NEW SOLIDARITY

March 11, 1980

Page 4

Turning the World Against the West Part II: The Cult of Frantz Fanon
by Mark Burdman

"I had chosen regression . . . here (in negritude) I am at home, I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. . . . I am not a potentiality of something. I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me." So wrote Frantz Fanon (l.), who with the encouragement of Jean-Paul Sartre (r.) became a spokesman for the unyielding anti-French faction inside the FLN during the Algerian war. (Above: a scene from that war, one of the most gruesome in this century.) Fanon's anti-West "right to revenge" doctrine is the ideological underpinning of terrorist movements worldwide. (Above center: a victim of a terrorist attack by the Secret Army Organization.)

Part I of this series reviewed the career of British epistemological warfare expert Arnold Toynbee and his role in creating Third World movements for "primitive revenge" against the industrial nations and the "Western idea" of industrial development. "Toynbee was an associate of the homosexual 'Children of the Sun' of British ruling circles of the 1920s and 1930s. They perceived themselves facing a serious problem: how does a diseased, decaying elite continue to recreate its ability to rule the world? If they are not 'creative,' they cannot capture and understand the principles of creativity. Therefore they must tend to lose out as breakthroughs are made in science and technology. . . . To maintain their dominance, the British must destroy technology and head toward a New Dark Age which they will rule through the mass promulgation of cults." Made at the Sorbonne To launch Toynbee's "war of revenge," British intelligence and the Jesuit "liberation theology" crowd created an international network of educational institutions to train Third World elites in hatred for development policies. The operation which produced the "Iranian revolution," for example, was centered around the sociology-anthropology divisions of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) and the Sorbonne. It was here that Iran's President Bani-Sadr was trained, and it was in the same nexus that BaniSadr's key mentor, Iranian guru Ali Shariati was indoctrinated into his antiwestern psychosis by liberationist Frantz Fanon. The Ecole Pratique went into operation in the post-World War Two period. Its "Division Six" sociology-anthropology department has specialized in cultist cultural relativism and existentialism. The department includes Georges Balandier, Bani-Sadr's thesis adviser on a doctoral paper dealing with "agrarian reform," Claude Levi-Strauss, formulator of the structuralist school of anthropology; and Jacques Soustelle, equally known for his reputed involvement in countless efforts to assassinate Charles de Gaulle and for profiling ancient Aztec tribal rituals. A sometime Ecole Pratique instructor, Henri Corbin, is a popularizer of "Sufism," the mystical perversion of Islam. Corbin coordinates a French Institute of Iranology in Teheran; through the years its journal has sponsored the mythology of a pure "Shiite culture" subverted by the Shah's regime. The Ecole Pratique mafia grew out of earlier institutions, such as the Americanist Society, which specialized in the pre-European cultures of the

early Americas, and the Paris Institute of Ethnology. Both were instrumental in creating the brainwashing pseudo-science of linguistics. These institutions are linked to the Tavistock Institute in London, the psychologicalwarfare center of British intelligence. Tavistock has been the spawning ground for innumerable radical and terrorist organizations. Through all of these places runs a common thread of hatred for advanced industrial society, a preference for preindustrial or tribal society, for "pure" cultures undisturbed by the modern world. They function as training bases for the Bani-Sadr types who follow Toynbee's path and want to put "the West" in the dock. What has been manufactured out of these environments? The deposed president of Cambodia under Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, wrote his thesis at the Sorbonne on the same theme as Bani-Sadr's, "radical agronomy." He applied his learning during the 1970s in Cambodia, with the results generally known. Also trained at the Sorbonne was Ali Shariati, the intellectual godfather of the Iranian Revolution, a propagandist for the notion of "fighting West-amination," ("western contamination") and returning to an "Iranian essence" characterized by submissive worship of the cult of the "pure Iranian woman." One of Ali Shariati's most important late 1950s-early 1960s collaborators was Frantz Fanon, who advised him on how to use "Islam" in a "revolutionary-existentialist way." Some observers consider Fanonhimself close to the EPHE-Sorbonne sociology-psychology crowdas one of the lesspublicized but most highly important architects of the Iranian Revolution itself. The Cult of Fanon Aside from the Iranian and Cambodian cases, no more successful agent has been produced out of the Paris cultist-existentialist sewer in the service of Toynbee's scheme than Frantz Fanon. To this day, there is hardly a proterrorist "left" grouplet in the world that does not eulogize Fanon's doctrine of the "right of revenge for oppressed peoples." The United Nations, lately occupied with legitimizing the claims of the Khomeiniacs, saw fit through its Commission on Apartheid, to hold an international tribute to Fanon at a conference organized in November 1978. Fanon emerged out of predominantly existentialist circles in France in the late 1940s-early 1950s. A neurotic and impressionable young intellectual, he

first became involved with the proponents of a doctrine called "negritude," the belief in a "Negro-African essence" somehow "felt" by blacks. The intellectual godfather of this tendency was existentialist-anarchist Jean-Paul Sartre, who was to become a significant influence over Fanon, guiding him along the path of indicting the West. Sartre's influence was manifest in Fanon's rambling and autobiographical account of the experience of "negritude" in the book Black Skin, White Masks: "Out of the necessities of my struggle," said Fanon. "I had chosen regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar weapon; here [in negritude] I am at home, I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. . . . I am not a potentiality of something. I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is." From this ode to the irrational, it was not a distant jump to Fanon's odes to the rebellious "masses" in his book The Wretched of the Earth. In fact, the single word "regression" sums up better than any other how it is that British neocolonialism and Fanonist rebellion are one and the same: they both depend on programming the victim into adopting and flaunting an infantile irrationalist identity. Fanon's popularity among the American and European proterrorist left and suburban youth strata is, from this standpoint, hardly surprising. Appropriately enough, Fanon began his public career as a psychotherapist, gaining clinical experience in the application of Tavistock-style regressionprogramming methods. Following this, in the late 1950s he became an activist in the Algerian War of Independence, rapidly emerging as a spokesman for the hard-core anti-French and anti-western wing of the Algerian National Liberation Front. The Algerian war was one of the most gruesome of this century. More than one million people died. It could have been scripted by Toynbee. Through the 1950s, prior to Charles de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, a series of French colonial administrators had enforced repression against the Algerian independence movements, forcing the Algerians into a hardline, no-compromise reaction. Probably the most brutal of these colonial chiefs was Jacques Soustelle. Under his tutelage, a substantial portion of the Algerian population was provoked into a psychotic rage against France.

A special feature of the brutality was the systematic elimination of those Algerians who sought a modus vivendi with responsible forces inside France. Such tendencies were either wiped out by the French colonial forces or by hardline, often proterrorist factions inside the FLN. The result was a classical "left-right" polarization, and the wiping out of almost an entire generation of Algerian political leaders and intellectuals. Fanon, with Sartre's encouragement, became a spokesman for the unyielding faction inside the FLN, and popularized the mythology of what he called a "Manichean" universe of irreconcilable conflict between the "colonizer" and the "colonized." The Terror Is Settling Here To this very day, Sartre is one of Europe's most influential backers of the Baader-Meinhof and Red Brigades terrorists, whom he attempts to defend as legitimate strugglers against the evils of advanced western society. He has also openly affiliated with the otherwise insignificant French Maoist movement, giving it a notoriety far beyond its weight in numbers. Sartre's existentialism was launched earlier in this century, according to one of its spokesmen, explicitly in opposition to the "tyranny of reason" represented by the great European philosophers Leibniz and Kant. In recent years, Sartre has worked closely with Tavistock gurus R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault to popularize the notion that there is no such thing as madness, since it is civilization and not individuals who are mad. This has provided a pseudo-intellectual cover for all varieties of anarcho-terrorist activity throughout Europe. When Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth was published, Sartre arranged to write the introduction. According to one biographer of Fanon, Sartre had special interest in doing so because for him, "there was a highly romanticized version of black African civilization that he saw as opposed to the technological civilization of the West. It was an image that evoked the lost innocence and harmony of another world." Asserting that "western culture" is "witchery," Sartre praised to the skies the "rural masses" ("that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army") against "the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers" and the "urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position." The "pure" peasant masses were to be pitted against the "corrupted" western-inclined city-dwellers.

Europeans, Sartre continued, are "exploiters. . . . With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation. . . . For with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters. . . . It seems we are the enemies of mankind." This is, of course, the brainwashing ideology that has gone into manufacturing the U.S. Weathermen terrorists, the West German Baader-Meinhof, and others who feed on an irrational rage against advanced industrial civilization. "The only chance of our being saved from shipwreck," Sartre adds, "is the very Christian sentiment of guilt. You can see it's the end; Europe is springing leaks everywhere. . . . In the past we made history and now it is being made of us. . . . Throughout the whole territory of the mother-country, the tribes are dancing their war dances. The terror has left Africa, and is settling here. . . . In the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives' collective unconsciousness." "To Become the Persecutor" Taking Sartre's cue, and following his own injunction to "wade in the irrational" and "not look for the universal," Fanon creates a Toynbee-esque universe of the "colonialist" vs. the "native," pitched in deadly battle, with anything done on the native's part fully justified because of the cruelty of the colonialist. It is a Sartre-type world of "existentialist givens," with no deeper law that the so-called "native" must adhere to than the law of the jungle. "The native's muscles are always tensed," Fanon writes. "The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. . . . The native's muscular tension finds outlet regularly in bloodthirsty explosions. . . . The fellah [peasant], the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they are the truth. . . . The primary Manicheism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonialization; that is to say that the settler never ceases to be the enemy." The "native's" political action is "canalized" violence, the transformation of "eroticism," a "muscular orgy," Fanon writes. In this dynamic, "the last shall be first and the first last. . . . The violence which has ruled over the ordering

of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms, . . . that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when . . . he surges into the forbidden quarters. . . . The natives' challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute. The colonial world is a Manichean world." Later: "the violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinarily reciprocal homogeneity. . . . On the logical plane, the Manicheism of the settler produces a Manicheism of the native. To the theory of the 'absolute evil of the native' the theory of the 'absolute evil of the settler' replies. . . . For the colonized people, this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning. . . . At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect." From this standpoint, a Toynbee-esque attack on "western values" is hardly surprising: "It so happens that when the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knifeor at least he makes sure it is within reach. . . The native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him. . . . In the period of decolonialization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them and vomit them up. . . . All the Mediterranean valuesthe triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty become lifeless, colorless knickknacks." Or, as Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering put it, "whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my revolver." From there, it is one small step to indifference to, or rejection of, economic cooperation with "the West": "The Third World ought not to be content to define itself in the terms of values which have preceded it. On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries ought to do their utmost to find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them. . . We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us. . . . For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the under-

developed world like nothing more than war criminals. . . . The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. On the universal plane this affirmation, you may be sure, should on no account be taken to signify that we feel ourselves affected by the creations of Western arts or techniques. . . . Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. . . . So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped countries, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: 'It's a just reparation which will be paid to us.' . . . This help should be the ratification of a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due, and the realization by the capitalist powers that in fact they must pay." Despite the transparent evil of Fanon's appeals to the irrational and infantile desire for revenge, there is no denying that he has achieved a wide readership and following throughout the developing sector. This cannot simply be explained by the argument, true enough as far as it goes, that colonialism is cruel and induces rage and frustration among its victims. Rather, the admirers of Fanon are those agents and dupes with a softness for the British doctrine of cultural relativism, who subvert the process of transcending colonial suppression by rejecting the only legitimate means for ending colonialism once and for allcooperation with republican forces in the West to institute a global program for development. In his essay "A Theory of Development for African Labor" (Fusion magazine, June 1979) economist Lyndon LaRouche debunked the ravings associated with Fanon and the cultural relativists. "British colonialist domination imposed an artificial backwardness on many nations and their peoples," said LaRouche. "It caused both an abnormal stagnation of cultural development and even cultural retrogressions. The effects of these London-centered influences on industrialized and developing nations have been a 'set of facts.' These 'facts' are widely employed as evidence that purportedly proves certain delusions. In this way, misinterpretation of the actual causes for such 'facts' both provides a rationalization for preexisting and prevailing conditions and employs those rationalizations as a theoretical basis for current policy judgments. . . . Hence the appropriateness of the term neocolonialism" (emphasis added). The decisive response to neocolonialism and to Britain's efforts to mobilize the "hinterlands" against the forces of progress, LaRouche stressed, is to

accomplish "the task of bringing modern technology and republican outlooks to the people of the 'hinterlands.' . . . We are working to place the present and future order of this entire globe under the rule of the Grand Design." Indirectly addressing himself to Fanon's odes to the "muscular orgy" of the "native," LaRouche stated, "A culture that reflects the effects of imposed technological stagnation, in which the African mind's potentialities are deemphasized for emphasis upon the sensual appetites and impulses of the body, must be transformed. . . . The 'traditional culture' of sections of populations long enslaved to technological stagnation, especially in rural and pastoral life, is intrinsically a culture belonging somewhere in Dante's Inferno, a culture tending to the same degree of moral degeneration as the world-outlook and prejudices of Europe's fanatical environmentalists." With adequate development policies, and with the creation of an elite each of whom will master "one or more of the relevant fields of science, engineering, medicine, poetry, music, drama, sculpture, agriculture, and agronomy," African culture "will become Platonic dialogues that embody the Platonic method of superseding present-day traditional beliefs. This will be generalized, to make emerging African culture an integral part of world culture by comparing the experience of transcending traditional beliefs in Africa with equivalents in the progress-phases of European and other cultures." In this view, Fanonism is pure subversion of the necessary tasks that Africans must undertake to overcome the continuing shackles of colonialism. Embracing Cannibals This whole question has more than abstract policy interest: Fanon, before his death in the early 1960s, was recruited by the Anglo-American intelligence services to help spread tribalism in Africa as a counterweight to the emerging power of city-building, nationalist forces. In what could be a precedent for the Carter administration's eagerness to deal with the Khomeiniacs in Iran, Fanon was befriended in the late 1950s by liberal-Anglophile Africanists in the CIA. The CIA and Fanon collaborated in activating the National Liberation Front of Angola, a tribal-based movement created as a counter-operation to the urban-based Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, today's ruling party of Angola.

Both the CIA and Fanon saw in FNLA leader Holden Roberto a "ruralist" to be used against the MPLA. Fanon justified this with the argument that "rural masses" are the "authentic" representatives of the people. By numerous accounts, the FNLA was and is infamous for acts of extreme brutality, up to and including cannibalism, as they express their "pure" tribal ways. His support for the FNLA ought to end the unconscionable admiration for Fanon in many developing sector circles. He, like his mentors Toynbee and Sartre, spits on the legacy of the great city-builders that Africa has known. His diatribes against "the West," stolen from a Jesuit-written script, deserve nothing but contempt. Fanon's path, like that of Iran's current rulers, is a guarantee that the countries of the developing sector will be subject to forms of self-imposed neocolonialist backwardness even more bestial than the colonialism of the past.