the revolt against the masses by fred siegel

“Naipaul is the real thing,” wrote Hilton Kramer in Commentary, noting the book’s literary qualities, “a novelist who creates a world, who conjures up compelling characters and commands our assent in their complex fate.”Īs taken as I was by Shiva’s North of South and V. Jimmy Ahmed, the Michael X character in Guerrillas, becomes entangled with a conflicted South African liberal named Roche and his radical-chic girlfriend Jane, who is drawn to Jimmy. Michael X, who became a pet cause for John Lennon, tried to nurture a Black Power movement in the infertile soil of Eric Williams’s Trinidad, and was hanged after committing a series of gruesome murders. Set in a fictional country that seems a hybrid of Trinidad and Jamaica, the novel is loosely based on the life of Michael X, a 1950s London pimp turned glamorous spokesman for Black Power and guerrilla warfare. Naipaul’s concussive 1975 novel Guerrillas. Walking through the basement of the Strand, the famed Manhattan used bookstore, in the late 1970s, searching for Walter Laqueur’s collection of essays on revolutionary guerrillas, I came across V. The Wretched of the Earth, his last work, would appear that year, with an introduction by the famed French litterateur and apologist for Soviet Communism, Jean-Paul Sartre. He died of cancer in Maryland in 1961, just 36 years old, having been brought to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, reportedly by the CIA, following unsuccessful treatment in the Soviet Union. Fanon served, among other roles, as the provisional Algerian government’s ambassador to Ghana. Assigned to a psychiatric facility in Algeria, he found himself drawn to the Front de Libération Nationale, a guerrilla group fighting to free Algeria from French control. After the war, Fanon studied medicine in Lyon.

A decorated veteran, Fanon fought for the Free French in World War II, after his native Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, fell under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. By the early 1960s, neo-Marxist economic arguments would be overshadowed by the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, by psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Williams argued-erroneously, as subsequent research made clear-that the triumph of capitalism was enabled by the brutality of slavery. An influential early book in this regard was 1944’s Capitalism and Slavery, by Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

The Third World-not the imperialist West or the sclerotic Soviet Empire-would be the source of neo-Marxist redemption, leftists argued. In the aftermath of decolonization, however, many intellectuals portrayed Western prosperity as an outgrowth of the immiseration of the global South.

The revolt against the masses by fred siegel