Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Blurred Lines: Why So Many Killers Confuse Terrorism with Justice

 


        The recent shooting at a Mormon chapel in Michigan is part of a disturbing trend: the growing justification of violence. A Catholic church was recently attacked, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and the murderer of a health care CEO is treated as a romantic figure because of his looks. Even Lori Vallow, the “doomsday mom,” defended her killings by invoking Nephi’s slaying of Laban.

        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 church, 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.

        This logic can be traced through intellectual traditions that divide the world into two hostile camps: the oppressors vs. oppressed of Marx, or the colonizers vs. colonized of 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. Its vision of collective struggle and sanctioned violence echoes today in the defense of Hamas atrocities, the celebration of political assassinations, and even in some strands of leftist Mormon thought.

        This post examines Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to show how violence is sanctioned when individual responsibility is erased and why Just War theory provides a much needed moral antidote.

Violence

        The Wretched of the Earth both justifies and minimizes intense violence. The first line of the book said, “decolonization is always a violent event” (1). Then, “decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” (3). Fanon warned of a “human tide” that sounded like the French Reign of Terror (13.) Fanon says the colonized are filled with “blood feuds” and “fratricidal blood bath(s)” (17, 21). “It is clearly and plainly an armed struggle” (42). “For the colonized, this violence represents the absolute praxis” (43). And finally, “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonialist.”

        His theories result in a Manichean view, his words, that erase individual moral virtue and justified murder. Because if a colonized person kills colonizer cops, he is a hero. As Fanon wrote “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 (30).”

Minimize Western Religion and Values

        When he does quote Christian teachings, he either invalidates or perverts them. According to Fanon, the teachings of love and harmony (3) are simply part of the “confusion mongers” that make exploitation easier (4).  Fanon said, “The last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation” (3).

        Fanon says Christianity is the white man’s church, “as we know in this story, many are called but few are chosen” (8). After he told story of rebel that killed colonizers Fanon said it was a “baptism by blood” (46).

        He ignored Western values the same way. Without evidence he asserted that “government agents use the language of pure violence” (4). Discussions of Western values cause the natives to tense their muscles and grab a machete and sharpen their weapons (8). Fanon said the West wages a war in values, that the people don’t care about. All they care about is land appropriation and blowing the colonial world to smithereens (6).

Putting It All Together

        All the above matters because the Western values that he diminishes, which were often promulgated by Christian thinkers, established guardrails against the kind of bloodbath Fanon justified and unleashed and provides moral correction against the abuses that supposedly justify the violent outbursts of the colonized.[1]

        Salamanca school scholar Francisco Suarez wrote that revolt is only violence is just only “if essential for liberty, because if there is any less drastic means of removing him it is not lawful to kill him…always provided that there is no danger of the same or worse evils falling on community as result of the tyrants death.[2]

        Early modern scholar 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.”[3]

        In similar language, Mosiah recognized the danger of revolt when he argued for the end of the monarchy: [Y]e cannot dethrone an iniquitous king save it be through much contention, and the shedding of much blood (Mosiah 29:21).

        In contrast to Fanon, Christian writers espousing what eventually became notable Western values recognized the same danger in revolution and warned against slaughter. At the same time, they recognized the rights of the oppressed and just war often became a catalyst for reform. Fanon dismissed the talk of rights as the “erstatz,” or fake struggle of the elite for the people “insipid humanitarianism” (28). Yet those supposedly insipid beliefs according to Fanon, or beliefs that are insufficient according to multiple LDS scholars,[4] are stronger than any of Fanon’s theories because they clearly address the morality of revolution.

        Despite being minimized by Fanon as abstract values that don’t matter, the Salamanca school scholars advocating for human rights of natives, the Grimke sisters arguing for abolition, the missionaries arguing for abolition, and the Christian missionaries that reported the abuses in the Belgian Congo suggest religion was often a reforming counter agent to colonialism. A focus on individual morality instead of collective guilt promoted by Fanon noticed the stark differences between the philosopher that opposed colonization compared to the politicians that wanted it, the ministers that built roads and bridges and the rapacious tax collectors, and the leaders of the Western Concession in Shanghai that shielded dissidents.

        Using collective accusations that erases individual moral responsibility is why we end up with Hamas apologists. Cornell West said the Palestinians most embody the “spirit of Fanon” (xii), so when they killed, they were simply part of the colonized oppressed and their actions turn them in to “heroes.” I quoted this earlier, but it is worth repeating what Fanon wrote regarding the morality of violence against the colonizers, “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 though their violence was a barbaric campaign of mass slaughter and rape against innocent families, the ideas of Fanon made all Jews guilty and all terrorists innocent.

        That is why Americans witnessed the bizarre spectacle of liberal groups making gliders their logo. (Gliders are how the terrorists travelled to the massacre at the Nova music festival.) And this confused moral logic led to tweets which argued the barbaric savagery of Hamas was “what decolonization looks like.”

        This collective guilt theory is why so many rationalized away the assassination of health care CEO Brian Thompson. (The other reason was the killer’s attractiveness.) He never killed anyone and arguably worked to provide health care to millions. But he was part of a hated industry, attacked for killing thousands. Thus, the nominal morality that opposes murder held less sway for the masses of morally confused. It’s true that the health care system really stinks but relying on collective guilt to indict one person as guilty and worthy of death and justify murder by another, is a dangerous slope and signals a dangerous erosion of clear moral standards.

Bad Categories Escape Morality

        In short, the problem was summarized from my post about the Visions of Glory. As I wrote about Visions of Glory, once a person starts labelling yourself as part of a righteous group, and their opponents as zombies, it becomes easier to justify killing them. When Fanon described an event as naturally violent (1) and a population existing in an “atmosphere of violence” (31) it’s natural to strike out.[5]

        The antidote is not to invent new theories or 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, and random shootings, but in clear moral standards rooted in justice.

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[1] Morgan Deane, To Stop a Slaughter: Just War and the Book of Mormon, (Arsenal of Venice Press, 2024,) 104-106.

[2] Andre Azevedo Alves, Jose Moreira, John Meadowcroft, The Salamanca School, (Bloomsbury Academic Pro, 2013), 53. 

[3] Grotius , 73-76. Grotius also placed limits on potential usurpers that included another warning that it is difficult to determine the morality of a rebellion. He suggested that individual shouldn’t take it upon themselves to decide a question on their own, which involves the whole people.

[4] Patrick Q. Mason and J. David Pulsipher, Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2021), 135. Duane Boyce, Even Unto Bloodshed: An LDS Perspective on War (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 223. Boyce states “modern just war framework…makes no explicit use of scripture…it seems obvious that it cannot be sufficient to address the concerns of Latter-day Saints.”

[5] There is an absurd double standard here as well. When conservatives do something as simple as enforce immigration law, they are attacked as evil for creating a “climate of fear.” But when a third world nation is on the verge of a horrific orgy of violence they honor scholars that call that violence natural, necessary, and heroic.