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May 11 - May 26, 2024
If you go back to Greek culture and read Thucydides, there are limits to what you can do to other Greeks, who are a part of your culture. But there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian. He’s a Barbarian.” The communists, he concluded, “were barbarians.”
From the beginning the CIA had two basic divisions. On one side was the gathering of intelligence through espionage. Their job was something akin to providing a private news service for the president. On the other side was covert action—the rough stuff, the active attempts to change the world. That was Frank Wisner’s territory.
Slowly but surely, Wiz and the CIA boys realized that actual Soviet territory was mostly rock solid.
They were certainly failing to penetrate it. If they wanted to fight communism—and they did, very badly—they had to look elsewhere.
When studying or working back in the imperial capitals, colonial subjects often came into contact with ideas that were never allowed to reach their territories. Much of colonialism had relied on the logic of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Or in practice, “Do as white say, not as white do.”
In the 1930s and 1940s, practically no Europeans supported colonial independence except the leftists.
The People’s Daily reported on the events in Iran and the Philippines, of course.22 Even though Washington’s real activities were secret at the time, Zain’s newspaper and the global left-wing press were often closer to getting the story of Washington’s interventions right than US newspapers, which largely saw it as their duty to peddle the official line that Wisner and his team passed on to them.
1953 was the end of the Jakarta Axiom; independent countries were no longer tolerated just because they had left-wing forces in check.
With the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, the new rule under Eisenhower was that neutral governments were potential enemies, and Washington could decide if and when an independent Third World nation was insufficiently anticommunist.
The CIA again asked Kermit Roosevelt to oversee operations. He refused this time, telling his superiors that future coups wouldn’t work unless the people and the army in the country “want what we want.”28 Frank Wisner chose Tracy Barnes instead.
Árbenz, realizing that the US was determined to oust him, began to contemplate giving in. His government frantically offered to give United Fruit what it wanted. But it was too late for concessions. The communists and a few others urged Árbenz not to hand over power. In vain, a twenty-five-year-old Argentine doctor living in Guatemala City at the time, named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, volunteered to go to the front, then tried to organize civilian militias to defend the capital.
Castillo Armas established Anticommunism Day, and rounded up and executed between three thousand and five thousand supporters of Árbenz.35 Eisenhower was elated.
The US press covered it differently. The New York Times referred to the coup plotters as “rebels,” while calling the Árbenz government “reds” or a “Communist threat,” and saying that the US government was “helping” mediate peace talks, rather than organizing the whole thing.
Most historians today would quickly recognize that this small Indonesian communist newspaper reported the events more accurately than the New York Times.
A front-page story in The People’s Daily on June 26 said that what was happening in Guatemala “threatens world peace, and could threaten Indonesia as well.”
An internal State Department document, now publicly available, should dispel the notion that Washington thought Guatemala was an immediate “communist threat.” According to Louis J. Halle in a note to the director of the policy planning staff, the risk was not that Guatemala would act aggressively. The risk was that Árbenz would provide an example that inspired his neighbors to copy him.
It might spread through the example of nationalism and social reform. Finally and above all, it might spread through the disposition the Latin Americans would have to identify themselves with little Guatemala if the issue should be drawn for them (as it is being drawn for them), not as that of their own security but as a contest between David Guatemala and Uncle Sam Goliath.
In strategic, US-controlled nations, they saw the necessity of breaking up feudal land control in order to build dynamic capitalist economies. But when carried out by leftists or perceived geopolitical rivals—or when threatening US economic interests—land reform was more often than not treated as communist infiltration or dangerous radicalism.
The Dulles brothers had worked on Wall Street, and both had actually done work for the United Fruit Company. To this day, there is a debate as to whether or not the CIA engineered the coups in Iran and Guatemala for cynical economic reasons—to help business buddies and American capitalism more generally—or if the Agency really felt threatened by “communism.”
But the motivation didn’t matter much to the millions of people reading about the events back in Asia, nor to the Latin Americans watching up close. Whatever their reasons, the United States established a reputation as a frequent and violent intruder into the affairs of independent nations.
That young doctor, Che Guevara, believed he learned an important lesson in 1954. He came to the conclusion that Washington would never allow mild social reform, let alone democratic socialism, to flower in its backyard, and that any movement for change would have to be armed, disciplined, and prepared for imperialist aggression.
Che took off to Mexico City, and began to formulate a more radical revolutionary strategy based on what he had seen in Guatemala.
Francisca, though not following the news as closely as Zain, felt that the Indonesian revolution was far from complete. They had only been free from white colonialism for five years, she thought, and there was no guarantee the freedom would last.
she knew that their situation was fragile, and that the Western powers were not inclined to simply cede freedom to the peoples of the Third World.
The brutal French invasion in Vietnam was more proof of that.
The way it looked from Indonesia was that in both Iran and Guatemala, nascent democratic movements had tried to assert new independence in the global economy, and the new Western power had reacted violently, and crushed them back into the subservient role they had always played.
Sukarno liked to call this “neocolonialism,” or the enforced conditions of imperial control without formal rule.
Even though Sukarno, Indonesia’s charismatic first president, was friendly with Washington and had always operated in varying degrees of opposition to the PKI, a minority party among many, the apparent boldness of the Communist Party—just advertising openly like that, rather than hiding in the shadows—was worrying to the US.
Jones himself, like everyone else in the US government, was an anticommunist, and thought it was his job to fight that system. But he thought the major failure of US diplomacy at the time was a persistent inability to understand the differences between Third World nations, and the nature of Asian nationalism.
he thought Americans failed to understand what nationalism was in the context of emerging countries, and its difference from communism.
Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism.
Sarekat Islam, the Islamic Union, was the central nationalist organization at the time; it had conservative Islamic thinkers, as well as many who were loyal to the Communist Party. Then called the Indies Communist Party, the party had often disobeyed directions from Moscow when its leaders saw fit, and saw Muslim unity as a revolutionary, anticolonial force.
Sukarno by nature was a syncretist, always more interested in mixing and matching and inclusion than shrill ideological disputes.
In 1926, he penned an article titled “Nationalism, Islam, and Marxism,” in which he asked: “Can these three spirits work together in the colonial situation to become one great spirit, the spirit of unity?” The natural answer for him was yes. Capitalism, he argued, was the enemy of both Islam and Marxism, and he called upon adherents of Marxism—which he said was no unchanging dogma, but rather a dynamic force that adapted to different needs and different situations—to struggle alongside Muslims and nationalists.54
It was under Sukarno’s watch that the young country chose to make Bahasa Indonesia the official Indonesian language.
A leader of less wisdom might have been inclined to make his native Javanese into the official tongue, but this is a hard language to learn and easily could have been seen as a kind of chauvinistic or even colonial imposition from the strongest island. Instead, Indonesia picked an easy, seemingly neutral language, and most of the country learned it within a generation or two.
Sukarno was a left-leaning Third World nationalist, and he was more of a visionary than a nuts-and-bolts administrator, as Howard Jones and the rest of the Americans would learn soon enough.
True to his conciliatory nature, he was committed to maintaining a friendship with both the United States and Moscow, and he certainly was not trying to aggravate the leadership in Washington.
Jones quickly came to the conclusion that in order to be effective, the aid programs he was managing could not in any way appear to be paternalistic or offend Indonesians’ fierce pride in their independence.
Bandung That term, “Third World,” was born in 1951 in France, but it really only came into its own in 1955, in Indonesia. As historian Christopher J. Lee has written, it was the Konferensi Asia-Afrika, held in Bandung in April, that really solidified the idea of the Third World.
This remarkable gathering brought the peoples of the colonized world into a movement, one that was opposed to European imperialism and independent from the power of the US and the Soviet Union.
In 1954, Indonesia got together with Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Pakistan, and India, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, the same leader who gave the Kennedy brothers a lecture over dinner. They formed the Colombo Group, named after the Sri Lankan capital, where they met, and began planning a bigger meeting.
Indonesia’s prime minister initially proposed a 1955 conference as a response to the founding of SEATO, the US-sponsored copy of NATO in Southeast Asia. But the invitation list soon expanded rapidly, as Nehru invited China (this necessarily excluded Taiwan), while apartheid South Africa and both Koreas (technically still at war) as well as Israel (whose presence might have upset Arab nations) weren’t invited. The people who came together at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations, and 1.5 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion people.
Some of the countries there had recently achieved independence while others were still fighting for it. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, attended as a friendly “observer” from outside Asia and Africa.
The very existence of the conference elevated Sukarno and Nehru to the status of global leaders.
the undying, the indomitable, the invincible spirit of those who went before us. Their struggle and sacrifice paved the way for this meeting of the highest representatives of independent and sovereign nations from two of the biggest continents of the globe.… All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilize peace in the
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How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. My people, and the peoples of many nations of Asia and Africa, know these things, for we have experienced them.…
Like peace, freedom is indivisible. There is no such thing as being half free, as there is no such thing as being half alive.…
Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.
Sukarno and the organizers had gone to great trouble to avoid antagonizing or frightening the most powerful country on earth with their openly anti-imperialist rhetoric. So they scoured their American history books, and asked the Americans they knew, looking for a way to connect the date of the conference to the United States.
