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shall
ascend to power on the democratic ladder
—declared the evidently popular Islamist party—
after
which we shall pull up
the ladder, and there shall be no more democracy.
Let us spend a little time on the Algerian scenario; it holds many lessons for us and, of course, occupies the tragic role of being one of the unwitting dispersal agencies of human resources for our ongoing climate of fear.
    Algeria is merely a convenient example, but it is also a subjective choice for me, I am compelled to admit. My generation grew up under the indirect education of a singularly vicious anticolonial struggle—the Algerian— one that surpassed in its intensity even that of the Kenyan Mau Mau–led nationalist revolt. That struggle easily qualifies as the most brutal of Africa’s wars of liberation right up to the independence decade of the continent— the nineteen sixties. In addition, Algeria played a key role in the formation of the radical corps of African—and even black American—nationalism in the fifties and sixties, served as a source of reference, solidarity, and material aid for many African revolutionary leaders, from Guinea and Ghana to the Congo and South Africa. This North African country belonged in the radical sector of African nations that eventually closed ranks with the more conservative group for the formation of the Organization of African Unity. Given such a history, it is perhaps inevitable that my generation would take more than a passing interest in the contemporary fortunes of that nation. As a newly independent entity, its experiments in postcolonial reconstruction provided study models in the quest for the developmental transformation of other newly independent African nations.
    To watch such a people plunged into a state of social retrogression, from whatever cause, is a harrowing cautionary tale, truly tragic, a reminder of the Sisyphean burden that unforeseen forces often place on the shoulders of would-be progressive movements. It is a daily reminder never to take any political situation for granted, never to underestimate the focused energy of the quasi-state whose instinctive recourse to the rule of fear as a weapon of struggle drives the best minds of a nation into exile, liquidates others, and paralyzes the creative drive of a dynamic people.
    Algeria, in 1992, was a dilemma posed to try the credentials of the hardiest democrat anywhere in the world but, most pertinently, her African cohabitants across the Sahara, who, in many cases, were then struggling to free themselves from the stranglehold of military dictatorship. That dilemma can be summed up thus: if you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fallout that comes with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself? This was the crux of the electoral choice that was freely made by the Algerian people. Why indeed should a people not, in effect, redeem Hegel from Karl Marx? They would only be paying Marx back in his own coin, since Marx’s boast was that he began with the model of Hegel’s schema of history but then turned Hegel on his head. He replaced Hegel’s idealism with a materialist basis and the class struggle. Both are agreed on the dialectical process that leads to the fulfillment of history in the emasculation of the state order. Social contradictions are resolved and political strife is eliminated. Rulership becomes indistinct from followership—in one case, through the benevolent embodiment of enlightened rule, in the other, through the eradication of classes.
    What the Islamist party of Algeria did was simply to embody the historic will, or spirit, in the Koran. Ironically, this ought to be regarded as a democratic advance on Hegel, since the process of this annulment of history was reached through popular choice, and the mantle of interpreters of the historic will—summed up by Fukuyama as