The New Dark Age

Thursday, 7 August 2025 — The Tricontinental

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In July, a few days after the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, I had lunch with his daughter, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France. When I commented that Fanon had died so young, at thirty-nine, Mireille corrected me: ‘No, thirty-six’. Even three more years would have been a gift – to him because he might have been able to finish other work and spend more time with his family, and to us because we might have gotten the book that would have come after The Wretched of the Earth – perhaps one on how to construct a national project that would not succumb to the pitfalls of narrow nationalism. But that was not to be.

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Thursday, 31 July 2025 — The Tricontinental

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Those who do not live in war zones or in suffocated countries are forced to live life as if there is nothing strange about what is happening around us. When we read about war, it is disconnected from our lives, and many of us want to stop listening to anything about the human misery caused by weapons or by sanctions. The scholasticism of the academic and the hushed tones of the diplomat are silenced as the bomb and the bank wage war against the planet. After authorising the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima (Japan) on 6 August 1945, US President Harry S. Truman announced on the radio: ‘If [the Japanese] do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth’.

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