizes. One would wish this maxim had found its place in the contemporary global order. A case in point is the decades-old conflict between Palestine and Israel, including the current Hamas-Israel war. Nobody wins. Everyone is brutalized. Israel, to be sure, has the upper hand on aggression. To say that it is an unequal conflict is an understatement. In that sense, it mirrors events during Algeria’s liberation war. And the results are similar. Everyone loses, especially the dead and the maimed, but also the physically unscathed and those not yet born. And the attacks from both sides are expressive of an absence of awareness that something at the heart of our humanity is being corrupted. The utilitarian logic is everywhere evidenced. From its perspective, for Israel to continue to exist, it must express disproportionate fury: it sees itself as fighting an unambiguously just war, even if, in the process, it utterly dehumanizes the enemy population and corrupts itself. Hamas, the underdog, evinces a similar logic from the other side, a logic that reminds me of a chilling statement made by one of the principal FLN commanders, Saadi Yacef:
At the time, if I had had the money, I would have paid the French soldiers so that they would torture Algerians. Why? Because when an Algerian dies as [a] result of torture, he has ten to twenty relatives who will avenge his death and join the FLN.
Meanwhile, a quite different register of rebellion proceeds apace in populist politics. Musk and Milei’s chainsaws and triumphant howling are also cases of rebellion without moderation. Musk is unable to recognize that his mass firing campaign will impact human lives even in the unlikely event—as we can surmise he believes, if we are being charitable—that more people will gain from his actions than those who will face the unavoidable hardship of unemployment. Note that the chosen symbol of power is the chainsaw. We know of horror movies where such devices are used to slice through human flesh. In the hands of a murderous maniac, it is a killing machine. In the hands of Musk and Milei, the killing is symbolic. Similar lack of moderation was evident in Trump’s Rolex-wearing Homeland Security Secretary Kirsti Noem’s recent display of regret-free self-righteousness when visiting El Salvador’s notorious gang prison, where 238 Venezuelan alleged gang member deportees from the U.S. had been taken. This callous disregard for the lives of concrete human beings shows that nothing worth celebrating will come from “Make America Great Again” radicalism.
Self-righteousness is the enemy of justice and basic human decency. It involves blindness to what must be given up for actual or perceived justice. We learn from the Algerian War of Independence that few things are more dangerous than absolute, self-righteous conviction about the goodness of one’s cause combined with the related utilitarian logic Camus critiqued.
Soothing narratives should always be avoided. Even where rebellion is necessary—and there are surely places in the world today where it is—rebels must remain permanently aware of the cost of their actions, even in the face of necessity. Indeed, we must recognize the ambiguity of existence and develop attitudes consistent with this. We must permanently countenance the possibility that some actions are both justified and unacceptable at the same time. This is especially true in the political realm but applies to all facets of human existence. There should be no place for the triumphal aesthetic of those who have no regrets, who have no sense that even just causes may harm some, including the innocent.
Unchecked rebellion is seductive. It gives one a sense that one is heroically giving reality a more human face. But one must avoid seduction. This is not to say that rebellion is never warranted. It is, and it is in this context that Camus invites us to keep regret alive. There are times when we must rebel, but we must never lose sight of the cost of rebellion. By regretting, we keep the space of values alive.
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