II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 47Obama tells us that it was at Occidental College that he came under the influence of Frantz
Fanon. Obama writes: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The
more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors
and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather
jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and
patriarchy.” (Dreams 100) Here is the aspiring president wandering through the post-modernist
proto-fascist rubble field. He is overwhelmingly other-directed, obsessed with his image in the eyes
of others. The name that stands out is that of Frantz Fanon, probably the biggest intellectual
influence on the young Obama.
BEFORE POL POT AND KHOMEINI, THERE WAS FANON
Fanon (1925-1961) was a French-speaking psychiatrist born on the island of Martinique in the
Caribbean. Like Rousseau before him, Fanon was promoted and made famous by Venetian cultural
operatives, notably by Umberto Campagnolo of the enormously influential Société Européenne de
Culture, one of the most important international think tanks of the time between 1945 and 1975. It
was the Venetian foundation operative Campagnolo who first brought Fanon to Europe and made
him a celebrity. The preface to the first edition of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in Paris in 1961
was written by the French existentialist pope, Jean-Paul Sartre. Fanon attempted to identify himself
with the merging anti-colonial revolutions of the third world and joined the Algerian FLN, but he
always remained a European existentialist decadent in methodological terms, and not a denizen of a
third world rice paddy or favela. Fanon, a disciple of Merleau-Ponty, was always a hater of science,
technology, and human progress, since he always thought of technology as something imposed by
the European colonial masters which had to be rejected as part of liberation from the colonial yoke.
This made Fanon a direct precursor of the New Dark Ages faction which emerged during the 1970s
in the form of such figures as Pol Pot of Cambodia, the “Islamo-marxists” Ali Shariati and Bani-
Sadr of Iran, and other declared enemies of western civilization. The problem was the aspirations of
the third world peoples to a better life could never be fulfilled without the large scale realization of
science and technology. Fanon was accordingly a thinker who appealed to degenerate third world
oligarchies, anxious to get independence but equally determined to prevent the masses from gaining
upward mobility through the social effects of industrialization, which this school tried to define as
ethnocide because it wiped out the backward and primitive dead-end cultures festering in the
backwaters of the planet.
The other leading idea of Fanon was the necessity of violence, which he exalted in direct
contradiction to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Fanon was evidently under the spell of Georges
Sorel, the theoretician of purgative violence who was so important for the young Mussolini. The
combination of anti-science demagogy couched in hyper-revolutionary third world terms, plus a
demand for violence which easily shaded over into terrorism, made Fanon’s writings a key tool for
the left wings of US, British and French intelligence during the phase of decolonization in the 1960s
and 1970s. Fanon was also important for the European terrorists of the Italian Red Brigades and the
German Baader-Meinhof group. Fanon, much more than Marx, must be seen as one of the
permanent keys to Obama’s thinking. Obama turns out to be an ultra-left existentialist, with
Fanonist-Sorelian fascist overtones.
Fanon expresses the utopian desire to eliminate all the problems inherited from European
colonialism by bringing an entirely new world, a utopia, into being. As so often happens, the chosen
tool to abolish the historical past is “absolute violence.” (Fanon citations are from The Wretched of
the Earth, chapter VI, conclusion, transl. Dominic Tweedie) Violence purifies, and it is only