Lewis's makes the following reference to Fanon: "To Franz Fanon, a rebirth of consciousness was necessary, a violent reawakening to the basic rights and responsibilities that are every human being's birthright. That decades of seemingly thuggish stability could be blasted apart so quickly in Egypt speaks to the fragility of that consciousness of suppression. Fanon spoke to a different era, for in these events we see that no existential cataclysm was required."
"Existential cataclysm?" Indulge in melodrama much, do we Mr. Lewis? What does that phrase mean exactly? Is this combination of words tautological? "Existential" means pertaining to existence. Cataclysm, in Lewis's context, means "any violent upheaval, especially one of a social or political nature." Accordingly, lumped together, the words mean a violent upheaval pertaining to one's existence? Can there be any other type of violent upheaval? But I digress...
Now to my point, followers of Fanon make the same mistake often committed by followers of Marx: they re-package their spiritual mentor's theories into what they believe the guy meant, in essence, imbuing the original texts with meanings that simply aren't there. This is particular so with regards to modern socialists' interpretations of Marx's theories of economics.
In the present case, Lewis implies that Fanon advocated a collective "rebirth of consciousness" as the means of escaping colonialist/imperialist oppression. In reality, Fanon advocated nationalism as the foundation of developing a collective identity:
"The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its
continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the
fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it
the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the
conditions and framework necessary to culture...Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. "
Marxists like Lewis cannot attribute nationalistic tendencies to a Marxist hero like Fanon for two reasons: 1) Socialism is intended to be an international and universal system. It will not succeed unless the entire world converts to socialism; and 2) nationalism is the purview of the Nazis and other fascists. So, Lewis projects his own interpretations (or, the more likely scenario, Lewis' poli sci professor interpreted Fanon and Lewis absorbed that interpretation as the gospel). Interestingly, the original nationalist movement which surfaced in France during the French Revolution, with its emphasis on the collective and the rights of all mankind, is one of the primary inspirations of Marxist thought.
How close does Fanon approximate Hitler? Consider this quote from Mein Kampf:
"All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word "man." He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times.... Exclude him and perhaps after a few thousand years darkness will again descend on the earth, human culture will pass, and the world turn to a desert. Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe."
Some will balk at the idea of comparing Fanon's ideas regarding African nationalism to Hitler's Aryanism, but, before you discount my comments, consider the reference in the article I copied in a previous post: Fanon was a protege of Aime Cesaire, one of, if not, the progenitor of the Negritude movement. Negritude was a form of black consciousness and racial solidarity against French colonial racism. It is as race-based as Aryanism. From Black Skin, White Masks:
"The Negro is aiming for the universal, but on the screen his Negro essence, his Negro 'nature,' is kept intact: . . . I have barely opened my eyes that had been blindfolded, and someone already wants to drown me in the universal? . . . I need to lose myself in my negritude, to see the fires, the segregations, the repressions, the rapes, the discriminations, the boycotts. We need to put our fingers on every sore that mottles the black uniform. . . . It is my belief that a true culture cannot come to life under present conditions. It will time enough to talk of the black genius when the man has regained his rightful place."
To summarize, the pantheon of the Left must remain inviolate and virginal in its purity at all costs. Since many of its icons are ahistorical, common sense averse, and self-contradictory, it is incumbent upon the priests of the Left to fill in the gaps where necessary to ensure that the overall narrative is preserved. This clergy interprets the words of the deities for the masses from their Delphic oracles (aka post-secondary institutions of lower learning). [An aside: although the comparison of the Left's monopoly on divine "truth" to the oracles of ancient Greece holds true, an identical comparison could be made to the Dark Age Catholic church]. As a result, the useful idiots on the Left frequently fail to read their own holy writ.
Also, there is often little ideological difference between the radicals on the Left and the radicals on the Right. Fanon may have joined the French army to fight Hitler, but, when he returned to peacetime Algiers, his soon to be acquired radical ideas that appear very similar to Hitler's. Of course, since the Left's narrative is that oppressed minorities, by their very natures, cannot be racist, confronting the Left with examples of these similarities will only fall on deaf ears.
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