Envy and Aristocide in

Underdeveloped Countries
N A T H A N I E L

FROM

AN

EVOLUTIONARY

STANDPOINT,

man has advanced to his present status by

successive increases in intelligence. He
owes his domination over both material environment and competitive fauna, not to
goodness, ruthlessness, piety or savagery,
but to brain. It is as Homo sapiens that he
rules absolutely. It follows that a study of
the forces conducive to the survival and
proliferation of viable intellectual elites and
a study of those which operate in the contrary direction and hence can be termed
aristocidal lie at the center of the dynamic
processes of history. Yet this is an area
which has been almost totally neglected by
modern social scientists since it is discordant with the dominant egalitarian creed.
The decay of religious faith has led to a
relativistic ethic which is little more than
a sociology of morals and which leads logically to a moral environment in which
everything is permissible. The Marxist way
out of this impasse is an objective ethic
which corresponds to the putative class
interests of the proletariat. The libertarian
solution is to propose an ethic based on the
maximization of freedom.
It is equally possible to assert that objective morality must be predicated on the
biological goal of species survival and that

W E Y L

the human condition is such that this survival depends on the maximum development and utilization of intelligence and of
those cognate positive psychic qualities
with which intelligence is normally correlated.
An ethic based on evolution and species
survival leads to many conclusions similar
to those espoused by libertarians. Open,
polymorphous societies with maximum
competition among individuals, who freely
choose their own channels of action, and
with minimal governmental restraint of
such action are the best systems yet devised
to advance the most able people to positions of leadership, authority and power.
Totalitarian systems operate in a contrary
direction since they have an in-built tendency to subordinate or exterminate the
most intelligent and creative of their citizens.
This last generalization applies primarily
to the revolutionary phase of the totalitarian seizure of power and transformation
of society. It does not apply equally to
bureaucratic Communism of the contemporary Soviet sort. The brain-requirements of a complexly articulated, stable and
technologically progressive social order
conflict at myriad points of contact with the
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underlying Marxist-Leninist philosophy of

envy. The class differentiations between
bureaucracy and laboring mass, against
which Djilas and other purists of Communism inveigh, are realistic recognitions
of the pragmatic need to base promotion
on ability and to relate income and perquisites to status.
From this standpoint, class stratification
within the Soviet Union is a progressive development even if the bureaucracy which
obtains promotion seems to be as opportunistic, mediocre, meritally shallow and
morally meretricious as the pages of The
Cancer Ward imply. It is possible in fact
to view the origin of the great Stalin purge
(though not its subsequent monstrous and
paranoidal growth) as the defensive reaction of an emerging managerial bureaucracy, which based its operations on stability, merit promotion, and the reimposition of class, rank and pay differences,
against revolutionary Communists motivated by egalitarianism and envy.
If this is correct, then there Was fundamental logic in the Stalinist extermination
of Trotskyists. It would also follow that
anti-Communists who hail egalitarian critics of the Soviet authoritarian system
might do well to consider that what these
critics most deplore are forces drawing the
Soviet system closer to a regime in which
the work incentive is inequality of reward.
Envy in Backward Countries

In the Arab world and in Negro Africa, one

of the most attractive features of MarxismLeninism is its perfection of the techniques of dictatorial rule. American liberal
ideologues are sometimes dismayed to find
that some of the new masters of the underdeveloped world believe they have more
useful things to learn from Lavrenti Beria
than from Thomas Jefferson.
Where national cohesion and loyalty are
weak, where citizenries are ignorant, where
society lacks such stabilizing forces as independent farmers, a strong native business
community and an officer corps imbued

with traditions of loyalty, power tends to

be both centralized and precarious. Any
democracy that arises on these foundations
will tend to be fragile and illusory. Any
dictatorship nurtured on this soil must re.
ly on effective propaganda, a powerful and
loyal political police and a good espionage
system if it is to survive.
There are other and perhaps equally important reasons for the popularity and influence of Marxism-Leninism in the socalled Third World. These are envy and the
need for exculpation. I n his thought-provoking and pathbreaking study of the role
of envy in human societies, Dr. Helmut
Schoeck defined this emotion in terms of
the resentment which inferiors feel at the
higher status and greater rewards of their
superiors. He quotes the following definition by Professor William L. Davidson
from the Encyclopedia of Religion and
Ethics :
Envy is an emotion that is essentially
both selfish and malevolent. It is aimed
at persons, and implies dislike of one
who possesses what the envious man
himself covets or desires, and a wish to
harm him. Graspingness for self and illwill lie at the base of it. There is in it
also a consciousness of inferiority to the
person envied, and a chafing under this
consciousness. ?

Strictly speaking, Marxism-Leninism is

not a pure philosophy of envy since it does
not consider the proletariat inferior to the
bourgeoisie, but, on the contrary, the c I m
which is heir to the future. The motivation
of envy, with the element of self-consciousness of inferiority, is more nearly approximated in the anarchocommunist philosophies of the New Left and in the revolutionary nihilism of people like Frantz
Fanon.
In primitive and simple societies, envy
is directed at the superior or fortunate individual. In advanced, modern societies, envy
is depersonalized; it is made collective in
its socially significant forms. Race, class
and caste resentments prevail and their
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combined centrifugal force disrupts societies. The earlier private envies still exist,
but they are despised, reprobated and repressed. Generally, the result is not to bind
and stifle the superior man by forcing him
to conform to the ways of mediocrity;
rather social policies are adopted which bestow rewards, status, power and income on
the undeserving, that is to say on the
enviers, not on the envied. This both reduces the rewards for ability and increases
the burden of parasitism which the able
and productive must support.
Traditional envy in backward societies
puts down creativity, punishes deviations
from community behavior patterns and tradition, blocks the introduction of better
working techniques, and forces those who
earn more through more efficient work to
share their surplus with the undeserving.
It creates stagnation, stifles progress, prevents innovation and perpetuates poverty.
Magic and witchcraft reinforce the demands which envy makes on the successful
few. Jahoda writes concerning Ghana:

In addition to the elements of pure

envy and hate (real or imaginary)
directed against the man who has left
others behind, there are claims made on
the kinsman with greater status and
wealth. These may be very onerous (e.g.
unlimited hospitality) and sometimes
altogether irreconcilable with the new
status (marriage to an illiterate crosscousin.) There is no ready escape from
such dilemmas, because the actor generally acknowledges, at least to some extent, the legitimacy of traditional obligations; being unable to fulfil them
adequately induces guilt and this increases the likelihood of diffuse anxiety
or explicit fears of supernatural reprisals.2
The prevalence of traditional envy in
Ghana is illustrated by Jahodas finding
that envy is attributed to small infants
who are said to be jealous of their forthcoming sibling before he is even born.
Middle school pupils, asked to write about

their life ambitions, gave replies such as

these: . if people see that you are going
higher they always hate you; sometimes
they make gang and kill you at once. Or,
C
when they saw that you are going too
high, they hated you and perish you from
the earth or make juju so you may be
mad.3
The enormous gap between expectations
and real possibilities for advancement in
tropical Africa ensures a high proportion
of failures and a concomitant prevalence
of envy. Partly for this reason, witchcraft
and magic have increased in sub-Saharan
Africa since independence and with the rise
of urbanization. Both factors contribute to
the breakdown of traditional tribal institutions and to the psychic security system
which the latter offered. Urbanization and
detribalization produce anomie. On the
other hand, surveys in Ghana indicate that
parents are increasingly critical of the
authoritarian, envy-producing methods of
child-rearing to which they themselves were
exposed.

..

.. .

Modern Envy in Underdeveloped Areas

Special factors seem to operate to increase

the scope and virulence of collective envy
in underdeveloped countries. Perhaps the
most important of these is the intensely visible gap between the lifestyles of the backward countries and those of the modem
world. This gap has existed since time immemorial. What is unique to the present
age is that it is highly visible and generally repudiated as immoral. This visibility
has been magnified by television, radio,
cinema and the mass press. Other things being equal, the curve of envy should rise in
response to the magnitude of the gap, to its
visibility, and to the general denial of its
legitimacy. As modern mass media penetrate the peasantries of Asia, Africa and
Latin America, they often serve as carriers
of envy. The widespread belief that the
poor nations are entitled to the same high
real income as the rich ones was not characteristic of earlier eras. Staring at the bro41!

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cade and jewels of episcopal vestments or

the tomb effigies of lords and kings in the
cathedral which he visited, the medieval
peasant would have been made acutely
aware of the chasm between his own lifestyle and that of his rulers. But he had also
been taught that these riches and luxuries
were not for him. Status, rank and equality
were prescribed by the laws of God and the
state. Whatever feelings of envy he might
possess were deflected or moderated by the
Christian assurance that he would enjoy
equality with the powerful in death, that
a virtuous life on earth would give him life
everlasting in heaven, while rich malefactors whom he now envied would stew eternally in hell.
All this has, of course, been swept aside.
Fire-and-brimstone Christianity is vanishing even from Latin America and Africa.
The West has proclaimed the dogma of human equality and it has swept all else before it. The wretched masses of the Orient
and the Tropics are taught that neither race
nor class should serve as barriers to their
advancement. The indoctrination goes beyond this legitimate observation. It adds
that genetic differences in intelligence,
character and ability are either nugatory
or nonexistent; that stock is nothing and
that environment or habitat is all. If this
is true, the abject poverty of these masses,
in contrast to the lavish wealth of life in the
West, must be the result of either accident
or injustice.
In the specific case of the underdeveloped world, envy and hatred are intimately
interrelated. The more the masses are exposed to visible illustrations of the richness
of life in the West, as against the poverty
of their own existence, the more they demand an end to the contrast. The more they
are indoctrinated with egalitarian ideologies, whether by Soviet or Western pundits,
the more they conclude that all the special
advantages which Western man enjoys
should be instantly available to them. Egalitarian and environmentalist teaching makes
them believe that their poverty is not due
to their own shortcomings. To the extent

that such people have recently emerged

from animism and, specifically, from the
belief that misfortunes are always due to
the ilIwill of a human being or god, they
find it easy to transfer this magical approach to Marxism and to blame their
misery and failure on the malevolence of
a class of exploiters.
Of course, it is possible for people in
these backward areas to realize that the
fundamental cause of their troubles may
be an objective situation, such as a popula.
tion explosion in a land of sparse natural
resources, or a psychological difficulty, such
as the domination of tradition and superstition over rational thought. But solutions of
that sort do not provide the same enormous
psychic satisfaction as the Marxist-Leninist
answer that poverty is caused by class or
race exploitation.
Marxism-Leninism has the decisive advantage over other possible explanations o
offering a tangible, living human hateobject. Since envy is an emotion which
arouses hate, it is best satisfied by an ideology which gives that hate an emotionally
satisfactory target. Specifically, the hated
object should be one which can be physically destroyed. If possible, that destruction
should be hand-to-hand and brutal rather
than such a long-range solution as getting
the detested foreigners to abandon their
properties and go home.
The second advantage of the ideology of
class exploitation is that it offers an unambiguous and putatively instantaneous solution to the problem of poverty. Once the exploiters are destroyed, uprooted, liquidated,
no major obstacles remain, the subjects of
these underdeveloped countries are taught,
to their acquiring the riches and adopting
the lifestyles of the exterminated enemy
class.
The third advantage is that MarxismLeninism automatically exonerates the native ruling bureaucracies, particularly if
they are so-called socialist bureaucracies,
of any responsibility for their failure to
govern honestly, competently or wisely.
Their shortcomings can aIways be imputed

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to the heritage of colonialism, to an alleged

divide-et-impera policy of the hated ci-devant foreign exploiter, or to alien class elements which have insidiously infiltrated
into the new socialist regime and which can
be noisily unmasked and publicly and joyously executed.
In preparing this article, it occurred to
me that it might be interesting to see
whether any of the post-Lenin revisions of
Marxism catered specifically to the envyhatred syndrome and, if so, whether they
had been accepted by large numbers of intellectuals in the so-called Third World.
Revisionists such as Djilas, Lukacs and
Marcuse are of little appeal or impact. The
case is otherwise, however, with Frantz
Fanon, the young Martinique-born Negro
doctor and psychoanalyst who fought with
the Algerian independence forces and died
of leukemia at the age of thirty-six.
The Wretched of the Earth

The most popular and the most significant

of Fanons books is The Wretched of the
Earth: It is directed specifically to the revolutionary forces of the so-called colonial
and semi-colonial world. This work, which
has apparently had major impact among
non-white revolutionaries, is specifically directed toward satisfying the hate-envy emotions of the populations it seeks to arouse.
Its author delights in the imagery of violence and annihilation in a way which
would have profoundly shocked Marx and
Engels, who considered their mission to
continue and enrich Western civilization,
not to destroy it. This work of violence and
nihilism is at variance with Marxism-Leninism in several significant respects. These
variances or deviations tend to illustrate the
specific role of envy in the revolutionary
ferment of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Fanon worships total violence for its own
sake and because he believes that it provides illumination and manhood. The
naked truth of decolonization, he writes,
evokes for us the searing bullets and
bloodstained knives which emanate from

it. For if the last shall be first, this will only

come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.
(p. 27) Fanon writes of the native revolutionary as the enemy of all values and in
this sense he is the absolute evil. He is
the corrosive element, destroying all that
comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with
beauty or morality
(p. 32) Decolonization means total, complete and absolute
substitution of one species of men by another species of men. (p. 27) Again, The
native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.
(P. 41)
Fanon enthusiastically approves the Mau
Mau requirement that each man kill a human being so that his road of return to established society should be permanently
blocked. He might have found the same
recipe for revolutionary nihilism in Dostoevskys The Possessed. TO work means
to work for the death of the settler. (p67) Violence alone, violence committed
by the people, violence organized and educated by its leader, makes it possible for the
masses to understand social truths and
gives the key to them. Without that violence, there is nothing but a few reforms
at the top, a flag waving; and down there
at the bottom an undivided mass, still living
in the Middle Ages, endlessly marking
time. (p. 118)
This pathological glorification of violence not unexpectedly appealed to JeanPaul Sartre, who wrote an intellectually
chaotic introduction to The Wretched of the
Earth. In this masochistic essay, Sartre
made the astonishing observation that if
you set aside Sorels fascist utterances, you
will find that Fanon is the first since Engels
to bring the processes of history into the
clear light of day. (pp. 12-13) Sartres
tacit assumption that IFanon was a more
profound thinker than Lenin tells us something about the quality of his critical judgments.
The glorification of total violence and the
strange belief that violence is a talisman,

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which in some magical way makes it possible for the masses to understand social
truths, is, of course, quite remote from
Marxism, Leninism or any other comparatively civilized and rational doctrine. It
seems to be the continuation of an ancient
and somewhat disreputable tradition-that
is to say, the worship of evil, destruction,
unreason, pure nothingness. If so, Fanons
progenitors include, not only the diabolists
of the Middle Ages, but the anarchists of
the deed who infested Europe during the
last decades of the nineteenth century and
whose social base seems to have been an alliance between bohemian intellectuals and
the shifdess, unemployed and unemployable
dregs of society.
Based on his materialistic conception of
history, Marx concluded that the proletariat
was destined to inherit power from the
bourgeoisie and to usher in a classless society. Hence, it was uniquely the class of
the future. Its morality was destined to be
the morality of society as a whole. Even
where the proletariat was numerically
weak, it constituted the only historically
conscious element in the social struggle and
its class needs, as interpreted, of course, by
professional revolutionaries who were rarely of working class origin, determined all
strategic and tactical decisions.
Fanon departs completely from this view.
In fact, he brands the proletariat as a reactionary class:
It cannot be too strongly stressed that
in the colonial territories the proletariat
is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been most pampered by
the colonial regime.
In the colonial
countries the working class has everything to lose; in reality, it represents
that fraction of the colonial nation
which is necessary and irreplaceable if
the colonial machine is to run smoothly

...

. . . (p. 86)

Fanon and Sartre consider the peasants

and the Lumpenproletariat the only true
revolutionary forces. In the colonial countries, the former writes, the peasants

alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The
starving peasant, outside the class system,
is the first among the exploited to discover
that only violence pays. (p. 47) As for the
second group, It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at
the core of the Lumpenproletariat that the
rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For
the Lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and
from their clan, constitutes one of the most
spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary fbrces of a colonial people. (pp.
102-103)
Marx had a different view of these people, whom even Fanon depicted as thieving, drunken, debauched shanty town
drifters. (p. 103) In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx pointed out
that the Lumpenproletariat of Paris, organized as the Mobile Guard, killed 3,000 revolutionary French workmen in 1848 and
captured another 15,000. In Class Struggles
i n France, Marx characterized this supposedly revolutionary element as
a mass strictly differentiated from the
industrial proletariat, a recruiting
ground for thieves and criminals of all
kinds, living on the crumbs of society,
people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu, with
differences according to the degree of
civilization of the nation to which they
belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character .

..

Fanons revision of Marxism-Leninism

may be intellectually somewhat shoddy, but
it is apparently having a major impact in
the underdeveloped countries and among
the advocates of permanent revolution. Its
psychological mainspring is envy in an
unusually concentrated and virulent form.
The shanty town unemployed and the
peasant mass are seen as the true revolutionary classes because they have nothing
to lose by the utter and total destruction of
civilization. In this revolution, the last
shall be first and the first last (p. 28), that

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is to say, the people of talent and ability are

to be exterminated and replaced by those
without either. In this revolution, individualism is the first to disappear (p. 36)the individual man is to be totally submerged in the inchoate mass.
The expression of this envy is the total
destruction of everyone who is more capable, more industrious, better educated,
more sensitive and more decent than the
most debased elements in the population.
Fanon complains that the African intellectual shuns these tribal peasants and shantytown thieves because he is terrified by the
void, the degradation, and the savagery he
sees there. (p. 177)
Fanon was intelligent enough to see that
the elimination of European rule often led
to a deterioration in living standards for
the African people and the degeneration of
honest government into kleptocracy. In
page after page, he enumerates the sicknesses of liberated Africa. Characteristically, he accuses the colonialists of setting Moslems and Christians at loggerheads, installing puppet native govern.
ments, fomenting graft by paying bribes,
and exploiting the free countries economically. These crimes are either committed
through the machinations of the colonialists
themselves or by Africans so imbued with
the colonial mentality that they can be considered as black shadows of the white settlers. One presumes that, after the whites
have had their throats cut, those blacks who
follow in their footsteps are also to be exterminated.
The presumed recipe is to forge a mystic
community in blood in which all are equal
because all are equally debased. The cooperative commonwealth to arise from this
shambles is sketched only vaguely. Fanon
envisages anarchosyndicalist rural and artisan cooperatives, such as those which functioned behind guerrilla lines in the Algerian struggIe for independence. The
shortest refutation of this blurred utopian
vision is that the shared hatred of civil war
is such a powerful cement that it can make

inept social and economic organizations

function, but only over the short run.
One of the more interesting features of
Fanons book is his summary of the work
of Dr. J. C. Carothers on the mind of the
native African black and that of Professor
Porot and his associates on the mentality
of the Algerian n a t i ~ e . ~
In the study he did for the World Health
Organization, Carothers concluded that the
African Negro brain is essentially auditory
rather than visual. He added that all the
peculiarities of African psychiatry can be
envisaged in terms of frontal idleness.6
Carothers added that it was no accident
that the word foresight has a visual connotation, and by no accident that vision,
unlike hearing, is dependent on cortical integrity. He thought it clear that a verbal
and musical ability alone must fail to develop most of those faculties that make man
preeminent
.7
Any appraisal of the validity of the
ture of native African mind obviously lies
outside the scope of this paper. What is inCarothers hypothesis concerning the structeresting is that Fanon should have made
a careful study of these controversial findings that both the African Negro mind and
the North African mind are deficient in
that part of the brain which is anatomically newest and best adapted to complex, abstract thought.
One is tempted to infer that Fanon was
first swayed by these analyses, then later
rejected them. He makes no effort to refute
Carothers findings or controvert his evidence. Any such refutation would have
been superfluous in The Wretched of the
Earth since these theories do not meet the
psychic needs of native Africans or of their
Western revolutionary supporters. Any
theory which attempts to explain the poverty or shortcomings of peoples in terms of
their own genetic deficiencies cannot serve
to channel envy into hatred of a scapegoat.
Maoism, Trotskyism, some of the anarchocommunist theories of the New Left and
other manifestations of contemporary revolutionary thought appear to be conscious

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or unconscious efforts to exploit pervading

sentiments of envy and to fan envy into
aristocide.
To the ruling bureaucracies of newlyfledged, backward nations, these theories
may at first seem attractive since they deflect criticism from governments which are
venal and incompetent to foreigners and
class enemies. On the other hand, poverty
and misery will continue to generate envy
and that envy will need objects for its
hatred. This can open a Pandoras box of
hatred and destruction, with the violence
turning on the native ruling element once
the hated whites have been expelled or
slaughtered. Thus, it is dangerous. As the
new nations are stabilized, strong forces are
set in motion to stifle the Fanon type of
thinking or, at the very least, to utilize it
against foreigners and then suffocate it if
possible.
Leaders of the Movements of Envy

The originating and leadership element in

these revolutions of nihilism is seldom composed of illiterate peasants or enraged
Lumpenproletarians. It consists more often
of alienated intellectuals. It would be quite
unrealistic to visualize these people as predestined failures, as people consumed by
hatred because they are unable to win for
themselves positions of comfort, respect and
power in their societies. On the contrary,
a man like Fanon would have been eminent
and successful had he defended the colonial
system instead of attacking it.
These revolutionary intellectuals are frequently characterized by their status as permanent outsiders. They are outcasts from
society either because society rejects them
or because they imagine that they are not
accepted. In the case of Fanon, his overriding ambiguity was his status as a black intellectual.
This sense of ambiguity and hence insecurity of status is likely to occur when a
new element moves rapidly into positions
of leadership and power. The preeminent
position, in relation to their numbers, of

Jews in the political, economic and intellectual elite is in sharp contradiction to their
underrepresentation in the social elite. The
former represent the present and future;
the latter represents the past. This ambiguity of status conduces to insecurity and rebelliousness.
The leaders of these revolutionary movements are above all intellectuals. Therefore,
they cannot express their envy of well-established elites in spontaneous violence.
They need to construct or accept a philosophy of history and society which makes
that violence appear to be supremely moral
and right. It is only after this has been
done that they are capable of committing
crimes and enormities on a terrifying scale.
Mere hatred, brutality and callousness cannot cause stupendous crimes. For that, it
is necessary that the perpetrators have a religiously or politically motivated utopian
philosophy, one that teaches that the
promised land can be reached only by wading through blood.
The motivation for revolution in the case
of ethnic minorities is probably to eliminate their own feelings of anomie. The Jewish revolutionary and the pampered and
honored black intellectual both envy their
psychically more secure counterparts who
belong by blood to the dominant ethnic
strain of their society.
These revolutionaries are also in the role
of men envied because of their superiority.
The Jews feel the weight of this potential
Gentile envy at all times. Millenia of persecution teach them that this fear is never irrational. The black intellectual, such as
Fanon, may have an equally intense fear
of envy by the far less gifted majority of
his own ethnic stock, a fear which has deep
roots, of which Fanon was keenly aware,
in the tribal heritage of magic and witchcraft.
This fear on the part of the envied may
a t first assume exclusively the form of rational self-protection against a potential external enemy. However, it evolves into an
internal and somewhat masochistic moral
rejection of the more privileged status and

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lifestyle enjoyed by the envied person. This

latter form may in time become so dominant that the original motivation of personal fear is discarded and forgotten, so much
so that the ethnic outcast turned revolutionary may believe that it never existed.
What do these leveller revolutionaries of
minority origin see as the solution to their
own personal problem? Or, if they are unaware of the nature of their personal motivations, what sort of future world do they
regard as desirable? How does the shape
of this world relate to their problem?
Feeling insecure in any stratified society,
believing, whether rightly or wrongly that
it will reject them, levellers of the Fanon
type want a classless, raceless society, one
in which mankind is an undifferentiated
mass. This is not very different from the
primitive Christian reaction to feelings of
anomie and exclusion vis-&vis Roman society. The Jewish revolutionaries, or rather
those who are revolutionary to escape their
Jewishness, share this infantile aspiration.
They believe they see this ideal actualized
in such revolutionary struggles as those of
Castros guerrilleros in the Sierra Maestra.
The early Christians saw a similar ideal in
the unity of the agape.
Societies based on undifferentiated fraternity, however, survive only under exceptional social conditions. They are successful
when persecution, fear and conflict dominate the scene. The danger or hatred must
be so intense that all latent animosity is
channeled toward the enemy or that fear
is so great that all internecine squabbles
must be tabled and set aside in the interests of group survival.
Once these particular tensions, hatreds,
fears or dangers have been removed, the
ideal of fraternity dissolves. The utopian
societies in nineteenth century America and
elsewhere were strangled in the cradle by
prosperity. By contrast, the Mormonsexemplifying intense group solidarity, but
not equality-thrived
because they were
persecuted.
Where old-established class or race gradations have been done away with, new cri-

teria and symbols of social differentiation

and pecking order take their place. In the
sphere of ethnic homogenizing, the case of
Brazil is instructive. The absence of firm
barriers against black-white intermarriage
in Portuguese culture did not create the
harmonious new Brazilian multiracial society that Gilbert0 Freyre envisaged. The
destruction of barriers against miscegenation led merely to a far more complex
ethnic classification than prevailed in the
Protestant countries with a slave-holding
past. These classifications in turn were
highly correlated with status?
The ethnic outcast turned revolutionary
in some ways parallels the declassed revolutionaries of anarchism of the deed of the
previous century. In both instances, there
are indications of psychic disorder masquerading as philosophy. In both instances,
the need is to destroy the entire social order and, specifically, to reduce all those
members of society who enjoy superior
status, position or respect to the common
level. This may imply nothing less than the
physical extermination of most of those
who are endowed with superior intelligence
and with those cognate qualities needed for
the creation and development of civilizations.
Aristocide in the Third World

A somewhat cursory survey of recent revolutions, civil wars and wars of invasion in
the underdeveloped world suggests that
aristocide has not been occurring there on
the massive scale that might have been expected on apriori grounds.
In Latin America, there have been no
wars between the nations of the area since
the bloody Gran Chaco conflict between Bolivia and Chile in the 1920s. As I have already indicated, the existence of a tacitly
accepted hierarchical system based on race
has tended to make power struggles of short
duration and small cost. The centripetal nature of the Spanish governmental heritage
has brought centralization of power. While
this may paralyze local initiative, it limits

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the cost and scope of upheavals and civil

wars.
The apparent exception-the
Cuban
revolution under Fidel Castro-was
primarily an armed struggle of intellectuals
and truants from the upper classes. Large
masses of peasants were involved only in
its final, largely ceremonial stages. While
a significant portion of the professionals,
intellectuals and middle-to-upper-class o p
ponents of the regime were executed after
show trials or in punitive action against rebellions, the human cost of the Castro revolution has been quantitatively insignificant
compared with the Soviet Union, China or
some of the Balko-Danubian states.
In Africa, aristocide often occurs in connection with intertribal struggles. Of these,
the ruthless suppression of the Biafrans at
the cost of at least a million lives is a
flagrant instance. The Ibos are better educated, more enterprising and more successful than other Nigerian tribes. On the eve
of the conflict, they were disproportionately
represented as students in secondary
schools and universities, in the government
service, and as skilled workers, artisans and
merchant^.^ Yet the suppression of Biafra
appears to have been primarily a tribal
struggle for power, intensified by the presence of rich oil reserves in Biafran waters
and by consequent big-power involvement.
The assassinations, rebellions, tribal conflicts, coups detat, and civil wars, which
have constituted such a monotonous and
persistent element in the history of free
Negro Africa, show components of envy
and genocide most clearly when they are
under Communist leadership or ideological
influence.
In terms of aristocide, the most salient
case is the Simba rebellion in the Congo in
1964j65. The rebels were supplied with
both Soviet and Chinese arms. Acting on
Maos statement, If we can take the Congo, we can hold the whole of Africa,lo
Chinese Communists provided military
leadership.
The victims of the Simbas were killed
with extreme cruelty, including disem-

bowelment of living persons and the eating

of their hearts, livers and genitals while still
warm in accordance with the requirements
of ritual cannibalism.l Others were forced
to swallow gasoline; then their bellies were
slit open and they were set afire.12
The victims were preferentially intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries and American agents. To deal with these people,
villagers would be assembled as a peoples
court. A prisoner would be brought forward and the crowd would be asked whether the accused was innocent or guilty.
There was seldom any doubt about the verdict.ls Execution was generally by burning
to death.
Self-evidently, genocide was attempted
against virtually the entire white population, including several hundred refugees
held at Stanleyville and Belgian nuns in the
countryside. Within Congolese society, the
executions were selective. One survivor estimated that 4,000 Congolese were killed
in Paulis-mostly the towns intellectuals
(clerks, teachers, civil servants) . They
started by killing anyone who was welldressed, said a railway employee who got
out alive. In this country the well-dressed
are the well-educated. 14
The unofficial representative of Katanga
in the United States stated privately that
the selective genocide of the more literate
inhabitants of the Simba-ravaged area had
so gutted the region of brains that he believed it would take a generation for it to
get back on its feet.
The Chinese Communist objective seems
to have been to make tabula rasa of the native Congolese so-called intellectuals either
to prepare the way for the sort of total social revolution envisaged by Fanon or else
to facilitate Chinese settlement in and domination of the Congo.
Despite this instance, the evidence for
systematic aristocide in Negro Africa is
fragmentary. Where ci-devant ruling tribes
are being slaughtered by their former
slaves, the process seems to be more a continuation of tribal war than systematic extirpation of elites. The spasmodic and im-

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pulsive nature of the African mind may

preclude devising and carrying out any
such long-range strategy. Ch6 Guevaras experience in the Congo convinced him that
the human material necessary for a revolution and a protracted guerrilla struggle
simply did not exist there.
In Asia, the suppression of Bangla Desh
by the troops of West Pakistan involved
both genocide and aristocide. Time reported on May 3, 1971:
The dead of Dacca included some of
East Pakistans most prominent educators and businessmen, as well as some
five hundred students. Among at least
seven University of Dacca professors
who were executed without apparent
reason was the head of the philosophy
department, Govinda Chandra Dev, 65,
a gentle Hindu who believed in unity in
diversity. Another victim was Jogesh
Chandra Ghosh, 86, the invalid millionaire chemist.
Intellectuals and businessmen were murdered in a general slaughter which may
have cost a million lives. If there was a selective concentration on the intellectual and
business elites, the reasons probably included the desire for loot in an area where
many businessmen had no faith in banks
and kept bullion in their homes. Other
probable causes were the conviction that
the independence movement could best be
destroyed by silencing its brains and, finally, the congenital Moslem antipathy to education and scholarship.
The Human Cost of Communism

The distinguished British expert on the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest, estimated the
human cost of Russian Communism as including over 20,000,000 human beings
. . executed or killed in other ways by the
Soviet Communist authorities since the
revolution.y15Conquest considers this a conservative estimate which might well be increased by fifty percent. It does not include
the nine million Russians who lost their

lives during the civil war or the five million

others who perished in the 1921 famine.
The twenty million were casualties of terror. As Lenin put it, The energy and mass
nature of the terror must be encouraged.
In the fall of 1970, the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee asked Professor
Richard L. Walker, Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of South Carolina, to prepare a parallel study of the human cost of Chinese Communism. Dr. Walker found that from 1927
to date Chinese Communism had caused a
minimum of 34 million deaths and a maximum of 64 million. This is in conformity
with the recent charge by Radio Moscow
that in the course of ten years, more than
25,000,000 people in China were exterminated
During 1960 alone, Mao Tsetungs government exterminated more
Chinese than were killed in the entire war
against Japan.
Regardless of which estimate is accepted, Mao Tse-tung emerges with the peculiar distinction of having slaughtered
more of his subjects than any other ruler
in history.
From the standpoint of this paper, the
significant issue is not the extent of the total genocide, but its selective concentration
on intellectual and managerial elites. Dr.
Walker stresses the burning of Chinese libraries and the selective liquidation of
Chinese intellectuals. He quotes Professor
Yang Shih-chans injudicious letter to the
Yangtze Daily, published during the brief
Hundred Flowers era of liberalization of
the regime:

...

During the social reforms campaign,

unable to endure the spiritual torture
and humiliation imposed by the struggle,
the intellectuals who chose to die by
jumping from tall buildings, drowning
in rivers, swallowing poison, cutting
their throats, or by other methods, were
innumerable.16
The Cultural Revolution of 1966-68 continued the war of extermination against
Chinas intellectuals. Ken ling, a young

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Chinese refugee who took a prominent part

in that movement, describes some of its aspects. The teachers in Lings school were
forced to parade around the .athletic field
wearing dunce caps, shouting that they
were blackhearted reactionaries, and b e g
ging forgiveness on their knees. This was
alternated with prolonged beatings, being
forced to kneel on broken glass, being compelled to eat bugs and human excrement.
Several attempted suicide; one was beaten
to death. These teachers had been competent, diligent and well-liked, Ling relates.
The motivation he gives for his active participation in this persecution and in the
,many others that followed is an almost classic expression of the mentality of envy. I
wanted to destroy things so I could say, I
have done all that. . If we could not enjoy something, then we would destroy it so
that everyone would be equal.l
By now, it is fairly generally recognized
that the Cultural Revolution in China was
not merely part of the personal power
struggle between Chief of State Liu Shaochi and Chairman Mao, but a momentous
battle over fundamental principles and revolutionary direction. The Cultural Revolution was directed against the increasing bureaucratization of the Chinese state and the
emergence of an urban-based managerial
and professional elite, preoccupied with its
careers and privileges and out of touch with
the farm and factory laborers. Fearing
that China was moving in the revisionistyy
and reformist direction of the Soviet Union,
Mao Tse-tung unleashed the regimented
youth of China to shatter the power of the
emerging bureaucracy and intelligentsia
and rebuild the country on more egalitarian lines.y18
The most sinister aspect of aristocide in
the Peoples Republic of China is not only
its vast extent, but the fact that it has continued long past the period of the revolutionary struggle for power.
The Marxist-Leninist theory of aristocide
is that intellectuals, officers, officials, executives, business leaders (except for the minority among them which works for the

..

revolution) are either part of the exploiting

class or its apologists and retainers. The
success of the revolution requires that they
be liquidated.
The practical advantages of this wholesale liquidation are considerable. Those
who look back with yearning to better times
are physically destroyed and thus incapable
of reminding the masses that life was better
under the old regime or of fighting for
greater freedom. The new masters of society comprise veteran Communists and fellow travellers and people from the lowest
strata of society. Neither group has anything to gain from counterrevolution.
Therefore, their loyalty can be counted on.
Ancillary advantages are that the revolutionary element is bound together by blood
guilt and that the sort of people who are
thrust into power come largely from the less
intelligent social strata and are therefore
more likely to serve as docile instruments
of the totalitarian state and credulous
mouthpieces for its propaganda.
Aristocide, however, is not an unopposed
force in Communist societies. It is most
acute and pervasive during the early period
of revolutionary consolidation of power and
liquidation of the middle classes. Once the
Communist society reaches the scientific,
technological and educational level of the
Soviet Union today, aristocide becomes an
impediment to material progress. It must
be offset by the efficient selection of the best
minds and the outstanding potential leaders
to man the bureaucracy and the professions.
Nevertheless, if a reversal of direction
occurs, it is not complete. The authoritarian
nature of the state requires the suppression
of dissent when that dissent becomes dangerous and challenges the fundamental
principles of the social order. As the society
becomes more prosperous and more intricately articulated, greater freedom for the
managerial, scientific and professional
classes becomes a prerequisite of progress.
Millions of minds are opened to critical
winds from abroad. When this freedom results in opposition to the system, the

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weapon of aristocide is again brought into

use. The new aristocide may affect only a
small fraction of the millions who perished
in Stalinist labor camps. It may take such
comparatively mild forms as mind-destroying chemotherapy rather than a bullet in
the skull in an NKVD cellar. But it is still
there and it still operates. As Marxists
would say, we have here a permanent contradiction within the system.
By the time aristocide has ceased to operate on a vast scale, irreparable genetic
havoc may have been inflicted on the population. We have no accurate way of appraising the precise extent to which the successive purges in the Soviet Union, including
the destruction of the kulaks as a class,
were genetically catastrophic. It is pertinent
in this context, however, to compare Russian creative achievements under the last
Czars with those under Bolshevism. In literature, no contemporary Russians rank with
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Those who tower
above the prevailing level of mediocrity are
men like Pasternak and Solzhenitsin, who
are branded as enemies of the regime and
who may also descend from the exploiting
classes and be partly Jewish. In music,
there is no one who ranks with Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky or Borodin. We search in
vain for great and original scientific minds
such as Mendeleev, Lobachevski and Sonya
Kovalevski. The impressive Soviet progress
in such specialized fields as rocketry and
the exploration of outer space seems to contradict the hypothesis of massive genetic
damage through purges and terror. But this
progress is, to a great extent, the work of
Jewish scientists and is the result of a formidable concentration of the best brains on
military science and technology. As I wrote
five years ago: Thus, the Soviet Union can
be regarded as a vast, as yet uncompleted,
dysgenic experiment, not only in direct
terms by liquidating members of the elite,
but perhaps indirectly by creating environments so hostile to the residual elite that
they react by limiting their p r ~ g e n y . ~ ~
In the Chinese case, we have even less
ability to gauge the genetic havoc. The eco-

nomically backward character of the country and the irrational thought processes of
Mao Tse-tung2O no doubt served to remove
commonsense limitations on the butchery
of the talented. The extirpation of the socalled landlords meant the elimination of
the entire stratum in rural China which had
most ambition, worked hardest, used the
most modern farming methods available,
and applied intelligence to its tasks. In
rural countries, the peasantry is the most
important reservoir from which men of outstanding ability and even genius are drawn.
But the Peoples Republic of China has decapitated even its peasantry.
The future will reveal the extent of the
genetic damage inflicted by the Maoist policies of aristocide. We will discover whether
the mental resources of the Chinese people
are sufficient to withstand even this genetic
outrage or whether the population has been
reduced to intellectual mediocrity by the
dysgenic policies of the regime.
The conclusion which this article suggests
is that Communism is the chief source of
aristocide in the contemporary world and,
together with Nazism, perhaps the greatest
dysgenic force in history. It is a devastatingly efficient system for the impairment
of mans genetic resources through selective extermination of gifted people. This
process is most virulent in the revolutionary
phase of the seizure and consolidation of
power and is particularly so in economically backward countries which can function
fairly effectively without a large and capable intellectual elite. As Communist regimes
become technologically complex and stabilize into managerial bureaucracies, these
dysgenic policies tend to become subordinated to the systematic search for people
of above-average intelligence and ability
to form part of the ruling class.*
*This article is based on a paper presented
at the Second Symposium on Human Differentiation entitled, The Nature and Consequences
of Egalitarian Ideology, sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies, Inc., of Menlo Park,
California, and held in Gstaad, Switzerland, September 10-14, 1972.

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Quoted in Schoeck, Envy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 19701, 15.
*Gustav Jahoda, Social Aspirations, Magic
and Witchcraft in Ghana: a Social Psychological
Interpretation, in P. C. Lloyd (editor), The New
Elites of Tropical Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 19661, 207.
bid., 209.
London, Penguin, 1967. The English title is
taken from the opening lines of the International:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation; arise, ye
wretched of the earth. The original French title,
Les damn& de la terre, derives from the same
source.
J. C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health
and Disease: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1953).
Ibid., p. 50.
J. C. Carothen, Journal of Medical Sciences,
97 (19511, 12.
Gilbert0 Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves
(New York: Knopf, 1946) ; Frank Tannenbaum,
Slave and Citizen (New York: Knopf, 1947);
Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in America (New
York: Walker, 1964).
Biafra, Andreski wrote, has a larger and
much better educated population than most African states and by all standards of professed political ethics eminently qualifies for sovereignty.
Stanislav Andreski, The African Predicament: A
Study in the Pathology of Modernization (London: Michael Joseph, 19681, 77.

lDAfrica Review, London, February 1966, 6.

Moscow landed an IL-18 in Uganda on October
31, 1964, from which three truckloads of arms
were taken to rebel territory. Soviet, Czech and
Chinese arms reached the Simbas through such
friendly African states as Sudan, Algeria, UAR
and Tanzania.
Ernest W. Lefever, Spear and Scepter (Wash.
ington: Brooking5 Institute, 1970), 110; M. Crawford Young, The Congo Rebellion, Africa Report, (April 1965), 6-11.
Time, November 13, 1964, 51.
Time, November 27, 1964, 42.
Time, December 4, 1964, 30.
?Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Report for the Fiscal Year Ending Feb. 29, 1972,
summarizing Conquests study for the Committee,
The Human Cost of Soviet Communism, published in 1971. Also see Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
*lbid, 17. I t is worth noting that Professor
Yang Shih-chan was a member of the Chinese
Communist Party.
Ken Ling, The Revenge of Heaven: Journal
of a Young Chinese (New York: Putnam, 1972).
IsWarren H. Phillips, Changing China, Wall
Street Journal, October 30, 1972, 1, 18.
Nathaniel Weyl, Aristocide a s a Force in
History, Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1967,
237-245.
wv. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 19701, 467470.

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