The Darker Nations Quotes

“Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence.

The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“[W]ho 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!”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“The cultivation of cultural nationalism as the social cement in an otherwise-political wasteland is a cause and consequence of the collapse of the Third World. Racial and religious political organization is not prepared to confront capital along with its central role in the creation of planetary distress. Rather, religious and racial organization is now the social balm for hopelessness and helplessness. IMF-driven globalization undermines the possibility of egalitarianism. Racialism and religiosity ridicule equity on behalf of a traditional, mostly hierarchical order. Neither this globalization nor traditionalism is capable of being true to the dreams of freedom and the demands for equality that govern the souls of modern humans.”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

“Many decades later, Prebisch recognized this major limitation in the Third World Order: “We thought that an acceleration of the rate of growth would solve all problems. This was our great mistake.”
― Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World