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As Nasser and Nehru prepared to leave Brijuni, they heard news that the U. S. government had decided to cut its $200 million pledge to finance Egypt's $ 1 .3 billion Aswan High Dam. The dam was crucial to Egyptian plans, as the Free Officers hoped that it would help the sluggish Egyptian agricultural sector, an area that needed immediate redress for the Republic to retain the support of the fellahin, the peasantry. To gain investment funds, Nasser had tried to play the Atlantic powers against the Soviets.12 Apart from these productive projects, Nasser also played off the two major blocs over arms sales. The United States had a less attractive offer: among its stringent restrictions, the U.S . government offered only certain kinds of arms, wanted them accompanied by a U.S. military assistance mission, and required that the U.S . arms aid be used to buy high-priced U.S. hardware (an elegant way to subsidize the U.S. weapons companies) . All this being impossible for Egypt, Nasser bought weapons from Czechoslovakia. In addition, Nasser had refused to join the Baghdad Pact and pushed the English to remove their military base from Suez. Little wonder that Dulles despised the Nasserite regime.
brilliant tbh
[...] The African, Asian, and Latin American states proffered draft resolutions to bring democracy to the United Nations in 1957, but it was not until 1959 and 1960 that the General Assembly heard debates on this theme. From Guinea to Pakistan, delegates reflected on the need for the United Nations to be awake to history, alter its structure as large numbers of new nations took their seats as sovereign powers, rethink its veto powers to the colonial and nuclear powers, and do so in the spirit of justice, not charity. [...]
yesss i love this. similar to what i've been thinking about tech workers
[...] In early December 1 964, Che Guevara took this message to the floor of the UN General Assembly: "We should like to wake up this Assembly. Imperialism wants to convert this meeting into a useless oratorical tournament instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent them from doing this . . . . As Marxists we maintain that peaceful co-existence does not include co-existence between exploiters and exploited, between oppressors and oppressed. [...]
The NAM states and NAM itself did not have the means to join the Vietnam War. NAM could not send its armies to Hanoi, even as the Second NAM Conference in Cairo (1964) had stated that wars of national liberation are defensible, that they are the principal means to fulfill the "natural aspirations" of people being colonized by powers that were loath to transfer sovereignty, and that " the process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible." NAM had supported the Algerian struggle in 1961 , and it welcomed the victory of the Algerians in 1962. It also supported the main liberation movements in Portuguese Africa (Mozambique, Angola, and Cabo Verde). It was enough to support wars of national liberation when these were far away and much harder to take a principled position on the armed overthrow of a recognized government. Many of the NAM states had already begun to experience armed struggle within. The dominant classes of these states held the reins of state power, and wielded it against their internal critics. It was far easier to bemoan U.S. interventions and the ailing Portuguese colonies than to validate the tactic of armed struggle, especially if such struggles had broken out within an NAM state.
one main thread running through this book is the delicate nature of the Third World coalition ... held together by opposition to the superpowers, but that's not always enough to really bind them together. sometimes there are opposing interests along other lines.
[...] For Cabral, like Nkrumah, colonialism and neocolonialism are two forms of imperialism, both of which negate "the historical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive forces." "If we accept the principle that the liberation struggle is a revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played, we will see that there is not, and cannot be, national liberation without the use of liberating violence by the nationalist forces, to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism." [...]
Who would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labor without want, now wanted to labor in their own image! By Havana, all the powers of the old empire had entered into a holy alliance to demolish the virus of anticolonial Third World nationalism; while John Bull and the Gaullists trembled at their fate in a world dominated by those they had once ruled, Uncle Sam lent his shoulders and wiles to keep things as close to the past as possible. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the heirs of Uncle Joe saw promise in the movements of the Third World, and even while they offered assistance to them, they did so with every attempt to steer the ship of history, rather than to share the rudder. Direction was anathema to the darker nations, which had been told what to do for far too long. Time now to deliver oneself to the future.
this is pretty, esp by the end
[...] Fanon defended the right of national liberation movements to adopt armed struggle, as the movements would do at Havana's 1966 Tricontinental. His defense, however, was not on tactical or even strategic grounds; he maintained that violence is necessary to wrench a colonized society into freedom and reshape the subservience of the colonized so that they might truly be freed by the act of taking their freedom. [...]
in Wretched
[...] the FLN failed the legions of anticolonial supporters who wanted a role in the creation of a new Algeria. The FLN's charter did not fully support the energy of the people; it was keener to demobilize this enthusiasm. The Third World "nation" did not fully live up to its promise of radical democracy, where every person would be constituted by the state as a citizen, and where each citizen in turn would act through the state to construct a national society, economy, and culture. From India to Egypt, from Ghana to Indonesia-the great legions of the Third World drew their immense strength from popular mobilization, but none of these states enabled the people who created the platform for freedom to have an equal part in the project to build it. Of course, the construction of the new nation would require the labor of the people, but this work came with direction from above, and not with the co-equal participation of the people in the creation of the national plan or the division of the national surplus. The people had to act, not to lead but to take orders, and the state, the father figure, would protect its feminized subjects.
In March 1 963, Ben Bella's government promulgated a set of laws known as the March Decrees. These had been created in consultation with a group of European and Arab Trotskyites (including the Egyptian Luftallah Solliman, the Moroccan Mohammed Tahiri, and the Algerian Mohammed Harbi) who favored worker self-management. The decrees declared any vacant property to be legitimate collective property, legalized worker self-management on farms and in factories, and forbade speculation. The workers had already seized the vacant factories, and the peasantry had already grabbed three million hectares of prime land left by the French colon farmers. The new government institutionalized the inventiveness of the workers and the farmers. So far so good, but then the state made some errors. Whereas it had written no role for the state in these new institutions, it also tried to cut out the main trade union federation, the two-hundred-thousand-strong Union Generale des Travailleurs Algeriens (UGTA) that had led the factory takeover. [...]
hmmm kinda cool bit of history
The demobilization of the population led almost inexorably within the Third World to military coups and military rule. Where the military did not overthrow the civilian government, the inability of states to break from colonial borders and other such dilemmas led to a strengthened military brass. More money to guns meant less to butter, and therefore to an impoverished agenda for the increase of the social wage, the improvement of agricultural and other social relations, and better prices for exported commodities. The main social agency that demanded this agenda within the constraints of the Third World regime remained the Communists, and it was the strengthened hand of the military that often exorcised the Left (helped out by the CIA and given a blind eye by the USSR) . The broader story of these tragedies occupies us in this part, as we make our way from the military coup in La Paz, Bolivia, to the massacre of the Communists of the Indonesian archipelago, to the border war between India and China, and eventually to the reduction of the Third World's political and economic agenda into OPEC and the ujamaa villages of Tanzania. Neocolonial imperialism persisted, and the countries of the Third World remained in thrall to economic and political logics that disinherited most of them. The people wanted the formal trappings of freedom rather than flag independence (the Tanzanians called it uhuru wa hendera) . They had to settle for mild reforms and nostalgia. Or else be "disappeared."