The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

A fantastic book about the history of the Third World countries during and after the Cold War. As they navigate a post-colonial world, they're pressured to choose a side between the “First World” capitalist countries and the “Second World” socialist countries.

This book is really fantastic and I highly recomended it to anyone interested in learning about 20th century history that you probably didn't know much about. Or if you're a fellow traveler wanting to learn more about international solidarity, the need for an international jubilee, and the modern history of neo-colonialism.

This book lays bare the hypocrisy of the liberal nations' call for liberty and equality as they subjugated and brutalized the underdeveloped world for centuries, finding new ways to do so as 20th-century de-colonialization made way for neoliberalism's neocolonialist aims. Europe prides itself on the Enlightenment's “Rights of Man” while treating the people of the underdeveloped countries like beasts of burden. The US's Declaration of Independence is a beacon for those who wish to live a life free of authoritarianism, meanwhile the has spent ~150 years overthrowing countries and installing authoritarian dictators.

THIS BOOK REPORT IS TOO LONG. I AM SORRY. READ THIS BOOK. IT IS GOOD. Here are some of the quotes I found interesting...

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The Failures of the Second World in effectively allying with the Third World

The Third World was a bastion of anti-imperial, anti-colonial fervor, which coincides with anti-capitalist fervor as these are the 3 heads of the same hydra. But this book explains how the Second World failed to leverage this energy, resulting in the First World coming in to dominate again. This is a shame and a betrayal of the call for solidarity with the workers of the world: “Certainly, Communism as an idea and the USSR as an inspiration held an important place in the imagination of the anticolonial movements from Indonesia to Cuba. Yet the Second World had an attitude toward the former colonies that in some ways mimicked that of the First World. For the founding conference of the Cominform held in Poland in 1947, the Soviets did not invite even one Communist Party from the former colonized world, and certainly not the Chinese Party.” The Second World failed to show the respect the Third World deserved.

“On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the heirs of [Stalin] saw promise in the movements of the Third World, and even while they offered assistance to them, they did so with every attempt to steer the ship of history, rather than to share the rudder. Direction was anathema to the darker nations, which had been told what to do for far too long.”
This is a shame, and further shows the lack of solidarity between these two anti-capitalist camps.

~
King Leopold's Ghost

This book talks briefly about King Leopoldo the 2nd from Belgium, who oversaw the genocide of the Congolese: “To supply the emergent tire industry, Leopold II's Free State, therefore, sucked the life out of the rubber vines and murdered half the Congo's population in the process (between 1885 and 1908, the population declined from twenty million to ten million).” I plan on reading “King Leopold's Ghost” this year. It's on the short list.

Even the other European empires saw the atrocities brought forth by Belgium, their concerns were not taken seriously due to the overt hypocrisy: “The Foreign Office in London wrote a tepid note critical of the Belgians, and Leopold II's reply rightly accused the British of hypocrisy: much of the policies followed by the Belgians in the Congo had been standard for the English elsewhere. Indeed, Casement found that British companies in the Putamayo region between Colombia and Peru followed the same kinds of barbarism, the U.S.-based United Fruit Company in Central America pillaged the dignity of the natives there, and in Portuguese Angola as well as French and German Cameroon, the companies used much the same kind of rubber plantation regime.” The whitewashing of history is ever present. Genocides are rebranded as “civilizing the savages.” Talk about projection. We're not the good guys, folks.
Like imagine if a country who's known for invading and overthrowing the governments of weaker nations for seemingly nonsensical reasons started criticizing another country doing the same thing.........

“...the U.S. and British governments, and most of the actors who participated in the condemnation of the Belgians remained silent on the brutality elsewhere. In fact, their criticism of the Congo enabled them to obscure their own role in the barbarity. [...] The imperial powers made Leopold II the issue, at the same time as they buried the broader problem in which they had a hand: imperialism. In 1908, Leopold turned over the management of the [Congo] to the Belgian government, and the barbarism continued until the Belgians completed their rail system in 1914 that rationalized the removal of the Congo's minerals all the way to 1961 and beyond.” Remember this when you talk about “Social Democracies” in Europe. While universal basic services should be strived for, they should not be built on the backs of the exploited Third World. And that's how most of these countries pay for everything.

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Post-Colonial Nationalism

While I lambasted the notion of “nations” and “nationalism” during a previous book review, this book has revitalized my post-colonial nationalist support: “The formerly colonized people have at least one thing in common: they are colonized. [...] For them, the nation had to be constructed out of two elements: the history of their struggles against colonialism, and their program for the creation of justice. [...] they had an internationalist ethos, one that looked outward to other anticolonial nations as their fellows.” Post-colonial nationalism is an international effort to stand in solidarity with the people of all former colonialized states.

This book talks a lot about different organizations and conferences in the underdeveloped nations that strove to fight imperialism and bring solidarity with colonized countries:
• Pan-African Conference of 1900, and later The Pan-African Congress
• The African Association
• The first Conference of African States, and later The All-African People's Conference.
And others I forgot to list.
These organizations stood against colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism to fight for an economic democracy, “We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy.” This is part of the ideology know n as Pan-Africanism.

There were similar efforts in Asia, fighting for Pan-Asianism and against the US Empire's growing neo-colonial efforts, rebranded as “dollar imperialism”.
• Asian Relations Conference of 1947
• Asian Conference of 1949

As well as in the Americas, where they were trying to get the US to stop invading them, overthrowing their governments, and draining their countries of wealth for the benefit of multi-national corporations.
• the First Inter-American Conference of 1889
• The Pan-American Union
• The Havana Conference of 1928
Though the Americas' anti-imperialists didn't cross paths with the Afro-Asian anti-imperialists because “Their target was not Old Europe, but the New Yankee.” But they finally came together, culminating into the “Non-Aligned Movement” (or NAM states), the Tricontinental, and the “League Against Imperialism”, which included a young patent clerk named Al Einstein you may have heard of. Weird that's never talked about...

“The colonial powers quickly tainted the [League Against Imperialism's] work by intimating that it was nothing but a Communist front. Certainly, the Communists played a major role in the league, but they did not exhaust its range and the claim made on it by peoples who had little experience with Communism.” ...oh. That's why.

What these conferences and organizations (many of which I did not list) show is that the fight for post-colonial nationalism must be an international movement; the formerly colonized peoples of the world must have solidarity to rid themselves of their oppressors. And, the fact that none of these organizations or conferences were ever mentioned in a high school history class, shows how imperialist propaganda is still rampant in the imperial core.

“[The Bandung Conference of 1927] allowed these leaders to meet together, celebrate the demise of formal colonialism, and pledge themselves to some measure of joint struggle against the forces of imperialism.”

Colonialism and imperialism has never ended, but it has been greatly reigned in from its peek in the early 1900s. This wasn't accomplished thanks to the human decency of the colonizers. That has never happened. It was accomplished by the sword-wielding colonized people, coming together in national awakenings to fight their oppressors.

The call for post-colonial internationalism is still alive and well within the G-77 and the United Nations. Of course the good ole US of A doesn't really give a damn about the UN because the idea of not having absolute autonomy on a global scale is simply heretical. We are the nation's police force, and we don't really do a good job at holding our own police accountable.

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Tariffs, the IMF, the World Bank, and Usury

One of the most influential books I read was “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism“ (2007) by Ha-Joon Chang. In it, the author opened my eyes to the exploitative nature of modern neoliberal capitalism to the historically underdeveloped nations. “The Darker Nations” stands alongside and reinforces the assertions made in “Bad Samaritans” as well as in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and “Open Veins of Latin America.”

Namely: The First World used tariffs to help grow their economies and now force the Third World to abolish tariffs and open up their unprocessed commodities to the global market. The Third World gets paid pittance for the raw material, which goes to industrialized nations for processing and is sold back for 100x the cost.

This is what we should do:
“Since Europe and the United States benefited from colonial rule, they must bear responsibility for it. To be responsible should mean that the First World needed to provide outright grants to the Third World (what would later be called ‘reparations'). To ask the people of the Third World to sacrifice more toward development would be morally inappropriate.“

Instead we do this:

“[T]he G-7 objected strongly when the [Non-Aligned Movement] states created tariff barriers to protect their economies, but by UNCTAD's count, the G-7 states themselves had over seven hundred nontariff barriers (such as government subsidies, quantitative restrictions, and other technical standards to block the import of certain goods into their protected markets).” Do as I say, not as I do.

And we do this:

“In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades-old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty fought for by the global institutions of the Third World.”

The IMF is an evil, evil organization that is directly responsible for the continued underdevelopment of the Third World. They do not make things better. They make things worse. They drain the wealth of the Third World to enrich the First World. “The IMF, for the United States particularly, would be one more instrument to maintain a tariff-free capitalist system.”

You may think the rich nations subsidize the poor nations. This is false. The following is (in my opinion) the most important quote in this book:

“By 1983, capital flows reversed, as more money came from the indebted states to the G-7 than went out as loans and aid. In other words, the indebted countries subsidized and funded the wealthy nations. In the late 1980s, the indebted states sent an average of $40 billion more to the G-7 than the G-7 sent out as loans and aid; this became the annual tribute from the darker nations. By 1997, the total debt owed by the formerly colonized world amounted to about $2.17 trillion, with a daily debt-service payment of $717 million. The nations of sub-Saharan Africa spent four times more on debt service, on interest payments, than on health care. For most of the indebted states, between one-third and one-fifth of their gross national product was squandered in this debt-service tribute. The debt crisis had winners: the financial interests in the G-7.”

The IMF is colonialism by another name. This is what I mean when I say neoliberalism is synonymous with neocolonialism: “[W]hereas almost a hundred Third World states accounted for less than 37 percent of the IMF's voting power, the five leading industrial powers controlled more than 40 percent, while the United States alone held 20 percent of the votes in the IMF. The fund was controlled by the United States and other advanced industrial states.“

The US controls the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF and The World Bank control the Third World. The third world sells their resources to the US corporations, which feeds the US empire, completing the cycle of global exploitation.

~~~
US Imperialism
“The United States had a poor track record with national liberation and anti-imperialist movements in Central America and the Caribbean. The armies and allies of the United States had been prone to oppose these movements, assassinate their leaders, and deliver arms to their monarchist or oligarchic opponents. Between 1900 and 1933, the U.S. military intervened to scuttle the national hopes of the people of Cuba (four times), the Dominican Republic (four times, including an eight-year occupation), Guatemala (once), Haiti (twice, including a nineteen-year occupation), Honduras (seven times), Nicaragua (twice), and Panama (six times).”

“[As of 1964,] The United States had intervened in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Latin America. [...] Imperialist powers had an inherent tendency to fight wars of conquest and subjugation, and as they did so, they would confront people's tenacious desire for liberty and independence.”

“The lack of a central authority in Bolivia, or else the effective devolution of power to the people's organizations, led the U.S. State Department to note in 1957 that ‘the whole complex of lawlessness, combined with the government's apparent unwillingness or inability to control it, added up to a considerable degree of anarchy in the country.' The ‘anarchy' for the United States was popular democracy for the Bolivians.”

The US Government doesn't like democracy. It likes authoritarians because they prioritize the interest of corporations over the interest of the people. These corporations drain the wealth of the exploited countries and fill US government and US corporate coffers.

“The U.S.-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example of this planetary role for Washington, DC. Whereas the evidence of U.S. involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the U.S. military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973).”

The US subsidizes the Military Industrial Complex by donating conditional funds to Third World nations that immediately go toward purchasing military hardware from US corporations. This has the added benefit of creating professional militaries that speak for the authoritarian ruler (and thus the interests of capitol) rather than an armed proletariat militia.

“By 1982, the United Nations offered the stark choice that either the world can ‘pursue the arms race,' or else it can ‘move consciously and with deliberate speed toward a more stable and balanced social and economic development.' But, the United Nations cautioned, ‘it cannot do both.'” Guess what we chose. “Every attempt to stem the arms trade or cut back on the vast increase in the global military budget was met with disdain or incomprehension—security and defense had come to be reality, whereas social development became idealistic.”

What kind of world would we live in if we prioritized helping people over designing and stockpiling more sophisticated ways of killing them?

~
Cartels - Oil, Private, & Public

The “Seven Sisters: Seven Sisters: Exxon (or Esso), Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and So-cal (or Chevron)” controlled the vast majority of crude oil production and
“acted together as a cartel of private companies to ensure that they not only got the best prices for crude oil but also controlled the entire oil market.
The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage—to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite—the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia—and to oil the military machine.”
Because that's what the corporations wanted. Corporations have no interest in their profits going toward benefiting society. They will only share profits with those who help secure their interests. Authoritarian oligarchs are the best thing for a corporation.

There aren't just cartels for oil, but every raw material: “Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much.” Some governments tried to create their own international governmental cartel to challenge corporate cartels. Rather than corporate cartels draining the wealth of the exploited nations, these public commodity cartels would “achieve a stabilization of prices to benefit the raw materials' producers.” Imagine that: the wealth of a nation being controlled by its government for the benefit of the nation itself, rather than it being controlled by multinational corporations who aim to drain it for the benefit of the imperial core. Wild.

The underdeveloped countries were single-commodity producers, booming or busting at the whims of the market, and if they got too upity, the oligarchy would cut them out and go to a neighboring country, devastating the economy. It's not a “market,” it's an global extortion racket. “By 1980, of the 115 ‘developing countries,' according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues.” Mostly oil, but also sugar, cocoa, coffee, fish, copper, and alumina.

This is where OPEC comes in. “The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude oil exports. [...] the idea that the darker nations could produce a cartel for their precious commodities to ensure a decent price, impacted the Third World. Various Third World political forums now tried to move a similar agenda as OPEC, to create various public cartels for the otherwise-cheap raw materials bought in a market created by the private transnational cartels mostly located in the First World.”

Tragically, the OPEC countries didn't help with the creation of similar price stabilization efforts for other raw materials. “Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else.” This is a tragedy for the Third World.

There was a big long paragraph in here about Petro-Dollars and Nixon delinking the US dollar to the Gold Standard and the 1973 embargo. I didn't really understand much, but I'll say it all sucks.