from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part I)

(xvi): Thrown between these two major formations, the darker nations amassed as the Third World. Determined people struck out against colonialism to win their freedom. They demanded political equality on the world level. The main institution for this expression was the United Nations. From its inception in 1948, the United Nations played an enormous role for the bulk of the planet.
(xvii): THESIS: The Third World project came with a built-in flaw. The fight against the colonial and imperial forces enforced a unity among various political parties and across social classes. Widely popular social movements and political formations won freedom for the new nations, and then took power. Once in power, the unity that had been preserved at all costs became a liability. The working class and the peasantry in many of these movements had acceded to an alliance with the landlords and emergent industrial elites. Once the new nation came into their hands, the people believed, the new state would promote a socialist program. What they got instead was a compromise ideology called Arab Socialism, African Socialism, Sarvodaya, or NASAKOM that combined the promise of equality with the maintenance of social hierarchy. Rather than provide the means to create an entirely new society, these regimes protected the elites amongst the old social classes while producing the elements of social welfare for the people. Once in power, the old social classes exerted themselves, either through the offices of the military or the victorious people's party... By the 1970s, the new nations were no longer new... Internecine warfare, a failure to control the prices of primary commodities, an inability to overcome the suffocation of finance capital, and more led to a crisis in the budgets of much of the Third World... The assassination of the Third World led to the desiccation of the capacity of the state to act on behalf of the population, an end to making the case for a new international economic order, and a disavowal of the goals of socialism. Dominant classes that had once been tethered to the Third World agenda now cut loose... Atavisms of all kinds emerged to fill the space once taken up by various forms of socialism. Fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power emerged from under the wreckage of the Third World project.
(2): Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution... The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home empty-handed.
(4): [VIETNAM] In 1945-46, thousands of French troops returned to the Red River delta in Indochina, and Ho Chi Minh and his comrades retreaded to the highlands of the Viet Bac to regroup for an extended war of liberation. This war lasted for almost a decade. But the French had an ally in another ambivalent revolutionary. By 1952, the US government had already begun to pay for almost two-thirds of the battered French military treasury's expenses. The French had to deaprt after their army suffered an embarrassing defeat from the poorly equipped but highly motivated Viet Minh at the garrison town of Dien Bien Phu (1954).
(4-5): [ALGERIA] In 1945... the French paratroopers and air force used brutal force to disband the anticolonial Algerian Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberte (Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty), harass hundreds of thousands of people through the French policy of ratonnades, and kill tens of thousands of Algerians. This massacre provoked the formation of the FLN...
(5): [MADAGASCAR] And.. in 1947, when the people of Madagascar demanded their freedom...and rose in revolt, the French forces countered them with bloodthirsty violence and killed tens of thousands. The guerrilla war continued, until the French had to concede some power to the Malagasy people, but only after a decade of repression and deceit.
(6): Cesaire invokes the barbarity of Western Europe and the United States, only to stop and warn us, "I am not talking about Hitler, or the prison guard, or the adventurer, but about the 'decent fellow' across the way; not about the member of the SS, or the gangster, but about the respectable bourgeoisie."
(7): The First and Second Worlds fell out openly when US president Harry S. Truman announced his support for the anticommunist forces in Turkey and Greece (1946), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped the conservatives defeat the popular Communists in the Italian and French elections of 1957, the USSR forced the Eastern European states into its orbit, and the animosity attained dramatic proportions during the First World's blockade of Berlin in June 1948.
(7): Goran Therborn wrote, "The Cold War was a fundamentally unequal conflict, that was presented and experienced on both sides as being equal." The USSR and the United States portrayed each other as equivalent adversaries, although the former had an economic base that was far inferior to the latter.
(8): In 1941, both the United States and the USSR had populations of about 130 million, but whereas the United States lost upward of four hundred thousand troops in the war, the Soviets lost between twenty and thirty million troops and civilians.
(9-10): Yet the Second World had an attitude toward the former colonies that in some ways mimicked that of the First World. For the founding conference of the Cominform held in Poland in 1947, the Soviets did not invite even one Communist Party from the former colonized world, and certainly not the Chinese Party... The Soviets did not see the rest of the planet as a storehouse of resources, but neither did they see it as filled with people who had fought a strong anticolonial struggle and wanted to lead their own movements, craft their own history. In answer to the formation of NATO in 1949, the USSR had created the Warsaw Pact in 1955...
(10): While there has been much deserved attention to the role of Eleanor Roosevelent for the drafting of the human rights agenda at the SF meeting, the historical record tends to underplay the crucial role played by the twenty-nine Latin American states. Cuba sent thirty-year-old Guy Perez Cisneros as its representative, and he fought doggedly for an expansive interpretation of human rights, helped along the way by the Panamanian delegation, which offered the decisive draft declarations on education, work, health care, and social security.
(11): A central character in this story is Nehru, the prime minister of the Republic of India from 1947-1964... Nehru [reiterated] the main points of the third world platform: political independence, nonviolent international relations, and the cultivation of the United Nations as the principle institution for planetary justice.
(12): [A NEW NATIONALISM?] If European nationalism took as a given that a people (who are perhaps a "race") need to be organized by a state so that their nation can come into its own, the anticolonial nationalists mostly argued that the people (who are often far too diverse to classify one way or another) need to be free of colonial rule. The formerly colonized people have at least one thing in common: they are colonized. Nehru, Sukarno, and others who had been pushed by similar social processes developed an alternative "national" theory. For them, the nation had to be constructed out of two elements :the history of their struggles against colonialism, and their program for the creation of justice. Whereas there were several limitations to their program, it was clear that few of the movements that moved toward the Third World agenda came with a theory of the nation that based itself wholly or even largely on racial or monocultural grounds... Instead they had an internationalist ethos, one that looked outward to other anticolonial nations as their fellows. The Third World form of nationalism is thus better understood as an internationalist nationalism.
(14): [THESIS]: A small, almost minuscule class became brokers between the massive social upsurge across the planet from the 1910s to the 1950s channeling that energy into the organizations they led. This group of leaders (whether India's Nehru or Indonesia's Sukarno, Mexico's Lazaro Cardenas or Ghana's Nkrumah) elaborated a set of principles that both skewered the hypocrisy of imperial liberalism and promoted social change. On paper, the Third World gleamed. As the project met governance, it began to tarnish rapidly. One of the reasons for this is that the third World failed to seriously undermine the deep roots of the landed and financial gentry in the social and political worlds that had been governed from above by imperial powers and their satraps. Without a genuine social revolution, the Third World leadership began to rely on the landed and merchant classes for it political power. Capillaries of power that provided legitimacy to the colonial rulers often transformed themselves into avenues for the delivery of votes in the new democratic dispensation.... The class character of Third World leadership constrained its horizon, even as it inflamed the possibilities in its societies. The Third World, then, is not just the voice of the leaders or their political parties but also their opposition.
(16-17): Leopold II, the second king of modern Belgium, had transformed the medieval city during his long reign (1865-1909) into a modern wonder--with wide roads, proper sewers, and a magnificent urban display... For centuries the city had been known for its textiles, lace, and glassware, and it is this craft production that the city celebrated. But by 1927, the main source of wealth for Belgium and the city was not from the artisans but from Africa. It was Africa, particularly the Congo, that made Leopold II one of the richest people on the planet, and it enable the Belgian economy to become the sixth largest in the world.
(17): The Congo Free State... was eighty times the size of Belgium.
(17): If a worker did not work hard, the officer would cut off their hand; one district official received 1,308 hands in one day from his subordinates.
(18): To supply the emergent tire industry, Leopold II's Free State, therefore, sucked the life out of the rubber vines and murdered half the Congo's population in the process (between 1885 and 1908, the population declined from twenty million to ten million).
(18): The Foreign Office in London wrote a tepid note critical of the Belgians, and Leopold II's reply rightly accused the British of hypocrisy: much of the policies followed by the Belgians in the Congo had been standard for the English elsewhere. Indeed, Casement found that British companies in the Putamayo region between Colombia and Peru followed the same kinds of barbarism, the US-based United Fruit Company in Central America pillaged the dignity of the natives there, and in Portuguese Angola as well as French and German Cameroon, the companies used much the same kind of rubber plantation regime.
(19): Between 1876 and 1915, a handful of European imperial states controlled a full quarter of the globe's land, with Great Britain and France in possession of far more than Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the states of the Iberian peninsula (the United States directly controlled a small amount, but it held sway over all the Americas).
(19): In 1908, Leopold turned over the management of the Free State to the Belgian government, and the barbarism continued until the Belgians completed their rail system in 1914 that rationalized the removal of the Congo's minerals all the way to 1961 and beyond.
(19): The conveners of the 1927 League against Imperialism conference chose Brussels deliberately.
(20): Regardless of the Comintern's vacillation over alliances with the national bourgeoisie, the general support given to national liberation movements across Asia and Africa by the Russian Communists is clear... In early 1920, delegates from across the planet gathered in Moscow for the Second Congress of the Comintern, where they studied the condition of imperialism and debated the effectiveness of strategies to combat it. Two divergent lines grew out of the congress--whether to ally with the national bourgeoisie and treat nationalism as a transitional phase toward socialism, or reject the national bourgeoisie and forge an international working-class alliance for socialism against the illusions of nationality.
(21): The League against Imperialism was a direct attack on the League of Nations's preservation of imperialism in its mandate system. In April 1919, the Paris Peace Conference produced the League of Nations... The "interests" of the colonized had to be curtailed, the Covenant of the League noted, because the colonized were "peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world" (Article 22).
(22): While they planned to meet frequently, this did not happen for several reasons: the Comintern took a hard position against national liberation movements in 1927, with the view that these efforts would eventually betray the working class (the Comintern revised this line in 1935)...
(25): When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the peoples under its yoke mobilized for their freedom. The "Arab Revolt" on the Arabian Peninsula (1916-1932), in Egypt (1918-1919), in Iraq (1920-1922), in Syria and Lebanon (1925-1926), in Palestine (1936-1937), and elsewhere united the Arab people not just against the Ottomans and others but also on behalf of a united Arab nation.
(27-28): These regional formations had a wide appreciation for the universal struggle against imperialism, for the need for coordination and consultation toward a just world. The best evidence for this is the enthusiasm with which each of these groups, and most of the countries within them, embraced the United Nations. It could be argued that one of the reasons for the success of the United Nations in its first three decades, unlike that of the League of Nations, is that the states of the Third World saw it as their platform. It was from the United Nations's mantle that the states of Africa, America, and Asia could articulate their Third World agenda.
(29): [CRITIQUE OF COMINTERN--V. GOOD] The Soviets and the Comintern did squander much of the goodwill gained in the immediate aftermath of Brussels by their impulsive and distancing shifts in political line. During the league's foundation, the majority opinion of the Comintern was that the Communists should work in a broad front with national liberation movements. Because of this, the Kuomintang joined the Comintern to fund the conference, and both worked together for its success. Just after the Brussels meeting, however, the Kuomintang massacred more than five thousand Communists in Shanghai and elsewhere to prolong a civil war. That the Comintern had joined forces with the Kuomintang in Brussels is astounding, but in the nationalists' postconference violence lay the seeds of the league's destruction. This and other instances led the Comintern to denounce non-communist national liberation forces, including Nehru, Roger Baldwin, and Hatta. The problem with the league's line was that it was inflexible--it chose to work with the Kuomintang before Shanghai, much to the chagrin of the Chinese Communists, and it chose to abandon its relationship with the Indian and Indonesian freedom movements even though these two did not have the kind of antipathy to the Left as the Kuomintang. In places such as India and Indonesia, anticolonial nationalism, even if led by a relatively weak national bourgeoisie, had become a powerful social force that could not be sidestepped. The context of each setting, such as the internal class alignments, did not seem to bear on the Comintern's insistence on a homogeneous strategy for world revolution.
(31): In 1955, the island of Java bore the marks not only of its 300-year colonial heritage, but also its recent and victorious anticolonial struggle.... The cry of Siaaaap (Attention!) rang out in the streets not only to the Japanese occupiers but also the British who had replaced them, and the Dutch who watied in the wings to reclaim the island. In March 1946, when it appeared as if the British would not allow the Indonesians their independence, half a million residents of Bandung abandoned their city en masse, as they set fire to warehouses, homes, and government offices.
(32): ...[W]hat is still important about Bandung is that it allowed these leaders to meet together, celebrate the demise of formal colonialism, and pledge themselves to some measure of joint struggle against the forces of imperialism. Despite the infighting..., Bandung produced something: a belief that two-thirds of the world's people had the right to return to their own burned cities, cherish them, and rebuild them in their own image.
(35): The Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI), like the Congress Party and the Kuomintang, had a grab bag ideology, rooted in an anticolonial ethos, but in favor of a vague nationalism that attracted all social classes. The middle class came on board because many of them had been discriminated against in terms of administrative jobs and humiliated by the colonial hierarchy. Already veterans in the struggle for justice, the working class and the peasantry would gradually move to the PNI as it became central to the freedom struggle. Unlike the Congress Party in India that had become a mass movement by the 1920s... and unlike the Vietnamese Communist Party whose mass base emerged through diligent organizational work..., the PNI looked very much like other urban, middle-class anticolonial organizations in palaces as diverse as Peru and the Gold Coast--it developed out of an idea and reflected the views of a narrow stratum, but is platoform would soon be adopted by many beyond its original circle...
(35): Frustrated by Sukarno's actions, the Dutch administration arrested him in 1931 and held him until the Japanese invasion of the archipelago in 1942... On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno (and his associate Hatta) declared independence for Indonesia--a move delayed by the entry of British troops who had come to restore the islands to the Dutch.
(36): Sukarno stood for freedom and justice, but not necessarily for a gernal revolution...--hence the complicity of the Dutch and the PNI in the crackdown on the 1948 Communist rebellion in Madiun (which led to the execution and incarceration of scores of PKI cadre, and the suppression of the PKI in 1951-1952, when the government arrested fifteen thousand party members). Sukarno did put money into education and state industries, drawing some of the agenda from the Communists, who continued to recruit a mass party (by 1965, the PKI numbered three and a half million cadre and twenty million members in mass organizations). In 1965, at his last Independence Day ceremony before a US-backed coup ejected him, Sukarno stated, "We are now ofstering an anti-imperialist axis... He had moved closer to the Communists than he would have imagined when he first entered politics.
(38): The pro-First World states at Bandung shared at least one thing in common: they were ruled by weak national bourgeoisises that had militant mass movements within which threatened their own legitimacy and power [EXAMPLES GIVEN: Phillipines, regime of Roxas and Magsayay, challenged in Huk Rebellion of 1946-1954; Thailand, rocked by Communist insurgency in Malaysia that ran from 1948-1960; Pakistan, attempted coup by Pakistan Communist Party in 1951; Iraq, which at this time had the Arab land's largest communist party]
(40): Whatever the orientation of the states, they agreed that world peace required disarmament. During Europe's era of relative peace (1815-1914), the part of the planet under its control grew from a third to 85 percent, and Europe's military technology exerted itself on much of this newly conquered terrain.
(42): The IAEA... is a child of Bandung.
(46-47): Nowhere was the impact felt stronger than in Moscow... Nikita Krushchev and Nicolay Bulganin went on a major world tour... in 1956, the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union rejected its earlier two-camp theory of the world... Some argue that the new leadership... had revised the previous commitment to the working class in the formerly colonized world and had now shifted its allgiance to the national bourgeoisie... Others contend that the policy is motivated less by any general theory of world revolution, and more by the invluence of the Chinese in the Third World.
(48): After Bandung, the US foreign policy establishment took a strong position against what it called "neutralism."
(53): The history of national liberation movements, Abdul-Rahman pointedout, often ignores the central role played by women in them, and in the liberation of women by the struggle. "The renaissance fo the Eastern woman has alwyas conincided with liberation movements," for liberation from imperialism meant that "women were emancipated from the fetters of social slavery and escaped from moral death." Within the confines allowed by imperialism, "women remained the victim of ignorance, isolation, and slavery."
(54): In 1919, Egyptian women of all classes took to the streets of Cairo to protest the British crackdown on demonstrations for a free Egypt... During the major mass protests in India in 1905, 1909, 1919, 1920-21, and 1930-31, women held the streets. Iran's constitutional movement saw women in public protest from 1907 to 1911, and again in 1919.
(56): Few of the new states that had experienced anticolonial struggles had a problem with universal adult franchise.
(59): On the more progressive side of national liberation, one finds many who argued that cultural traditions had ossified under the impact of patriarchy and feudal relations, and any opportunity to rederess this had been suffocated by imperialism's alliance with the old social classes, which benefited from misogyny and status.