Fanon and Anti-Fascism

I: Our Neo-Fascist reality

Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is another massive neoliberal redistribution of US capitalist wealth that has gutted welfare reforms won by African-American struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. As much as the last piece of the puzzle, the military, is still being tailored to his authoritarian control, the massive budget for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) gives him the largest funded militarized force in US history, already operating as neo-fascist storm troopers. Importantly, his attempt to overturn birthright citizenship takes us back to the revolutionary moment when, as Karl Marx contemporaneously observed, Black slaves freed themselves and brought about the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution following the Civil War. Let’s not forget that it was the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement of 2020 that emerged out of the George Floyd moment during the COVID lockdown, a moment which immediately spread across the US and the world after a young woman, Darnella Frazier, stood and videoed the murder of Floyd as he called out, “I can’t breathe.”^[i] Trump wanted to bring in the military at that time. That is the threat now. But as in Apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, Black communities in Apartheid America have always understood that Black protest walks in the shadow of massacre. Nonetheless, as the BLM movement demonstrated in 2016, the Black dimension will continue to play a vanguard role in the anti-fascist future. As Fanon puts it in his 1956 speech to the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris (1956), “Racism and Culture,” “Racism … haunts and vitiates American culture. And this dialectical gangrene is exacerbated by the coming to awareness and the determination of millions of Blacks and Jews to fight this racism” (Fanon, 1967: 36, my emphasis).

The white supremacist US foreign policy also has a connection to South Africa’s case against Israel for violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza.[ii] For South Africans, the case is particularly illuminating because it is directly related to the long struggle against Apartheid, a struggle that included a large number of South African Jews. In other words, although South Africa is increasingly neoliberal, corrupt, and reactionary, its willingness to accuse Israel of genocide is underscored by a constitution informed by the struggle against Apartheid. The memory of colonial genocide has not faded across the continent as Namibia’s first lady, Monica Geingos, made clear as she immediately spoke out against Germany’s defence of Israel in opposition to South Africa’s charge of genocide. What she said was instructive: “The absurdity of Germany, on January 12, 2024, rejecting genocide charges against Israel and warning about the ‘political instrumentalization of the charge’ is not lost on us.”[iii] What was not lost was the memory of the 1904 Herero-Nama genocide by the German military, which killed 100,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama in then-German South West Africa. It is this connection between genocide and colonialism that continues to be very real.

This was familiar territory for Frantz Fanon, who had left Martinique to join the struggle against Nazism and Fascism and realized a year later, at 19 years old, that he had been duped by “this false ideology.” Just a few years later, in 1948, he became acutely aware of the hypocrisy of the French signing the UN’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” almost at the same time as it was suppressing anticolonial uprisings in Madagascar and Vietnam and brutally torturing combatants and those assumed to be combatants.

Fanon was especially aware of Aimé Césaire’s argument that Nazism was the product of a “boomerang effect” (2000: 36) of European colonialism, where European savagery, violence, and brutality—racism—toward non-European peoples rebounds with the largest holocaust in history, the systematic extermination of six million Jews. In Martinique, Fanon worked on Césaire electoral campaign in 1945 and remembered Césaire’s speech in Black Skin, White Masks, when Césaire said, “When I switch on my radio and hear that black men are being lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we they have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead” (2008: 70).

In this very Fanonian spirit, we discover postwar fascist continuities in the observation of South Africa’s Black Consciousness theorist and organizer, Steve Biko, who added, Hitler is likely to be found in Pretoria.” Fanon was writing on South Africa in Black Skin, White Masks, which was just a few years after the military defeat of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, when the Apartheid National Party, which had only recently closed down its pro-Nazi and proto-Nazi groupings (to which most of the new Apartheid government leaders had been connected^[iv]), was elected to office.

II: Putting Fanon in context

Fanon was 14 when the Second World War began and 17 when he first decided to join the French resistance against Fascism in Europe. Against his older brother, Joby’s advice, who was channeling his philosophy teacher, saying that it was a white conflict, Fanon was adamant:  “Wherever liberty is in question, I feel concerned. We’re all concerned, whatever our color” (Joby Fanon, 23).

The wartime trauma and experiences in the racist French military as well what he saw (for example in The Wretched of the Earth, he remembers colonial Algeria creating the logic of a farmyard in Algeria where children fight over bits of bread (1968: 307)) reflected the disconnect between the ideals of the French Republic, he had internalized in Martinique and the realities he witnessed. These experiences changed him. He wrote to his parents in April 1945 that he was wrong: “We must no longer look to this false ideology, behind which secularists and idiotic politicians hide, as our beacon. I was wrong! Nothing here justifies that sudden decision I took to make myself the defender of the farmer’s interests, when the farmer himself couldn’t care less.” (quoted in Joby Fanon: 34) Fanon’s feeling was shared across the Black world. As the Black soldiers, the “heroes of the battlefield of Europe … machined gunned … this is Sétif in 1945, this is Fort-de-France … this is Dakar, this is Lagos” (Fanon, 1968: 232). It was the same for Black soldiers returning to American cities who now faced fascism at home with a new militancy.

Fanon’s changing attitude to the French struggle against fascism from inside the war reveals a lifelong commitment to be at the core of the fight against tyranny and for a just freedom. As he put it in Black Skin White Masks, after writing of the reality of South Africa’s racist structure, he articulates a vision of human solidarity: “Colonial racism is no different from other racisms. Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick… I cannot dissociate myself from the fate reserved for my brother”[v] (2008: 69).

The liberation of France did not bring an end to French colonialism and French racism, far from it. But that did not mean a change in Fanon’s principle of struggling for human solidarity.

Let us not forget that postwar France was Social Democratic with powerful Communist and Socialist Parties supporting colonialism or at best mildly critical of the massacres and torture, whether that be in Madagascar or Vietnam, or quiet about French colonialism’s Sétif massacre in Algeria in 1945. The European civilizing mission had not been undermined by the military defeat of fascism but remained dominant among liberal intellectuals such as Octave Mannoni. French liberal worries about the effects of the torturing of the Vietnamese or the Algerians on French youth in the military had a point because it is through colonial wars (whether that is the French and Americans in Vietnam, the British in Kenya, the French in Algeria or the Portuguese in Angola), Fanon argues, that the recruits “learn fascism” (see “Algeria Face to Face with the French Torturers,” Fanon, 1967: 70).   Does anyone doubt that this dialectic is not at work amongst the citizen soldiers of the IDF in Gaza today?

Fanon’s wartime experiences can certainly be considered part of his decision to become a psychiatrist.[vi] He worked with the founder of Institutional socio-psychotherapy, François Tosquelles, at Saint Alban psychiatric hospital in the mountains of Lozère, France. Tosquelles had been one of the founding members of the anti-Stalinist POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, that, along with advocating revolutionary opposition to Fascist dictator Francisco Franco, supported worker and farmworker collectives and communes in Catalonia as an anti-fascist expression of the society that they were fighting for. It was in that context that Tosquelles began practicing “sociotherapy” in the trenches of the war zone. Fleeing Franco’s Spain, Tosquelles was found by the director of Saint Alban in a French internment camp. And it was through Tosquelles’ radical therapeutic practice, Saint Alban became a hospital where, in contrast to others that had become places of starvation and extermination as the Vichy regime followed the Nazi policy of systematic sterilization and murder of the mentally ill, the large majority of patients not only survived but were actively involved in their own survival alongside resistance fighters who found a refuge there.

Fanon’s decision to study psychiatry at the University of Lyon was connected with Saint Alban, which he heard about from its former director, Paul Balvet. Balvet was practising socio-psychotherapy at Vinatier Hospital in Lyon when Fanon decided to study psychiatry. The idea of what became known as Institutional or social psychotherapy was building a new society inside the hospital as an attempt to de-institutionalize the hospital, its hierarchies and structures, and change the relationships of power. While Saint Alban Hospital became a refuge for anti-fascist fighters and refugees, after the war, it became known as a site for radical and innovative mental health practices. Fanon became Tosquelles’ intern there in 1952 before taking a position at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria.

Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital was a settler colonial hospital where the racist theories and practices of the so-called Algiers School of ethnopsychiatry, which Fanon had earlier written about in the essay ”The North African Syndrome,” were dominant. Arriving before the outbreak of the national liberation war, Fanon spent the next four years working from inside the hospital as a reformer, educator, and practitioner of socio-psychotherapy within a system he described as systematized dehumanization (see 1967: 53). After November 1954, when the FLN opened the national liberation struggle, Fanon was also dedicated to it. For him, both struggles, inside and outside the hospital, were connected. In this sense, his work was to make concrete what he had argued in Black Skin, White Masks, namely, to bring the social world into the consulting room and thereby enlighten the analysand on the need to change the world.[vii]

III: Fascist Complicities

For Fanon, the undercurrent of fascism in postwar France, which would re-emerge more fully with De Gaulle’s coup, was set in motion by France’s Socialist government.

In one of the appendices for Fanon’s 1959 A Dying Colonialism (in French, L’an V de la révolution algérienne, noting the revolutionary calendar of the French Revolution) on “Algeria’s Minorities,” Fanon’s intern at Blida-Joinville, Charles Géronimi, writes of his wish, reflecting the view of many progressives at the time, to take a “third position” on Algeria, that is, against the French and the FLN. This “third position” was based on the French left’s triumph in June 1954, led by Pierre Mendès-France. But Mendès-France’s immediate response to the call for Algerian independence in November was to insist that “Algeria is France.” With that, the idea of a third position disintegrated as an attempt to “humanize repression,” Géronomi argued, “in the face of the fascist-Lacoste,”^[viii] with the French Left,  Géronomi concludes, “playing the game of Algerian fascism” (1965: 174).

Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism details the complicity of the medical profession, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts in state torture regimes. These continue to play out today. After 9/11, the revelations of the duplicity and scheming between top officials in the American Psychological Association (APA) and the United States government’s torture program became clear. Promoted by the Pentagon and CIA, loosening the constraints around “experiments with human subjects,” that were put in place after the Vietnam War, the APA promoted and justified psychologists’ work in the torture industry and collusion in the management of torture programs. After the release of photos from Abu Ghraib American prison, liberal intellectuals became immediately concerned about the effects of US torture on American military personnel, mirroring the same moral turpitude of “French intellectuals” during the Algerian war, who deplored how “the French recruits are learning fascism.”

“The gravity of the tortures,” explains Fanon, “the horror of the rape of little Algerian girls, are perceived because their existence threatens a certain idea of French honor … Such shutting out of the Algerian, such ignoring of the tortured … or the massacred family, constitutes a wholly original phenomenon. It belongs to that form of egocentric, sociocentric thinking which has become the characteristic of the French” (“Algeria Face to Face with the French Torturers”(1967: 71)). That phenomenon is now common and grounded in pathologization.

IV: A Threat to Antifascism: The Absence of Ideology and the Needed Vision of an Antifascist Future

At the end of 1960, in his role as the Algerian Provisional Government’s representative in Africa, Fanon took an organizational trip through the Sahel. One vividly senses his presence in his notebooks. He writes of the excitement of meeting revolutionaries and “discussing strategy, terrain, passage.” Reading books and reliving them “with the intensity that circumstances and the place confer upon them.” But while acknowledging that Africa would soon be liberated, he cautions that things are not that simple: “the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles, the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology” (1967: 186).

This absence of ideology—in short, what you are against and also what you are for (or what we might call an idea of the future society and its human character)—cannot be deferred. Instead, the nature of liberation and what it aspires to become must be concretely clarified, made more inclusive, and rendered holistic. For Fanon, the end of colonial occupation cannot simply mean taking over state offices, flying a new flag over the border posts, and assuming management of state administration. While the struggle itself does explode old colonial truths, it also exposes the reality that what is framed as national can often be divergent and conflicting. These are problems Fanon addresses in his last book, The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon’s vision of re-humanization challenges movements to envision new possibilities for social life through the practice of including all those formerly colonized and excluded as active participants, creating the nation as spaces where people can develop new ways of being and relating to one another.Liberation, as praxis, thus involves the creation of new social relations, grounded in solidarity, equality, and participation, requiring a quite different commitment to what might be considered “development projects”. This is why the practical work of including everyone in the building of the new nation is essential to what Fanon considered the “limitless humanity” of revolutionary processes—an openness to rethinking and reimagining the future and the need to “humanize this world,” he argues, beginning with conditions of work (1968: 99). Fanon articulates this philosophically in terms of the human not capitalist notions of time: “the important thing,” he argues, “is not that three hundred people form a plan and decide upon carrying it out, but that the whole people plan and decide even if it takes them twice or three times as long.” Because, “the time taken up by explaining, the time ‘lost’ in treating the worker as a human being, will be caught up in the execution of the plan. People must know where they are going, and why.”

Knowing that building the new nation and awakening the whole people will take time, he adds, “We African politicians must have very clear ideas on the situation of our people. But this clarity of ideas must be profoundly dialectical” and global, because “the yardstick of time must no longer be that of the moment or up till the next harvest, but must become that of the rest of the world” (1968: 193-194).

V: Sanction All Revolts

Bodily experience is central to Fanon’s political and psychiatric thought and essential to his notion of human freedom, with gait, expression, and breath reflecting lived experiences. By connecting the body’s free movement to liberation, Fanon highlights the interplay between physical and mental emancipation, redefining space and resistance. This interplay is central to Fanon’s analysis of the physical geography of settler colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth and to Fanon’s directive that we “sanction all revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts” (1968: 207). Does this sanction mean that he has no criticism of such attempts? Of course not. However, meaningful critical engagement can only begin with the recognition that “every time we don’t understand,” we are, as Fanon puts it, “at the heart of the drama” (1965: 125).

Acknowledging the radical intellectuals’ lack of comprehension behind their often reactive opinion serves as a valid starting point to listen to revolt with openness. For Fanon, the challenge to hear the rationality of revolt and to hear its new language is not easy because it involves a commitment to a new kind of listening that must cut through prejudice and assumption.[ix]

Intellectuals, he argues, need to break with their presuppositions by using all they have learnt in elite schools in the struggle against such education and become disciplined by the movement (1968: 150),  “put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities” (my emphasis).

What Fanon calls “the rationality of revolt” is therefore neither given beforehand nor immediately comprehensible. Instead, it is living. Fanon introduces the idea within the anticolonial struggle, arguing that retrogression is the inevitable result of the incapacity to “rationalize popular praxis.” The revolutionary movement does not erase differences but enlivens them (Lenin), and thus, for Fanon, the intellectual challenge is the work of political and educational clarification, which begins byrationalizing popular praxis and attributing to it reason, but does not end there. To do this requires a cognitive break. Because without that, national consciousness would become “nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell,” where “the nation is passed over for the race” with chauvinism and xenophobia erupting in violence. Fanon’s conception of the new anticolonial, anti-fascist nation—a new society—is inherently fluid because it must be actively created and consciously willed by those who have been silenced and dehumanized. Political education, then, also allows those who had been denied subjecthood, space, encouragement, and independence to speak their thoughts. Fanon’s anti-fascism is a revolutionary philosophy and radical humanism are grounded in the recognition of the profound psychological scars inflicted by colonialism and racism. These scars can persist long after formal liberation, shaping the identities and experiences of those who have endured and also continue to endure dehumanization. Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist informed his understanding of these dynamics, particularly in his analysis of the impact of all the forms of colonial violence on mental health. In The Wretched of the Earth, he explores how the trauma and the brutality of settler colonialism leave lasting wounds on individuals and communities. He argues that liberation is not merely a political process but must be social and psychological, requiring a re-humanization of the oppressed.

As much as he has written about “radical mutations in consciousness” brought by the national liberation struggle, he insists, in his last words of the last chapter of his final work, that we can’t wait until humanity is “imperceptibly transformed by revolutionary processes in perpetual renewal” (1968: 305). Rather, because of the systematic dehumanization of capitalist-colonialism, consciousness needs help now. Almost returning us to the analytical self-criticism of the consulting room, he argues, “the important theoretical problem is that it is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to de-mystify, and to harry the insult to humankind that exists in oneself” (1968: 305, my emphasis). As much of individual liberation cannot be achieved without social praxis and changing the world, for Fanon, claims of “an authentic national liberation” can only exist “on the precise degree to which the individualhas irreversibly begun their liberation.”^[x] (1967: 103, my emphasis). The two are intertwined, but the first task of the newly independent nation is “to give back dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign inhabitants dwell therein” (1968: 205, my emphasis, translation altered).

This sums up an anti-fascist philosophical grounding, humanism. The struggle for freedom, he said in the statement he made at the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers, Rome, in 1959, was that “after the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized.  This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others” (1968: 245-246).

*A version of this paper was presented at the  international symposium,  “Fanon Today:  Contemporary Struggles and Theoretical Perspectives,”  Berlin, July 22-23, 2025.

Bibliography

Fanon, Frantz (1965) A Dying Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review)

________ (1967) Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press)

________ (1968) The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press)

________ (2008) The Black, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press)

Fanon, Joby (2014) Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary Lanham: Lexington Books

 Notes

[i] On Fanon’s ideas of combat breath, see my Frantz Fanon, Combat Breathing (Polity, 2024). While the concept of “Combat Breathing” re-emerging at the end of Trump’s first term with the George Floyd‘s murder inspiring a new Black Lives Matter movements, and the idea of prison and police abolition moved from the margins, liberals and American corporations and banks quickly adopted the language of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and promised action, much of which was unrealized.

[ii] Phillippe Sands points out that American prosecutors at the Nuremburg trial never use the word genocide fear that it could also be used against America and Americans (see New York Times, August 13, 2025,https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-philippe-sands.html In South Africa “the land question” remains, with white farm owners owning the majority of land (on the struggle for land and the creation of decommodified communal land see Abahlali baseMjondolo, Twenty Years of Organising in the Shanty Towns of South Africa: Twenty years of Struggle and Courage, Daraja 2025). In contrast to the ICE racist attacks on Black and Brown workers in the US, Trump’s continued support of Apartheid is seen in his encouragement of white (Afrikaner) farmers to migrate to the US.

[iii] See Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany. Prepared in the Administrator’s Office, Windhuk, South-West Africa, January 1918, Union of South Africa. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty, August 1918 (London: Published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918).

[iv] https://samilhistory.com/2023/09/09/the-nazification-of-the-afrikaner-right/

[v] It is significant that when Fanon writes this, “we had in mind Jaspers’s metaphysical guilt,” remaining silent versus the risk of one’s life to prevent the murder of other human beings. The reference is to Karl Jaspers’ The Question of German Guilt, published in 1947.

[vi] One could argue that Fanon was impelled to try to understand these traumatic experiences through diagnosis and analysis that would see into the fascist core of the forms of racism.

[vii] We should remember that while Fanon maintains in Black Skin, White Masks that only a psychoanalytic interpretation can “reveal the affective disorders responsible” for Black alienation, the “inferiority complex” is, he says, a double process: first, primarily economic and second, the “internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority” (2008: xv).

[viii] In February 1956, the socialist Robert Lacoste became the resident minister and then the governor general of Algeria until May 1958. In the essay, Fanon added that “for a long time history is made without [the French Left]. They were unable to prevent the sending of contingents to Algeria … They were passive under Lacoste, powerless before the military coup of the 13th of May. Nevertheless, their existence has forced the neofascists of Algeria and France to be on the defensive. The Left has done nothing for a long time in France. Yet by its action, its denunciations, and its analyses, it has prevented a certain number of things” (1965: 149),

[ix] In his practice as a psychiatrist, Fanon spent much of his time listening, and much of Fanon’s writing can be considered a compilation of voices and responses to what he had been hearing.

[x] In a 1957 article in El Moudjahid, Fanon describes the Algerian revolution as one that “expresses both a process of liberation from foreign yoke and the destruction of feudal relics,” where the individual, he adds, “can blossom, advance and exercise [their] personal judgment and initiative freely” (2018, 57-71).