John Gerassi first came to our attention when we read our dear and distinguished Afrikan revolutionary ancestor George L. Jackson’s magnum opus and revolutionary treatise Blood in My Eye (see page 181). George was not merely mentioning Gerassi in passing but was corresponding with him. That invoked immediate intrigue as to who John Gerassi was, and that is how we started reading his work The Great Fear.
Originally published in 1967, Gerassi painstakingly describes the development—or better said the underdevelopment—of Latin American nations. This maldevelopment that was engendered and fortified by U.S. imperialism, is why the U.S. pejoratively and contemptuously refers to Latin America, and areas in the Caribbean as “America’s Backyard.” Gerassi undertook this work at a time when various nations in Latin America were desperately struggling to break out the straight jacket of semi-colonialism and neocolonialism placed on them by U.S. imperialism, one well-known example is the Cuban Revolution.
What makes The Great Fear such a pivotal work is that it not only thoroughly analyzes the cause of Latin America’s economic stagnation—semi-colonialism and neocolonialism—but it provides solutions on how to solve this problem of being the subject of U.S. imperialism. This is important because, just like in Africa, Latin America is being robbed blind! And we must say this, while solutions to this looting are pretty practical at face value, it honestly and truly can never happen without an all-out war. Let’s face it, the U.S. and Europe, and its other settler colonial offshoots—Australia, Canada, New Zealand etcetera—wealth is acquired by forcing Africa and Latin America to sell their natural resources at give-away prices and preventing them from industrializing so they can sell them inflated consumer goods. This international organized theft is what the west calls “global economics”, no matter how practical the solutions, they will never give up their hustle without a bloody war.
With all that being said, The Great Fear is an essential read for understanding how global economics truly works! Did somebody say theft?!
When people ask for suggestions on informative books about the global economy and how it truly works, we usually suggest they read Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent; now we can add The Great Fear to our list of suggestions.
