The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (5 page)

With material like this at our disposal, not only should it prove possible to overcome the current inertia evidenced by those claiming to oppose imperialism from within the metropoles, but maybe this time we'll get it right.

1
. For a comprehensive overview of how this came to be, see Immanuel Wallerstein's magisterial study,
The Modern World-System,
4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011; the first three volumes were originally published by Academic Press in 1974, 1980, and 1989, respectively).

2
. A rather vast literature has been devoted to this topic. In my estimation, Aimé Césaire's
Discourse on Colonialism
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1955), Eduardo Galeano's
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), and Walter Rodney's
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Baltimore: Howard University Press, 1974) remain among the very best explications.

3
. The equation of colonialism to genocide was first made by Jean-Paul Sartre in an essay prepared for the 1967 Russell Tribunal on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam and was originally published under the title “On Genocide” in
Ramparts
(February 1968), 35-42. Somewhat more accessibly, the essay was subsequently released in short book form—see Jean-Paul Sartre and Arlette El Kaim-Sartre,
On Genocide and a Summary of the Evidence and Judgments of the International War Crimes Tribunal
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)—and is included in the Tribunal's published record; see John Duffett, ed.,
Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal
(New York: Clarion, 1970).

4
. See Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel,
The Incomparable Crime: Mass Extermination in the Twentieth Century
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967).

5
. Karl Jaspers,
The Question of German Guilt
(New York: Capricorn Books, 1961; reprint, New York: Dial Press, 1947).

6
. For a standard litany of claims to the contrary, see James Dawes,
That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

7
. A considerable measure of sheer hubris is typically embodied in the framing of this ubiquitous postulation. See, e.g., Kerry Kennedy and Eddie Adams,
Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World
(Brooklyn, NY: Umbrage Editions, 2000).

8
. Witness, as a prominent example, the failure of the October-November 1969 Moratorium demonstrations against the Vietnam War—in which it is credibly estimated that some two million people participated—even to forestall the Nixon administration's expansion of ground combat into Cambodia a few months later. See “1969: Millions March in US Vietnam Moratorium,”
BBC News: On This Day, October 15
(
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/15/newsid_2533000/2533131.stm
); Simon Hall,
Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement
(New York: Routledge, 2011), 119-136; Keith William Nolan,
Into Cambodia: Spring Campaign, Summer Offensive, 1970
(San Francisco: Presidio Press, 1999).

9
. On the concept at issue, see Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse,
A Critique of Pure Tolerance
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 95-137.

10
. Consider, for instance, the 1971 May Day demonstrations against the war in Indochina, during which roughly twenty thousand people participated in a concerted program of deliberately disruptive—but essentially nonviolent—civil disobedience in the U.S. capital. Now mostly forgotten, May Day had no discernable effect on Nixon administration policy, even with regard to the “secret” bombing of Cambodia (which continued unabated until 1973). See Lucy G. Barber,
Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 204-213; William Shawcross,
Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

11
. On the concept of the general strike, see, e.g., Ralph Chaplin's 1933 essay, “The General Strike,” collected in Lenny Flank, ed.,
The IWW: A Documentary History
(Athens, GA: Red and Black, 2007), 185-212; Milorad Drachkovitch,
The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864-1943
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 83-100. On the strike in France, see, e.g., George Katsiaficas,
The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968
(Boston: South End Press, 1999), 87-116.

12
. The reasons for this are no doubt varied and complex. As concerns North America in particular, however, considerable light is shed on the matter by J. Sakai's
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat
(Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989).

13
. The case of Germany is very well known, but see Mark Mazower,
Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
(New York: Penguin, 2008). On the genocidal comportment of imperial Japan, see, e.g., Iris Chang,
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
(New York: Basic Books, 1997). On the relatively neglected topic of Italian colonialism's genocidal impacts in Libya and Ethiopia, see Alberto Sbacchi,
Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935-1941
(Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997); Rory Carroll, “Italian Atrocities in World War II,”
The Guardian,
June 24, 2001 (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/jun/25/artsandhumanities.highereducation
).

14
. See generally, Aviva Chomsky,
A History of the Cuban Revolution
(New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

15
. Although its author's biases are obvious, the best history of the war for Algerian independence available in English is probably Alistair Horne's
The Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962
(New York: Viking Press, 1977; rev. ed. published by the History Book Club, 2002).

16
. See Marilyn Blatt Young,
The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1991).

17
. On Guinea-Bissau, see Gérard Chaliand,
Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in “Portuguese” Guinea
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Patrick Chabal,
Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People's War
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On Mozambique, see Thomas H. Henriksen,
Revolution and Counterrevolution: Mozambique's War of Independence, 1964-1974
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). On Angola, see John Marcum,
The Angolan Revolution,
2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969 and 1978, respectively).

18
. See, e.g., Carlos M. Vilas,
The Sandinista Revolution: National Liberation and Social Transformation in Central America
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986).

19
. There is a paucity of readily accessible English-language material on the Namibian liberation struggle, but see John Ya-Otto, Ole Gjerstad, and Michael Mercer,
Battlefront Namibia
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1986); Fen Osler Hampson,
Nurturing Peace: Why Peace Settlements Succeed or Fail
(Washington, DC: U.S. Institute for Peace, 1996), especially
pages 53–64.

20
. The British knowingly induced a severe famine in Bengal and other areas of Eastern India by siphoning off the grain necessary to sustain the population, and stockpiling it in England as a hedge against postwar scarcities. An estimated three million people died as a result. See Madhusree Mukerjee,
Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravishing of India during World War II
(New York: Basic Books, 2011).

21
. The notion that the independence of India was achieved through Gandhian nonviolence has been aptly dismissed as a “comfortable fiction” by a number of knowledgeable analysts. See, e.g., Alex Von Tunzelmann,
Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
(New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 8. For a good debunking of the mythology surrounding Gandhi's pacifism, see Faisal Devji,
The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

22
. See Peter Ward Fay,
The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942-1945
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

23
. See generally, Roy Douglas,
Liquidation of Empire: The Decline of the British Empire
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Peter Clark,
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana
(London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).

24
. The Anti-British Liberation War, as the Malayan guerillas called it, was not directly successful. Nonetheless, it tied up a considerable proportion of Britain's military assets for a considerable period. See Anthony Short,
The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960
(New York: Frederick Muller, 1975). On Kenya, where quelling the so-called Mau Mau Uprising demanded an even greater share of Britain's available strength during the period, see Caroline Elkins,
Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
(London: Pimlico, 2005). Despite its rather stilted prose, the best English-language source on the
Yemeni war for national liberation is probably Vitaly Naumkin's
Red Wolves of Yemen: The Struggle for Independence
(Cambridge, UK: Oleander Press, 2004).

25
. Again, there is a wealth of literature documenting the outcome and analyzing its causes. For a somewhat superficial but nonetheless useful summary, see Vijay Prashad,
The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
(New York: New Press, 2007).

26
. On Germany, Italy, and Western Europe more generally, see Michael J. Hogan,
The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Nicolaus Mills,
Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower
(New York: John Wiley, 2008). On Japan, see, e.g., John W. Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), especially pages 526–547.

27
. For the seminal work in this area, see Kwame Nkrumah,
NeoColonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
(New York: International, 1966). For more current assessments, see Zygmunt Bauman,
Globalization: The Human Consequences
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Richard A. Falk,
Predatory Globalization: A Critique
(Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 1999); Michel Chossudovsky,
The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order
(Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003); Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(New York: Picador, 2008).

28
. Even if such a strategy was viable, the moral and ethical implications attending the beneficiary population's displacement of the suffering entailed in such struggles onto the colonized speak for themselves. With very few exceptions, such a posture has nonetheless been perpetually evident among anti-imperialists in the United States. For a good overview, see Richard Seymour,
American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).

29
. See Alan J. Levine,
The Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992).

30
. Notwithstanding triumphalist Anglo-American prattle about the decisiveness of the Normandy invasion, and so on, the truth is that the Red Army not only bore the great brunt of the fighting against German
ground forces but inflicted vastly more casualties upon the Germans—roughly 80 percent of the total—than did the Western Allies; William J. Duiker,
Contemporary World History
(Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2009), 128. For further background, see Chris Bellamy,
Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War
(London: Macmillan, 2007).

31
. See Richard Boyle,
Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam
(San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1972); Cincinnatus (Col. Cecil B. Currey),
Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army during the Vietnam Era
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).

32
. On the IRA campaign, see, e.g., Peter Hart,
The IRA at War, 1916-1923
(London: Oxford University Press, 2003). By the late 1960s, Uruguay's Tupamaros had emerged as a useful template for adaptation to North American and European contexts; see María Esther Gilio,
The Tupamaro Guerrillas: The Structure and Strategy of the Urban Guerrilla Movement
(New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973). Among the more influential tracts during the period was Brazilian practitioner Carlos Marighella's
Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla
(Berkeley, CA: Long Time Comin' Press, 1969; reprint, St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black, 2008).

33
. Noam Chomsky,
American Power and the New Mandarins
(New York: Pantheon, 1968; reprint, Oakland, CA: AK Press), 277. In actuality, the term “creeping Eichmannism” predates Chomsky's usage by nearly a decade, having first appeared in E.Z. Friedenberg's
The Vanishing Adolescent
(Beacon Press, 1959). See Neil Postman,
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
(New York: Delacourt Press, 1970), 9.

34
. For further development of this argument, see “The Ghosts of 9-1-1: Reflections on History, Justice, and Roosting Chickens,” in my
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 5-38.