and prompted him to take a leadership role in the War Crimes trials
that he shared with Bertrand Russell. The basis of colonialist exploitation,
in Sartre’s view, is the belief on the part of the colonists that the natives
are necessarily taken for “submen” to justify their exploitation whereas
the cry of the freedom fighter is that “we too are men.”^37
Ends and means: fraternity and terrorWe discussed the issue of ends and means inChapters 10 and 11 above,
where it was a matter of relating ethics to politics. Sartre frequently
stated the end–means problem in terms of ethics and politics, since his
notion of the ethical beforeSaint Genetand even there, was anti-
Machiavellian, as we saw. In fact, it was his “amoral realism” that led
him to adopt a more utilitarian stance in all but name, with his view that
“bourgeois” or “idealist” ethics, such as those analyzed in theNotebooks
for an Ethics, were at best naive in the present state of our inauthentic
society and at worst the breeding ground of oppressive and exploitative
practices masquerading as bourgeois “justice.” The “realist” issue was
whether one could pursue justified violence, that is counterviolence, to
dismantle socioeconomic structures that were themselves violent or
promoters of violence. Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’sThe Wretched
of the Earth,^38 addressed to the European beneficiaries of colonialist
exploitation, marks the extreme form of Sartre’s ambivalent attitude
toward physical violence.^39 And yet, there is a constructive strain even
(^37) At the invitation of philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell, Sartre joined and ended up
chairing a gathering of public intellectuals as an “International War Crimes Tribunal” to
hear and assess evidence of “genocide” and other crimes against humanity leveled against the
American military during the Vietnam war. A summary of the evidence and the judgments is
presented by Sartre’s adopted daughter, and a brief essay, “On Genocide,” by Sartre
concludes the work. Jean-Paul Sartre and Arlette Elkaı ̈m-Sartre,On Genocide(Boston,
MA: Beacon, 1968 ). For a collection of relevant essays by Sartre, seeColonialism and
38 Neocolonialism.
Fanon,Wretched of the Earth. For an excellent comparison of Sartre and Fanon on antira-
cism, anticolonialism and the politics of emancipation, see Erik M. Vogt,Jean-Paul Sartre
und Frantz Fanon: Antirassismus, Antikolonialismus, Politiken der Emanzipation(Vienna:
39 Verlag TuriaþKant,^2012 ).
See Ronald Santoni,Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent(University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2003 ), esp. chapter 10 , “Justificational Ambivalence: Problematic
Interpretation.” See also Linda Bell,Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence: A Feminist
Approach to Freedom(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993 ).
A socialist humanism and its morality? 369