After the Cataclysm

After the Cataclysm (Political Economy of Human Rights) 
by 

Noam Chomsky,

 

Edward S. Herman

 

In this detailed exposure of what would now be called “fake news,” Chomsky and Herman are not motivated by a desire to induce cynicism or nihilism in their readers, nor to induce despair in the face of terrifying odds. Instead, they display a passionate conviction that the search for Truth can be sustained and that the power of lies will turn to dust in the light of serious investigation. 

There is no single cause for the misery and oppression we find in every part of the world. But there are some major causes, and some of these are close at hand and subject to our influence and, ultimately, our control. These factors and the social matrix in which they are embedded will engage the concern and efforts of people who are honestly committed to alleviate human suffering and to contribute to freedom and justice. [p344]

This particular volume deals with Indochina in the years following America’s wars there, but it is concerned less with an account of the way those countries dealt with the aftermath of the wars and more with an analysis of the way Western media described the situation to their American and other Western audiences. 

We have not developed or expressed our views here on the nature of the Indochinese regimes. To assess the contemporary situation in Indochina and the programs of the current ruling groups is a worthwhile endeavour, but it has not been our objective. [p344] 

Our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regards to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task. We will consider the kinds of evidence used by the media and those naive enough to place their faith in them, and the selection of evidence from what is available. [p160]

One amusing comment often repeated on social media is that if the USA had lost the War of Independence against the tyranny of the British empire, they might instead have ended up resembling Canada; the implication is usually that this outcome might have been preferable. For Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, the alternative option which the USA deployed such astonishing firepower to enforce on their peasant populations was the violently oppressive “sub-fascism” of America’s client regimes in Thailand, Indonesia or the Phillipines, or those of Latin America. Since these options would be appalling to any objective observer, it was important to the Americans to convince the world that the people of Indochina were suffering dreadfully under their “communist” postwar regimes, while diverting attemtion entirely from the grim record of their own supposedly capitalist (actually fascist) clients. 

Now that the countries of Indochina have been pounded to dust, Western ideologists are less fearful of the demonstration effect of successful communism and exults in the current willingness of the Western satellites of ASEAN to cooperate in “peaceful competition”. In the London Observer Gavin Young reports on ASEAN’s program of obliterating Communism “not with bombs but with prosperity”, under the leadership of the smiling humanitarian Marcos, Lee Kuan Yew, Suharto, Hussein Onn of Malaysis and General Kriangsak of Thailand (with his “dark, puckish face, at once warm-hearted and mischievous”) and are now firmly set to eradicate the ills of their societies, as Young discovered when he interviewed them on their gold courses. ... Imagine what the reaction would be in the West to a featured article in the press explaining how wondrous Asian communism is becoming, based exclusively on interviews with Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, etc. [p13]

So then, this books offers an intensive review of the way Western media [mis]reported on post war Indochina, supported with comprehensive evidence, and indeed the technical footnotes comprise a good quarter of the book’s volume. While this is not unreadable it is probably better described as a reference source than a popular history. I read through all the same because I have yet to find a comparable account in more accessible form.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: Volume I The Political Economy of Human Rights 

by 

Noam Chomsky,

 

Edward S. Herman

 Chomsky has a remarkable and enviable ability to describe foul behaviour in a way that remains both factual – with ample supporting evidence – and calm. It is possible to read this without being overwhelmed by the sheer evil and cynicism of the behaviour described but it is not easy. 

Post-War history is very strange and often makes no sense, because so much of it is not true. Most of us assume that World War II was fought to put a stop to fascism, but in Asia and Latin America especially, the fact is that fascism won. What the U.S. has done with its immense military and economic power since the conclusion of World War II has been to wage a continuous military and economic war against peasants across the globe, on behalf of unrepresentative, fascistic tyrannies and ruthless corporations extracting resources and wealth from Third World economies. 

How was it possible, for example, for the U.S. to be defeated in the Vietnam War? The answer rather depends on what you imagine this war was about and who were the enemy. No it was not a war against the Communists of North Vietnam, nor even a proxy war against Chinese Communism. It was a war against the peasants of South Vietnam, and its objective was to impose and maintain a puppet regime that was grotesquely corrupt, depressingly incompetent, horribly vicious, and utterly lacking in political roots. The more the U.S. protected its fascistic puppets the more the people hated them and the more they were punished for failing to submit to their own destruction. As the Americans faced defeat, the level of punishment inflicted on the people escalated obscenely. It is a foul and unacceptable model of behaviour that the U.S. has replicated many times, with variations on a theme. 

The rest is just a few quotes. 

...the U.S. leadership knew from its earliest involvement that the Communists in Vietnam were the only political movement with mass popular support and that the faction it supported was a foreign implant. (Diem, in fact, was imported from the United States.) Joseph Buttinger, an early advisor to Diem and one of his most outspoken advocates in the 1950s, contends that the designation “fascist” is inappropriate for Diem because, although his regime had most of the vicious characteristics of fascism, he lacked the mass base that a Hitler or Mussolini could muster. ...Henceforth in this book we will use the term “subfascist” as an appropriate designation for the members of the system of U.S.- sponsored client fascist states. [p33,34]

The U.S. assault on the Indochinese was quite consciously undertaken to smash them into submission to minority, subfascist agents chosen by the U.S. government. By a reasonable use of familiar terms this was plain aggression. If the facts were faced and international law and elementary morality were operational, thousands of U.S. politicians and military planners would be regarded as candidates for Nuremberg type trials. And the United States would be paying reparations proportionate to the vast destruction it caused. [p34]

The words “terror” and “terrorism” have become semantic tools of the powerful in the Western world. In their dictionary meaning, these words refer to “intimidation” by the “systematic use of violence” as a means of both governing and opposing existing governments. But current Western usage has restricted the sense, on purely ideological grounds, to the retail violence of those who oppose the established order. Throughout the Vietnam War these words were restricted to the use of violence in resistance to regimes so lacking in indigenous support that Joseph Buttinger rejects General Lansdale’s own designation “fascistic” as too complimentary. The essence of U.S. policy in South Vietnam, and elsewhere in Indochina, was intimidation by virtually unrestrained violence against the peasant population. [p97]

Wholesale violence by fascist client states is not terrorism. [p108]

Bernard Fall, writing in the early 1960s, raised the same question and provided a partial answer: “Why is it that we must use top-notch elite forces, the cream of the crop of American, British, French or Australian commando and special warfare schools, armed with the very best that advanced technology can provide, to defeat Viet-Minh, Algerians or Malay ‘C.T.s’ (Chinese terrorists), almost none of whom can lay claim to similar expert training, and only in the rarest of cases to equality in firepower? / The answer is very simple. It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up.” [p118]

Since the generals sponsoring the National Security Doctrine have been nurtured by and dependent on the U.S. military – intelligence establishment, and look to the United States as the heartland of anti-Communism and Freedom, it is little wonder that the economic doctrinal counterpart to the NSD is quite congenial to the interests of multinational business. The military juntas have adopted a “free enterprise – bind growth” model, on the alleged geopolitical rationale that growth means power, disregarding the fact the dependent growth means foreign power... in the economics of client fascism, that is, National Security Economics, the welfare of the masses is no longer a system objective – the masses become a cost of goods sold, something to be minimised – so that although the military juntas sometimes speak of long run benefits trickling down to the lower orders, ths is really an after-thought and not to be taken seriously. [pp287, 288] 

... since the world is one of good and evil, with “no room for comfortable neutralism” (Pinochet, echoing a familiar refrain of his U.S. mentor), and since free enterprise-growth-profits-USA are good, anybody challenging these concepts or their consequences is ipso facto a Communist-subversive-enemy. ... It also means that any resistance to business power and privilege in the interests of equity, or on the basis of an alternative view of desirable social ends or means, is a National Security and police problem. This applies to such organisations as peasant leagues, unions, student organizations or community or political groupings that might afford protection to the weak or threaten to become a political counterforce to elite domination.[p288]

...the definition of a “terrorist” offered by President Videla: “a terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilizations.” (London Times, 4 January 1978.) The general deserves full marks for honesty at least. [p303]

Summarizing his investigation of U.S. police operations in Latin America, Langguth writes: “...the main exporter of cold war ideas, the principal source of the belief that dissent must be crushed by every means and any means, has been the United States. Our indoctrination of foreign troops provided a justification for torture in the jail cells of Latin America. First in the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama, then at the more ambitious International Police Academy in Washington, foreign policemen were taught that in the war against international communism they were “the first line of defence.” ... The U.S. training turned already conservative men into political reactionaries.” ... After the students have graduated they can still benefit from the assistance of U.S. advisors and international coordination that becomes useful when, for example, Uruguayan dissidents are to be assassinated by “death squads” that operate with impunity in Argentina. [p309]

Nicaragua ... sends the entire annual graduating class of its military academy for a full year of training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, ... the Nicaraguan military has wiped out whole districts on the convenient pretext of guerrilla collaboration. [pp325, 326]

Robert (‘Blowtorch’) Komer who was in charge of the “other war,” cheerfully reported in early 1967 that ‘we are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass’ in what he correctly perceived as a “revolutionary, largely political conflict,” though he never drew the obvious conclusions that follow from these conjoined observations. Komer went on to recommend, rationally enough from the point of view of a major war criminal, that the United States must ‘step up refugee programs deliberately aimed at depriving the VC of a recruiting base” (his emphasis). Thus , the United States could deprive the enemy of what the Combined Campaign Plan 1967 identifies as its “greatest asset”, namely, “the people.”[p352]

By the standards applied at the trials of Axis war criminals after World War II, the entire U.S. command and the civilian leadership would have been hanged for the execution of this policy of discriminating use of firepower. My Lai was indeed an aberration, but primarily in the matter of disclosure.

JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture

Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (Chomsky Perspectives) 
by 

Noam Chomsky

 

This is one of a series of Chomsky paperbacks republished in 2015 which collectively offer a truly radical and transformative review of America's role in world affairs. It is surely essential reading for anyone seeking a rational explanation for seemingly crazy situations. After the virtual insurrection of American youth in the Sixties and early Seventies, in opposition to the very crimes of aggression described with such clarity here, it would seem that a counter revolution has conspired to close the public's mind - perhaps its heart. The extent to which we have been deceived is made more graphic with the realisation that Chomsky's voice has been so lonely and so untypical for all these years. It is not that the evidence is not there in plain sight, so one must assume that we have chosen not to know. Chomsky has laid it out for us with such clarity that it is now difficult to justify ignoring it any longer. The truth as he tells it is painful and upsetting - it hurts - but it must be faced. 

The first part of this book provides an overview of the Cold War, dating this from 1917, not 1945. I have placed a selection of quotes on this topic below. The second part focuses on America’s interference in Indochina from 1945 to the 1970s and beyond, and is especially concerned to expose the way historians of the Vietnam war have changed their tune periodically, in order to paint a retrospective picture at odds with contemporary records, including flatly contradicting their own earlier publications as though nobody would have the imagination to cross-check. Chomsky provides detailed rebuttals and ensures that JFK is accorded his proper place in the sequence of war criminals that have held the presidency. In the last section of the book, Chomsky notes that Kennedy secured escalating military spending which amounted to a Keynesian boost for the economy and a massive growth in nuclear and conventional weaponry on the basis of a supposed gap compared with the USSR, at a time when he knew very well that Kruschev was actually reducing the size of the USSR’s forces and reaching out for opportunities to reduce the risk of nuclear war. He also describes Kennedy’s personal role in moving Latin American policy beyond support for fascist regimes towards direct American leadership of a grotesquely oppressive security state system across the continent, as well as his aggressive and illegal efforts to subvert and destroy Castro’s regime in Cuba. This provides the basis for interesting comparisons between JFK’s “Camelot”and Ronald Reagan’s administration. 

The quotes that follow help to outline Chomsky’s account of the Cold War, which is the essential context for any understanding of the USA’s criminal role in the Third World, its intolerance of democracy, destruction of human rights, rejection of international law and consistent promotion of fascism. 

The inhabitants of Asia and the Western Hemisphere were “appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare,” military historian Geoffrey Parker observes. “It was thanks to their military superiority rather than any social, moral or natural advantage, that the white peoples of the world managed to create and control” their “global hegemony,” history’s first. “Europe’s incessant wars” were responsible for “stimulating military science and spirit to a point where Europe would be crushingly superior to the rest when they did meet,” historian V.G.Kiernan comments aptly. [p5,6]

These traditional features of European culture emerged with great clarity in the Indochina wars. There is a direct line of descent from the English colonists who carried out “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in the most populous parts of the union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru” (Secretary of War Gen. Henry Knox, 1794) to the “ethnic cleansing” of the continent, to the murderous conquest of the Philippines and the rampages in the Caribbean region, to the onslaught against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” [p6]

Every age of human history, Adam Smith argued with some justice, reveals the working of “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other People.” The “masters of mankind” in the half millennium of the European conquest included Europe’s merchant warriors, the industrialists and financiers who followed in their paths, the supranational corporations and financial institutions that are creating what the business press now calls a “new imperial age,” ... as new governing forms coalesce to serve the needs of the masters in a “de-facto world government”: the IMF, World Bank, G-7, GATT and other executive agreements. [p11]

Our “excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence” in Vietnam is commonly attributed to the Cold War, the felt need ‘to resist every hint of Soviet expansion wherever it occurred, even in areas that were not vital to our interests.” The doctrine is not wholly false, but must be translated from Newspeak into English. The term “Soviet expansion” served throughout the Cold War as a cover for policy initiatives that could not be justified, whatever their actual grounds. The Indochina Wars provide a revealing illustration of the general practice.” [p16]

The actual reasons for terror and subversion, and finally aggression, derive from the basic logic of North – South relations, developed with unusual explicitness in the early postwar period. Recognizing that they held unprecedented power, US planners undertook to organize the world in the interests of the masters, “assum[ing] out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system, as the chief historian of the CIA, Gerald Haines, puts the matter in a highly regarded study of US policy in Latin America. Each region of the South was assigned its proper place. Latin America was to be taken over by the United States, its rivals Britain and France excluded. Policy there, as Haines explains, was designed “to develop larger and more efficient sources of supply for the American economy as well as create expanded markets for U.S. exports and expanded opportunities for investment of American capital,” a “neo-colonial neomercantilist policy that permitted local development only “as long as that did not interfere with American profits and dominance.” The Monroe Doctrine was also effectively extended to the Middle East, where the huge oil resources and crucially the enormous profits they generated were to be controlled by the US and its British client, operating behind an “Arab facade” of pliant family dictatorships. As explained by George Kennan and his State Department Policy Planning Staff, Africa was to be “exploited” for the reconstruction of Europe, while Southeast Asia would “fulfil its major function as a source of raw materials for Japan and Western Europe”, helping them to overcome the “dollar gap” so that they would be able to purchase US manufacturing exports and provide lucrative opportunities for US investors. [p16]

In short, the Third World was to be kept in its traditional service role, providing cheap labour and resources, markets investment opportunities and other amenities for the masters, with local elites permitted to share in the plunder as long as they cooperate. By the same logic, the major threat to US interests was always recognized to be “radical and nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to popular pressures for “immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses” and development for domestic needs. Such “ultranationalism” is unacceptable, regardless of its political coloration, because it conflicts with the demand for a “political and economic climate conducive to private investment”, with inadequate repatriation of profits and “protection of our raw materials.” [pp16,17]

Eastern Europe was the original “Third World,” diverging from the West along a fault line running through Germany even before the Columgian era, the West beginning to develop, the East ecoming its service area. By the early 20th Century, much ofthe region was a quasi-colonial dependency of the West. The Bolshevik takeover n 1917 was immediately recognized to be “ultranationalist,” hence unacceptable. Furthermore it was a “virus,” with substantial appeal in the Third World. / The Western invasion of the Soviet Union was therefore justified in defense against “the Revolution’s challenge ... to the very survival of the capitalist order,” the leading diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis comments today, reiterating the basic position of US diplomacy of the 1920s. “The fundamental obstacle” to recognition of the USSR, the chief od the Eastern European Division of teh State department held, “is the world revolutionary aims and practices of the rulers of that country.” These “practices” of course, did not involve literal aggression; rather, interfering with Western designs, which is tantamount to aggression. The Kremlin conspiracy to take over the world was therefore established, a record replayed in later years as other ultranationalists and viruses were assigned to the category of “Soviet expansion.” [p22]

The Bolsheviks sought to make “the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominant in the earth, “ Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned... force must be used to prevent “the leaders of Bolshevism and anarchy” from proceeding to “organize or preach against government in the United States.” The repression launched by the Wilson administration successfully undermined democratic politics, freedom of the press, and independent thought, safeguarding business interests and their control over state power. The story was re-enacted after World War II, again under the pretext of the Kremlin conspiracy. [p23]

According to the official version, it was Soviet crimes that aroused Westerrn indignation. In his scholarly history of Soviet American relations, George Kennan writes that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 created the breach... The idealistic Woodrow Wilson was particularly distraught, reflecting the “strong attachment to constitutionality” of the American public... A few months later, Wilson’s army dissolved the National Assembly in occupied Haiti “by genuinely Marine Corp methods,” ... The reason was that the Haitian legislature refused to ratify a constitution imposed by the invaders that gave them the right to buy up Haiti’s land. A Marine-run plebiscite remedied the problem... [p24] Following the same high principles, the US enthusiastically welcomed the “fine young revolution” carried out by Benito Mussolini in Italy in 1922, as the American ambassador described the imposition of Fascism... because they blocked the threat of a second Russia, the State Department explained. Hitler was supported as a “moderate” for the same reason. In 1937, the State Department saw fascism as compatible with American economic interests, and also the natural reaction of “the rich and middle classes, in self defence” when the “dissatisfied masses, with the example of Russia before them, swing to the Left.” ... Major US corporations were heavily involved in German war production, sometimes enriching themselves (notably the Ford motor company) by joining the plunder of Jewish assets under Hitler’s Aryanization program, “U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power”, Christopher Simpson writes, increasing “by some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Euopre and barely holding steady in Britain.”... [pp 23-25]

As Gaddis and other serious historians recognize, the Cold War began in 1917, not 1945. Whatever one believes about the post-World War II period, no one regarded the USSR as a military threat in earlier years... It should be added that Stalin’s awesome crimes were of no concern to Truman and other high officials. Truman liked and admired Stalin, and felt he could deal with him as long as the US got its way 85 percent of the time. Other leading figures agreed. As with a host of other murderers and torturers of lesser scale, the unacceptable crime is disobedience; the same is true of priests who preach “the preferential option for the poor”, secular nationalists in the Arab world, Islamic Fundamentalists, democratic socialists, or independent elements of any variety. [pp26, 27]
The question of what Kennedy might have done or what was hidden in the secret recesses of his heart, we may leave to seers and mystics. We can, however, inspect what he did do and say, an inquiry facilitated by a rich documentary record. [p83]

Note that JFK and his advisers consistently regarded lack of popular support for the war and GVN initiatives towards political settlement not as an opportunity for withdrawal but rather as a threat to victory. [p97]

For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade. [p142]

The high level shift of policy after Tet called for a revision of the earlier record. Since everyone was now an “early opponent of the war,” the same must have been true of the grand leader. The enterprise had soured; the picture of John F. Kennedy must therefore be modified. [p143]

Frantz Fanon: A Biography

Frantz Fanon: A Biography 
by 

David Macey

 

This is certainly among the best biographies I have encountered. The subject, Frantz Fanon, was complex and challenging and he is not presented as an icon, but rather as an individual. This seemingly bland remark is worth unpacking. If Fanon is to be set up on a plinth as a model or as a paragon, then the flaws - both personal and theoretical – identified in this biography will topple any statues. Fortunately, the reality is far more impressive than the myths, of which Macey identifies and demolishes a large number. 

Macey provides a very detailed, chronological account of Fanon’s life story: his childhood in the French colony of Martinique, his service in World War 2 as a French soldier, his training and professional practice in psychiatry, his engagement with the Algerian war of independence against the French, his contributions to Black African literature and culture, his political writings and his untimely death from Leukaemia at the age of only 36 years. It was a very full and eventful life and the story is told with style and a deep commitment to the truth. 

A critical point emerging from this is that Fanon’s activities and writing were very much a product of his situation and his own lived experiences. For example, his work as a psychiatrist, in Algeria and Tunisia, was often experimental and innovative, and typically demanded energetic confrontation with outdated practices, but it was built on the foundations of his training and early experiences in France, was entirely in line with contemporary developments in the field of psychiatry in other countries, and was performed in collaboration with others of his profession. 

Wrapped around this, a huge amount of wider history is described, most importantly a history of the Algerian War; reference to other liberation struggles (the Congo is one example) is patchy though interesting. The early history of France’s unprovoked invasion and colonisation from the 1830s onwards comes surprisingly late in the book, to be honest, it would have been helpful to unpick a little more detail when he observes that the French did seriously and explicitly consider emulating the USA’s genocide of Native Americans when they drove native Algerians from their lands and property and the book does not really engage sufficiently with the importance of Islam as a factor in the struggle for independence, despite a few useful asides, such as a discussion of the role of women. After all, the saga of French engagement with North African Islam is by no means resolved today, and even President Macron has been known to appeal without embarrassment to France’s “civilizing mission.” 

Fanon’s writings are described at some length and subjected to very sharp scrutiny. Despite their huge impact, Macey is not overawed. He finds them poorly researched, factually unreliable, making unjustifiable generalisations from special cases, inconsistent and weakly argued. He points out that Fanon makes predictions that have demonstrably failed and often misunderstands what he has observed. He attributes these failings to the very constrained conditions in which they were written, which is especially so in the case of his most famous work, The Wretched of the Earth, written in a few short months while Fanon was dying of leukaemia. On the other hand, he is highly critical – even snortingly dismissive – of the way Fanon has been poorly translated into English, his writing often taken out of context, subject to selective reading as well as direct misrepresentation, and distorted in order to support other agendas. Macey argues that Fanon himself is sometimes idealized and his contributions exaggerated in ways that are just not supported by evidence. 

What emerges from this critical biography is a more truthful, more three dimensional and in many ways far more admirable Frantz Fanon, generous, humane and incredibly energetic, willing to make commitments and willing to risk being wrong, who achieved a great deal in his short life and bequeathed a lasting legacy in his ideas and his values. 

Quotes that follow are from the digital edition, whose page numbers differ a lot from the hard copy which I initially used. 

One of the striking features of many of the tributes to Fanon that were published immediately after his death is the stress placed on his fundamental humanism. The negative emphasis on the theme of violence is probably a reflection of the American reception and of the way in which Fanon is read by Hannah Arendt in her book On Violence. She looks at Fanon’s influence on the violence that afflicted American university campuses in the 1960s, but fails to make any mention of Algeria[p51]

Outside France, the most familiar image of Fanon was for a long time that created in the United States, where Grove Press advertised Constance Farrington’s flawed translation of Les Damnés de la terre as ‘The handbook for a Negro Revolution that is changing the shape of the white world.’[p52]
... the self-identification of civil rights workers, black power activists and Québecois separatists with Fanon’s wretched of the earth necessarily involves the misrecognition of exaggeration. In the United States, civil rights workers did encounter terrible violence and the protests of the Black Panthers did meet with armed repression. But they were not faced with General Jacques Massu’s Tenth Parachute Division and the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion. When Fanon speaks of ‘violence’, he is speaking of the French army’s destruction of whole villages and of the FLN’s bombing of cafés, or in other words of total war and not of limited low-level conflict. The extreme violence of the Algerian war was, fortunately, not reproduced in the United States or Canada. [p54]

The new interest in Fanon’s first book is a product of the emergence of post-colonial studies as a distinct, if at times alarmingly ill-defined, discipline. [p55] ... Fanon is one of the very few non-Anglophones to be admitted to the post-colonial canon, and alarmingly few of the theorists involved realize – or admit – that they read him in very poor translations. The most obvious example of the problems posed by the translations is the title of the fifth chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs. Fanon’s ‘L’Expérience vécue de l’homme noir’ (‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’) becomes ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The mistranslation obliterates Fanon’s philosophical frame of reference, ... that experience is defined in situational terms and not by some trans-historical ‘fact’.[p56]

The ‘post-colonial Fanon’ is in many ways an inverted image of the ‘revolutionary Fanon’ of the 1960s. Third Worldist readings largely ignored the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs; post-colonial readings concentrate almost exclusively on that text ... The Third Worldist Fanon was an apocalyptic creature; the post-colonial Fanon worries about identity politics, and often about his own sexual identity, but he is no longer angry. His anger was a response to his experience of a black man in a world defined as white, but not to the ‘fact’ of his blackness. It was a response to the condition and situation of those he called the wretched of the earth. The wretched of the earth are still there, but not in the seminar rooms where the talk is of post-colonial theory. They came out on to the streets of Algiers in 1988, and the Algerian army shot them dead.[p58]

Recognizing that Fanon could be – and often was – wrong is part of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called ‘the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon’.[p59]

The classics of French phenomenology – Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception and Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant – are obviously not treatises on racism and anti-racism, but they provided tools that were much better suited to the analysis of ‘the lived experience of the black man’ than either Marxism or psychoanalysis.[p178]

Nothing could prepare him for the most devastating experience of all. It occurred on a cold day in Lyon when Fanon encountered a child and his mother. This is possibly the most famous passage in Peau noire, masques blancs. The child said to his mother: ‘Look, a negro’ and then ‘Mum, look at the negro. I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’[p164]

The being-in-the-world that he had established for himself collapses into a being-for-others. Under the gaze of the child and its mother, Fanon now becomes ‘responsible for my body, responsible for my race, for my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze at myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics – and my eardrums were bursting with cannibalism, mental retardation, fetishism, racial taints, slave-traders and above all, above all, “Y a bon banania”.’ He feels nauseous. Nausea is, in Sartrean terms, an expression of shame: ‘Being ashamed of onself is a recognition that I am indeed the object the other is looking at. I can only be ashamed of my freedom to the extent that it escapes me in order to become a given object.[p226]

The final pages of Peau noire, entitled ‘By Way of Conclusion’, are a hymn to freedom in which Fanon rejects in very Sartrean terms all determinism and insists that his freedom is both absolute and self-founding to the extent that it transcends history. ‘Superiority? Inferiority? Why not quite simply try to touch the other, feel the other, reveal the other to me? Wasn’t my freedom given to me to build the world of the You?’ [p248]

The third edition of Antoine Porot’s dictionary of psychiatry, published by France’s leading academic publishing house in 1975, still contained entries by Henri Aubin on ‘North African Natives (psychopathology of)’, ‘Blacks (psychopathology of)’ and ‘Primitivism’. The former begins: ‘The primitive mentality must be evoked here, particularly as we are speaking of a less highly evolved ethnic group . . .’ It need scarcely be added that the same dictionary contains no entry on ‘White Europeans (psychopathology of)’. No one attempted to explain the massacres at Sétif and Kherrata in terms of the innate psychological traits of white settlers. [p297]

Fanon’s explanation of what was going on in Algeria is harsh and couched in staccato phrases in which one can both hear the voice of the man who could declaim passages from Césaire’s Cahier to such effect and that of the author of Peau noire: ‘I want my voice to be brutal, I do not want it to be beautiful, I do not want it to be pure. I want it to be completely strangled. I do not want my voice to enjoy this, for I am speaking of man and his rejection, of the day to day putrefaction of man, and of his appalling abdication.’ [p354]

...most fighters were illiterate and the wilaya produced their own propaganda material. Inside Algeria itself, radio was a much more effective propaganda medium than the written word. After 130 years of the French civilizing mission, the illiteracy rate was astonishingly high: in 1954, 86 per cent of Algerian men and 95 per cent of Algerian women could not read.[p421]... Colonization did not lay the foundations of Western society in Algeria. It created a divided and unevenly developed society, segregated along ethnic lines. ... As in Martinique (albeit it on a very different scale), Algeria’s ‘development’ was actually an underdevelopment. It could not be permitted to compete with France [p604]


Fanon had already rejected negritude as a ‘great black mirage’ in his 1955 article on ‘West Indians and Africans’, ... In Les Damnés de la terre, he returned to that topic in more detail. He now argued that the doubts about the existence of a universal black culture expressed by Richard Wright and others in Paris demonstrated that cultures always existed in national contexts, and that the problems faced by Wright or Langston Hughes were therefore not the same as those facing Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. In the underdeveloped countries, national culture meant the struggle for national liberation, not folklore or an abstract populism. Those who were still fighting in the name of Negro-African culture and organizing conferences dedicated to the unity of that culture should realize that they had all been reduced to comparing coins and sarcophagi. [p476]

Negritude could exist only in the context of white domination: blacks from Chicago and blacks from Nigeria or Tanganyika were the same only to the extent that they defined themselves in relation to whites. It was the dominant white culture that had described all the inhabitants of Africa as ‘negroes’ and the people of Algeria as ‘Arabs’ or ‘natives’. [p477]... Something had begun to change when ‘the negroes’ began to describe themselves as ‘Angolans’ or ‘Ghanaians’; as Amrouche had remarked in 1956, Algeria was beginning to be inhabited by ‘Algerians’ and not stateless ‘natives’. The theorists of negritude had, according to Fanon, failed to register that change. [p478]

Fanon speaks of a ‘nation born of the concerted action of the people’ but does not define that people in either religious or ethnic terms. In his remarkably generous discussion of the role and fate of Algeria’s European minority in L’An V de la révolution algérienne, Fanon is quite explicit about what he understands ‘Algerian’ to mean: any individual living in Algeria was a potential Algerian and could decide to be a citizen of the nation of the future. Fanon’s ‘nation’ is the dynamic creation of the action of the people, and his nationalism is a nationalism of the political will to be Algerian, not of ethnicity. And it is this nationalism of the will that allows him to speak in Sociologie d’une révolution and Les Damnés de la terre of ‘we Algerians’. [p491]... In practice, the Code of Nationality adopted in 1962 defined Algerian nationality in both ethnic and religious terms and made Islam the state religion, though it also specified that citizenship could be granted by decree to non-ethnic and non-Muslim ‘Algerians’. It was granted to only a tiny number of Europeans.[p492]

Fanon’s explosive text is actually made up of material dictated to his wife in the spring and summer of 1961, and supplemented by previously published and reworked material. The ‘Bible of Third Worldism’ was composed ‘in pitiful haste’ by a man who was dying but still trying to live up to the demands of a revolution.[p569]... Between April and the beginning of July, Fanon worked fast against the clock. The final text reflects the speed at which he worked. Little or no research was done. His impressions of what he had seen of the newly independent states of Africa merge into a nightmarish picture of colonial Algeria. Fanon’s hopes and fears for the future are expressed with powerful emotion, but he rarely justifies them with hard facts.[p570... The composite image of the ‘Third World’ that emerges from the book is in part a product of Fanon’s relatively limited experience, of the circumstances in which it was composed and of Fanon’s style of working. There is no indication of extensive or original research on his part [p589]


Sartre and Beauvoir got on well with Fanon, who could be seductively charming when he wished to be. To Beauvoir’s surprise, he proved to have a personal horror of violence. Although he justified the use of violence both on the public platform and in print, he was obviously deeply distressed when he spoke of the violence inflicted by the Belgians in the Congo and the Portuguese in Angola. More surprisingly, he displayed the same emotion when he spoke of the ‘counter-violence’ of the colonized and of the settling of scores that had taken place within the FLN... He thought, however, that his personal dislike of violence was a failing that reflected his position as ‘an intellectual’. [p578]

Fanon and violence’ is now such a spontaneous association in France that it trivializes what he is actually describing. [p594]... What, in reality, is this violence? . . . It is the colonized masses’ intuition that their liberation must come about, and can only come about, through force.’ In a sense, it is the term ‘violence’ itself that is so scandalous; had Fanon spoken of ‘armed struggle’, the book would have been much less contentious.[p595]... Critics like Daniel and Domenach suggest that Fanon’s theses on violence are an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Hannah Arendt makes the same point and quite erroneously claims that he glorifies ‘violence for its own sake’. Fanon does not ‘glorify’ violence and in fact rarely describes it in any detail: there are no descriptions of what happens when a bomb explodes in a crowded café and when shards of glass slice into human flesh. The violence Fanon evokes is instrumental and he never dwells or gloats on its effects. In a sense, it is almost absurd to criticize Fanon for his advocacy of violence. He did not need to advocate it. The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence.[p595]... Nkrumah’s ‘positive action’ may not have appealed to him in either ideological or personal terms, but Fanon was well aware that Ghana had been decolonized without an armed struggle. He even suggests that France’s military involvement in Algeria meant that it could not fight colonial wars elsewhere and that peaceful decolonization was possible in West Africa. Fanon’s violence is primarily the violence of Algeria and its history. When he insists that a violent liberation struggle leads to a higher or purer form of independence, he is thinking of the future independence of Algeria. What he fails to recognize is that, in terms of the decolonization of ‘French’ Africa at least, Algeria was the exception and not the rule.[p596]

As Aimé Césaire remarked when he parted company with the PCF in 1956, it was obvious that ‘the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of people of colour against racism is much more complex – what am I saying? – of a completely different nature to the French worker’s struggle against French capitalism and can in no way be regarded as a part or fragment of that struggle.’ By 1961, there can have been few issues over which Fanon and Césaire were in agreement, but this was one of them.[p600]

It is, however, impossible to reconcile Fanon’s idealization of the peasantry with the reality of what happened to so many young people who fled into the countryside after the Battle of Algiers. They were killed by Amirouche and his men during the ‘blueitis’ episode. As a black outsider who was both intellectual and urbanized to his fingertips, Fanon himself would not have survived long in Amirouche’s company.[p606]

The fundamental ambiguity of Les Damnés de la terre is that, whilst Fanon constantly prophesies the victory of the people, the theoretical model he adopts necessarily implies that the group unity on which that victory is based cannot be sustained. In a sense, Fanon foresaw that the post-independence period would be difficult and dangerous; he could not foresee that it was a bureaucratized army that would hold the real power in an independent Algeria. And he did not live to see it do so. [p610]