"In guerrilla war the struggle no longer concerns the place
where you are, but the places where you are going. Each
fighter carries his warring country between his toes.

                 -- Frantz Fanon...The Wretched of the Earth


IN AN EARLIER POST, I had asserted that the attack on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon was an exercize in
pre-theoretical violence...nothing that a small group of
dedicated guerrillas could do would change US policy in the
global economy or in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Events may prove me wrong.  First there are the widening
economic effects of the bombings in the US economy which may
be much larger than I had imagined.

But, in terms of the attacks themselves, I had forgotten the
theories of Frantz Fanon that I had read in the '60's when
trying to understand guerrilla warfare in North Africa,
Vietnam and, later in South America.  I want to suggest to
the students of private and public violence that Fanon may
be a better analyst than am I.  I would hope that we both
are wrong...that American response will be balanced and
constructive....but it looks like Fanon may have a better
grasp on the social psychology of terror than do I.

The ideas of Fanon on Guerrilla warfare.

Most of the rhetoric one hears on the media from American
politicians and American commentators about the destruction
of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon presents the
engineers of the calamity as if they were insane to do such
a thing...as if they had no other aim than hatred of the USA
to motivate them to such madness.  For those who would like
to step back and think a bit about the larger questions of
motive and intent, a good place to start is with the
writings of Frantz Fanon, who fought against the French in
Algeria after WWII.

In brief, Fanon argued that the terrible violence of
personal terror was an effective weapon in guerilla warfare.
France had high tech armament with which to fight; Algerians
had only hand weapons and their bodies to use against the
French army and the wealth of Colonial France.  Fanon argued
that such violence did two things; first it created the
belief among French soldiers and French citizens that there
was no one to trust...all Algerians were 'enemy' of the
Colonists.  Second, the reaction of the French army against
innocent Algerians would widen and deepen the social base
from which guerrillas could draw support.

If we step back and look at the response in the USA and that
of the Taliban goverrnment in Afghanistan, Fanon's theory of
guerilla warfare seems to be confirmed.  The hatred and
violent rhetoric of US politicians together with the
vigilanti attacks upon Islamic Americans...or those thought
to be Islamic Americans, bespeak the explosion of distrust
among Americans of ALL THINGS ISLAMIC.  And the call from
President Bush, Colin Powell and other members of the US
government for a patriotic war against all countries which
support terrorists gives one some sense of the efficacy of
the WTC bombing to engender suspicion, mistrust and a drive
for revenge against millions of persons unknown and
unanswerable to the destruction at the WTC and the Pentagon.

And if USA war-time policy becomes fact; the use of military
violence against Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and the rest of the
'60 countries' alleged by US 'experts' to support
anti-American violence...if this should happen, tens of
millions of Islamic believers from the Phillipine Islands to
Morocco will view the USA as an indiscriminate butcher of
the wretched of the earth.

The writings of Chairman Mao about the use of the population
as an ally against colonialism/western exploitation also
bears on the outcome of the WTC tragedy...if there is
indiscriminate American response, the present sentiment of
the Islamic world...that of horror and rejection of the
bombings, that sentiment will fade fast and active
guerrillas with find more and more support as American
violence continues against Islamic countries.

Islamic religion forbids the use of violence except against
those who violate the peace of Islam.  It would be easy for
Islamic guerrillas and their limited supportes to make the
case that the USA, using violence against innocent and
peacable muslims, does indeed constitute a threat to the
Peace of Allah and the Islamic world.

There are, in the desperately poor countries of North
Africa, the Mid-east and the Islamic Orient, an endess
supply of young men, uneducated, devout, jobless and without
hope for the future.

And if the USA should include Cuba in its list of terrorist
countries, direct violence against it would trigger ever
more anger and outrage among the young men and women of
Latin America.

****************

Born on the island of Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought with
the allied forces against Nazi Germany in Europe during the
second World War and afterwards studied psychiatry in
France, where he published his first book, Peau noire,
masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). While practicing
medicine in Antilles in northern Africa during the
French-Algerian war, Fanon actively supported and organized
a resistance to French colonialism by authoring two books
outlining an insurgent Third World uprising: L'An V de la
revolution algerienne (Year Five of the Algerian
Revolution), and Les Damnes de la terre (The Wretched of the
Earth).  ...Benjamin Graves '98, Brown University

More about Frantz Fanon at:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=Frantz+Fanon


PS: Robert K. Tannebaum has a remarkable prescient piece of
fiction in which he lays out a view very similar to that of
Fanon in his, 'Reckless Endangerment' Signet Books,
1999...in which he writes of a fictional attempt to bomb a
Jewish meeting in New York and the chaos attendent upon the
attempt by local authorities and the federal
government...one might learn from it if not from Fanon.

 -- TRY


Visit the Red Feather Institute
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