If you quote “by any means necessary”, you’d better be aware of the history behind the sentiment. Movements and intellectuals who’ve said it have generally taken it as a grave, momentous declaration both philosophically and practically. It’s not to be tossed off as a simple slogan, and it’s always something that has to be discussed, always debatable. It’s anti-intellectual to refuse that discussion. It’s anti-politics to treat it as always and obviously true, as if it were beneath some group or person to have to explain why any means to the ends of their cause are always already justified: anti-politics because this absolutely refuses any possibility of solidarity beyond whatever assemblage of people already identify themselves as in struggle, because it erases people and groups who have just as much claim to that struggle as the any-means-necessary proclaimers. It’s also anti-politics if the sloganeer absolutely refuses to give any account of their tactical or strategic vision. That hints that the person saying it fears to be weighed and found wanting, hints they’re slinging the slogan precisely because they know they have no plan.
All of this goes just as much for anybody comprehensively rejecting the sentiment, too. Pacifists already know they have a hard philosophical road to travel, so they’re usually thoughtful in trying to say “Never by violence”. By contrast, any non-pacifist is on tortured ground trying to explain why some means are usually not ok but might hypothetically be necessary under certain kinds of circumstances, and that should make them always have to listen attentively to someone else’s embrace of the possibility of violence. The founding document of American nationalism says exactly that: there’s nowhere in the Declaration where a principled restraint is placed on the means of revolution, just on the causes of it. Though it would be peculiar to think that a revolution might legitimately be conducted worse than the tyranny that justified it, the Declaration also imagines a revolution to be a finite transition between one government and the next, unlike the French Revolution, which arguably came to think of itself as a permanent state of transformation. Americans of any ideological stripe except for committed pacifists have to be willing to hear out someone who says that a problem will “never purged away but by Blood”.
As a threat, “by any means necessary” is often an effective way to compel attention and perhaps even create openings for negotiation or change. As an empirical description of the spontaneous reactions of people subjected to intolerable repression, it might be an accurate rendition of the tacit rules governing their actions: if the alternative to escape from a concentration camp or slavery is torture and death, if the consequence of losing a battle is the destruction of everything, once the escape is underway or the battle joined, anything that might need to be done will be done without anybody having to say so. As an agreed-upon principle in a planned attack or action, on the other hand, it’s another matter—and again, activists who just tweet the slogan out as if it is is morally obvious and beyond discussion are disrespecting the gravity that past people in the most dire circumstances have devoted to talking about what they will and will not do.
So let’s talk history.
In the history of struggles against imperialism, slavery and similar systems of hierarchy and domination, the question of what to do if an opportunity to fight back arises always involves three considerations. I can’t think of a real-world example where none of these questions has been asked and debated except for desperate situations where people have acted completely spontaneously when opportunity arose.
The first question is, “Are there moral or ethical limits to what we might do if we get a chance, within our own moral and cultural frameworks or within what we understand to be the moral frameworks of those dominating or colonizing us?” The second question is, “Would our action be more powerful, effective, or successful if we suspended those limits? Are those limits making us more vulnerable to enslavement or domination?” The third question is, “What would be the practical consequences of acting in spite of those limits (ours or the colonizer’s)? Are the people oppressing us constrained in some way now which they might abandon if we acted without constraint to resist them?”
The answer to the first is always yes: human societies have commonly placed rules on warfare or collective violence, particularly before the 19th Century. Total war as we’ve experienced it in modernity is a substantially novel phenomenon.
Early Modern European expansion
Early modern Europeans expanding and exploring around the world were opportunists who were also driven by institutions and ideas about land tenure and social hierarchy that made them inclined to violently dispossess indigenous societies where possible, often through fairly decentralized activity on the part of settlers, soldiers and priests. But when they saw little prospect of doing so and local environments were enough unlike Western Europe, they shifted readily into negotiating and trading with local sovereigns instead.
Many societies in the Americas and Africa fought to retain their land and communities during that period. We tend to foreground the long-term outcomes of those struggles and forget that in many cases that resistance was successful over a period of centuries. The Valley of Mexico was not conquered in a few years by Cortes if by that we mean, “placed under a singular administrative rule that was controlled by the Spanish monarchy”. Indigenous societies east of the Mississippi in North America gave ground to French and English settlers only gradually over two centuries. Portuguese forces lost battles in the Zambezi Valley in south-east Africa and only held partial sway in Angola—and everywhere the early modern Portuguese went in Africa, they intermingled with local populations and effectively Africanized. Dutch-speaking farmers moved out haltingly from the settlement in the Cape and were challenged by Khoi and then Xhosa-speaking communities in each movement east and northward.
In those conflicts, indigenous societies often applied their own moral understandings of war and violence to structure their responses to settler aggression. They destroyed or stole livestock and burned dwellings as retributive action or as a deterrent to aggression. They ambushed aggressors who were too far ahead of their main forces, or too deep into unfamiliar territory. They kidnapped or captured isolated settlers who chose to move beyond more concentrated communities, and disfigured corpses or survivors in the aftermath of battles, as did Europeans. But indigenous communities also frequently chose to limit the scope of conflicts with aggressive European settlers and forces, and to concede land to settlers—something that didn’t seem like a major concession at first, given that many of those societies viewed land tenure in fundamentally different ways. They invited European guests into their communities to make peace, and sought to make kinship relations with the strangers to create new ‘middle grounds’ that might blunt the aggression of the new arrivals. In many cases, the goal of violence was to restore previous territorial boundaries or limit the scope of authority claimed by settlers over frontier zones. Throughout the early modern period, many societies encountering European merchants and settlers treated them as merely one more neighbor contending for power and influence, as likely to be useful allies as they were dangerous rivals, and only slowly grasped how lethally different the Europeans often were in their outlook and ambitions.
So the first question: what is moral? was habitually asked in contexts where non-Westerners had advantage and where they were shortly in desperate straits after Europeans arrived. And Europeans asked it too, even if the answers were often appalling and programmatically dishonest by both contemporary standards and in the eyes of societies in the Americas, Africa and South Asia.
The second question: can we disregard the usual limits we’d place on violence in order to completely annihilate Europeans? was rarely asked until it was fundamentally too late for that to succeed, whether in material terms or otherwise. And yet, asking that from the perspective of the present, it’s hard to say that they should not have done so in terms of their own interests.
If you had a time machine and went to the Americas in 1375, any remotely honest modern person would have to advise indigenous communities to slaughter every single European landing on their shores—that even allowing a single settler, no matter how much they professed peace, was an inevitable prelude to catastrophe within the span of two or three generations. From the perspective of all pre-1492 American societies, whatever their rivalries and conflicts, whatever the specifics of their sociopolitical arrangements, nothing good came of the arrival of Europeans. Most of those initial contacts involved carefully negotiated agreements intended to limit European presence and maximize trade, if they did not immediately involve all-out aggression by the Europeans, as in the case of the Spanish in much of the Caribbean, and none of those agreements held for any length of time. Massasoit’s friendship with the Plymouth Colony led in short order to Metacom’s head being on a pike outside Plymouth’s walls. Counterfactually, it is impossible to envision some sage advice about non-military strategies you could give pre-1492 American societies that would have permitted contact with Europe to unfold differently—there were no agreements or arrangements that would not have been violated as soon as it was feasible to do so. Where indigenous American societies retained some measure of sovereignty longest, it was because they were unrelentingly aggressive towards European intrusion or because they gave way quickly and moved into territories that were remote from European areas of interest.
It is hard in any such situation to expect anything else, or to judge against that resistance, anywhere it happened. Lapulapu should have fought Magellan in Cebu, and should have killed him as he did. There was nothing innocent about that journey around the globe.
That’s the lesson for much of sub-Saharan Africa as well—either have state capacity capable of repelling European military attacks and thus allow for more negotiated relationships, live in environments that posed more danger to Europeans than local populations, or retaliate in force for any intrusion by European merchants and slavers. The presence of formidable states and empires elsewhere outside of Europe, willing and capable to punish aggression, was also sufficient to inhibit the formation of colonizing power. Only where that power took hold did the third question become urgent: what will the Europeans do if we do resort to “any means necessary”? Because that third question has a completely different meaning if you are not a slave, a colonial subject, or living under harsh repression. Two states or empires that have some degree of force symmetry may ask one another, “well, what will happen if we commit an outrageously disproportionate act of aggressive violence against the other?” Just as two small-scale communities might. Most of the time, concerns about retaliation alone are enough to answer the question, if it is not already considered answered by prevailing ideas about relations between societies or by the sheer material inability of either party to do anything of the sort.
The question has always been different when you’re under the heel of an empire or a captive at the mercy of a slaveholder. Slave revolts often end like that of Spartacus, and because we usually learn of them from slave societies that survived such wars, we rarely learn how the slaves answered the question of whether to revolt and what, if anything, would be the limits of their uprising. And yet, slaves and colonial subjects in premodern and early modern history do sometimes decide, and not merely in spontaneous desperation, that the risks of fighting back without limits are worth it, whether for the hope of freedom, the thought that making the costs of slavery so high in terms of fear that the system no longer can go on, or simply the desire to punish cruelty and injustice in the only terms that slaveholders understand.
Atlantic Slavery
Which brings us to revolts against slavery in the Americas, on slave ships in the Middle Passage, and in West and Central Africa.
It is not universally true that slaves in the Atlantic system decided to fight without limits. In the case of some successful maroon communities, the goal in conflicts was often to arrive at stable agreements with slaveholding empires that would preserve the autonomy of the maroons—a goal that was notably achieved in Jamaica, Surinam and Brazil and more informally in other cases. Even in the Haitian Revolution, the long-term goal of the revolutionaries shifted towards an acceptance of their sovereignty.
But the short-term of the initial Haitian uprising included death to slave-owners and their families, as it did in other revolts. And here I think you can say that the first question was asked and it was answered in terms of what slave owners had already offered as the morality of the situation. Slave owners had already committed the ultimate act of violence simply by enslaving other human beings, by raping them and commanding their bodies, and by giving themselves license to torture and murder slaves without restraint. In that situation, the answer to the first question: do we have a moral framework that should inhibit our actions? is long since asked and answered before the slaves ever have to consider it. The second and third questions are answered too. What do you have to gain? At least for a while, the hope of freedom and the possibility of making slavery so fearful to those who would commit to it that you might end it eventually. (Which is in some ways exactly what I think happened in the Atlantic system: revolts both actual and possible made the system unsustainable.) And what retribution could be worse than being worked to death, tortured at will, and raped and humiliated on an everyday basis? What could slave-owners threaten to do that they did not already do? The only reason they might forbear violence against the enslaved is to preserve their value as property, not because of any humane credo that forbids abuse.
And so just as you might have to admit that it would have been completely sensible for indigenous societies to be unrelentingly hostile to contact with Europeans, it’s hard to imagine sitting in judgment of any Atlantic slave revolt and saying “but please, don’t hurt anybody, don’t harm a civilian”. Who is a civilian in a slaveowner’s house?
Modern Colonialism, Decolonization and Racism
This is where I think the asking and answering of the questions gets the most complicated in real historical terms.
If considering the initial advance of the West into the rest of the world and the situation of Atlantic slaves (as well as slaves in premodern societies elsewhere, and other servile groups like serfs in Europe) should lead almost anybody except a pacifist to concede that there are situations where “by any means necessary” is a valid principle—even to the point of saying “whatever you do, if if it’s not necessary, you can’t really be judged for it”—then in talking about modern struggles against colonialism, racial supremacy and other situations of domination, the person who is too free with “by any means necessary” needs to confront many situations where the three questions were and should have been answered against that declaration.
For one, the rise of nation-states and their (often halting, frequently hypocritical) regulation of warfare and violence, coupled with the legal-moral frameworks that inform much of modern life, has meant that colonial rule and racial domination have become more complicatedly institutional, juridical, and systematized, and as a result there are no places or possibilities for sovereignty or freedom that exist outside of or in exclusion to the maintenance of empire, inequality and domination. We can counterfactually consider that Native American societies that mobilized unyielding total violence against arriving Europeans might have maintained their autonomy for much longer than they did, or that West and Central African societies and states that retaliated without constraint against slave-raiders (including other African societies) might have stayed ‘outside’ the Atlantic. But anyone pursuing freedom today isn’t repelling invaders or preserving autonomy. Winning control of a state immediately enmeshes the new rulers in a system that has all sorts of constraining norms, spoken and unspoken.
More importantly, all decolonizing struggles, all struggles against racial supremacy, at least begin by invoking liberal concepts, even if those are not the imagined final state of the freedoms or justice that the struggles aim to achieve. To the first question: do we have moral limitations on the scope and nature of our actions against a colonizer, against a racial supremacist, against an oppressor? the answer in modern historical contexts has frequently been yes, yes we do, and even when it has been no, we must not, because those constraints will not be followed by our oppressor or colonizer and because accepting them dooms us to perpetual subjugation, that has been a really serious discussion. I cannot think of an example where it has not been.
Moreover, to go back to a point I made earlier, in many cases when the answer is “no, we do not”, that is said to colonizers or oppressors as a threat or a prophecy: that if you do not accept the necessity of our freedom, if you do not seek justice along with us, eventually people will rise up, whether we who are predicting that are responsible for it or not. There have been times where modern states have accepted the truth of that prediction: urban riots in the United States and Western Europe spurred efforts at reform, much as labor unrest in the late 19th and early 20th Century led to change. Since the 1980s, I think it would be fair to say that reactionary groups and interests have come to the conclusion that they’ve check-mated possible unrest or violent resistance and no longer need to make concessions in pursuit of stability. Colonial governments came to the same conclusion in Africa and Asia after the violence of their initial conquest in the 19th Century, as have some authoritarian postcolonial states.
That at least is a vexed ground where the people in power are playing a dangerous game: taunt people with the impossibility of a truly violent uprising and they may feel the need to make the threat come true, to answer the first question in favor of no constraints. More importantly, many movements and groups engaged in struggle have asked themselves, “And how do we want to live? What is the better future that is possible?”, and have concluded that they cannot obtain that better future by poisoning the present even worse than their oppressors have. Every group that struggled to overthrow the yoke of European rulers at least recognized the cogency of that argument even if or when they concluded otherwise. Almost every group or movement fighting for freedom within a nation or territory has done the same.
At the least, when you’ve cleared the first question—no rules, no constraints—and felt that necessary and righteous, the second and third questions also come to the fore. Do we have anything to gain by foregoing moral constraints, and what might our enemies do if we act on that basis? Even groups and movements that come to the conclusion that they face an enemy without real scruples who means to continue their subjugation forever might—in fact often do—conclude that there is little to be gained tactically by discarding tacit or formal constraints on their actions, or that the gains of the moment are likely to be erased by overwhelming retaliation.
It is in fact a diagnostic sign that a group has stopped fighting for liberation or justice when it categorically stops asking, “Are there any constraints on us? Will there be those constraints in a better future?”, and even more when they invariably, uncritically, dogmatically dismiss the second and third questions as irrelevant and unwelcome. That’s how you end up in a Greenwich Village basement thinking that making a bomb will free somebody somehow, or end up driving people out of the cities of Cambodia into killing grounds. I can think of modern examples where clearing the three questions and heading into violent action without hesitation or restriction have actually secured useful tactical outcomes and where the colonial power or oppressive system have not been able or willing to retaliate meaningfully. That’s a relatively particular subset of cases, often in situations where the imperial or dominating power is weak already and is already plainly committing enormous folly and moral error that robs it of any sympathy. And even then, acting without constraint during the struggle is often a terrible burden after decolonization or the unravelling of oppression: it frequently puts the fighter for liberation in position to be the iron fist of repression on the next turn of the wheel.
What I mean to do here is scourge all certainties. The people who judge that no struggle is just if the means are indiscriminately violent are either moral idiots or historically blind if they think that judgment can hold in all situations. Slaves seeking freedom, prisoners in concentration camps, independent societies resisting conquerors and genocide: who today would dare sit in judgment of what they do in fighting back as if their actions are on an equal playing field with those who hold them in slavery or murder? If you would judge that, you are rejecting the most basic moral and legal justification of self-defense, an idea with deep purchase in human history. But the people who say, “by any means necessary” as if it were a meme or an advertising slogan are equally bereft of understanding, depth and respect for the gravity of what people often must think about, have thought about, when they seek a remedy for injustice. Standing in solidarity requires being part of that discussion, requires being subject to criticism. Nobody gets a free pass here.
Image credit: Patrickroque01, at Wikimedia Commons
The case I always think is interesting to consider here (which I will readily admit is largely a function of my own personal interests) is the "closing" of Japan under the Tokugawa. There's a famous story about a missionary telling one of the shoguns (I think Ieyasu, but it might even have predated him) that the secret to European success was religion: the missionaries would spread Christianity to the populace, who would then welcome conquest. On being informed of this, they expelled and/or crucified every Christian they could get their hands on, and strictly excluded Europeans for the better part of two centuries.
Which, you know, is pretty appalling on a lot of levels. At the same time, though, the end result was (at least arguably) that when Perry and the black ships finally forced the "opening" of Japan, triggering the Meiji restoration a few years later, Japan was in a position to rapidly industrialize, going from a basically feudal system to beating a European power head-to-head in fifty years. (OK, admittedly, Tsarist Russia is basically the Detroit Pistons of circa-1900 Europe...)
I'm not sure what useful lesson is really to be drawn from this, though, other than "Be absolutely ruthless and also try not to have anything that the colonizers want all that badly." The Tokugawa were bloody-minded to an impressive degree, but it's also not clear that they would've been able to withstand a concerted effort on the part of the European powers. But China was RIGHT THERE and much more easily manipulated than Japan, and could provide everything that might've been extracted from Japan ten times over. So there wasn't really any compelling reason to push until the US belatedly got into the empire business, and thus, Perry.
I guess if you really want to play the counterfactual game, the best tool would be not anything political, but biological inoculation. That is, if you're taking your time machine back to 1375 in the Americas, bring along a bunch of smallpox vaccine and try to head off the epidemics that really tipped the scales. But then you're off doing the full Kim Stanley Robinson thing...