While I’m not particularly interested in political history, I always find it important to keep up with developments in that field, as new scholarship can dramatically change long-held beliefs.
This week we looked at some new scholarship on the beginnings of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and also took a look at some writings on the Bandung Conference. With China investing heavily in Africa these days, there is a growing interest among some scholars to look at the history of Afro-Asian interactions, and the Bandung Conference is an obvious topic of interest.
I predict that there will be some interesting scholarship that will emerge in the next few years on this topic, and so we took a brief look at the Bandung Conference to get a sense of what that was all about.
And here are the readings we covered:
The Cold War
Karl Hack and Geoff Wade, “The Origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Volume 40, No. 3 (2009): 441-448.
Larisa Efimova, “Did the Soviet Union instruct Southeast Asian Communists to Revolt? New Russian Evidence on the Calcutta Youth Conference of February 1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Volume 40, No. 3 (2009): 449-469.
Karl Hack, “The origins of the Asian Cold War: Malaya 1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Volume 40, No. 3 (2009): 471-496.
Harry A. Poeze, “The Cold War in Indonesia, 1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Volume 40, No. 3 (2009): 497-517.
Tuong Vu, “‘It’s Time for the Indochinese Revolution to Show its True Colours’: The Radical Turn of Vietnamese Politics in 1948, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Volume 40, No. 3 (2009): 519-542.
Geoff Wade, “The Beginnings of a ‘Cold War’ in Southeast Asia: British and Australian Perceptions,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Volume 40, No. 3 (2009): 543-565.
The Bandung Conference
Ang Cheng Guan, “The Bandung Conference and the Cold War International History of Southeast Asia,” in Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order,” edited by See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 28-47.
Christopher J. Lee, “Introduction: Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives, edited by Christopher J. Lee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 14-44.
Archival Source
“Afro-Asian Conference [Proceedings of 1955 conference at Bandung, Indonesia and discussion on second conference]” (http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/search/)
The Cold War was pictured as a moral crusade of the “Free World ” i.e. the USA , for the righteous purpose of ” containing “Communism on its way to subvert countries of the third world .Communism was painted as a monolithic united bloc bent on world conquest ; while basically after the terrible losses and devastation incurred , the USSR
adopted a defensive attitude and reacted to American initiatives .Stalin once proposed the reunifiacation and neutralisation of Austria and Germany , he lets Great Britain crush the Greek antinazi Resistance in favor of the collaborationist royalists . To the Marshall plan answered the Prague coup . The Warsaw pact was created in 1955 after the founding of NATO IN 1949 . Mao after his 1949 take over of China concentrates on internal affairs , launching successive and murderous communist reform campaigns and mistreating his own countrymen .
According to this article http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org/index.php/vietnam-even-matter-ken-burns/ , here ‘s the real face of the Cold War :
[ For more than 400 years, Europeans had exploited developing world countries, making colonies of them in order to milk them of their resources. They became fabulously wealthy in the process.. But in 1945, at the end of World War II, the European imperial states collapsed, victims of their own suicide, brought on by their starting two World Wars in only 30 years. The global imperial system, however, remained in place. The only question was who was going to dominate it and pick up those nations that had been colonies of the Europeans. It was the greatest land grab in the history of the world and the U.S. was determined that those former European colonies would now become its vassals so that they could enrich the U.S. as they had their European masters.
At the same time, the global capitalist system had collapsed in the Great Depression that preceded World War II and could not be revived without war. While the Western world was in Depression, the economy of the Soviet Union boomed, growing almost 400%. For developing world countries, it was an appealing alternative to the neo-colonial subjugation being offered by the U.S. And spending on weapons proved so powerful a means of transferring national wealth to the weapons makers it was graced with its own institutional moniker: military Keynesianism. Weapons spending lined the pockets of the weapons makers while providing the captains of finance the means to expand and hold their new-found global empire.
The concept of imperialism is the main explanatory factor for understanding the foreign policy of advanced capitalist states. This is the perspective that saw U.S. involvement in Vietnam as an effort to keep the raw materials and cheap labor of Southeast Asia open for the postwar redevelopment of industry in capitalist Japan and also as an effort to enforce the rules of the international order: no small country has the right to break away from the grasp of the more powerful advanced capitalist states. If they try, they will pay an enormous price.]
[ Vietnam wasn’t an isolated case or an aberration. It was simply the most violent case of the norm when countries refused to submit to U.S. domination. That is what the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran was about in 1953. It’s what the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala was about in 1954. It’s what the assassination of Lumumba in Congo was about in 1961. It’s what the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba was about in 1961. It’s what the invasion of the Dominican Republic was about in 1965th( +the 1965 Indonesian 1-million victims massacre ) It’s what the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile was about in 1973.( the other 9/11 ) and Haiti, Granada , Panama . Can you see the advantage that context conveys for understanding? That’s precisely what Burns will not do.
The reason this is so important, and what makes Burns’ occlusion of it such a fraud is that, as William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” This is what the destruction of Yugoslavia was about in the 1990s. It’s what the invasion of Iraq was about in 2003. It’s what the Honduras coup was about in 2009. Its what the invasion of Syria, albeit by jihadist proxies like al Qaeda and ISIS, was about beginning in 2011. It’s what the destruction of Libya was about in 2011. It’s what the coup in Ukraine was about in 2014.
Should we talk about North Korea in 2017? Venezuela in 2018? Iran, in 2019? Russia? China? As you can see, it never ends.]
The blog ” VIETNAM FULL DISCLOSURE ” presently publishes numerous posts , debunking and demolishing extensively the Burns – Novick ” Vietnam war series “as corporate -sponsored Pentagon whitewash