Would Frantz Fanon Have Supported the Oct. 7 Massacre? 

His Biographer Isn’t So Sure

How did a single chapter from a book written over six decades ago by a Black psychiatrist, who never discussed the Israel-Palestine issue, become widely cited in relation to October 7? 

A new biography explores the life of Frantz Fanon.

By Etan Nechin

February 5, 2024

Source: Haaretz

A banner quoting Frantz Fanon outside the Minneapolis Police Department following a police shooting in 2015: "We revolt simply because for many reasons we can no longer breathe." Credit: Tony Webster


On the morning of October 7, as images of the torn fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel proliferated on social media, so too did quotations by Frantz Fanon.

The writings of this Martinique-born philosopher, psychiatrist and leftist, who is noted for his work on racism, anti-colonialism and violence, have become emblematic of Algeria’s struggle for independence from France in the 1950s and early ’60s. On Black Saturday, his quotes were used to argue that the massacre conducted by Hamas was a direct and inevitable reaction to “colonial” oppression by Israel. One of the most-quoted lines that day, taken from Fanon’s seminal work “The Wretched of the Earth,” states: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Fanon, whose life was cut short at age 36 in 1961, has posthumously lent his voice to an array of causes – stretching from America’s civil rights movement to Pan-Africanism, resonating particularly with Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestinian activists. “The Wretched of the Earth” and “Black Skin, White Masks” have entered the academic canon, regularly appearing on humanities department syllabi. For his champions, he occupies the role of post-colonial herald, a prophet of insurgency, articulating the sentiments of the downtrodden.

Yet the breadth of Fanon’s intellect and the nuances of his political stance often remain in the shadows for those who invoke him.

In his extensive new biography “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon,” Adam Shatz ventures beyond the conventional view of Fanon as an icon of political violence and the Algerian revolution. He offers a three-dimensional portrait of the man, situating him within the context of his own life and times, while also engaging with the intellectual milieu that shaped – and was in turn shaped by – his revolutionary ideas.

There are existing biographies of Fanon, but Shatz – by day the U.S. editor of London Review of Books – says he was motivated to write his because he felt that none of the others “had captured the passion, the tragic passion, of Fanon’s life in psychiatry, activism and writing.”


“Fanon was somewhat of a dreamer, a utopian, who thought that the upheaval of revolution or the shock of violence could address deep-seated issues. This didn’t happen.”

In an interview at his Brooklyn home, he says he sought to write something “that would situate Fanon in a larger group of writers and revolutionaries addressing the same predicament: not only how to dismantle the colonial order, but to create something better in its place. A powerful additional motivation was the Trump presidency, and the unfolding drama in France over Islam, ‘integration,’ police violence and jihadism – the embers of Algeria could still be felt there.”
West Indian skin, French mask

The book’s opening chapters explore the genesis of Fanon’s philosophy, mapping it back to his youth and the stark contrast between the profound disjunction between his nascent hopes and the realities he later confronted. It illustrates how his theories were a synthesis of thoughts crafted in solitude at his writing desk and those forged in the wider arena of social and political engagement.

Fanon was born in the French West Indies to a middle class family in July 1925. Initially, he did not even perceive himself as Black; he identified as French – a sentiment echoed by all of his peers on the island of Martinique. The phrase “nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (“Our ancestors the Gauls”) was a mantra for Martinican children like Fanon, despite their African heritage.

The complexities of race and class on the island influenced Fanon, particularly the “pigmentocracy” that permeated society. However, his family’s relative comfort shielded him to some extent – until the Vichy government’s arrival in 1940 unveiled a more sinister side of France characterized by racism and fascism.

This prompted the teenage Fanon to volunteer for the Free French Forces, where he confronted a colonial army rife with racial hierarchies. Despite being treated as an “honorary European” (Fanon was injured and received the Croix de Guerre military decoration), he saw firsthand the disparities in how Arabs and Africans were treated, and grappled with the irony of fighting against Nazism in an army practicing its own form of racial supremacy.

This contradiction was Fanon’s first jolt toward political consciousness, a feeling reinforced after the war when he faced rejection from French women who refused to dance with a Black liberator.



The U.S. cover of “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon” by Adam Shatz. Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

After his release from the army, these experiences drew him to Négritude – a cultural and political movement among French-speaking Black intellectuals that emphasized African values and heritage, and protested colonialism and racial discrimination. He was also drawn to the works of Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, playwright and politician who would become his first mentor. Fanon moved to France to continue his studies, eventually enrolling in medicine at the University of Lyon, where he specialized in psychiatry.

“A pivotal moment for Fanon occurred in France, described in ‘Black Skin, White Masks,’ when a little white boy is traveling on the train with his mother and points to Fanon and says ‘Look maman, a nègre.’ Here’s a little boy and yet he’s already a ‘racial expert’: he already comes to associate a Black man like Fanon with danger, with menace, and Fanon realizes that in the eyes of the French, he is a Black man,” Shatz says. “He is not simply a French man of color, as he was raised to believe; he does not enjoy the anonymity of a typical French person. And I think that is certainly the primal scene in Fanon’s work.”

This incident challenged Fanon’s belief in the French promise of color blindness and propelled him toward exploring various philosophies. These included Negritude, Senegalese statesman and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor’s mystical understanding of Black consciousness, and eventually European existential philosophy – which he found in the pages of Les Temps Modernes, the magazine edited by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

“You have to imagine Fanon as a man on a quest for identity during his time in Lyon. He found himself in a city that felt desolate, markedly homogeneous in its demographic, save for a small community of North African men. As a physician, Fanon came to treat these individuals. And in doing so, they left a significant imprint on his evolving sense of self,” Shatz notes.

Intrigued by iconoclastic psychiatric thinkers aligned with Marxism and surrealism who delved into madness in provocative ways, Fanon saw psychiatry’s goal as liberating individuals from internal complexes that obstructed their social interactions. He characterized mental illness as a “pathology of freedom,” devising his own discourse on restoring a person’s sense of identity and belonging, particularly after experiences of marginalization or mental health challenges.

In Lyon, Fanon’s encounters with North African migrant workers led to a pivotal realization about the “pathology of colonialism and racism.” Recognizing that these diagnoses overlooked the deeper, systemic issues stemming from oppression, Fanon was inspired to develop his concept of disalienation. This approach aimed not only to heal individual psychological distress, but also to address and mend the collective trauma caused by colonial and racist structures. This revelation bridged Fanon’s medical practice with his anti-colonial activism, forming a foundational element of his broader philosophical and political work.

“Fanon didn’t invent anything or create new concepts; he was a bricoleur, crafting a syncretic language from psychiatry, Negritude, phenomenology and anti-colonialism. The language he developed is highly distinctive, though the concepts are often used for convenience,” Shatz explains.


I think Afro-pessimism and decolonial thought share the same kind of historical fatalism that defines much of Zionism. For classical Zionism, a Jew in exile is living in a kind of hell, where it’s always possibly 1939.

Adam Shatz

“Fanon’s work, while deeply invested in the collective endeavor of liberation from the shackles of colonial dominance, economic exploitation and political oppression, does not solely focus on these broader societal issues. He also maintains a profound interest in the psyche of the individual, advocating for the liberation of colonized individuals from psychological complexes such as despair, passivity, feelings of futility and a perceived incapacity to influence historical events,” he says. “It’s important to recall that Fanon is not simply a revolutionary who infuses his political writings with psychiatric insights. He is a revolutionary critic of psychiatry.”

Although Fanon’s first book, 1952’s “Black Skin, White Masks,” was born from this period, Shatz writes that “it is neither a memoir nor a clinical study, but rather an unusual mixture of genres and discursive registers: analytic and poetic, despairing and hopeful, solemn and sarcastic.”

The biographer places “Black Skin, White Masks” within the broader historical and intellectual era, capturing the post-World War II revolutionary spirit that swept through Europe and the developing nations of the “global south.” On a journey of self-discovery, Fanon began to reject his initial mentors. This period was marked by national liberation movements, the influence of Marxism and the push for decolonization – a context within which Fanon found resonance and, ultimately, his place.
The guise of normality

Eleven months before the Algerian War of Independence began in November 1954, Fanon started working at a psychiatric institute just outside of Algiers. “Fanon didn’t come to Algeria as a revolutionary but a colonial administrator,” says Shatz. “It was not uncommon for France to send ‘assimilated’ West Indian professionals to the colonies to serve as examples of all the good things France had done for the natives, to serve as models for Africans,” he adds sarcastically.

“From the moment France colonized Algeria in 1830, it took the French approximately 40 years to ‘pacify’ the country – an endeavor the French considered pacification, but which for Algerians was a brutal invasion. During this period, about one-third of the Algerian population was decimated by violence and disease. By 1848, amid ongoing colonization efforts, France had divided Algeria into three departments and began governing the land as an integral administrative part of France itself, effectively transforming Algeria into an extension of France. Despite this, Algerians were not granted the rights of French citizens; they were subjects and were not recognized as citizens until the final stages of French rule.

“Algerians were violently uprooted, their lands confiscated, their language relegated to that of a foreign tongue and they were, in essence, turned into spectators within their own territory. For Fanon, these experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. As I suggest in my book, Fanon perceived colonialism not merely as an oppressive regime, but as a pathological system that presented itself under the guise of normality.”



Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956. Credit: Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

Shatz demonstrates how Fanon’s work shaped his thought and vice versa – whether implementing his radical psychiatric approaches on Algerian patients, or traveling to the Algerian backwoods where he witnesses local rituals and becomes enamored with the rural Algerians. When the war begins, Fanon knows which side he’s on: he is no longer a Frenchman.

“He begins to think of himself as an Algerian. He’s not a Muslim; he’s an atheist. He’s not an Arab; he’s a Black man from the West Indies. And yet he begins to develop this fusional relationship with the Algerian struggle – and in the course of that, he reimagines what it means to be Algerian. He thinks of Algerian nationalism as a kind of nationalism of the will, a nationalism that anyone can join. Arabs and Muslims, who are colonized of course, but also European sympathizers – or, for that matter, members of the Jewish minority,” Shatz says.

Initially, Fanon sought to join the Algerian National Liberation Front as a soldier, but the movement utilized his medical and intellectual expertise in other critical ways. He operated a covert clinic to treat wounded Algerian fighters, contributed writings to the army’s El Moudjahid publication and took on a variety of roles, including acting as an ambassador for the provisional Algerian government. This period of his life followed his expulsion from Algeria in 1956, during which time he resided in Tunis and Accra (where he served as the movement’s traveling ambassador in Africa).

Shatz paints a broad picture of the region and portrays Fanon’s relationships with Algerian revolutionaries, white French Marxists who came to support the revolution, and African leaders such as Patrice Lumumba. He also highlights the blind spots that Fanon, in his zeal, either overlooked or dismissed – including the Islamic component of the Algerian struggle.


It’s impossible to know what Fanon would have said about the Oct. 7 attack. But I don’t think Fanon would have been surprised by the fact that it happened. That the violence of oppression inevitably provokes the counterviolence of the oppressed is, after all, a Fanonian theme.

Adam Shatz

“Fanon, I think, imagined that the anti-colonial revolution might provide the kind of modernization that the French were claiming to bring with their civilizational project,” Shatz says. He highlights an essay Fanon wrote in 1959 called “Algeria Unveiled”: “It’s a captivating essay that explores the evolving symbolism of the veil,” his biographer says. “For Fanon, the veil can represent both subjugation and resistance. Fanon believed that through their revolutionary actions – like the Algerian women who planted bombs for the National Liberation Front – these women were not only fighting against colonialism but also challenging patriarchy.

“He hoped that, post-independence, Algerian men would recognize and embrace the women’s rights to freedom and equality. However, the outcome was different. While there’s a vibrant feminist movement in Algeria, the societal changes Fanon hoped for were not fully realized. Fanon was somewhat of a dreamer, a utopian, who thought that the upheaval of revolution or the shock of violence could address deep-seated issues. This didn’t happen.”
Apostle of violence

One of the issues facing Shatz as a biographer was Fanon’s aversion to documenting his private life. “He kept things close to the chest. He expressed disdain for those who wrote memoirs, viewing it as a bourgeois pastime,” he says. “The only real traces of Fanon’s personal life emerge in fleeting passages in his work, often masked by the use of the royal we pronoun. Fanon’s reluctance to write about himself makes the task of his biographer particularly challenging.”

Yet while the book may not contain new archival discoveries about Fanon, its depth is enhanced by the relationships Shatz fostered over the years with individuals close to Fanon. These include Algerian historian Mohamed Harbi, Algerian psychoanalyst Alice Cherki and, most notably, the late Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, Fanon’s secretary and confidante – aka Fanon’s “tape recorder” – who typed “The Wretched of the Earth” from his dictations.

Shatz, 51, has a rich history in journalism and a deep connection to the regions Fanon wrote about. Coming from a left-leaning, secular Jewish family in Massachusetts, his fieldwork took him to Algeria, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Egypt. His published works include “Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel” and “Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination.” In recognition of his contributions to French culture, in 2021 he was named a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. In this book, Shatz weaves together those years of travel, encounters and intellectual explorations into Fanon’s world, in all its contradictions and complexities.

No Fanon work has generated more debate than “The Wretched of the Earth,” which was published in 1961, the year of his death. It is a trenchant analysis of the psychological and cultural impacts of colonialism, advocating for decolonization and the liberation of oppressed peoples. It presents a powerful critique of colonial rule and a call to arms for revolutionary change, rooted in Fanon’s own experiences in Algeria.



The family of Liraz Assulin, who was killed by Hamas terrorists while attending the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, creating a memorial for her near Kibbutz Kfar Azza last month. Credit: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters


Fanon had a talent for revolutionary phraseology, for what you might call revolutionary jingles. Thus, one can read them very selectively and find support for one’s argument – in this case, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ – as a classic example of Fanonian struggle.

Adam Shatz

Its first chapter, “On Violence,” is also its most discussed. In it, Fanon discusses the role of violence in the decolonization process, arguing that it has a regenerative force for the oppressed to reclaim their humanity and overthrow the colonial system. He views violence as a cathartic response to the violence enacted by the colonizer and a crucial component in the struggle for liberation.

While many readers saw “The Wretched of the Earth” as nothing but a call to wanton violence, settling the score with the “master” – as many of his appalled contemporaries did – Shatz offers a more complex analysis.

For instance, he draws attention to a passage from “The Wretched of the Earth” where Fanon addresses this directly: “Racism, hatred, resentment and the ‘legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation.”

In Shatz’ understanding of Fanon’s thinking, there is a tension between Fanon the doctor, whose first commandment is “do no harm,” to the revolutionary for whom violence is a way of achieving liberation.

“The longest chapter in the book is ‘On Violence.’ But the second longest chapter is ‘Colonial Warfare and Mental Disorders,’ which is an absolutely wrenching chapter where he writes not only about the impact of colonial violence on the colonized after independence. He also writes about the impact of anti-colonial violence on anti-colonial fighters who are haunted by the acts that they’ve committed,” the author says.

Shatz doesn’t argue that Fanon shies away from violence, but that his exploration of violence is phenomenological, focusing on the lived experience and the psychological transformation it brings about – such as a sense of empowerment or regeneration. This viewpoint is not unique to Fanon and is common in nationalist movements.

Furthermore, Shatz highlights Fanon’s poetic inclination, influenced by Negritude poets and his Caribbean background, which infuses his work with rich metaphors and a deep connection to historical struggles against oppression like the 18th-century Haitian Revolution.

Shatz contends that the misinterpretation of Fanon is partly due to the incorrect translation of the term “violence” as “cleansing” rather than “disintoxicating,” which Fanon intended to describe as an unfortunate but necessary step in the journey toward decolonization and reclaiming identity.

That misreading is attributed partly to Sartre’s militant preface to the book, in which he infamously stated: “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone – to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.”



Simone de Beauvoir, left, and Jean-Paul Sartre at a Parisian restaurant in 1970. Credit: AFP

Fanon’s afterlife

Since Fanon’s death from leukemia and double pneumonia in December 1961, just seven months before Algeria’s independence, there have been numerous misuses and misreadings of his work. Shatz addresses this in an epilogue dedicated to Fanon’s posthumous influence, exploring how his ideas have been referenced and absorbed in various fields.

This epilogue includes subchapters on Fanon’s impact on Black liberation movements, psychiatry, post-colonial literature, the European migration discourse, pan-African and East Asian revolutionary thought, and Palestinian liberation – even though Fanon never directly wrote about either Palestine or Israel.

Fanon’s specter is invoked so frequently that Shatz has continued to expand on this epilogue even after his book was officially completed. A few weeks after the Hamas attack, Shatz wrote a piece in London Review of Books called “Vengeful Pathologies,” in which his nuanced application of Fanon’s theories in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly regarding Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7, transcend a simplistic interpretation of Fanon as merely advocating violence.

Instead, Shatz uses Fanon to delve into the psychological ramifications of colonization and the complex motivations behind the use of violence in liberation struggles.

As for why Fanon is suddenly so prevalent, Shatz observes that he “had a talent for revolutionary phraseology, for what you might call revolutionary jingles. Thus, one can read them very selectively and find support for one’s argument – in this case, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ – as a classic example of Fanonian struggle. The textual evidence is there. Just as Marx has been reduced to class struggle, and Freud to the unconscious and the Oedipus complex, so Fanon has been reduced to violence. And like Marx, he has lent himself to both vulgar and sophisticated readings.

“It’s impossible to know what Fanon would have said about the Oct. 7 attack,” Shatz continues. “But I don’t think Fanon would have been surprised by the fact that it happened. That the violence of oppression inevitably provokes the counterviolence of the oppressed is, after all, a Fanonian theme. As he writes in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’: ‘The colonized person is a persecuted person who dreams constantly of becoming the persecutor.’ Whether he would have endorsed this kind of attack, however, one can only speculate. A militant reader of Fanon might say that he would have, and there are grounds for making this claim. But ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is also full of warnings about the danger of turning hatred and revenge into a political program, and Fanon insists that an anti-colonial struggle must overcome the ‘primitive Manichaeism’ of the colonial system.”

The renaissance of Fanon comes at a time when, according to Shatz, certain styles of thought – such as Afro-pessimism and the decolonial movement – have tended to substitute ontology for history. “Instead of seeing these identities as products of history and as entities that can be unmade, they view them as fixed and essential. Thus, the person who is the child, the grandchild or the great-grandchild of a colonized nation is somehow eternally colonized. Right? The notion is that anti-Black oppression is something that can never be transformed; it’s simply an irreducible, ontological part of societies under Western domination.

“I think Fanon was very skeptical of this style of thought – which, by the way, has a lot in common with Zionism. I think Afro-pessimism and decolonial thought share the same kind of historical fatalism that defines much of Zionism. For classical Zionism, a Jew in exile is living in a kind of hell, where it’s always possibly 1939. The only authentic life is among Jews in Israel. And I think there are many parallels. To me, that all speaks of the great doubt that has fallen over so many societies – most societies, arguably – that there is any horizon beyond what we know today.”

“The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Adam Shatz, is out now.

Saving Assange Now or Never

Julian Assange will soon find out whether he will be granted a final appeal in the U.K. in his fight against extradition, or will soon face the cruel vengeance of the U.S., says Mary Kostakidis.

By Mary Kostakidis

February 5, 2024
Source: Consortium News

In Julian Assange’s extradition case, Magistrate Judge Venessa Baraitser determined he would not survive imprisonment in a U.S. Supermax facility – that he is very likely to commit suicide.

One of the final witnesses in the 4 week extradition trial in 2020 was an American lawyer whose client Abu Hamza was held in ADX Colorado where Julian is likely to be sent. Abu Hamza has no hands. He was extradited from the U.K. following assurances by the U.S. that the prison system was able to deal with the special requirements of such a prisoner.

His lawyer testified that despite assurances he would not be placed in total isolation, that is indeed where he was kept, under Special Administrative Measures, and the U.S. had also failed to delivered on other undertakings to protect his human rights – he did not have a toilet in his cell he could operate – he was stripped of all dignity, contrary to guarantees.

In the case of David Mendoza Herrera, the Spanish government successfully pursued the return of their citizen who was extradited to the U.S. following assurances the U.S. reneged on – a process that took many years while the prisoner attempted first to seek redress in the U.S. but ultimately only succeeded after suing the Spanish government for failing to protect his rights. It was forced to act after the Spanish Supreme Court virtually threatened to suspend the Spain-U.S. Extradition Treaty.

The assurances provided by the U.S. in their 2021 High Court Appeal of the District Court’s decision in Assange’s case were not tested in Court. They were automatically accepted, a judge expressing complete confidence in the reliability of a guarantee from the United States Government, and differentiating between the guarantee of a State and that provided by a Diplomat.

(Whilst a Diplomat’s assurance may involve a different signature at the bottom of the page, surely it appears there only after the boss’s approval, but evidently this makes a difference).

Significantly however, the assurances were also conditional — they could be revoked at any time, so not worth the paper they were written on, no matter who signed them.

Since that decision was handed down though, the U.K. Supreme Court has delivered a landmark ruling in a case where the U.K. government had accepted assurances provided by a foreign government (Rwanda). It determined that such assurances cannot be automatically accepted – that there is a requirement for ‘meaningful, independent, evidence- based judicial review focusing on the protection of human rights on the ground in that country’.

In Julian’s case, it is the human rights of national security prisoners in the U.S., their treatment and the conditions in which they are kept.

The U.N. considers solitary confinement beyond 2 weeks as torture – special rapporteurs have been arguing this for decades. In condemning the treatment of Chelsea Manning in a U.S. prison, then Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez said:


“Prolonged solitary confinement raises special concerns, because the risk of grave and irreparable harm to the detained person increases with the length of isolation and the uncertainty regarding its duration… I have defined prolonged solitary confinement as any period in excess of 15 days. This definition reflects the fact that most of the scientific literature shows that, after 15 days, certain changes in brain functions occur and the harmful psychological effects of isolation can become irreversible.” [Emphasis added.]

Abu Hamsa has been in solitary confinement for nine years. His lawyer testified walking was too painful for him because his toe nails were so long, and his pleas for them to be cut were ignored.

Significant Recent Changes in Assange’s Health

The automatic acceptance and reliability of the assurances were not the only problem at that time.

A serious problem that arose during that hearing was its failure to note or take into account the change in Julian’s medical condition. It is a critical failure because the decision delivered was based on assurances the U.S. prison system could mitigate against his known risk factors – the risk he would commit suicide. But he had developed another serious physical risk factor.

After the four-week Extradition hearing in the lower court where Assange appeared boxed in a glass booth at the back of the court where he was prevented from communicating with his lawyers, he was permitted to appear via videolink from Belmarsh at subsequent substantive hearings.

At the start of the U.S. Appeal there was a brief pre-hearing chat between Assange’s lawyer and the judge to the effect that the defendant has elected not to appear due to an increase in medication.

It was extraordinary and inconceivable he would choose not to observe the hearing via videolink. Indeed I was later informed by his wife Stella he had wanted to appear but had not been permitted to by the prison.

Both his absence and the explanation flagged a problem.

Assange had not missed a single hearing. He had shown great determination in his struggle to engage with the drama unfolding in court despite enormous challenges such as not being able to attract his lawyers’ attention (after being denied the tools and time to prepare for his own defence), and in spite of medication and a dramatic deterioration in his health as was so throughly documented by former U.N. Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer in his book The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution.

Why was he so heavily medicated so as not to be able to sit in the video-link room at Belmarsh ? What had necessitated this increase in medication? This question was directly pertinent to the decision the court had to make, but I heard no question from the judge about it and the hearing proceeded.

Then, remarkably, some time into the hearing, Julian appeared.

We journalists observing via a link could see him in a window on our screens. He would have been able to see and hear the judge, and those in the courtroom would be able to see him on a monitor as we could.

He looked mighty unwell, not only drugged. He had to use his arm to prop up his head but one side of his face was noticeably drooping and one eye was shut.

During these hearings we were given very occasional, brief glimpses of the defendant – time enough to note he is still observing his own legal proceeding, be it in a depersoned way. I asked the video link host on the chat facility to show us more of the defendant – we needed a better and more frequent look at him as he looked unwell.

Journalists are warned when we join the video-link that using the chat facility for anything other than communicating about technical issues and only with the host (hearings were frequently hamstrung by audio problems) could result in access being withdrawn. But many of the other 30 or so journalists on the link were sending Me Too messages on the Chat. Remarkably and to my relief the host obliged & we were shown Julian more often and for longer than in any previous hearings.

So after the bizarre news Julian was not going to attend his own hearing, the second thing I could not understand is that given his condition when he did appear, there were no questions or adjournment. Those deciding his fate were not perturbed by his state, or had failed to notice what was immediately evident to us.

Julian persisted in his attempt to focus, but he was clearly severely hampered. He eventually gave up, stood up & moved away from the monitor camera. It was as if he could no longer abide the humiliation of being scrutinised by people unknown, witnesses to a feeble, failed attempt to command his body and mind, a mind that has been razor sharp and never before let him down.

The public learnt some nine weeks later, and days after the judgement came down clearing the way for Julian’s extradition, that he in fact had had a TIA – a Transient Ischaemic Attack or minor Stroke – often a precursor to a major, catastrophic one when prompt access to an MRI machine would be vital if his life was to be saved.

I don’t know whether it is known, exactly when Julian had the stroke. The monitoring of prisoners is not exactly tailored to pick up and quickly respond to such silent stealthy symptoms. Did the stroke occur before the hearing? Was that why he was so heavily medicated? Or did it occur at the time of the hearing?

One thing is clear – he has had a stoke, so his condition has changed, and the assurances accepted took no account of this, though the Court’s decision was handed down long after he had the stroke and around the same time it was finally diagnosed and made public.

One of the two Justices presiding over the U.S. Appeal, Ian Duncan Burnett, was the Chief Justice of the High Court at the time. His decision in the case of U.K. citizen Laurie Love set a precedent where extradition to the U.S. was denied on the basis of a medical condition.

This engendered a little hope that he may not reverse the District Court’s decision in Julian’s case. But as Law Professor Nils Melzer remarked, you don’t need the Chief Justice on a case where he has already set a precedent that can be followed. However you do need him if his precedent is to be overturned.

Throughout the hearing, the Love decision loomed large in our minds and Love was present in Court, but we realised this potential pathway was a dead end when it was finally raised by Julian’s lawyers.

The Chief Justice responded swiftly, dismissively and categorically: ‘Oh but that was an entirely different case. He had eczema.’ (Verbatim to my memory)

So the difference between being extradited or not, was eczema, and there would be no joy for Julian in this court despite the marked deterioration in his physical and psychological health.

Julian sought leave to appeal the decision of the High Court, in the Supreme Court, but that Supreme Court’s determination was that there were no arguable points of law to form a basis for an Appeal.

The Upcoming Hearing

Over two days on Feb. 20-21, a panel of two High Court judges will rule on whether Julian can appeal both the Secretary of State’s decision to extradite him and Judge Baraitser’s decision on the basis of the all grounds he argued which she knocked back, such as the political nature of the prosecution and the impossibility of a fair trial for him in the U.S..

The reliability and adequacy of the U.S. assurances that he will not be held in a super max prison, nor under S.A.M.S., that his suicide can be prevented, that he would be returned to Australia to serve out his sentence at some point, have not been tested in court, and now the medical condition for which they were furnished has changed. And in the meantime there has been a landmark ruling by the [U.K.] Supreme Court in another case, regarding the necessity for judicial review of foreign govt assurances.

A letter very early this year to the U.K. home secretary from a cross party group of our Parliamentarians is an important and timely one, requesting he “undertake an urgent, thorough and independent assessment of the risks to Mr. Assange’s health and welfare in the event he is extradited to the United States.”

Assange has made an application to attend this month’s hearing in person so he can communicate with his legal team.

The judges may make an immediate decision at the conclusion of the two-day hearing or reserve their judgement.

If Assange wins this case, a date will be set for a full Appeal hearing.

If he is denied the right to appeal there are no further appeal avenues at the domestic level.

He can then apply to the European Court of Human Rights, which has the power to order a stay on his extradition – a Rule 39 Instruction, which is only given in “exceptional circumstances”. It may however be a race to lodge the Appeal before he is bundled off on a plane to the U.S.

If Julian Assange is extradited and the U.S. is successful in prosecuting him he will not receive a fair trial there and unlikely to receive the constitutional protection afforded to its own citizens, the U.S. will have redefined in law, investigative journalism as ‘espionage’.

It will demonstrate that U.S. domestic laws, but not protections, apply internationally to non-U.S. citizens.

It will have cost Assange his freedom & likely his life – an example to anyone who attempts to discredit the state sanctioned narrative. A narrative that has been shattered by independent and citizen journalists in Gaza – explosively, daily, globally, and irrevocably.


This is the text of a speech delivered by Mary Kostakidis to a conference on Julian Assange held in Sydney, Australia on Jan. 29.

 

Journalist Mary Kostakidis presented SBS World News for two decades as Australia’s first national primetime news anchorwoman. Previous articles include “Watching the Eyes” for Declassified Australia. She covers Julian Assanges’s extradition court proceedings live on Twitter.

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Killing Kenneth Smith

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

 FEBRUARY 2, 2024
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Image: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”

– Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine”

Kenneth Smith was executed by the state of Alabama for a contract killing. He was paid by a pastor to murder his wife. The state of Alabama paid an execution squad to strap Kenneth Smith to a death gurney, clamp a mask over his face, and suffocate him to death with nitrogen gas. Smith thrashed and convulsed for at least four minutes as the nitrogen squeezed the oxygen out of his lungs. What is the message here?

Nitrogen hypoxia was touted as an efficient and humane method of killing humans. Compared to what? The lynchings of 340 people that took place in Alabama between 1877 and 1943? The electric chair? Hanging? Firing squad? Lethal injection, which the state previously used to try to kill Smith and failed? It took Kenneth Smith at least 22 minutes to die, gasping for breath, his stomach heaving, vomiting into his gas mask. Is this the new definition of humane? Is 22 minutes to death a new measure of efficiency?

According to Alabama’s State Attorney General, Steve Marshall, it was a “textbook” case of execution. Who wrote the textbook, Dr. Mengele?  Marshall bragged about the execution as if Alabama had been the first state to land a man on Mars: “As of last night, nitrogen epoxy as a means of execution is no longer an untested method; it is a proven one.” Marshall sounded like a pitchman for an execution franchise.

Even though they managed, barely it seems, to kill Kenneth Smith,  the state still can’t find any doctors willing to supervise its lethal gassings and lend the killings medical legitimacy. They can’t even find a willing veterinarian.  Will Alabama state colleges and universities replace their sociology degrees with a BS in Death Penalty Administration? Will community colleges offer certificates in the proper application of Execution Technologies?

But did the execution of Kenneth Smith really go as smoothly as Marshall claimed? We were told that Smith would slip into unconsciousness almost immediately after the valves were opened and the nitrogen began to flow into his lungs. He didn’t. We were told that the execution would be painless. It wasn’t.  We were told it would all be over in minutes. It wasn’t.

It’s impossible to know the full details of what really happened to Kenneth Smith. How much agony he experienced, how long he struggled for breath, how long it took him to die. Why? Because the state of Alabama closed the curtain on the death chamber before Smith was pronounced dead. The handful of witnesses allowed in the execution viewing room weren’t able to witness his death, only the preamble of his killing. What is the state hiding behind its fatal curtain? An affinity for torture?

How long did it take Kenneth Smith to die? We don’t know for sure. At least 22 minutes. But perhaps as long as 28 minutes. A long time. But perhaps that’s the kind of death Alabama wants. Given the blood-thirsty statements of Governor Kay Ivey and AG Marshall, you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

None of the witnesses were allowed cellphones, cameras, tape recorders, notebooks, pens or pencils in the theater of death. The witnesses had to memorialize the killings in their minds. Here’s what Matt Roney of the Montgomery Advertiser saw: “Smith writhed and convulsed on the gurney. He appeared to be fully conscious when the gas began to flow. He took deep breaths, his body shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head…Smith clenched his fists, his legs shook under the tightly tucked-in white sheet that covered him from his neck down. He seemed to be gasping for air.”

Smith’s spiritual adviser Jeff Hood stood next to Smith during the execution. Here’s how Hood described the state killing to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now: “What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life. We saw minutes of someone heaving back and forth. We saw spit. We saw all sorts of stuff from his mouth develop on the mask. We saw this mask tied to the gurney and him ripping his head forward over and over and over again. And we also saw correction officials in the room who were visibly surprised at how bad this thing went.”

The US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. But Kenneth Smith’s execution proves these words have lost all meaning. By a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to kill Smith. But the cowardly court couldn’t even be bothered to put their reasoning in writing as to why an experimental method of execution didn’t qualify as “unusual” and how a second attempt to kill a man wasn’t considered “cruel.” You can see why these usually garrulous jurists remained mute. Their logic would have been as tortured as the execution itself.

Kenneth Smith was put to death for a murder for hire that took place in 1988. What was gained by his execution? Was he a threat to kill again? By all accounts, he’d been a model prisoner for 35 years.

Kenneth Smith was put to death even though the person who subcontracted him to do the killing, Billy Gray Williams, was sentenced to life without parole.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though a jury recommended by an 11-1 vote he receive a life sentence. This recommendation was overruled by the judge in the case, who unilaterally imposed a sentence of death.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the State of Alabama has since banned judicial overrides of jury recommendations in death penalty cases.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the State of Alabama had previously tried to kill him by injecting him with a lethal cocktail of drugs but botched the execution.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the method used to kill him was experimental and had been banned by veterinarians for use on mammals.

Does Kenneth Smith’s execution make anyone feel safer? Thirty-five years after the crime does it make anyone feel like “justice” was done, that a “message” had been sent? If so, what kind of message?

Does killing Kenneth Smith act as a deterrent to potential murderers? Since the moratorium on the death penalty was lifted by the US Supreme Court in 1976, Alabama has executed 76 people, the seventh most of any state in the Union. Yet Alabama’s homicide rate is the fourth highest in the US. Alabama and Oregon have roughly the same population. There were 721 homicides in Alabama last year and only 204 in Oregon. Oregon placed a moratorium on executions in 2011 and has only executed 2 people since 1976. One might argue that the death penalty actually increases homicide rates. Killing begets killing.

So why was Kenneth Smith executed?

Constitutional scholars can’t tell you.

The Catholic Church can’t tell you.

The people who witnessed his death can’t tell you.

His spiritual advisor can’t tell you.

The Supreme Court won’t tell you.

But the State of Alabama will.

Kenneth Smith was executed to advertise that the State of Alabama could kill. It’s as simple and gruesome as that. Not kill efficiently or humanely (as if executions could ever qualify as such). But kill. If its bumbling death squad couldn’t find a vein to poison before, they could locate his lungs this time around. If they couldn’t find a doctor to administer lethal drugs before, they now found people willing to strap a mask around his face, turn on the gas and watch him die, gasping and writhing, for as long as it took without any moral hesitation. The state had found a new way to kill humans and the humans willing to do the job–for a price.

Who benefits? Not the people of Alabama. Not the state’s already strapped budget, which expended millions to put him to death that could have been spent feeding the state’s malnourished kids or tending to its sick. Only the state’s pitiless politicians, a group so monstrous they are willing to use human sacrifice as a campaign theme. 

The State of Alabama has become the very thing it claimed to be punishing: a contract killer.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

A Radical Reinvention of the Enlightenment

BY DANIEL FALCONE


FEBRUARY 2, 2024


Cover Art for the book The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis by Richard Whatmore

In this interview, exclusive for CounterPunch, Richard Whatmore discusses his latest book, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (Penguin, 2023). In a world that demands highly rational planning to abolish empire and combat the manifest exploitation of a capitalist society, Whatmore emphasizes that the left needs to sustain the critique of fanatical economic practices. Thinkers and writers of the 18th century like Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft would find the idea of self-regulating markets to be absurd. Whatmore reminds the reader that “contemporaries saw commerce as an anarchic force, turning social relations and relations between states upside down.” Further, he indicates that, “During the end of enlightenment era, historical actors were certain that the world had to change – what existed could not be sustained – and they lost all faith in contemporary ideological solutions to the problems they faced. They sound like us.”

Daniel Falcone: Political Scientist Camila Vergara recently stated, “I got my copy of Richard Whatmore’s The End of Enlightenment, which offers a radical re-evaluation of the Enlightenment as a failed project due to the pursuit of wealth & empire. Timely critical approach to Western values, and a research treasure with more than 100 pages worth of useful notes.” I was pleased to see such an enthusiastic endorsement of your thesis. Could you elaborate on your main arguments and the purpose of the book?

Richard Whatmore: Praise from somebody I respect as much as Camila Vergara is very welcome indeed. I will try and explain the central argument of the book; it is that we have come to a point in time where most of us, including scholars of course, use the term ‘the Enlightenment’ loosely and imprecisely. One of the goals of the book is to return to 18th century conceptions of Enlightenment. I think that in the 18th century contemporaries were obsessed with avoiding wars of religion; their parents and grandparents would have had direct experience of the consequences of religious warfare and here there is a parallel to the generations which experienced world war in the 20th century, shaping subsequent political identities for several generations.

My argument is that any strategy to prevent religious warfare from breaking out amounted to an Enlightenment. So, there were multiple enlightenments, all intended to prevent religious violence, itself associated with superstition and fanaticism, from causing societal chaos. An important point is that stopping religious fanaticism might entail autocracy, controlling the thoughts and behaviour of persons living in a particular community or state. Such strategies have been called at different times Enlightened Despotism by historians.

But the more interesting relationship that developed during the 18th century was that between enlightenment and free states. Free states, it is vital to recognise, were in decline. Republics had become endangered species and republicanism as an ideology was on the wane. The most significant free state was Britain, which Montesquieu called the freest state in human history and a republic hiding beneath the form of a monarchy. Numerous commentators in the 18th century thought that Britain too was on the edge of a precipice and likely to collapse as a free state. British politics were seen to be corrupt; the population was increasingly self-interested or addicted to luxury, and politicians were becoming the servants of merchants and bankers seeking legislation to guarantee them vast profits through the establishment of commercial empires.

The public good was ignored or betrayed. For these reasons, Britain was not expected to survive. The End of Enlightenment tells the story of the attempt by figures such as Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Catharine Macaulay, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft to save liberty and enlightenment together. They all, for differing reasons, saw themselves to have failed. But the strategies they employed are significant and remain so; some of the problems they addressed have not gone away.

Daniel Falcone: How is the book organized and what does it add to the historiographic account of Enlightenment scholarship?

Richard Whatmore: The book begins with David Hume because Hume was one of the figures who believed in the reality of enlightenment. He was certain that his own times merited congratulation because wars of religion had once more been close and had been prevented from breaking out. The example Hume gave was the French monarch Louis XIV, who with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had revived counter-reformation Catholicism in all its evangelism and intolerance. Yet Louis XIV, rather than establishing universal monarchy on mainland Europe, was ultimately defeated militarily and Europe was not ravaged again by theological conflict turned violent. At his most optimistic, in the 1740s, David Hume thought that major states such as Britain and France would come together as what he termed ‘governments of laws rather than of men’, establishing ‘civilised monarchies’.

By the 1760s Hume’s optimism was gone. He became convinced that Britain’s addiction to public credit and commercial empire had ruined politics. Politicians were becoming servants of rich merchants, as in the case of the malign domestic consequences of the influx of wealth via the East India Company. Equally worrying for Hume was that ordinary people, especially in London, were turning xenophobic and fanatic in their lust for liberty. After explaining Hume’s change of opinion, The End of Enlightenment describes responses to Hume from figures as different as the republican revolutionary Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the Swiss-loving historian Edward Gibbon.

Daniel Falcone: I noticed that David Graeber’s posthumous work on Pirate Enlightenment where he considers how “proto-democratic practices” of Madagascar’s Zana-Malata people formed an Enlightenment adjacent project thought too long as something distinctly Euro-centric. He argued that the recoveries of non-western thought can expand our understanding of Enlightenment. More recently, Surya Parekh, authored Black Enlightenment to stretch the orthodoxy and discourse to include black authors and the race anxiety felt by European thinkers. Can you comment on how works like this impact, or relate to, you own revisionist work on the subject?

Richard Whatmore: Alas but David Graeber, brilliant though much of his work unquestionably was, had no knowledge of the history of political and economic thought in relation to the Enlightenment. He made the same mistake as many authors who want to use the late 17th/early 18th centuries as a source for utopian ideas in the present and in the process unfortunately gets the past completely wrong. There may have been practices in Madagascar that Graeber wanted to call ‘proto democratic’, but I would be careful about defining ‘democracy’ in such a way, redolent of what used to be called Whig history.

What I like about so many eighteenth-century authors is that they take ideas in action seriously. If you want to propose an idea in the past for use in the present, then you need to establish a clear alternative future for the present and a transition mechanism that gets us from the existing state of things to that alternative future. Above all, you need to identify ideas that tend to thrive, rather than only working in specific circumstances or being like endangered species going the way of the dodo. For example, if your republic keeps getting taken over by Caesar figures or republican generals like Bonaparte, you need to have a precise plan to deal with it. If you fail to do this then you are simply saying ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could live like they do’. Alas, it is very hard to change your culture and society without violent revolution, but they try exactly this with precise plans during the period I call The End of Enlightenment.

I want to make a further point that arises from Graeber’s approach. For me, you cannot link democracy in the past to democracy in conditions of commercial empire in the 18th century. The latter conditions largely subsist today in the sense we are still governed by commercial empires, even if we think we live in sovereign states or are free peoples. In the 18th century it was advisable only to draw parallels when experiences were sufficiently connected so that lessons could be learned directly. Distance or difference translated into irrelevance. In the case of the American Revolution, for example, revolutionary experience was not deemed relevant to radical politics in Europe because of the surfeit of land in America taken from the indigenous peoples. In short, in the governance of the United States, you could throw land at a problem. In Europe there was no spare land to throw and therefore American politics was entirely divorced from European circumstances as to lack imaginative purchase for reformers.

The history of democracy, which used to be called the history of free states, has always been difficult. The story relayed in The End of Enlightenment remains significant because something happened that led to free states being the dominant form of state in modern times while also making so many people dissatisfied with this reality. What happened is that, altogether unexpectedly, Britain survived the eighteenth century. Indeed, Britain free states across the world, especially in Europe and South America, began to model themselves on Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. This was depressing for reformers because Britain remained what Adam Smith called a mercantile system with a corrupt economy giving too great a political voice to merchants and bankers. Worse still, socialist, or other utopian alternatives of the time faced the problem that the French Revolution had descended into Terror, failing to create a stable republic, and ultimately collapsing into the First French Empire, that restored the power of church and aristocracy vanquished in 1789.

Some observers saw the French revolutionaries to be replicating the history of radical Protestantism, creating a republican church which divided and then turned violent, establishing two separate churches which then repeated the process over and over. Recovering the history of democracy and free states, we must return to the history of Britain and its commercial empire. As Tocqueville said about the atrocities committed by the French in Algeria, he hated them at the same time as he considered them to be necessary, because France would not otherwise survive as a great state. He could see no alternative for France, no alternative future. This was why the work he never finished concerned the British in India. The tragedy of modernity was that the free state of Britain was better at war than any free state historically.

Commercial empires historically, Carthage or the Dutch Republic, have risen meteorically and then fallen to earth. Britain was different. It survived as a form of free state, but with a mercantile economy geared to empire and profit whatever the consequences for peoples in, say, Ireland or Bengal. All of this means that the circumstances and admirable distinctiveness of the Zana Malata people has very little to teach us about politics or the economy in the present, although worth relating.

Turning to Parekh’s Black Enlightenment, one of the consequences of the establishment of commercial empire was, as we all know, racism, war and grotesque violence justified by the pursuit of profit. An attempt was made in the 1780s to abolish empire, turning the entire globe into (small) communities of pacific free states. I am interested in ideas that contemporaries felt directly solved problems and how they changed their views after their ideas were perceived to have failed. Strategies for enlightenment had to face the problem that the combination of Britain as a free state with commercial empire seemed to be fostering fanaticism everywhere, including fanatic ideas about liberty turning xenophobic. Enlightenment ended because contemporaries felt they had not solved these problems. I do not think we have either.

Daniel Falcone: Why is it important to see The Enlightenment as something that changes in meaning historically? How can it?

Richard Whatmore: I hope it is clear from The End of Enlightenment that if you define enlightenment as any strategy intended to prevent fanaticism and superstition from breaking out there are both multiple enlightenments and issues concerning the relationship between a particular enlightenment and, for example, liberty, equality, and commerce. Enlightenment was different in distinct contexts. Montesquieu’s view was correct that strategies for enlightenment in one set of circumstances had to be utterly different to enlightenment in an alternative context. Strategies had to be different if reform was going to be successful in one place rather than in another. The rise of Britain as a free state and the attempt to create a new kind of Republic during the French Revolution led to what I call the end of enlightenment; wars of religion broke out in secular guise. Maintaining enlightenment became much more difficult.

Whether you were a republican, monarchist, ancient or a modern, everyone considered themselves to have failed. The 18th century ended with a war to the death between the newly free state of France and Britain. The French Republic put an end to the liberty of historic republics from the Swiss cantons to the Dutch Republic and independent republics such as Venice Genoa and Geneva. If you loved liberty, the choice appeared to be between a grotesque commercial empire sustained by corrupt trade with a xenophobic populace or fanatic French republicanism likely to descend into war-driven empire. During the end of enlightenment era historical actors were certain that the world had to change – what existed could not be sustained – and they lost all faith in contemporary ideological solutions to the problems they faced. They sound like us.

Daniel Falcone: Is there room, in your opinion, for interpretations of the Enlightenment to be firmly rooted in leftist opposition to abuses set forth by organized capital? For example, Noam Chomsky reads the Enlightenment as such.

Richard Whatmore: Noam Chomsky says that the defenders of enlightenment were anarchists, giving the example of the division of labor and its effects in making individuals lead meaningless lives characterized by what was later called alienation (Adam Smith famously makes the point without using the term). Although there is little point in seeking the origins of anarchist philosophy in the eighteenth century, Chomsky does recognize that contemporaries saw commerce as an anarchic force, turning social relations and relations between states upside down. What we have recently experienced and may be surprised at today – the rapid rise of China so soon after declarations were made at the turn of the century that the United States could be expected to be the sole global superpower – would not have surprised observers of trade in the enlightenment era. Rich countries became poor, and poor became rich, meaning that neither international relations nor domestic politics could be expected ever to be stable in conditions of the commercialization of societies. I think that it is accurate to draw parallels between portrayals of the effects of John Law’s Mississippi scheme (and the resulting South Sea Bubble), for example, and Chomsky’s description of capitalism. When Adam Smith coins the term ‘mercantile system’ to describe cabals of merchants bribing politicians to pass legislation for their profit against the public interest, I think this too is an origin point for many subsequent critiques of Britain’s version of commercial society. And it was natural in the eighteenth century to rail against private corruption in the provision of state-funded products, with self-enrichment rife from the dockyards to the army to tax collection. In a sense then, we still live in their world and I’ve no doubt that they would find the notion of self-regulating markets to be ridiculous.

I think what we have lost, and the left has lost, is the critique of certain economic practices as fanatic, being the equivalent of unleashing religious warfare upon the world. Enlightenment fears about wars of religion breaking out anew, I’ve argued, encompassed tyrants and liberty, commerce and poverty, democracy, and empire. Avoiding a world where religious fanatics rule was the core enlightenment goal, and by the end of the century, almost all the luminaries see themselves to have failed. The world was ruled by empire-builders, warmongers, money men and crooked politicians, in addition to being buffeted by the establishment of new churches both secular and religious. The eighteenth century is full of projects to abolish commerce, create purely agricultural societies and closed commercial states.

But there are also highly practical schemes to abolish empire and combat the manifest evils of commercial society, for example by establishing moderate wealth everywhere. I suppose what I’m saying is that their critiques of organized capital – for example, they would never have contemplated the control of domestic politics by individuals who had no stake in the state, being able to liquidate their assets and move across borders at a time of crisis – are even richer than the Chomskyan perspective.


Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York City.