Shahalam Tariq
Every year piles of fresh anti-Communist literature appears, scattered around and above sacks of non-fiction and political literature. And in doing so, it introduces a population – ignorant of the history of national liberation movements in the Third World and of Cold War – to the apparent horrors of perhaps the most inhumane and terrifying ideology to have existed; Communism. This trend is nothing new, the grand-daddy of such a trend in mainstream literature is perhaps George Orwell, who has said to been making up lists of potential Communists for the British Empire, so much for “anti-totalitarianism”. Thus, such ideas have gained such a central place in the hegemony of neo-liberalism that even a slight admiration for any Leftist ideas is met with frowning eyes and Jordan Peterson-esque reductionism which helps paint anyone on the left as the “other”, as coined by people like Fanon and Said.
But if Communism is the epitome of evil that the world must be rid of, what else is the alternative? Capitalism, of course, right? Because apparently all capitalism has done is generate wealth, lift people out of poverty and encourage innovation. What makes claims of capitalism’s self-evident supremacy appear so legitimate is not so much anything real. Instead it is a discourse created and facilitated by a global propaganda making machine which helps give such erroneous and obviously false claims an air of appearing ‘real’, but as much as these claims are just accepted as being self-evident, even a light dive into the workings, and history of capitalism and its growth shows alarming indicators which suggest the opposite.
And, Washington Bullets is one such attempt which investigates the violent nature of capitalism, the historian Vijay Prashad, delves into the history of how neo-liberalism has nestled itself into a ‘Third World’, which refused to become a part of such a global order. Prashad writes of national liberation movements, and left-leaning governments who made attempts to free themselves of the shackles of a colonial past and an imperialistic future, and majority of these movements were Socialist. The United States of America with its tools – usually the CIA or the IMF – orchestrated assassinations, genocides, economic degradations, fake protests and so on, for the sake of bringing down a global leftist movement which challenged, repeatedly, the epicenter of neo-liberal success; the USA.
One prominent example is that of Indonesia, which boasted the third largest Communist party in the world after China and the USSR. This rising tide of a Leftist movement in the country disturbed the imperialist overlords back in Washington, and thus with the help of the Indonesian Army, the US helped fund the killings of more than a million Communists, it was a literal genocide, orchestrated out of a fear, a fear which has challenged the hegemony, and thus the existence of USA since the years of the Cold War.
Prashad, has an excellent chapter in how religion was used for anti-Communist purposes as well, citing General Zia Ul Haq’s example of creating a reactionary religious fervor for the sake of generating a ‘Jihad’ against the Soviets, with many other examples.
Today, the success of socialism is becoming more and more obvious with the triumph of such states as Vietnam and Cuba. Despite being stuck in an embargo, despite decades of propaganda against the Cuba by the global imperialist media and despite many attempts to destabilize the efforts of the Revolution, Cuba is still going strong against everything displaying such tremendous feats as having one of the finest healthcare systems in the world. Thus, it is on us to re-read the history that we have been told, and look at everything again from a fresh perspective. Books such as ones by Vijay Prashad and many others like him, give us a chance to do exactly that.
