Understanding the Goals of Liberation

Introduction to the Liberation and Struggle topic

Much of my research is concentrated on the political and social developments of liberation movements. In order to form a cohesive resistance to oppression, strong political organization is required. Grassroots organization, centralized state power, and militant struggle are important elements in any liberation movement. In many cases, resistance movements are criticized for their use of violence, but critics rarely consider that anti-colonial movements are fighting against racial, economic, and even military violence by antagonistic forces.

The struggle against colonialism has existed for centuries and continued well into the latter half of the 20th century. The military interventions, economic control, and politicized violence employed by the colonizers is often minimized within Western history books. Since the Global North initiated colonialism and built their states off stolen wealth, it is in their best interests politically to downplay the crimes of colonialism. Another sneaky tactic that Western historians employ is to paint anti-colonial movements as "extreme" by overemphasizing the violent tactics used by the revolutionaries while ignoring the historical context that lead to armed struggle. A good overview of colonialism is Kris Manjapra's Colonialism in Global Perspective.

Demonization of liberation movements has gotten easier with the implementation of neocolonialism. Neocolonialism is a system in which former colonies are given nominal independence while the former colonial powers retain considerable influence over their politics and government and economic chokehold. With true sovereignty evading these young states, liberation struggle continues in various forms. Willian Blum covers the many cases where the US employs direct aggression against these movements in Killing Hope and other works. A. B. Abrams' Atrocity Fabrication brilliantly covers the propaganda used to mostly these interventions.

One of the most well-known foreign interventions is the liberation war in Vietnam. Against incredible odds, an impoverished colony managed to defeat both their colonial overlord, France, and subsequently defeat the US military. The US committed unspeakable atrocities during the war, which well documented in Kill Everything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse. The many massacres and rapes were not isolated incidents, as many in the West claim, but system acts of terror that were encouraged by American leaders. What made these victories possible was the discipline, strong ideology, and willpower of the Vietnamese leadership. A good work of the ideological development of Vietnamese is Vietnam's Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology by Tuong Vu (note that this last title is a very Western outlook, but still is a good source).

Another spectacular Third World revolution was the Chinese Revolution, which ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is difficult to fully appreciate the dire situation in China before the establishment of a strong centralized government. Foreign invasions of colonizers and fascists had damaged the health and prestige of the early-modern Chinese state. Over the course of a few centuries, China fell from a great power to a deeply impoverished and politically divided country. Huaiyin Li does a good job of detailing the important role that the Communist Party of China (CPC) had in stabilizing the modern Chinese state in his book, The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 (also rather Western-centric in its accounting, though it does give a lot of credit to the CPC for their ability to create a strong modern state). Under the CPC leadership, China saw exponential increases in their standard of living. China later resisted pressure from the Soviet Union and the United States and became a great power in its own right.

Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention the Palestine Issue given the escalation of the genocide by Israel. The history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is long and complex; I cannot capture the whole thing in a single post. The short version is, Israel is a Western settler colonial state that  occupies Palestinian land. The government of Israel enforces an apartheid system against the native people. The creators of Zionist philosophy had always planned to create a "bastion" of European culture in the "barbarous" region of the Levant. There was a clear acknowledgment by the founders of this movement that they would have to violently expel the native inhabitants in order to create their idealized ethnostate. True to their word, in 1948, the founders of Israel committed a horrific genocide against the Palestinians and created their ethnically pure state of Israel. Good historical coverage of the Zionist project can be found in Ilan Pape's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.