Dar Es Salaam, British Colonialism

In the years 1966-1967, two events took place that express the thirty-year history of psychological warfare and deconstruction that has now resulted in the seemingly relentless spread of genocide throughout the African continent, with little protest from the populations of the United States or Europe. The first, was a symposium held at the University College, Dar Es Salaam, in June 1966, entitled “The University’s Role in the Development of the Third World.” The second was a two-week “anti-symposium,” from July 15 to July 30, 1967, titled “The Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation,” held in London at the Roundhouse on Chalk Farm, and initiated by two of the major agents of British psychological warfare, R.D. Laing and D.G. Cooper. “This was really the founding event of the Anti-University of London,” Cooper stated.

Now, thirty years later, it becomes clear, that the deconstructionist ideology and “practice,” called “revolutionary suicide” by some, and “existentialism” by others, was taught to many of the participants in these events first-hand, by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and their students, such as Franz Fanon. The subsequent deployment of educational and psychiatric “shock troops” designed through, and at the conclusion of, these two symposia, played a pivotal role in the wholesale extermination of millions of Black Africans, all justified as “revolutionary activity.” Some of the most fanatical advocates of existentialist deconstruction were themselves the victims, sometimes called “subjects,” of “anthropological field experiments” conducted by the ideological heirs of what were then the just-concluded fascist movements of Europe. These “lab experiments” were to result in what we call today the “rock-drug-sex counterculture,” but which was, fleetingly, called in the 1960’s, the “New Left.”

Actually, this was in no way out of the ordinary. The pseudo-science of “ethnology” had been born in France in the aftermath of the destruction of the Ecole Polytechnique, through the efforts of people such as Augustin Cauchy. The nineteenth-century creation of sociology, and the subsequent appearance of ethnology, were the conclusion, not the beginning, of the decline of thought in France. As Lyndon LaRouche stated, in the unpublished 1988 manuscript A New Anthropology Based Upon the Science of Physical Economy, the Ecole “had been the world’s leading and most vigorous center of advancement of the physical sciences during the 1794-1814 period of the great Gaspard Monge’s leadership. ... The Metternichean [1815 Congress of Vienna-N-DS] destruction of the Ecole is more than analogous to the circumstances under which the social pseudo-sciences were established. Ethnology was a product of the positivism, the latter the neo-Cartesianism which the Metternicheans adopted as a replacement for what French science had been under Carnot and Monge.”

Post-World War II education of the students from former and still-emerging colonies in Africa, was the application of “ethnology” in the classroom. Africans were encouraged, as Julian Huxley states in his autobiography, to stay away from physics. Students who showed scientific aptitude, were “sidetracked” into the pseudo-sciences, that they might voluntarily adopt, through acquiring a “terminal degree” in the same, the very set of pseudo-scientific prejudices that were the basis of the colonial system.

The Case of Franz Fanon

In the case of Franz Fanon (1925-1961), although he was trained as a physician at the University of Lyons, it was also there that he became an avid reader of Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the “Negro handler” who was later to author the introduction to Fanon’s most famous writing, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon attached a quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra to the top of his 1952 doctoral dissertation. Fanon was then, after he successfully completed the academic requirements for a degree in psychiatry, tracked to the hospital at Blida, Algeria, where he, a decorated World War II veteran, joined the National Liberation Front (F.L.N.).

In 1945, in the city of Setif, Algeria, 40,000 Muslims were killed by the French Algerians in one month, in what was referred to as “Open Season on Arabs.” Nine years later, a terrorist war was to begin in earnest, in which Fanon would play a significant role, including as the representative of the provisional government of the Algerian revolution at the 1960 All-African Peoples Congress in Accra, Ghana. It was in the context of the Algerian War that Fanon would discover his “vocation to violence,” a “typically French” calling that had been preached earlier by anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel, in his Reflections On Violence—as well as having been the theme that had exhausted most of the leadership, good and bad, of the French Revolution.

Fanon had volunteered, as a loyal French subject, to fight on the side of the Free French in World War II. In fact, he had been decorated with the Croix de Guerre by Col. Raoul Salan, who would later become the head of the O.A.S., the “secret government” organization that would attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle multiple times. He did not realize, however, that he would be recruited by the ethnology project of British Intelligence of which Heidegger-follower Sartre was the main public proponent. Fanon would be recruited as a member of the “extended psychological warfare division” of the Tavistock Institute, becoming far more influential after his death than he was at any time in his short career.

By the time the “colonials” were arriving in Europe to be trained to “take over” their countries, the cultural pessimism that had plunged the world into two world wars had completely dominated the universities of Europe. It was that cultural pessimism that was then introduced, by way of these students, into the colonies and former colonies, as “anti-Western” ideology. This would, in turn, inform the “choice of curriculum” for the “revolutionary universities” of the newly emerging African nations in places like Dar Es Salaam, a key area of British influence in Africa.

There may still be those that view the psychedelic, associative political antics of the 1960’s “New Left” with nostalgia, and even a hidden, wistful pride. However, for the sake of the millions whose lives are being snuffed out in the most concentrated genocide in history, it is time that we set the record straight. It is the “New Left” ideology of the 1960’s, particularly as expressed in the writings of psychiatrist Franz Fanon, and the writings of one of Fanon’s major influences, Nazi Heidegger-follower Jean-Paul Sartre, which are the primary reason for the collapse of the political “immune system” of the United States and Western Europe, and its consequent moral indifference to African genocide, today.

For example, there should be no surprise whatsoever, in the transition of Yowerwi Museveni from being an ultra-revolutionary devotee of Mao, Lenin, and Fanon, to being the “bargain-basement” auctioneer of the patrimony of Uganda. That is the lawful conclusion of adherence to the doctrine of “revolutionary violence” and “societal decolonization” that is at the core of the curriculum taught at Dar Es Salaam, and the “extracurricular activity” advocated by the Dialectic of Liberation Congress. Museveni still “expropriates land,” but now, it is from his countrymen.

This is not to say that those who were, in the 1960’s, “along for the ride,” necessarily knew, particularly in their usually mind-altered state, what political vehicle they were getting into, or what ideological horse they were riding. This is similar to those who ended up in the SA, or SS, but, arguably, never intended to become mass murderers. The question is, what sorts of decisions do people make, or have made for them, that can cause them to commit such monstrous acts as we see occurring today?

‘Black Handlers’ Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet

While the British and the French are both legendary for their racism, there is a difference in style between the two. This is also true, to a degree, in the training of colonial intelligence officers. The French prefer a catamite-like relationship to their colonials, particularly the Black Africans, whom they find simultaneously fascinating and repulsive—unlike the British, who simply revile them. For example, the British would never have recruited Josephine Baker to London in the 1920’s to dance naked, clothed only in a string of bananas around her waist, as she did, to great acclaim, in pre-Hitler Paris. Away from the mother country, or at least the stage, that kind of entertainment for Englishmen might be allowed, but creating a spectacle of such a thing at Albert Hall just wouldn’t do (at least, not until the 1960’s “Winds of Change” policy of Harold Macmillan made Jimi Hendrix possible).

The call for the destruction of Western civilization did not originate with Africans from the colonies, or “Third World people,” but with the decadent French elite itself. By the turn of the century, France was the headquarters for the anti-musicians known as “Les Six,” including Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, for various faddists in painting, such as Marcel Duchamp, and for the “automatic writing” of Gertrude Stein. This would escalate, in post-Versailles France, into the Dadaist and Surrealist Movements. Opium-soused “dramatists” like Antonin Artaud, or film-maker Jean Cocteau, would call for the “killing” of Western civilization. They saw “the Blacks” as their allies in this, since the “Blacks” were completely untouched by civilization, or were, despite themselves, possessed of a Jungian “collective unconscious” that rejected Western civilization “instinctively.”

“Existentialism” was simply a variety of fascist ideology that sought to propagate a method for the destruction of Western civilization. It was this “method” which Fanon learned at the University of Lyon, in his study of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and, of course, “the Black intellectual’s best friend,” Jean-Paul Sartre.

It was Jean-Paul Sartre, the French sycophant-follower of the Nazi philosopher Heidegger, who was the French Intelligence, and British Intelligence, “Negro handler” for Africans, African-Caribbeans, and African-Americans, from at least the 1940’s, and possibly earlier. Sartre was one of the board members and sponsors of Presence Africaine magazine, together with Aimé Cesaire (Martinique), and Leopold Senghor (President of Senegal), the leaders of what was called the “Negritude” movement, and African-American author Richard Wright. In 1947, Sartre wrote the essay “Black Orpheus” as the introduction to a collection of “Negritude” poetry. He also wrote the introduction to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, as well as to the selected speeches of Patrice Lumumba, slain in the Congo in 1961.

Sartre’s simultaneous fascination with “things African,” and emulation of Heidegger, with whom Sartre had studied in Nazi Germany in 1933, were not, in fact, contradictory. Sartre’s first, and most famous novel, Nausée, is primarily a description of Heidegger’s famous geworfenheit, or “being-thrown-ness.” Writes Heidegger: “The actuality of true life lies in the being-thrown-ness. ... Man ... is not the self-conscious, self-righteous subject for whom the world is an object, but man is eternally in the world; he is part of it, and he must live with it, in sorrow.”

For Sartre, Africans, and African-Americans, appreciate this “profound absurdity of their existence” instinctively, thus removing any need on their part to tempt fate by the rather dicey enterprise of taking Heidegger’s Nazi philosophy courses at the University of Freibourg in 1933. Rather, Sartre speculates, “Blacks” demonstrate their “instinctive grasp” of “being-thrown-ness” in jazz:

For a moment, the jazz is playing; ... there is no melody, only notes. ... They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. ... I must accept their death; I must even will it; I know few impressions stronger or more harsh. ...
A few seconds more and the negress will sing. ... If I love this beautiful voice it is ... neither for its fullness or sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born. ... The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that there it is, that something has happened. Silence.

“Some of these days

“You’ll miss me honey. ...”

What has just happened is that the Nausea has disappeared.

Disappeared, that is, for Sartre—not necessarily the reader.

Sartre’s Heideggerian racism, though, was more than embarrassing. It was lethal. Some Africans and African-Americans once close to Sartre, like Richard Wright, discovered that something was wrong, although almost always too late. Others, like Fanon, never knew what hit them—in part, because they agreed (as did Fanon), with the Nietzschean premises of existentialist thought.

When Tavistock Institute’s R.D. Laing and D.G. Cooper composed a book titled Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, a handbook to instruct their psychological warriors in how to develop revolutionary shock-troops en masse, Sartre composed an introduction to their text as well, stating, “It is, I am happy to say, a very clear, very faithful account of my thought. ... [W]hat attracted me in this and your earlier works was your constant concern to find an ‘existential’ approach to the mentally sick.’ ”

Sartre’s ideas on violence would seem at first to be identical to those of Fanon. In reality, they are far more vicious. The recent events in Zaire-Congo, almost directly reproduce Sartre’s “theory of revolutionary violence,” as rendered in his introduction to the 1972 edition of Lumumba’s speeches:

Those fighting, unite in order to win a skirmish, but also to escape the perils of death: Reprisals by the colonial power put the seal on secret pacts. Violence is brought to bear at one and the same time against the enemy and against the particular interests playing the enemy’s game; if the group organized is armed, it blows off locks and door hinges, liquidates the enemy leaders, the “tribal chieftains,” and wipes out feudal privileges, everywhere replacing the officials put in positions of power with its own political cadres as the struggle is going on. At the same time a popular war implies the unity of the army and of the people, and therefore the unification of the people themselves: Tribalism must disappear or the insurrection will be drowned in a sea of blood; the liquidation of these vestiges is carried out during the struggle, through persuasion, through political education, and if necessary through terror. ... If two insurrectional movements happen to coexist at the beginning and do not merge forces, either they will both be massacred by the colonial army or else one of them is sure to annihilate the other. Once the battle is won, the leaders are at once soldiers and politicians: They have shattered the old structures and everything must be rebuilt from the ground up, but it does not matter; they will create popular infrastructures; their institutions will not be a copy of European ones; as mere stop gaps their aim will be to ward off the dangers threatening the young state by reinforcing unity at the expense of traditional freedoms. [Emphasis in the original]

Or, as Sartre’s wife Simone de Beauvoir mused, in her introduction to a volume of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, “ ‘Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime,’ said Saint Just.”

One of the “mentally sick” that Sartre used as a guinea-pig for his brand of “existential psychoanalysis,” was the pederast, thief, homosexual prostitute, and “genius” author, Jean Genet. Genet was the subject of a several-hundred-page tome by Sartre called Saint Genet, and became a sort of cause célèbre in the France of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the “genius-criminal” (not an unfamiliar preoccupation of the post-Hitler period). Genet, who authored several novels, was also the author of a 1950’s play called The Blacks: A Clown Show. This nearly incomprehensible tract, which required for performance an “all-Black cast,” including those who are seen only in “white face” masks, was widely viewed at the time as a “revolutionary drama,” in which many African-American actors, unable to work in a still-segregated entertainment industry, premiered or appeared.

This gave Genet a ticket into the “Black movement,” which he cashed in, in 1970, coming to America to “slum”—that is, tour—with the Black Panther Party. Genet, who was not without insight, was a “New Age ethnologist” with a keen, and pornographic, eye. “When the Panthers’ Afro haircuts hit the Whites in the eye, the ear, the nostril ... they were panic-stricken. How could they defend themselves in the subway, the bus, the office, and the lift against all this vegetation, this springing, electric, elastic growth like an extension of pubic hair? The laughing Panthers wore a dense furry sex on their heads ... .”

Genet sees the Panthers’ use of violence in erotic terms:

[The Panthers’] violence was almost violence in the raw, but as a response to white violence it had a meaning beyond itself. The Panthers had to open breaches, make gashes, in order to make contact with the world: Hence marches in which arms were carried openly, murders of policemen, bank hold-ups. Their coming into the world caused fear and admiration. At the beginning of 1970 the Party still had both the suppleness and the rigidity of a male sex organ: and it preferred erections to elections.

What is significant in this, is that the Panthers’ susceptibility to the profiling operation run by Genet, was their admiration for Franz Fanon. Bobby Seale of the Party claimed to have read The Wretched of the Earth six times. Former Black Panther Minister of Information, and “loose cannon ball,” Eldridge Cleaver said, “The feelings and thoughts and passions that were facing us were incoherent and not connected until we read Fanon.” Criminal minds like those of Fanon and Heidegger-follower Sartre were cool observers, and manipulators, of “Black rage,” and leeringly admiring of its “primordial” nature, as well. They admired Africans as a taxidermist admires a butterfly. Genet described the Black Panthers with the precision, and voyeurism, of an undersexed zoologist. It was his and Sartre’s “anthropology” reports, which were used to destroy whatever was left of the post-Martin Luther King Civil Rights movement internationally.

Yoweri Museveni on Fanon

Sources familiar with the University of Dar Es Salaam have joked that “anyone in Dar Es Salaam’s Political Science Department, could get a degree from the school by reading three authors—Marx, Lenin, and Fanon.” In fact, research files have provided a document entitled “Fanon’s Theory on Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique,” by Yoweri Museveni, the product of a “field trip” to Mozambique he undertook on behalf of the University, with six other students, in 1969.*

The document has the advantage that it reveals, not only Museveni’s thinking about the work of Fanon, but his understanding about what Fanon means by the use of violence. It also demonstrates how field applications of Fanon’s theory are the basis today for the destruction of African people, in the image of Cambodian mass-murderer Pol Pot.

Museveni begins his essay with a quote from Fanon: “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force.” He assures the reader:

Fanon did not advocate violence for its own sake. If he had, he would have been a homicidal maniac, not a revolutionary. ... Fanon advocated violence in order to bring about total and authentic decolonization. He says: “Decolonization which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding.” ...
... [Fanon] goes on, “The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and blood-stained knives which emanate from it. For, if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists ... .” In other words, Fanon acknowledges violence as the highest form of political struggle. He also says that it is only reasonable, if we are talking about fundamentally changing the colonial society which, to him, means making the last first, and vice versa, to expect to use violence. In other words, like Chairman Mao, he acknowledges the fact that it is naive to rely on the “good sense” of imperialism, or to expect that exploiters are going to abdicate their seats peacefully. He further adds that this colonial situation is perpetuated by the use of colonial violence, and to end it, you must use revolutionary violence.

Of what does Museveni-Fanon’s revolutionary violence consist?

Political commissars, many of them trained in Algeria between 1962 and 1964, agreed that the first obstacle to overcome before enlisting people’s support, was to convince them that they could kill a European. This sometimes was overcome by the guerrillas organizing an ambush against the colonialists in the neighborhood. Once the people got to see a dead white man, killed by Africans, then the ball would have been set rolling; more important still, it was more remunerative to get the masses themselves to kill enemy troops. Such visual aids help the “native”—the dehumanized Black man—to realize his potentiality and power vis-à-vis his enemy. ...
... Here in Mozambique it has been found necessary to show peasants fragments of a Portuguese soldier blown up by a mine or, better still, his head. Once the peasant sees guerrillas holding the head of the former master, the white man’s head cold in death, ... he will know, or at least begin to suspect, that the picture traditionally presented to him of the white man’s invincibility is nothing but a scarecrow ... .
(See Box on opposing view of man)

Museveni, however, presents a “politically correct” view of the use of Fanonist violence: “However, once the peasants’ passions are aroused, they usually swing to the other extreme; that all white men are devils, and all white prisoners must be killed. ... This position is not entirely wrong, but needs to be corrected in the interests of waging a scientific struggle.”

Museveni also tries to stress that he does not wish to separate the “field work” of the “revolutionary student” from the “revolutionary peasantry,” “who still have to be trained by the revolutionary cadre force”: “A high-ranking military cadre will augment the peasant’s awakening by political lectures to the soldiers.” (This is exactly what Laurent Kabila’s forces established in the holocaust areas of Zaire, where political indoctrination apparently also involves mass exterminations as “laboratory work.”) Museveni also indicates, in this early paper, the “borderless revolution” thesis that we see today in his dream of a “greater Tutsi empire”: “The military cadre might have been trained in Algeria, North Korea, Cuba, China, or the Soviet Union. The peasants themselves might be sent to Tanzania for military training or on various missions”—perhaps like those of the Rwandan “search and destroy” units loose in the Zaire-Congo bush, as refugee workers reported to the Associated Press and New York Times earlier this year.

Education, to be truly revolutionary, Museveni asserts, must be directly connected to violence.

It might be said that one can conduct such political education without fighting, so that Fanon’s theory on violence becomes a superfluity or mere romanticism. I do not share that view. Without a revolution, a revolutionary social convulsion, one cannot get the necessary discipline to mobilize the population. One cannot create a new order unless one shakes the old one; that is why the Chinese bourgeois revolutionaries, like Dr. Sun Yat Sen [!] and the communists were opposed to the old Chinese society, to Confucianism—which acted as a stabilizing element of the Chinese empire by providing it with an ethical basis.

We see in Museveni’s hostility to Confucianism, that he is not simply a hater of “Western civilization,” but of the stabilizing influence of civilization as a whole. Of course, that should not surprise us, given that he believes that decolonization, as Fanon states, “is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder.” This is probably what recommends Museveni as “a model for African leadership” to his State Department Office of Population Affairs supporters, his friends at CSIS, to “free enterprise” raw materials pirates, such as the “Cobalt Club’s” Michael Ledeen, and to the I.M.F. and World Bank, the most “anti-civilization” forces loose in the world today.

‘A Limitation on the Search for Truth’

During the discussion period after the first session of the 1966 Dar Es Salaam symposium, attended by representatives from over twenty nations, and sponsored by World University Service (headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland), a Dr. Bockstiegel, a professor from Germany, advanced the following ominous proposition:

I would like (and this is where I differ from my friend from the U.S.A.) to submit that in today’s world, no country can afford to regard the university other than in an almost exclusively utilitarian way. ... I would also like to say something about the production of ideas. The use of brains makes it possible to meet the needs of society in new and better ways. This implies something which may sound like something terrible to a great number of German university professors at least, but it implies a limitation of the search for truth in the university. This may sound really terrible, but, on the other hand, I think we have to do it. The unlimited range of search for truth simply makes it necessary. [Emphasis added]

Bockstiegel’s conclusion was intended to bolster a speech given earlier by Mr. Griffith Cunningham, principal of the Kivukoni College at Dar Es Salaam, the official “party school” of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), “the single political party of Mainland Tanzania.” As Griffith explained in his speech, “Kivukoni College ... was established in 1958. ... We came into operation in 1961. Tanzania was under colonial rule in 1958, and the party was not allowed to set up a college because the British Colonial administrators felt that it would become a party college, and this would be a bad thing. Instead, TANU set up an independent trust, which turned around and set up a party college anyway.”

A furor had erupted when Cunningham clearly outlined to his listeners that his program for education amounted to little more than what would have been called at the time a Maoist “serve the people” indoctrination, masquerading as a several-years-long “curriculum”:

The course we provide is in the social sciences. It is not vocational ... . Besides this, we do a short course programme which is devoted almost entirely to helping the political party ... . [I]t provides government servants with some political education, so that they know how to work with the party. This is important, in a one-party state. Many of the civil servants were raised in the British tradition, and they do not really understand how the one-party democracy works.

Cunningham also proudly described the radio propaganda efforts of his students. “Once a week we have a programme called ‘Tell The Nation’... a very practical programme about why you have to pay taxes and what local government is and how it works ... very, very simple, using a vocabulary of 200 to 300 words of no more than two syllables—all in Swahili.” In order to avert the problem of college students “adopting European values,” Cunningham fully endorsed what he referred to as the Tanzanian government’s program of “national service.” “It means that every student, when he graduates, has to go out and put on a pair of army boots, and get up at five in the morning, and live in a tent.” Alarmed delegates from various nations either openly objected, or tried to muddy the embarrassing clarity of Cunningham’s presentation, but found his position not only seconded, but furthered, by Bockstiegel’s “New Dark Age” attack on truth and the search for truth.

Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, himself a school teacher, had said, in his 1970 speech, “The University’s Role in the Development of the New Countries,”

There are some people who would undoubtedly challenge the assumption that the University should cooperate with the government. ... Yet this is to say that a University could, and should, live divorced from its society. It implies too, that there is an automatic conflict with Government—that Government is not concerned with truth! ... I fully accept the task that the University is to seek for truth, and that its members should speak the truth as they see it, regardless of consequences to themselves. But you will notice the words “to themselves”; I do not believe they should do this regardless of the society. [Emphasis added]

As Nyerere should remember, from the experience of apartheid in South Africa, colonialism in his own country, fascism in Germany, and recent injustices, such as that against Lyndon LaRouche, in the United States, it is decidedly dangerous to equate the terms “government” and “society.” It is in the combination of this equation, of “government” with “society,” and what Bockstiegel called the “limitation of the search for truth,” that produced the nightmare student of the 1960’s, Yoweri Museveni, who could describe violence as “a laxative, a purgative, an agent for creating new men.” Museveni, and his fellow graduates Kabila, Afwerki, Zenawi, Garang, and others, now are proving the merit of the education they received—a kind of “on the cheap” version of British Colonial Office “special forces” training in psychological warfare, not appreciably different from, although perhaps not as thorough as, that gained by Serbian war criminal Karadzic from London’s Tavistock Institute.

Tavistock’s R.D. Laing, and D.G. Cooper, in their openly admitted organizing of the “Dialectics of Liberation” conference of 1967, pitched that conference to emphasize an attack on the United States and its war in Vietnam. To that end, they used the speech of Stokely Carmichael, then the leading spokesman of the “Black Power” tendency in the United States, as the “vector” to catalyze an emotional “feedback loop” in the conference’s participants. Carmichael, who, according to Museveni’s autobiography, was also at Dar Es Salaam, opened his speech by quoting from “one of my patron saints, Franz Fanon.” Carmichael also made it clear that he was creating a division between the “Old” and “New” Left, and that the dividing line was color. “There will be new speakers. They will be Che, they will be Mao, they will be Fanon. You can have Rousseau, you can have Marx, you can even have the great libertarian John Stuart Mill.”

R.D. Laing, a formidable clinician, viewed this confrontation with intense interest. In his lecture called “The Obvious,” Laing presented the conference, as was his wont, with an “inside look” at the mind of the psychiatrist, and at the “meta-psychiatric” awareness of the contemporary political terrain that Tavistock, for purposes of effective mind-control, demanded of its psychological warfare experts. “Someone is gibbering away on his knees, talking to someone who is not there. Yes, he is praying. If one does not accord him the social intelligibility of this behavior, he can only be seen as mad. Out of social context, his behavior can only be the outcome of an unintelligible ‘psychological’ and/or ‘physical’ process, for which he requires treatment.”

Laing admonishes his audience that, to make this presumption, is to miss the truly “clinically interesting”: “Someone whose mind is imprisoned in the metaphor cannot see it as a metaphor. ... The unintelligibility of the experience and the behavior of the diagnosed person is created by the person diagnosing him, as well as by the person diagnosed.” For Laing, the same rule holds for politics, as in clinical work. The “Black American struggle,” or the war in Vietnam, were not necessarily governed by rules of social behavior any different than those by the which a schizophrenic might find himself the victim of the irrational behavior of his family. A little later, Laing’s work would be used to form the Heidelberg Mental Patients Collective, out of the which would come the Baader-Meinhof Gang, one of the major “cover stories” for British Intelligence-related assassinations and “wetworks” in Germany to this day.

D.G. Cooper made it clear that he and Laing were completely aware that they were making a political intervention into the radicalism of the time. “I would like to outline ... why we, the organizers, arranged this meeting between these particular people, why we generated this curious pastiche of eminent scholars and political activists. ” He writes,

Our experience originated in studies into that predominant form of socially stigmatized madness that is called schizophrenia. Most people who are called mad and who are socially victimized by virtue of that attribution ... come from family situations, in which there is a desperate need to find some scapegoat. ... The doctors would be used to attach the label “schizophrenia” to the diseased object, and then systematically set about the destruction of that object by the physical and social processes that are termed “psychiatric treatment.”
All of this seemed to us to relate to certain political facts in the world around us. One of the principal facts of this sort was the war of the United States against the Vietnamese people.

Thus, it is clear that both Laing and Cooper approached their “Congress” as a clinical experiment in mass-psychiatry, along the lines of some of the guidelines offered by Tavistock Institute head John Rawlings Rees in his book The Shaping of Psychiatry by War. In this work, Rees calls for the creation of mobile psychiatric teams, what he refers to as “psychiatric shock-troops.” The clinic becomes indistinguishable from a city street, a jungle ritual, a cocktail party, or a lecture hall. Angela Davis, who attended the conference on her way back to the U.S. to infiltrate the Black Panther Party for U.S. State Department operative Herbert Marcuse (who also spoke at the conference), distinctly remembered that “in the enormous barn-like structure, its floor covered with sawdust, the air reeked heavily of marijuana, and there were rumors that one speaker, a psychologist, was high on acid.”

Fanon’s Economic False Consciousness

The hereditary mistake contained in Fanon’s thought, is most carefully delineated in the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth. There, in the name of turning Africa away from imitation of the decadence of European culture, he demonstrates that his ignorance of economics will condemn him—and anyone who follows his ideas—to surpassing the oppression practiced by the former colonial powers:

That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man; today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind. Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed with the desire to catch up with Europe. ...
When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. The human condition, plans for mankind, and collaborations between men on those tasks which increase the sum total of humanity are new problems, which demand true inventions.

Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions ... .

Fanon, like almost everyone educated in any university in Europe or America today, shows complete ignorance of the fundamental superiority of the American Revolution, and the American System of Political Economy, (See box on real histroy of American System economics) over anything accomplished in post-Enlightenment Europe, particularly the French Revolution, which was run by British Intelligence. Fundamentally, Fanon’s “justifications for violence” are essentially no different than the arguments of the Terror of Robespierre and Saint Just.

More important, however, the fact that it was the American System, practiced by the Philadelphia school founded by Benjamin Franklin and his protégés, Alexander Hamilton and Mathew and Henry Carey, which accounted for the success of the United States—not the slave system, which accounted for the backwardness of the United States, and the large fortunes of a Southern and Boston oligarchy—was unknown to Fanon, just as it is unknown to virtually all graduates of American and European universities in this century.

Fanon’s criticisms of Europe are true for the Enlightenment, and the British and Dutch East and West India Companies that financed the culture of the Enlightenment. They are not true, for the networks of Gottfried Leibniz, inherited by Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society founder Benjamin Franklin, who attempted, unsuccessfully, to ensure the dissolution of the British Empire with a successful revolution in France, in gratitude for the efforts of the Marquis de Lafayette, and the scientific circles that would be guillotined by the Terror, such as Antoine Lavoisier, who would be executed in implementation of the Pol Pot-like ukase, “The Revolution has no need of scientists.”

The targetting of the United States by the “Dialectics of Liberation” conference, was largely a targetting of Martin Luther King and his non-violent movement. King had, partially at the urging of the Rev. James Bevel, on April 4, 1967 at New York’s Riverside Church, given a speech opposing the war in Vietnam—a speech which had polarized America. He had been roundly criticized for the speech by the established Civil Rights organizations. The “Black Power” advocates, who perceived themselves to be more “radical” and therefore more “serious” than King, were used by various intelligence agencies, including by way of police-authored urban disruptions, to divide the forces that King could have assembled, slightly a year before the opening of the 1968 Presidential campaign.†

King had more than noticed the fascination with Fanon that raged in the United States. “Over cups of coffee in my home in Atlanta and my apartment in Chicago, I have often talked late at night and over into the small hours of the morning with proponents of Black Power who argued passionately about the validity of violence and riots. They don’t quote Gandhi or Tolstoy. Their Bible is Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.” (Eyewitnesses and participants in these discussions, such as the Rev. James Bevel, who acted as the Director of Direct Action for King, as well as the head of the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, assert that the difference between those who advocated violence, and those who did not, was largely a difference between the theology students, who had formed the backbone of King’s early non-violent movement, and the political science students, who saw the movement only in “political,” rather than spiritual, terms.)

King differed from his “Black Power” critics, including in their attack on the United States. “The hard cold facts today indicate that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structure of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.” This was King stating his commitment to the anti-colonial outlook that had been enunciated by Franklin Roosevelt at the close of World War II, but left unfulfilled. Against the notion of violence, King had earlier stated, “If every Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way.”‡

King’s advocacy of non-violence, was an advocacy of agape¯, one that he had voiced at least as early as 1956, when he was twenty-seven years old:

Agape¯ is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape¯ is love seeking to preserve and create community. ... Agape¯ is a willingness to go to any lengths to restore community. ... The Cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. ... He who works against community is working against the whole of Creation. Therefore, if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community.

And, in another location, King stated,

Agape¯ means ... understanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. When we rise to love on the agape¯ level we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves us.

Franz Fanon realized that “the native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.” He recognized this as a slave’s mentality, and, as a doctor, recognized it as a malady. His admiration for Nietzsche, his manipulation by Sartre, and his anger at the mass-murdering racism of the French in Algeria, caused him to write a tract that is now used to justify the acts of mass-murder being carried out by his followers, the British agents Kabila, Kagame, and Museveni.

Yet that is no justification for the conclusions to the which Fanon came. The conclusions were wrong. Patrice Lumumba, in the Congo, had, in contrast, terrified the Belgian colonial establishment by organizing Belgian students as the international flanking force of his Congolese National Movement. Like Martin Luther King, Lumumba, at the Free University of Brussels in 1959, had stated,

We want to secure our independence through the united effort of all. We want the Belgians to put a stop to their divisive policy. We must understand each other, and they must join forces with us. This is how we can build the Congolese nation, through the friendship of all. I think—I am in fact convinced, and optimistic to believe that despite everything, despite the insults, the moves to intimidate us, the threats that have been made, we have chosen the path we will follow and the sort of struggle we will wage, one that will continue to be non-violent. ... We too decry violence. We have chosen just one weapon for our struggle, and that weapon is non-violence, because we believe that whatever the goal, it can be reached by peaceful means. That is what our struggle represents, and that is why I call for the moral support of every friend of humanity, of all those who believe that every human being, whatever the color of his skin, whatever his social status, can and must enjoy the same freedoms as every other citizen of humanity.

I n not learning what the young Martin Luther King knew—that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” that the power of ideas, such as that of agape¯, is greater than any force, including military, on the planet—Fanon never escaped that permanent dream of the oppressed. Neither will the Fanonist graduates of the Dar Es Salaam Political Science Department, who today threaten to plunge Africa into an unstoppable Dark Age on behalf of the British Empire.