“We are being conquered.”
“The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor.”
It’s unlikely that Trump’s minister of racist violence, Stephen Miller, has read Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—or at least, it is unlikely that he would admit to having read it. Fanon’s book, published in 1961, is the most famous and most influential statement of the necessity for anticolonial struggle and anticolonial violence. Miller, in contrast, is a white nationalist asshole who believes the subjugation of colonized people should be brutal and unending. You wouldn’t think the second would feel he has much to learn from or borrow from the first.
And yet, Miller’s public ethos, if taken at face value, embraces a strident militant nationalist anticolonialism which echoes, or mirrors, Fanon’s insights and arguments. Like Fanon, Miller argues that rule by outsider is intolerable; like Fanon, Miller argues that self-respect and honor must be rooted in a culture rooted in the nation; like Fanon, Miller insists that colonial violence can only be repulsed, and can only be healed, through anticolonial violence. Like Fanon, Miller sees in that violence a hope for rebirth—a new nation generating a new man and a new polity.
Of course, Miller’s words and ethos should not be taken at face value; Miller is a fascist piece of shit, and fascists are compulsive and incessant liars.
I think it’s important, though, to recognize the extent to which our current fascists are building on, and are invested in, an appropriated anticolonial vision. Miller sees himself—strategically—as a colonized subject. It is this identity of imagined oppression which gives MAGA its energy, its bitterness, and its justification for atrocity.
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“A world divided in two”
Fanon himself is sometimes described as justifying anticolonial atrocity, but it would be more accurate to say that he identifies the atrocities that are inseparable from colonialism. “The colonial world is a Manichean world,” Fanon says, and adds that, “the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil.”
For Fanon, colonization is simultaneously psychic and material. The colonized are told that their culture and their selves are worthless. This is meant to alienate the colonized from their own culture and their own dreams; it’s also meant to justify domination as a kind of charity. If subjugation is virtue, then the more extreme the subjugation the more extreme the virtue. “We have seen how the government’s agent uses a language of pure violence,” Fanon writes. “The agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.”
Violence originates with the colonizer, who defines the colonized as nothing but the violence that eliminates them. The colonized do not, and cannot, so define themselves; reduced to nothing, they must seek the position of something: “The colonized man is an envious man…there is not one colonized subject who at least once a day does not dream of taking the place of the colonist.” Colonial violence calls decolonial violence into being; oppression demands either acquiescence in death or resistance.
For the colonized, to be a moralist quite plainly means silencing the arrogance of the colonist, breaking his spiral of violence, in a word ejecting him outright from the picture. The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist. Taking it a step further, he is determined to fight to be more than the colonist. In fact, he has already decided to take his place.
Fanon’s argument is difficult to refute; if you are targeted for extermination, you have a right, and even a moral imperative, to refuse to be exterminated. The pious jeremiads of liberal imperialists calling for peace and virtue are obviously hypocritical and easily dismissed. “The Church in the colonies is a white man’s Church, a foreigners’ Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor,” Fanon sneers, and adds, “when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand.”
Stephen Miller—like fascists before him—takes a different tack. He does not recommend that the colonized should bear oppression with patience and nonviolence; nor does he promise that the colonized will eventually be elevated through contact with their betters. Instead, Miller claims the mantle of the colonized for himself, insisting that it is not the wretched of the earth, but the fascists of the earth, who are persecuted, and who have a right to envy and to violence.
Miller isn’t subtle about his anticolonial framing. As he explained in 2023, he sees immigration as a colonial invasion; foreigners are taking over the US and imposing their government and their values, relegating white men like Miller to second-class, or no-class citizens. “We are being conquered,” he said.
This is a complete resettlement of America in real time. It took hundreds of years, going back long even before our founding, going back all the way to the earliest days of the colonies in America to slowly build everything that we have.
And now we have millions of people coming in from different cultures and different ways of living and different belief systems. They’re going to take those belief systems with them to America. So, a generation from now…people will not know the country that they are living in. These consequences are permanent. Unless there’s massive large-scale deportations by the millions, it will be irrevocable.
For Miller—as for Fanon—colonialism is a psychological and material harm, which displaces the colonized from their land, their culture and themselves. That displacement is innately violent, and therefore calls forth violence in return. Miller states this most explicitly at Charlie Kirk’s funeral; he (falsely) frames the assassination of Kirk as a left wing attack on conservative identity, and uses it to justify apocalyptic retribution.
They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You have no idea the dragon you have awakened. You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic.
You can easily see Miller nodding along to Fanon’s insight, “good is quite simply what hurts them most.”
“the impulse to take the colonist’s place”
I am not arguing that Fanon is responsible for Stephen Miller. In the first place, Hitler was presenting fascists as the colonized victims of Jews, and neo-Confederates were presenting themselves as the colonized victims of Black people, long before 1961. And in the second place, we do not have to pretend that truths and lies are the same thing. Algerians were in fact colonized and brutalized; white Americans like Stephen Miller are not. Fascists want you to think that both sides are equally culpable. But, again, fascists lie.
Nonetheless, understanding Miller’s anticolonial cosplay is important in part because it illuminates the exact contours of those fascist lies. People on all parts of the political spectrum have argued that MAGA’s appeal is grounded in economic anxiety or in real deprivation; people vote for Trump because their living standards have eroded or because they don’t have adequate health care. Research has debunked this argument repeatedly, but it continues to appeal to the many people who do not want to grapple with America’s long history of racism and fascism.
In that context, it’s worth actually listening to Stephen Miller and thinking about what he’s saying. Miller is not saying that MAGA will solve economic anxiety. He is instead saying that he is Franz Fanon and that white men are equivalent to colonized Algerians. This is a completely preposterous, fanciful, and intentionally deceitful argument, designed not to address any actual problems, but to obfuscate and displace victim and victimizer. It is not an argument you can meet halfway; it is not a position with which you can compromise. It is a horrific lie designed to adopt the position of the colonized as an excuse for justifying massive violence as recompense for utterly imaginary harms.
Miller’s faux-Fanon-face isn’t just a lie; it’s also a confession. When Miller says that settler-colonialism is intolerable; when he says that it is reasonable and necessary to meet violence with violence; when he says that cultural erasure is a real harm, he’s acknowledging that white supremacy and colonialism are in fact ideologically bankrupt. Or, as Fanon puts it, “The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it ever endeavor to cover up this nature of things.”
There are a couple of corollaries here. First, appealing to empathy to combat fascism is largely useless; fascists are aware that they are perpetrating injustice. They understand the plight of the oppressed, and in fact see themselves in the oppressed. That does not make them want to end oppression though. It simply makes them double down on their determination not to be the colonized or the weak. To see yourself in the other can lead, not to sympathy, but to rage.
Second, Miller demonstrates the extent to which denunciations of anticolonial, and anti-authoritarian violence are fundamentally in bad faith. Miller not only advocates violence himself; he justifies that violence with anticolonial rhetoric, because he understands that colonial violence, absent these kinds of lies and projections, is fundamentally unjustifiable. Fanon’s description of a colonial landscape as a Manichean world enforced by the bayonet is so irrefutable that dead-eyed ghouls like Miller can only respond by pretending that they’re the ones at the point of the bayonet rather than the ones holding it.
Hopefully violence is not the only solution, as Fanon believed it was in Algeria. But it’s clear that in the face of Miller’s willful and homicidal delusion, debate and compromise are largely irrelevant. The only path is resistance, spiced perhaps with mockery at the oppressors who can’t stop whining about how they are oppressed. “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World,” Fanon wrote. He meant that the wealth of the west was derived from the expropriated resources of the colonies. But looking at Stephen Miller, he could have said that the west’s sense of its own worth, its own virtue, and its own grievance is also stolen from the colonies. The only virtue is anticolonial virtue, which is why the colonists lie, not least to themselves, not just about who is violent, but about who has invaded whom.
Wow. Mind blown. Thank you for so much to think about.