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February 8 - February 8, 2024
“Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.
Somewhat ironically, direct contact with Europe had always been important for fomenting revolutionary movements in the Third World. The Indonesian independence movement had early roots in Holland, and it was in Paris that Ho Chi Minh got his political education.
Francisca said, “I think this was one of the worst crimes of colonialism. After three and a half centuries of Dutch occupation we were left with almost no knowledge of our own people, and our own culture.”
this might look like an instinctive anti-Western disposition, and that young nations might make early mistakes when forming a government. But wouldn’t Americans feel the same way, and demand the right to make their own mistakes?
As Sukarno declared in his opening speech, delivered in bursts of accented but perfect English, it was the “first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!”
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.…
a conference of “the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race,”
“Soccer was the people’s sport, because it was cheap,” he would remember later. “And sport builds the collective spirit, it teaches you to work with others, that you can’t accomplish anything alone. I realized soccer taught me that if you have something you want to accomplish, you have to cooperate.”
“No man is perfect,” Sumiyati learned. “This is a time of transition and we have to struggle for the changes we want to see. We move forward step by step, we can’t expect the world to turn over as easily as we turn the palm of our hands.”
Up to a million Indonesians, maybe more, were killed as part of Washington’s global anticommunist crusade.
As historian John Roosa puts it, “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order.”
But how could the international press, and the State Department, remain entirely untroubled by the fact that this was achieved through the mass murder of unarmed civilians? Howard Federspiel, at the State Department, summed up the answer perfectly. “No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”
After learning about the mass extermination program, Pravda asked in February 1966, “What for and according to what right are tens of thousands of people being killed?” The official Communist paper reported that “rightist political circles are trying to eliminate the communist party and at the same time ‘eradicate’ the ideology of Communism in Indonesia.”
By the end of the 1960s, it was safe to say that the Third World movement was in disarray, if not destroyed. The “Bandung Spirit” had become a ghost.
“I fear that the horror of the killings in Indonesia was only possible because in the West we are so saturated with racism that the death of Asians, even in the hundreds of thousands, doesn’t impress us. Blacks in North America know it well,” the article continued. “Knowing the same thing, the peoples of the world should take the path of open struggle.”
Men take advantage of weakness in other men.
Back then, “Jakarta” stood for independent Third World development that Washington need not view as a threat. Now “Jakarta” meant something very different. It meant anticommunist mass murder. It meant the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States.
“We refused to become US puppets, or join in the anti-communist crusade,” he wrote. “That was our crime.”
On Bali, one group of prisoners would carefully collect and utilize their own feces to fertilize tiny bits of soil and grow vegetables. They would pass the time by singing songs, either those from the days of Sukarno or based on their own experiences. The refrain to one of them, sung in Spanish, came from the title of Fidel Castro’s 1953 speech—“La historia me absolverá”—history will absolve me.
The Third World movement fell apart partly because of its own internal failures. But it was also crushed. These countries were trying to do something very, very difficult. It doesn’t help when the most powerful government in history is trying to stop you.
