countering the current counter-revolutionary moment with Dr. Gerald Horne
talking about his life & work during the pan-Africanist & anti-apartheid movements, the legendary historian draws sobering parallels between then & now
“1 trend is the world adjusting to this counter-revolutionary moment in the US & the other is the rise of BRICS, the rise of China. On one hand, any erosion of the imperialist bloc is, needless to say, fabulous news. But if the [left] movement in the US is ill-prepared, for any losses suffered in the international scene by US imperialism, the shortfall will be taken out of our hides!”
Dr. Gerald Horne didn’t love that I called him the “Forrest Gump of the Pan-Africanist Movement,” though as you will see it got him to chuckle. Through reading the 2024 release I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader (Edited by T.A. Parris), I was amazed to discover that a historian with as prolific an output as Bob Dylan had as songwriter, had a whole other life before that, starting with being involved as a lawyer with the Black Panther Party in California in the 60s and 70s, then being part of the anti-Apartheid movement in the 80s. In between, he pops up around the world, witnessing in person in the USSR Brezhnev’s 1973 Arab-Israeli War speech, participating as an observer in Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s trial in 1979 & even interviewing Arafat in his Beirut bunker when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.
Transitioning full-time to becoming a historian around the fall of the USSR & the liberation of South Africa, Dr. Horne has published over three dozen significant works of Black radical history ranging from more biographical ones about historical figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ben Davis, and William Patterson among others, to those that cover US domestic as well as international geopolitical trends over periods of history. My introduction to Dr. Horne’s work was through his Paul Robeson book Portrait of the Artist as Revolutionary (2016), about which I interviewed him for the introductory episode of a podcast I co-hosted called Revolutionary Tracks, discussing the superstar actor & musician who sided with internationalism over patriotism as an archetype for a radical artistic practice in the present day. His Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014) would be my sneering pick for a work of US history that will “blow your hair back,” to borrow an appropriate expression; getting at the country’s foundational myth, the book shows how the Revolutionary War not only wasn’t all that “revolutionary,” but in fact was counter-insurgent by design—Washington broke up with London because London was pushing to end slavery.
Having otherwise only kept up with Dr. Horne’s work by reading his Monthly Review essays & Black Agenda Report interviews, I found I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader from OR Books to be a phenomenal introduction to a body of historical materialist analysis as represented by his seminal essays neatly slotted into chapters of Racism, Internationalism & Resistance, uncovering broader political trends that subvert mainstream imperialist capitalist narratives. From the McCarthy-era “Faustian Bargain” made by the NAACP to the successes & failures of Malcolm X by Spike Lee, every topic in the book that Dr. Horne covers in the book serves as an opportunity to look at the entire picture considering all historical forces of capital in action & so determining the framework of resistance against them, doing far more than what he said he set out to do when he became a historian:
“It was clear to me [in the early 1990s] that the old order had evaporated, a new world was emerging & my time might be better spent analyzing, on a full-time basis, domestic—& particularly global—trends.”