The Anti-Colonial Century

I. India

A. Indian National Conference (INC)--the political organization in India that advocated for independence--and which is still in existence today. Its most famous member were Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

1. Mohandas Gandhi--Oxford-trained Indian lawyer. His own experience with racial discrimination in England, South Africa, and India led him to embrace Hindi religious and dietary practices--although he rejected the subjugation of women in society, and fought against the worst of caste practices, seeking equality for all Indians--and independence for the country. Gandhi was western educated, but learned in his time away from India that many British--or, most specifically, the British government--saw him as inferior because of his ethnic background; he spent much of his adult life fighting against that, and fighting for independence for his country.

a) Homespun--Gandhi was a proponent of domestic industry. He insisted on wearing traditional clothing--including a loincloth--from Indian grown cotton. This cotton he himself worked to turn into thread, which he then wove into cloth. This rejection of Western methods endeared him to a large part of India that could not afford western goods--he made their poverty a virtue. Gandhi consciously rejected westernization, and in this way made himself popular among the masses.



b) Salt March--in 1922, to protest the British imposition of a tax on salt, Gandhi and a growing number of followers march 239 miles to the sea to make their own salt, rather than pay the British for their imported salt.

c) “Non-cooperation” movement--after the success of the Salt March, Gandhi encouraged Indians to engage in a non-cooperation movement, where they would refuse to use the British governmental system--especially the courts--and to avoid the purchase of British goods

d) “Quit India” movement--signaled a renewed effort to persuade the British to grant India independence. Indian dissatisfaction with British rule grew throughout the 1930s, as more Indians became impoverished while the British government continued the practices that enriched the metropole in London.

B. Non-violent Civil Disobedience--Gandhi practiced pacifism; in fact, he was the lone figure in the INC to vote against conditional support for the fight against fascism. So this practice he undertook as a matter of principle, rather than for tactical reasons--and his followers often times were not as principled as he was. Non-violent civil disobedience is most effective when it provokes a disproportionately violent response.

1. Quit India--campaign sparked by the fact that the Viceroy of India (and Englishman appointed by the British government) declared war on Germany without consulting any Indians. In response, some breakaway factions of the INC sought out the Japanese. Most, however, followed Gandhi’s call to begin a massive program of civil disobedience. The British responded by sending a representative to negotiate a settlement with INC representatives; when those negotiations broke down, Gandhi renewed his call for civil disobedience to begin.

a) Arrest of INC leadership--the British responded to this movement by arresting the entire national leadership of the INC, which effectively killed the national movement--but spurred the development of secondary leaders in the provinces of the country. The leadership was arrested in 1942, and were to be held for the duration of the war. Gandhi was released in 1943, due to failing health. After his release, he went on a hunger strike in an attempt to win the release of the rest of the leadership.

b) Success or failure?

2. Civil Rights Movement in the United States--Gandhi’s best-known acolyte, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Gandhi’s methods in developing non-violent civil disobedience in the United States.

a

) King was not the only proponent of the tactic in the Civil Rights Movement; members of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) were foremost in using the tactic up to the period that SNCC split apart due to internal tensions.



b) Albany Movement (1961-1962)--Sheriff Laurie Pritchett, an ardent segregationist, had studied the civil rights movement, and ordered his deputies not use violent tactics to make arrests. Pritchett also arranged for nearby counties to take in prisoners when his jail was full--and secretly arranged for anonymous “benefactors” to bail out King and other Southern Christians Leadership Conference (SCLC) leaders. By the summer of 1962, King left Albany defeated.



c) Birmingham (1963)--with the cooperations of Eugene “Bull” Connors, King and the Civil Rights Movement was revitalized by the tactics of the Birmingham Police Department



d) Bloody Sunday--the actions of the Alabama State Troopers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, galvanized Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

II. Vietnam

A. French colonialism--began in 1858, when the French army and navy invaded to “protect” Roman Catholics in Vietnam who were being “persecuted.”

1. Collaborators--this labeled most Catholics in Vietnam as collaborators with the foreign enemy, which would have repercussions in the mid-20th century.

a) Dr. Tom Dooley, an American Catholic, and his accounts of communist treatment of Roman Catholics did much during the late 1950s (he was cited as an example of volunteerism by John F. Kennedy while the latter was establishing the Peace Corps). Dooley was cultivated by CIA agent Edward Lansdale, and probably gathered intelligence for the CIA while in southeast Asia.

2. French colonists--confined their activities largely to the lucrative rubber plantations, while allowing the elite in Vietnam (or, as the French preferred to say, Indochina or Cochin China; the French, in fact, forbade the use of the term Vietnam to refer to the country) to acquire most of the land and wealth they cared to not acquire for themselves, while peasants in the countryside were impoverished.

B. Ho Chi Minh--like Gandhi, Ho became the focal point for the independence movement in his country. Also like Gandhi, Ho was western educated--although his family was vehemently nationalist. His father was a minor mandarin, but refused to learn French because he claimed it would “spoil” his Vietnamese. Ho, like Gandhi, spent much of this public life dressed like a peasant, by choice, abandoning trappings of the office he attained.

1. Ho the Communist--Ho’s involvement with international communism dated from 1919 (even before Mao tse-Tung); he was one of the original members of the French Communist Party, and served for a number of years with the Comintern in Moscow as the expert on colonialism.

2. Ho the Nationalist--Ho petitioned the Versailles Conference to grant Vietnam independence, but was ignored. Ho collaborated with the United States Army Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) to defeat the Japanese, and then petitioned US president Harry Truman to support independence for the country, and was ignored. Ho forced emperor Bao Dai to abdicate, but was forced to accept the French re-establishing control; he immediately set about creating a resistance movement, however.



3. Dien Bien Phu--a contingent of French paratroopers were defeated at this battle and force to surrender, the French then signed the Geneva Accords. The country was divided “temporarily” into two sections at the insistence of the United States; France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam agreed that reunification elections would be held in 1956, but the United States and Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) did not sign the accord, and felt no compunction to follow its edicts--particularly because the government in the south never had much popular support.



4. The American War in Vietnam--the most obvious instance of the United States fighting a proxy war against the Soviet Union, when the war was essentially fought by the opposing side to throw off the cloak of colonialism and become an independent country.