There is something persistently seductive in the specter of revolutionary violence. It beckons not only the downtrodden, as Marxist mythology would have it, but also the educated and the privileged. The bloodied banner of revolution – no matter how soaked with tyranny – continues to enchant a particular kind of progressive mind. It is a seduction not of the body but of the soul – a spiritual longing to be cleansed through the fire of someone else’s destruction.

Frantz Fanon, a man of immense insight and considerable darkness, captured this impulse with chilling honesty. In his book The Wretched of the Earth , he describes violence not merely as a tool but as a cleansing force, one that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.”

For Fanon, killi

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