Fluent Essays

3 Pages Essay. Choose one question from the two Prompts and do the Comparative Essay. No Plagiarism. Due in 24 hours.  Must use the Readings. Use one reading from Column A and one reading from Column B. HISTORY 21C: MODERN WORLD HISTORY FINAL ESSAY DUE: UPLOAD TO CANVAS BY SEPTEMBER 6 AT 11:59PM Please respond to ONE of the following prompts: 1. Throughout the quarter, we have looked at divisions in society based on class, gender, and race. Select one primary source from Column A and one primary source from Column B (listed below). Using the two sources, compare and contrast the ways that class, gender, OR racial divisions have been constructed in different moments of history. Be sure to provide the necessary historical context for understanding these comparisons. 2. I have argued that modernity is not synonymous with progress. Select one primary source from Column A and one primary source from Column B (listed below). Using the two sources, write an essay that either agrees or disagrees with my argument. You will need to provide specific evidence from the two sources to support your argument. Be sure to also provide the necessary historical context for understanding any evidence. For your essay, select one primary source from Column A AND one primary source from Column B: Column A Column B Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life” (Topic 2) Qiu Jin, “An Address to Two Hundred Million Fellow Countrywomen” (Topic 3) Vladimir Lenin, “From What is to be Done?” (Topic 4) Mohandas Gandhi, “Indian Home Rule” (Topic 10) Ernesto Guevara, “Guerrilla Warfare” (Topic 11) Liu Shao-chi, “On the Agrarian Reform Law” (Topic 11) Emiliano Zapata, “Plan of Ayala” (Topic 5) Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (Topic 7) “Japan at War Selections” (Topic 8) Martin Luther King, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (Topic 12) Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (Topic 13) Nelson Mandela, “I am Prepared to Die” (Topic 14) Guidelines and Tips: • Your essay should be 3-5 pages, typed, double-spaced, one-inch margins, 12pt Times New Roman (or similar font) • Please provide an original title for your essay (it makes me happy when students get creative with essay titles) • Your essay must be organized around an original, arguable thesis statement • Be sure to include proper citations for all quoted and paraphrased material (any citation style is acceptable, just be consistent) • Take a look at the rubric for the final essay for specific details about what I expect from this essay (with regard to the content and organization) • This is a History class, so I expect you to be able to provide the necessary historical context • Do not assume that your reader knows what you mean. Be specific and detailed. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight. I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence Rev. Martin Luther King April 4, 1967 Riverside Church, New York City 1 Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years—especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. For those who ask the question, "Aren’t you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier: O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be! Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a 2 commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life? Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries. They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives. For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators—our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change—especially in terms of their need for land and peace. 3 The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy—and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us—not their fellow Vietnamese—the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go—primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them—mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force—the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators? Now there is little left to build on—save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers. Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front—that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them—the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence? Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. 4 So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands. Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores. At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor. Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism." If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play. 5 The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict: 1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. 2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. 3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. 4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government. 5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agree- ment. Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible. As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing Clergy and Laymen Concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God. In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter- revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." 6 Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person- oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is … History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 1 THEODORE ROOSEVELT, “THE STRENUOUS LIFE” (10 April 1899) “The expanding role of the United States in world affairs is one of the twentieth century’s momentous developments. As late as the 1890s, the United States was on no one’s list of ‘great powers’ despite its growing population, resources, and industrial expansion. It had no colonies, a tiny army, a “washtub” navy, and a diplomatic corps notorious for its unprofessionalism. The United States had played a key role in opening Japan to foreign trade in the 1850s and 1860s, and although it intervened frequently in Latin American affairs, the U.S. government and the American people showed little interest in the affairs of Europe or Asia. This changed in the late 1890s… Among the advocates of an expanded international role for the United States, none was more enthusiastic and vociferous than Theodore Roosevelt. Born in 1858 in New York and a graduate of Harvard, Roosevelt was an author, rancher, state assemblyman, New York City police commissioner, and undersecretary of the navy before being elected vice-president on the Republican ticket in 1900. He became president in 1901 after the assassination of President McKinley, and was reelected in 1904. As president, Roosevelt directed the construction of the Panama Canal, helped broker an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, sent the Navy on a world cruise to ‘show the flag,’ and announced the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States proclaimed the right to intervene in the political affairs of Latin American states. Roosevelt delivered the following speech in early 1899 during the heated national debate following the U.S. victory over Spain in the Spanish American War. According to the armistice agreement of August 12, 1898, Spain ceded to the United States Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam. In December the two sides negotiated the Treaty of Paris, by which the United States would receive the Philippines in return for twenty million dollars. Senate ratification of the treaty was bitterly opposed by most Democrats and members of the Anti-Imperialism League, who believed that annexing the Philippines clashed with the nation’s commitment to liberty and freedom. In his Chicago speech, ‘The Strenuous Life,’ and in many other statements, Roosevelt vigorously opposed the anti-imperialists’ arguments. He and other supporters of the new U.S. imperial role won the day when the Senate narrowly approvied the Treaty of Paris in February 1899.”1 In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who 1 James Overfield, ed., Sources of Twentieth-Century Global History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 10- 11. History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 2 does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes-to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research-work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a General, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth’s surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 3 As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days-let us, the children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations. We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them! We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill. Last year we could not help being brought History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 4 face to face with the problem of war with Spain. All we could decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and; once in, whether failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now. We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make of our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful page in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all merely amounts to dealing with them badly. We have a given problem to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright. The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills “stern men with empires in their brains”-all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth leading. They believe in that cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all and end-all of national life, instead of realizing that, though an indispensable element, it is, after all, but one of the many elements that go to make up true national greatness. No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All honor must be paid to the architects of our material prosperity, to the great captains of industry who have built our factories and our railroads, to the strong men who toil for wealth with brain or hand; for great is the debt of the nation to these and their kind. But our debt is yet greater to the men whose highest type is to be found in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like Grant. They showed by their lives that they recognized the law of work, the law of strife; they History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 5 toiled to win a competence for themselves and those dependent upon them; but they recognized that there were yet other and even loftier duties – duties to the nation and duties to the race. We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders. We must build the isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West. So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint of international honor the argument is even stronger. The guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago, left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of duty. If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited nations are eager to undertake. The work must be done; we cannot escape our responsibility; and if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance to do the work – glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of the great tasks set modern civilization. But let us not deceive ourselves as to the importance of the task. Let us not be misled by vainglory into underestimating the strain it will put on our powers. Above all, let us, as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities with proper seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We must demand the highest order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to grapple with these new problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability those public servants who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the nation or inability to rise to the high level of the new demands upon our strength and our resources. Of course we must remember not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and not the causes of History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 6 disaster. Let me illustrate what I mean by the army and the navy. If twenty years ago we had gone to war, we should have found the navy as absolutely unprepared as the army. At that time our ships could not have encountered with success the fleets of Spain any more than nowadays we can put untrained soldiers, no matter how brave, who are armed with archaic black-powder weapons, against well-drilled regulars armed with the highest type of modern repeating rifle. But in the early eighties the attention of the nation became directed to our naval needs. Congress most wisely made a series of appropriations to build up a new navy, and under a succession of able and patriotic secretaries, of both political parties, the navy was gradually built up, until its material became equal to its splendid personnel, with the result that last summer it leaped to its proper place as one of the most brilliant and formidable fighting navies in the entire world. We rightly pay all honor to the men controlling the navy at the time it won these great deeds, honor to Secretary Long and Admiral Dewey, to the captains who handled the ships in action, to the daring lieutenants who braved death in the smaller craft, and to the heads of bureaus at Washington who saw that the ships were so commanded, so armed, so equipped, so well engined, as to insure the best results. But let us also keep ever in mind that all of this would not have availed if it had not been for the wisdom of the men who during the preceding fifteen years had built up the navy. Keep in mind the secretaries of the navy during those years; keep in mind the senators and congressmen who by their votes gave the money necessary to build and to armor the ships, to construct the great guns, and to train the crews; remember also those who actually did build the ships, the armor, and the guns; and remember the admirals and captains who handled battle-ship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat on the high seas, alone and in squadrons, developing the seamanship, the gunnery, and the power of acting together, which their successors utilized so gloriously at Manila and off Santiago. And, gentlemen, remember the converse, too. Remember that justice has two sides. Be just to those who built up the navy, and, for the sake of the future of the country, keep in mind those who opposed its building up. Read the Congressional Record. Find out the senators and congressmen who opposed the grants for building the new ships; who opposed the purchase of armor, without which the ships were worthless; who opposed any adequate maintenance for the Navy Department, and strove to cut down the number of men necessary to man our fleets. The men who did these things were one and all working to bring disaster on the country. They have no share in the glory of Manila, in the honor of Santiago. They have no cause to feel proud of the History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 7 valor of our sea-captains, of the renown of our flag. Their motives may or may not have been good, but their acts were heavily fraught with evil. They did ill for the national honor, and we won in spite of their sinister opposition. Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day. Our army has never been built up as it should be built up. I shall not discuss with an audience like this the puerile suggestion that a nation of seventy millions of freemen is in danger of losing its liberties from the existence of an army of 100,000 men, three fourths of whom will be employed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast fortresses, and on Indian reservations. No man of good sense and stout heart can take such a proposition seriously. If we are such weaklings as the proposition implies, then we are unworthy of freedom in any event. To no body of men in the United States is the country so much indebted as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the regular army and navy. There is no body from which the country has less to fear, and none of which it should be prouder, none which it should be more anxious to upbuild. Our army needs complete reorganization-not merely enlarging-and the reorganization can only come as the result of legislation. A proper general staff should be established, and the positions of ordnance, commissary, and quartermaster officers should be filled by detail from the line. Above all, the army must be given the chance to exercise in large bodies. Never again should we see, as we saw in the Spanish war, major-generals in command of divisions who had never before commanded three companies together in the field. Yet, incredible to relate, the recent Congress has shown a queer inability to learn some of the lessons of the war. There were large bodies, of men in both branches who opposed the declaration of war, who opposed the ratification of peace, who opposed the upbuilding of the army, and who even opposed the purchase of: armor at a reasonable price for the battle-ships and cruisers, thereby putting an absolute stop to the building of any new fighting-ships for the navy. If, during the years to come, any disaster should befall our arms, afloat or ashore, and thereby any shame come to the United States, remember that the blame will lie upon the men whose names appear upon the roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side of these great questions. On them will lie the burden of any loss of our soldiers and sailors, of any dishonor to the flag; and upon you and the people of this country will lie the blame if you do not repudiate, in no unmistakable way, what these men have done. The blame will not rest upon the untrained commander of untried troops, upon the civil officers History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 8 of a department the organization of which has been left utterly inadequate, or upon the admiral with an insufficient number of ships; but upon the public men who have so lamentably failed in forethought as to refuse to remedy these evils long in advance, and upon the nation that stands behind those public men. So, at the present hour, no small share of the responsibility for the blood shed in the Philippines, the blood of our brothers, and the blood of their wild and ignorant foes, lies at the thresholds of those who so long delayed the adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those who by their worse than foolish words deliberately invited a savage people to plunge into a war fraught with sure disaster for them – a war, too, in which our own brave men who follow the flag must pay with their blood for the silly, mock humanitarianism of the prattlers who sit at home in peace. The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth – if she is not to stand merely as the China of the western hemisphere. Our proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must see that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense in our home administration of city, State, and nation. We must strive for honesty in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation and of the individual; for the widest freedom of individual initiative where possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative where it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But because we set our own household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part in the great affairs of the world. A man’s first duty is to his own home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the State; for if he fails in this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing to be a free man. In the same way, while a nation’s first duty is within its own borders, it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind. In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are confronted by most difficult problems. It is cowardly to shrink from solving them in the proper way; for solved they must be, if not by us, then by some stronger and more manful race. If we are too weak, too selfish, or too foolish to solve them, some bolder and abler people must undertake the solution. Personally, I am far too History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 9 firm a believer in the greatness of my country and the power of my countrymen to admit for one moment that we shall ever be driven to the ignoble alternative. The problems are different for the different islands. Porto Rico is not large enough to stand alone. We must govern it wisely and well, primarily in the interest of its own people. Cuba is, in my judgment, entitled ultimately to settle for itself whether it shall be an independent state or an integral portion of the mightiest of republics. But until order and stable liberty are secured, we must remain in the island to insure them, and infinite tact, judgment, moderation, and courage must be shown by our military and civil representatives in keeping the island pacified, in relentlessly stamping out brigandage, in protecting all alike, and yet in showing proper recognition to the men who have fought for Cuban liberty. The Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their population includes half-caste and native Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit. Others may in time become fit but at present can only take part in self-government under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent. We have driven Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let it be replaced by savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and not for good. I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about “liberty” and the “consent of the governed,” in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States. England’s rule in India and Egypt has been of great benefit to England, for it has trained up generations of men accustomed to look at the larger and loftier side of public life. It has been of even greater benefit to India and Egypt. And finally, and most of all, it has advanced the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in the Philippines, we will add to that national renown which is the highest and finest part of national life, will greatly benefit the people of the Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play our part well in the great work of uplifting History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 10 mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in mind that we must show in a high degree the qualities of courage, of honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance must be stamped out. The first and all- important work to be done is to establish the supremacy of our flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can accomplish anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the foe, we can afford contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be remembered that their utterances are not saved from being treasonable merely by the fact that they are despicable. When once we have put down armed resistance, when once our rule is acknowledged, then an even more difficult task will begin, for then we must see to it that the islands are administered with absolute honesty and with good judgment. If we let the public service of the islands be turned into the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have begun to tread the path which Spain trod to her own destruction. We must send out there only good and able men, chosen for their fitness, and not because of their partisan service, and these men must not only administer impartial justice to the natives and serve their own government with honesty and fidelity, but must show the utmost tact and firmness, remembering that, with such people as those with whom we are to deal, weakness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness comes lack of consideration for their principles and prejudices. I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness. History 21C: Topic 2 Readings 11 RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN” (1899) “Born in British India in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was educated in England before returning to India in 1882, where his father was a museum director and authority on Indian arts and crafts. Thus Kipling was thoroughly immersed in Indian culture: by 1890 he had published in English about 80 stories and ballads previously unknown outside India. As a result of financial misfortune, from 1892-96 he and his wife, the daughter of an American publisher, lived in Vermont, where he wrote the two Jungle Books. After returning to England, he published ‘The White Man’s Burden’ in 1899, an appeal to the United States to assume the task of developing the Philippines, recently [acquired] in the Spanish-American War. As a writer, Kipling perhaps lived too long: by the time of death in 1936, he had come to be reviled as the poet … The Freedom Charter Adopted at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, on 26 June 1955 We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people; that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality; that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities; that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief; And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white together equals, countrymen and brothers adopt this Freedom Charter; And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won. The People Shall Govern! Every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws; All people shall be entitled to take part in the administration of the country; The rights of the people shall be the same, regardless of race, colour or sex; All bodies of minority rule, advisory boards, councils and authorities shall be replaced by democratic organs of self-government . All National Groups Shall have Equal Rights! There shall be equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races; All people shall have equal right to use their own languages, and to develop their own folk culture and customs; All national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride; The preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime; All apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside. The People Shall Share in the Country's Wealth! The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people; The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people; All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions. The Land Shall be Shared Among Those Who Work It! Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re- divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger; The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers; Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land; All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose; People shall not be robbed of their cattle, and forced labour and farm prisons shall be abolished. All Shall be Equal Before the Law! No-one shall be imprisoned, deported or restricted without a fair trial; No-one shall be condemned by the order of any Government official; The courts shall be representative of all the people; Imprisonment shall be only for serious crimes against the people, and shall aim at re- education, not vengeance; The police force and army shall be open to all on an equal basis and shall be the helpers and protectors of the people; All laws which discriminate on grounds of race, colour or belief shall be repealed. All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights! The law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organise, to meet together, to publish, to preach, to worship and to educate their children; The privacy of the house from police raids shall be protected by law; All shall be free to travel without restriction from countryside to town, from province to province, and from South Africa abroad; Pass Laws, permits and all other laws restricting these freedoms shall be abolished. There Shall be Work and Security! All who work shall be free to form trade unions, to elect their officers and to make wage agreements with their employers; The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits; Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work; There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers; Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants shall have the same rights as all others who work; Child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished. The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened! The government shall discover, develop and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life; All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all, by free exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands; The aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace; Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit; Adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan; Teachers shall have all the rights of other citizens; The colour bar in cultural life, in sport and in education shall be abolished. There Shall be Houses, Security and Comfort! All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security; Unused housing space to be made available to the people; Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry; A preventive health scheme shall be run by the state; Free medical care and hospitalisation shall be provided for all, with special care for mothers and young children; Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, creches and social centres; The aged, the orphans, the disabled and the sick shall be cared for by the state; Rest, leisure and recreation shall be the right of all: Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished, and laws which break up families shall be repealed. There Shall be Peace and Friendship! South Africa shall be a fully independent state which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations; South Africa shall strive to maintain world peace and the settlement of all international disputes by negotiation - not war; Peace and friendship amongst all our people shall be secured by upholding the equal rights, opportunities and status of all; The people of the protectorates Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland shall be free to decide for themselves their own future; The right of all peoples of Africa to independence and self-government shall be recognised, and shall be the basis of close co-operation. Let all people who love their people and their country no say, as we say here: THESE FREEDOMS WE WILL FIGHT FOR, SIDE BY SIDE, THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES, UNTIL WE HAVE WON OUR LIBERTY “I am prepared to die” Nelson  Mandela  (1918-­‐2013)  was  born  the  son  of  a  Tembu  tribal  chieftain  at  Qunu,  near   Umtata,  in  South  Africa.  He  renounced  his  right  to  succeed  his  father  and  instead  chose  a   political  career.  He  attended  college,  became  a  lawyer,  joined  the  African  National  Congress   (ANC)  in  1944  and  helped  found  its  powerful  Youth  League.   In  1962,  he  was  arrested  by  South  African  security  police  for  his  opposition  to  the  white   government  and   its  apartheid  ("separateness")  policies  of   racial,  political,  and  economic   discrimination   against   the   nonwhite   majority.  In   1964,   the   government   brought   further   charges   including  sabotage,  high   treason  and  conspiracy   to  overthrow   the  government.   This  is  Mandela's  statement  from  the  dock  at  the  opening  of  his  defense  in  the  1964  trial.     I  am  the  First  Accused.   I   hold   a   Bachelor's   Degree   in   Arts   and   practised   as   an   attorney   in   Johannesburg   for   a   number  of  years  in  partnership  with  Oliver  Tambo.  I  am  a  convicted  prisoner  serving  five   years  for  leaving  the  country  without  a  permit  and  for  inciting  people  to  go  on  strike  at  the   end  of  May  1961.   At  the  outset,  I  want  to  say  that  the  suggestion  made  by  the  State  in  its  opening  that  the   struggle   in   South   Africa   is   under   the   influence   of   foreigners   or   communists   is   wholly   incorrect.  I  have  done  whatever  I  did,  both  as  an  individual  and  as  a  leader  of  my  people,   because  of  my  experience  in  South  Africa  and  my  own  proudly  felt  African  background,  and   not  because  of  what  any  outsider  might  have  said.   In  my  youth  in  the  Transkei  I  listened  to  the  elders  of  my  tribe  telling  stories  of  the  old   days.  Amongst  the  tales  they  related  to  me  were  those  of  wars  fought  by  our  ancestors  in   defence   of   the   fatherland.   The   names   of   Dingane   and   Bambata,   Hintsa   and   Makana,   Squngthi  and  Dalasile,  Moshoeshoe  and  Sekhukhuni,  were  praised  as  the  glory  of  the  entire   African  nation.  I  hoped  then  that  life  might  offer  me  the  opportunity  to  serve  my  people  and   make  my  own  humble  contribution  to  their  freedom  struggle.  This  is  what  has  motivated   me  in  all  that  I  have  done  in  relation  to  the  charges  made  against  me  in  this  case.   Having  said  this,  I  must  deal  immediately  and  at  some  length  with  the  question  of  violence.   Some  of  the  things  so  far  told  to  the  Court  are  true  and  some  are  untrue.  I  do  not,  however,   deny  that  I  planned  sabotage.  I  did  not  plan  it  in  a  spirit  of  recklessness,  nor  because  I  have   any  love  of  violence.  I  planned  it  as  a  result  of  a  calm  and  sober  assessment  of  the  political   situation  that  had  arisen  after  many  years  of  tyranny,  exploitation,  and  oppression  of  my   people  by  the  Whites.   I  admit  immediately  that  I  was  one  of  the  persons  who  helped  to  form  Umkhonto  we  Sizwe,   and  that  I  played  a  prominent  role  in  its  affairs  until  I  was  arrested  in  August  1962.   In  the  statement  which  I  am  about  to  make  I  shall  correct  certain  false  impressions  which   have  been  created  by  State  witnesses.  Amongst  other  things,  I  will  demonstrate  that  certain   of  the  acts  referred  to  in  the  evidence  were  not  and  could  not  have  been  committed  by   Umkhonto.  I  will  also  deal  with  the  relationship  between  the  African  National  Congress  and   Umkhonto,   and   with   the   part   which   I   personally   have   played   in   the   affairs   of   both   organizations.  I  shall  deal  also  with  the  part  played  by  the  Communist  Party.  In  order  to   explain  these  matters  properly,  I  will  have  to  explain  what  Umkhonto  set  out  to  achieve;   what  methods  it  prescribed  for  the  achievement  of  these  objects,  and  why  these  methods   were  chosen.  I  will  also  have  to  explain  how  I  became  involved  in  the  activities  of  these   organizations.   I  deny  that  Umkhonto  was  responsible  for  a  number  of  acts  which  clearly  fell  outside  the   policy  of  the  organization,  and  which  have  been  charged  in  the  indictment  against  us.  I  do   not  know  what  justification  there  was  for  these  acts,  but  to  demonstrate  that  they  could  not   have  been  authorized  by  Umkhonto,  I  want  to  refer  briefly  to  the  roots  and  policy  of  the   organization.   I  have  already  mentioned  that  I  was  one  of  the  persons  who  helped  to  form  Umkhonto.  I,   and  the  others  who  started  the  organization,  did  so  for  two  reasons.  Firstly,  we  believed   that  as  a  result  of  Government  policy,  violence  by  the  African  people  had  become  inevitable,   and  that  unless  responsible  leadership  was  given  to  canalize  and  control  the  feelings  of  our   people,   there   would   be   outbreaks   of   terrorism   which   would   produce   an   intensity   of   bitterness  and  hostility  between  the  various  races  of  this  country  which  is  not  produced   even  by  war.  Secondly,  we  felt  that  without  violence  there  would  be  no  way  open  to  the   African  people  to  succeed  in  their  struggle  against  the  principle  of  white  supremacy.  All   lawful  modes  of  expressing  opposition  to  this  principle  had  been  closed  by  legislation,  and   we   were   placed   in   a   position   in   which   we   had   either   to   accept   a   permanent   state   of   inferiority,  or  to  defy  the  Government.  We  chose  to  defy  the  law.  We  first  broke  the  law  in  a   way  which  avoided  any  recourse  to  violence;  when  this  form  was  legislated  against,  and   then  the  Government  resorted  to  a  show  of  force  to  crush  opposition  to  its  policies,  only   then  did  we  decide  to  answer  violence  with  violence.   But  the  violence  which  we  chose  to  adopt  was  not  terrorism.  We  who  formed  Umkhonto   were  all  members  of  the  African  National  Congress,  and  had  behind  us  the  ANC  tradition  of   non-­‐violence  and  negotiation  as  a  means  of  solving  political  disputes.  We  believe  that  South   Africa  belongs  to  all  the  people  who  live  in  it,  and  not  to  one  group,  be  it  black  or  white.  We   did  not  want  an  interracial  war,  and  tried  to  avoid  it  to  the  last  minute.  If  the  Court  is  in   doubt  about  this,  it  will  be  seen  that  the  whole  history  of  our  organization  bears  out  what  I   have  said,  and  what  I  will  subsequently  say,  when  I  describe  the  tactics  which  Umkhonto   decided  to  adopt.  I  want,  therefore,  to  say  something  about  the  African  National  Congress.   The  African  National  Congress  was   formed   in  1912   to  defend   the   rights   of   the   African   people  which  had  been  seriously  curtailed  by  the  South  Africa  Act,  and  which  were  then   being  threatened  by  the  Native  Land  Act.  For  thirty-­‐seven  years  -­‐   that   is  until  1949  -­‐   it   adhered  strictly  to  a  constitutional  struggle.  It  put  forward  demands  and  resolutions;  it  sent   delegations   to   the   Government   in   the   belief   that   African   grievances   could   be   settled   through   peaceful   discussion   and   that   Africans   could   advance   gradually   to   full   political   rights.  But  White  Governments  remained  unmoved,  and  the  rights  of  Africans  became  less   instead  of  becoming  greater.  In  the  words  of  my  leader,  Chief  Lutuli,  who  became  President   of  the  ANC  in  1952,  and  who  was  later  awarded  the  Nobel  Peace  Prize:   "Who  will  deny  that  thirty  years  of  my  life  have  been  spent  knocking  in  vain,  patiently,   moderately,   and   modestly   at   a   closed   and   barred   door?   What   have   been   the   fruits   of   moderation?  The  past  thirty  years  have  seen  the  greatest  number  of  laws  restricting  our   rights  and  progress,  until  today  we  have  reached  a  stage  where  we  have  almost  no  rights  at   all."   Even  after  1949,  the  ANC  remained  determined  to  avoid  violence.  At  this  time,  however,   there   was   a   change   from   the   strictly   constitutional   means   of   protest   which   had   been   employed  in  the  past.  The  change  was  embodied  in  a  decision  which  was  taken  to  protest   against   apartheid   legislation   by   peaceful,   but   unlawful,   demonstrations   against   certain   laws.  Pursuant   to   this  policy   the  ANC   launched   the  Defiance  Campaign,   in  which   I  was   placed   in   charge   of   volunteers.   This   campaign   was   based   on   the   principles   of   passive   resistance.  More  than  8,500  people  defied  apartheid  laws  and  went  to  jail.  Yet  there  was   not  a  single  instance  of  violence  in  the  course  of  this  campaign  on  the  part  of  any  defier.  I   and  nineteen  colleagues  were  convicted   for   the  role  which  we  played   in  organizing  the   campaign,   but   our   sentences   were   suspended   mainly   because   the   Judge   found   that   discipline  and  non-­‐violence  had  been  stressed   throughout.  This  was   the   time  when   the   volunteer  section  of  the  ANC  was  established,  and  when  the  word  'Amadelakufa'  was  first   used:  this  was  the  time  when  the  volunteers  were  asked  to  take  a  pledge  to  uphold  certain   principles.  Evidence  dealing  with  volunteers  and  their  pledges  has  been  introduced  into   this  case,  but  completely  out  of  context.  The  volunteers  were  not,  and  are  not,  the  soldiers   of   a   black   army   pledged   to   fight   a   civil   war   against   the   whites.   They   were,   and   are,   dedicated  workers  who  are  prepared  to  lead  campaigns  initiated  by  the  ANC  to  distribute   leaflets,   to  organize  strikes,  or  do  whatever   the  particular  campaign  required.  They  are   called   volunteers   because   they   volunteer   to   face   the   penalties   of   imprisonment   and   whipping  which  are  now  prescribed  by  the  legislature  for  such  acts.   During  the  Defiance  Campaign,  the  Public  Safety  Act  and  the  Criminal  Law  Amendment  Act   were  passed.  These  Statutes  provided  harsher  penalties  for  offences  committed  by  way  of   protests  against  laws.  Despite  this,  the  protests  continued  and  the  ANC  adhered  to  its  policy   of  non-­‐violence.  In  1956,  156  leading  members  of  the  Congress  Alliance,  including  myself,   were   arrested   on   a   charge   of   high   treason   and   charges   under   the   Suppression … THE AGRARIAN REFORM LAW OF THE PEOPIJ'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ***+f( FOREIGN IANGUAGES PRESS, PEIflNG I THE AGMRIAN REFORM LAW OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CH tNA TOGETHER )IVITH OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FonrrcN L,u,lcuaops Pnnss Prxwe ,rg5q ,{ l $ -,(l CONTENTS PAGE THs .q,cnanrau Rrronu Law or urc Pnopr,n's Rnrusuc or Currva 1 DEcrsroNs CoNcsnNrNc firE DTFTERENmATToN oF CLAss Srerus rN TrrE Couwrnysrpn .,.............. lg GnrtsnRr. Rrcur,arrors Govrnrvruo rrm OncewrsarroN oF Peesexrs'Assocrerrors ...,,. 6T Or ure AcRARTAN REFoRtvr LAw (BU Liu Sloq,o-ctlil ........, 7d f t\ associations shal1 enjoy the same treatmeut as accorded the People's Government organs of the corresponding level. Articl,e 18 A statement of the income and expenditure of the funds of the peasants' associations shall be submitted at fixed intervals to tire peasant corgress, and shall be made public to the peasants after being audited and approved by the congress. CEAPTER V Bv-Lews 'Article l9 All provincial peasants' associations sha1l draw up, in accordance with these General Regulations, their respective unified rules which shall be promulgated and put into efiect after ratification by the provincial peasant congress. Regulations which were drawn up prior to the promulgation of these General Regulations, if found to be in conflict with these General Regulations, sha1l be modified accordingly. 'Arti,cla 20 These General Regulations shal1 be prornulgated and put into effect following their adoption by the Gov- ernment Administrative Council of the Central People's Government. 74 ON THE AGRARiAN Liu Shao-chi Fellow members, comrades : The Comrnon Programme of the People's Political Consultative Conference stipulates that the People's Republic of China "ml1st systematically transform the feu.dal and semi-feudal land ownership system into a system of peasant land ownership." Last winter, the People'.s Government carried out and cornpleted, or in the main completed, agrarian reform in the suburbs of the cities and in a number of, other areas in North China and in half the area of IIonan Province involving a total rural population of z6 million. Generally speaking, no serious deviations occurred. in the course of carrSring out the agrarian reform last winter. It was carried out quite srnoothly and very few disruptive incidents took place. The people, especially the peasants who have been given land and other means of production, are satisfi.ed with this agrarian reform. In addition, in the extensive newly-liberated areas, the People's Government and the People's Liberation R,EFORM LAW 'Liu Sha6-chi, Vice-Chairman ol the Cenfiol People's Gooernment, maile tf,is report on luna 14, 1950, at the Seconil Session of lhe National' Committee o! the Chinese People's Polillcal Consultotioc Conlercacc helil in Pefting. i. 75 Army carried out campaigns to wipe out bandits, oppose local despots and reduce land rent, and have ""1 oppeasants' associations in many areas. According to re- ports from East China and Central-South China, the peasants' associations in these two areas have a com- bined membership of about z4 millions and there are also about one million people's militia there. In areas where these campaigns developed, people's representative conf,erences at county, district and hsiang levels and peasant's representative conferences have generally been held. Active peasant elements have emerged in large numbers, the adminisrtration,s in more than 38,ooo hsiang have been reconstructed and the level of consciousness of the masses of the peasants has been r,apidly raised. About r8o,ooo cadres will be trained in East China and Central-South China before the winter of this 1,ear to carry out agrarian reform. Therefore, we consider that in these areas, where the peasant movement has developed and where preparations have been made, a start can be made to put the agrarian reform into opera- tion this winter. At present, agrarian reform in China has been completed, or in the main completed, in an area. with a rural population of about r45 million (total population of the area is about 16o million. There is still an area with a rural population of about 264 rnillion (total population of the area about 3ro million) where agrarian reform has not been carried out. Requests for permission to proceed with agrarian reform in the winter of this year have been made by various areas with a total rural population of about roo million-3,5oo,ooo in North China, 8,ooo,ooo in Northwest China, 35,ooo,ooo to 4o,ooo,ooo in East China and 47,ooo,ooo to 56,ooo,oo0 L6 in Central-South China----covering more than 3oo counties in all. Action on such requests have to be discussed by the National Committee o{ the People's Political Consultative Conference and a decision to carry it out has to be made try the Central People's Government. Besides, there is still an area with a rural population of about 164 millioas where it is not planned to carry out agrarian reform this winter. In the greater part of this area, agrarian reform may be carried out after the autumn of r95r. In a smaller part of the area, it may be carried out after the autumn of rg5z. As for the remaining smal1 part of the 21s6-\Mhg1e national minorities are concentrated-agrarian reform will be put off to some firture date. Agrarian reform has been carried out in areas inhabitecl by Koreans and Mon- golians in Northeast China and it may be carried out in other areas where the majority of the masses among the national minorities demand it. But it is still impossible to decide today when agrarian reform will be carried out in other areas in- habited by a population of about zo million national minorities. That wiil have to be decided on the basis of work within the national minorities and the level of political consciousness of the rnasses of the people. We should give the national rninorities r5rore time to consider and prepare for reform among themselves and we must not be impetuous. The Draft Agrarian Reform Lar+' we Dropose also stipulates that it shall not applv to areas inhabited bv national minorities. This means that we plan to complete agrarian reform throughout China in the main, but not entirely, in two and a half to three years, beginning from this winter. This is only an 77 approximate plan. If this plan is realised, it will be an extremely great historic victory for the Chinese people. And it will be a very rapid, and not slow, fulfilment of one of the basic historic tasks of the Chinese revolution. It is necessary to work out such an approximate plan. This will enable the People's Government and people's organisations in the various newly-liberated areas to prepare and to carry out their work according to this plan. We request that, in those areas where it is decided not to carry out agrarian reform this year, it shall not be carried out. Even if the peasants should spontaneously go ahead with agrarian reform, they should be dissuacled from doing so. In those areas where it is decided to carry out agrarian reform this winter, efforts should be concentrated on making preparations in the summer and autumn in order that agrarian reform can start immediately after the autumn harvest and the speedy completion of the public grain collection. A1l possible efforts should be made to complete agrarian reform in the main in a correct way in an area with a rural population of roo millions within the winter of this year. If deviations should occur in some areas after agrarian reform starts and give rise to certain chaotic conditions which cannot be remedied quickly, agrarian ref,orm should be held up in these areas in order that the deviations may be corrected and further prepar,ations made to carry out agrarian tetrorm next year. To sum up, chaotic conditions must not be al1owet1 to occur and no deviation or confusion may be allowed to remain uncofrected fo1 long iu our agrarian reform 78 WITY AGRAR,IAN REFORM SHOI]LD BE CARR,IED OUT? The essential conterrt of agrari,an reform is the con_ fiscation of the land of the landlord class for distribution to the landless or land-poor peasants. Thus the iandlorcls as a class in society are abolished and the land owner_ 79 ship system of feudal exploitation isaransformed into , .yst"- of peasant iand ownership' This is indeed the ;;;;".t and'most thorough reform in thousands of vears of Chinese historY. Why should su.ch a reform be m'ade? In a nutshell' it is beciuse the original land ownership system in China i, .*tr.*"fy irratilnal. In general the land situation in o1d China is roughlY as follows: Landlords and rich peasants, who constitute less than ro per cent of the rural population, possess ap- proximatily from 7o to 8o per cent of the land and ir..t"ffy exploit the peasants by means of their land' per cent of the land' lows : BO Land owned by landlords and public land constitute 3o to 5o per cent; rich peasants possess ro to 15 per cent of the land; rniddle peasants, poor peasants and farm Iabourers possess 3o to 4o per cent of the land and per- sons renting out small parcels of land possess 3 to 5 per cent of the land. The total area of land retted out in the rural areas constitutes about 6o to 7o per cent of the land. Land rented out by rich peasants represer:.ts about 3 to 5 per cent, r,vhile land cultivated by rich peasants themselves constitutes about ro per cent. In other rvords 90 per cent of the rural land is cultivated by rniddle peasants, poor peasants and a sec- tion of the farm labourers, who own merely a part of the land, ancl the greater part does not belong to them. Such a situation is still very serious. I{erein lies the basic reason why our nation has become the object of aggression and oppression and has becorne impoverishecl and backward. This also con- stitutes the principal obstacle to our nation's democra- tisation, industrialisation, indepenclence, unification and prosperity. Unless rve change this situation, tire victory of the Chinese people's revolution cannot be consolidated, the productive forces irr the rural areas caunot be set flee, the industrialisation of New China canuot be realised and the people cannot enjoy the fundamental gains of the victory of the revolution. But to change the situation, rve must, as stipulated in Article r of the Draft Agrarian Reform Law, ,'abolish the land or'vnership svstem of feudal exploitation by the landlord class and introcluce the system of peasant land BI ownership in order to set free the productive forces in the rural areas, develop agricultural production and thus pave the way for New China's industrialisation." It is for this basic reason, and with this basic aim that we must institute agrarian reform. Dr. Sun Yat-sen long ago put forward the slogan of "equalisation of lanil ownership" and, later, the slogan of "land to the tillers." The industriatrisation of China must rely on the vast rural markets at home. Without a thorough agrarian reform, it would be im- possible to realise the industrialisation of New China.. 'I'his reason is too obvious to require much explanation.. Ilowever, it is still necessary at the present time to explaiu clearly the basic reason for and the aim of agrarian re{orm, because they expose the fallacy of the various reasons advanced for opposing agrarian reform, for expressing doubts about it and for justifying the landlord class. At present, in fact, opposition to and doubts about agrarian reform still remain. We can see from the basic reason for aud the aim of agrariau reform that the historicai crimes committed by lbe landlord class in the past are rooted in the o1d social system. Landlords in general will only be de- prived of their feudal landholdings and abolished as a social class, but they will not be physicaily eliminated. A sma1l number of them on whom the people's courts should pass sentences of death or imprisonment, co n- prises certain landlords guilty of heinous crirnes-rural clespots whose crimes are gross and whose iniquities are extreme, and those criminal elements who persis- tently resist agrarian reform. Therefore, it is stipulated in the Draft Agrarian Reform Law that after their land 82 and other lneans of production have been con6.scated, the landlords will still be given shares of land and otheit"ff. el:Hfl labour.labour, #'tr"-"l have always been different from those of the philan_ thropists. The results of agrarian reform are beneficial to the thepeasant But the bas e of relievin free the rural productive forces from the shackles of the feudal land ownership system of the landlord clais in try can be raised and if China finaliy embark upon the road to Socialism. 'lhe mere carrying out of agrarian reform can only sol.ve part, but not the whole, of the problem of the peasants' poverty. "l-he basic reason for and the basic aim of agrarian reform are intended for production. Hence, every step in agrarian reform should iu a practical way take into 83 consideration and be closely co-ordinated with th-e deve- lopment of rural production. Precisely because of this basi,c reason and aim, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has proposed that rich peasant economy be preserved and protected fro,m in- fringement in future agrarian reform. This is because the existence of a rich peasant economy and its develop- ment r,vithin certain limits is advantageous to the development of the people's economy in our country. It is, therefore, also beneficial to the broad peasant ulasses. This, in brief, is my explanation of wh5r agrarian reform should be carried out. CONFISCATION AND REQUISITIONING OF LANI) The Draft Agrarian Reform Law stipulates that the follor,ving lands should be confi.scated or requisition- ed: (r) Landiords' land; (z) The rural land belonging to ancestral shrines, ternples, monasteries, churches, schoois and organisations and other land owned by pubiic bodies; (3) The rural land of industrialists and merchants; (4) The land of those people who, because they have other occupations or lack labour power, rent out land amounting to inore than twice the average landholding in that locality and the land rented out by rich peasants of a semi-landlord type. Except in such instances, the land and other properties of rich peasants should not in general be touched. Land and other pro- perties owned by middle peasants, poor peasants, trarm labourers, and other rural people should not be touched. 64 Ifere we tolerate the renting out of small plots of land and do not requisition them. 'lhis will have some unfavourable effects upon rural production but such possible ,efiects cannot be great, because in our estiniate, the total amount of land thus rented out in sma1l plots do not exceed 3 to 5 per cent of the tothl acreage of arable lancl. And it is necessary to show consideration for revolutionar-v soldiers, for the dependents of martyrs, aud for lvorkers, employees, professional and other people who rent out sma1l plots of land be,cause they have other occupations or lack labour power. 1'his is because China does not yet have social in- surance for unemployed persons or those who have lost their labour power. Moreover, much of such land has been bought with the hard-earned proceeds of the un- remitting toil of individuals. IIence there are some advantages in allowing such persons to retain this part of their land and continue to rent it or to cultivate it themselves. Regarding the land and other property of the rich peasants, Article 6 of the Draft Agrarian Reform Law clearly stipulates: Firstly, land owned by rich peasants and cultivated by themselves or by hired labour and their other pro- perties shail be protected from infringement because a rich peasant economy can onl,y be preserved in this way. Secondly, small plots of land rented out by rich peasants shall remain untou.ched. But in certain special areas, the land rented out by rich peasants mav be requisitioned in part or in u,ho1e with the approval of the People's Government at provincial leve1 or above. Be- cause, in general, the amount of land reuted out in small 85 plots by rich peasants is not great. In order to neutralise the rich peasants effectively and to protect the middie peasants and smal1 land lessors it is also necessary to allow the rich peasants to retain this portion of the rented-out land. But in certain special areas the situation is different, the land rented out by rich peasants is of considerable size and, if it were not requisitioned, the poor peasants would be unable to get an appropriate amount of land. Theref,ore, in these areas, the land rented out by rich peasants may be requisitioned in part or in whole to solve the problem, if this is ratified by the people's government at provincial level or above. 1l'hirdly, the large amounts of land rented out by a srnall number of rich peasants should be requisitioned in part or in whole. ' For instance, if a rich peasant rents out more land than the land he cultivates by himself and by hired labour, then he is no mere rich peasant; he is a rich peasaut of a semi-landlord type. Therefore, the Draft Agrarian Retrorm Law stipulates that where iarge tracts of land are rented out by a rich peasants of a semi-landlord type, exceeding in area the land cultivated by him or by hired labour, the rented-out portion should be requisitioned. Then there are also members in a landlord family who throughout the year are engaged in the main agri- cuLtural work, cultivating part of their land but renting out the major part of it. Such persons in a landlord family should be given consideration. Land which they cultivate themselves should be basically retained after adequate readjustment has been made, but the rest should be confrscated. 86 Landlords' draught animals, farm implements, and thoir surplus grain and surpius houses in the country- side should be confiscated at the sarne time as their land. Ifouse furnishings should be confiscated and distributed rvith the houses, but for convenience they may be re- arranged. J3y surplus grain is meant the grain retained by landiords in excess of their own food requirements atter rent reduction and deliver5r of public grain. By surplus houses are naeant houses in excess of those needed by the landlords and their families. It is neces- as the sur- and farm o distribute be retained for or distributed to the landiord. The reason is that - these are the essential means of agricultural production. After the peasants have been allotted land, they must have such means of production bef,ore they can produce. Of course, it is f,ar fro'm enough for the peasants rnerely to divide up the landlords' means of production', ln order to solve the problem of production the peasants themselves must work hard and help each other, together with the Government's assistance. Except for the above cases, other properties of the landiords including their industrial and comntercial enterprises must not be confiscated. Of course, owing to long years of exploitation most landlords have a great deal of other properties. According to past experience, iI these properties of the landlords are to be conii-scated aud distributed, the landlords wili hide and disperse them, while the peasants will search for them. 'Iirus chaotic conditions wil] easiiy arise, and wastage and 0/ destruction of great quantities of social wealth will also occur. lt is therefoie better to allow the land'lords to keep these properties. Thus they can earn a living fr"i, th"." froperties, or they can invest them in pro- duction. Tfrit-is also beneficial to society' This wa-v J a.aling with landlords in future agratiqt reform is far more lenient than it was in the past' Ilowever, many landlorcls may still stubbornly oppor. and sabotage agrurian reform, and may still ,iriUforrrty oppose and sabotage the Peop1e's Govern- ment. \Me must resolutely punish such obstinately ,-u"tio"uty landlords and should not be lenient or 1et them have their waY. Certain elements in the landlord class will coniluct sabotage during and before agrariat reform, such as the ,luogni.tl"c ;d killing of ,draught animals and the alestiuction of trees, farm implements, water conservancy pir:"",t, buildings; crops and furniture' The people's !"J.r"*."ts at i1i leveL throughout the country should iork out detailed measures to strictly prohibit such aJrriti... Landlords should be held responsible for tatirrg good care of the properties which are still in tt .ir "liat, and should n< t destroy, hide, disperse or r"lf tfr"*. they should pay compensation or be punish- ; f* aoy "iolatiorrs. Other persons than landlords' ,"tto a"tttoy such property, should also be punished' PEESERVE RICH PEASANT ECONOMY 'I-he various provisions in 'the Draft Agrarian Reform Law regariing land and' other properties of the B8 rich peasants are aimed at preserving the rich peasant ."oooioy and, in the course of land reform, at neutralis- ing the rich peasants politically and rendering better prlotection to middle peasants and persons renting out^smail parcels of land in order to isolate the landlord .1".. "od unite all the people to carry out agrarian reform and eliminate the feudal system in an orderly manner' Why, in the past, did we allow the peasants to requisition the surplus land and property of rich peas- an[s during the agrarian reform and why now do u'<' advocate thi preservation of the rich peasant economy in the coming igrarian reform ? It is mainly trecause the present political-military situation is basically different' Formerly, only two years ago, the ::evolutionary forces of the people and the counter-revolutionar5' forces were engaged in a grirn war. The people's forces were still in a relatively inferior position, and the ott'tcome of the war was not yet decided. On the one hand, the rich peasants sti11 did not believe that the people could win the war and they still leaned to the side of the landlords and Chiang Kai-shek to oppose the agrari,an ref,orm alld the people's revolu- tionary war. On the other hand, the people's revolutionary war also required that the peasants make great sacrifices in fighters, public grain and labour ser- vice to suppott the war and strive for victory. To strive for victory in the war was in the greatest interests of the Chinese people and everything had to be subordin- ated to this need. It was only at such a time that rve allowed the peasants to requisitiou the surplus land and property of tn. rich peasants and also to confiscate all the pro- 89 perty of tlie landlords so as fo satisfy to a greater ext-ent tlie demands of the impoverished peasanis, rc.use the peasants' revolutionary enthusiasm to a high clegree in order to participate in and support the people,s re- volutionary y/ar, and overthror,v Chiang Kai-shekrs regime which was supported by American imper-ialism. This was both necessary ancl correct at that time, when, if there had been no extremely thorough agrarian reform in the Liberated Areas and if the demands of the impoverished peasants h,ad not been fully satisfied, it would have been hard to overcome the difficulties t[at were encountered. The present situation is already essentially different from that of the past. The people's revolutionary war on the mainland has been in the main completed, and the Chiang Kai-shek gang oI brigands are undoubtedly doomed to ultimate Eestruction. The two great tasks required of the peasants-militar5r service and labour service-have entirely come to an enil and the burden of public grain delivery has also been comparatively lightened. The present basic task Ior The people throughout the country is to undertake economic construction on a nation-wide scale. The fight for Taiwan remains a huge tas1i, but the People's Liberation Army has adequate strength to shoulder it. The dificulties we are meeting with are different in character from what we encountered in the war of the past. Our present difficulties are mainly financial anrl economic rlifficulties arisigg in the course of the restora- tion, reform and development. of the economy. 90 At the same time, the great revolutionary uhity of all nationalities, all democratic classes, all democratic parties and groups and people's organisations throughout the country has already been established politically and organisationally and the political attitude of the rich peasarr-ts, in general, has also'unilergone a change. If the People's Government pursues a policy of preserving the rich peasant ecouomy, the rich peasants can be won over to a neutral attitude in general and better protection can then be given to the middle peas- ants, thus dispelling certain unnecessary misgivings of the peasants during the development of productiou. 'Iherefore, in the present situation, the adoption of a policy to preserve the rich peasant economy in the com- ing agrarian reform is necessary both politically and economically. It will help to overcome the current finan- cial and economic difficulties and thus benefit our country and our people. During the period between luJy ry46 and October rg47, fhe masses of peasants and our rural cailres in many areas of North China, Shantung and Northeast China, in carrl.ing out agrarian reform, failed to follow the directive issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on May 4, 1946, which stressed that the rich peasants' land and property should be substantially left untouched. Ins,tead, they arbitrarily confiscated the land and property of rich peasants as well as those of the land- lords. This is understandable. trt is because this was a period of the rnost heated and bitter struggle between the Chinese people and the. KMT reactionaries. It was cluring this periocl that most of the deviations in 9l some places. 1'hes,e things happened mainl1, because of the serious political and military situation at that time. It was also because most of our rural cadres had no experi_ ence in carrying out agrarian reform, did not know how to define class status correctly in the rural areas, and in a number of cases mistook rich peasan,ts for landlords and middle peasants for rich peasants. In view of this situation, the Central Cornrnitteeof the Communist Party of China made public the Outline of Agrarian Laou on October ro, rg47, under which the class status of the rich peasants and landlords was distinguished but the surplus land and propertl. of the rich peasants were allowed to be requisitioned. In the winter of Central Com_ mittee of the Commun issued a direc- tive on the differentiat n the countrv_ side. Chairman UIao staternent on the "Present Situation and Our Tasks,, and Comrade Jen Pi-shih also made a speech on problems of agrarian reform. Since then, certain chaotic phenornena in the rural areas have ceased and agrarian reform has followed the right path. . - It is necessarv to draw attention to the experienceof the past so that our comrades may not ,"p"ui former -mistakes in carrying out. agrarian reform in the newly- liberated areas. e2 Now we are in entirely new conditions and it is absolutely necessary to adopt in our proposed agrariar reform law the policy of eliminating the feudal system and preserving a rich peasant economy. 'I'he policy adopted by us of preserving a rich peasant economy is of course not a temporary but a long-term policy. That is to say, a rich peasant economv r,vill be preserved throughout the whole stage of New' Democracy. Only when the conditions are rnature for the extensive application of mechanised farming, for the organisation of collective farms and for the Socialist reform of the rural areas, will the need for a rich peasant economy cease, and this will take a somewhat long time to achieve. This is why we advocate the preservation of a rich peasant economy at Present. Of course, in the areas where agrarian reform has been completed, the rich peasants are not permitted to take advantage of this to regain land from the peasants and, if such cases occur, they should be strictly pro- hibited. SOME PROBLEMS CONCERNING LAND DISTB,IBUIIION On the question of how to distribute land, it must first be made clear that this is a question of dis- tribution by subtraction, supplementation and adjus,t- rnent based on the holdings of the present tillers and properly taking into accouut the interests of the present tillers of the 1and. 93 Latd distribtrtion on this basis will avoid excessive and unneeessary land changes and will benefit produc- tion. \A/hen rented land is drawn on for distribution to others, proper care rnust be taken of the original tillers. 'ivould cause them to sufier some loss but to give thern this consideration will mean that they suffer litt1e or no loss. This is necessarlr. After agrarian reform, there still remains a por- tion of land that has to be rented out' This land can be rented out to tillers who have had their land too much clrawn upon, as an adjustment and compeusation' The the land of t not be d or should be slightly. ows that the satisfied consideration -I-he tillers will be hrppy because the l'and which they rented from others nolv bocomes … Ernesto Che Guevara GUERRILLA WARFARE: A METHOD . '" FOR EIGN LANGUAGES PRESS PEK I NG Ernesto ehe Guevara GUERRILLA WARP ARE: A METHOD FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS PEKING 1964 r' PUBLISHER'S NOTE This article by Ernesto CM Gueva: a, I fdinister of Industry of Cuba, was published in the September 1963 issue (No. 25) of the journal Cuba socialista, and re- published in Chinese in Renmin Ribao (People's DailY}, Peking. This English translation has been made direct from the original Spanish. Printed in the People's Republic of China GUERRILLA warfare has been employed on innumer- able occasions throughout history in different circumstances, to achieve different aims. Of late it has been used in various people's wars of liberation when the vanguard of the people chose the path of irregular armed struggle against enemies of greater military power. Asia, Africa and America have been the scene of such actions when trying to attain power in .the struggle against feudal, neo-colonial or colonial exploita- tion . In Europe guerrilla warfare' was used as supple- mentary to their own or allied regular armies. Guerrilla warfare has been waged many times in America. As a case in point closer to home the experience of Cesar Augusto Dandino fighting against the Yankee expeditionary force on the banks of the Segovia in Nicaragua can be noted, and recently Cuba's revolu- tionary war. Since then in America the problems of guerrilla warfare have become a question for theoretical discussions for the Continent's progressive parties, and whether it is possible ' or expedient to use it, has become the subject of head-on controversial discussions. This article will try to present our views on guerrilla warfare and how to use it correctly. Above all, it must be made clear that this form of struggle is means - means to an end. That end, essential and inevitable for all revolutionaries, is the winning of political power. Therefore, in analysing specific situa- tions in different countries in America one must use the concept of guerrilla warfare in the limited sense of a method of struggle in order to gain that end. Almost immediately the question arises: Is guerrilla warfare the only formula for seizing power in the whole of America? Or at least will it be the predominant form? Or will it simply be one of many forms used in the struggle? And in the final analysis it may be asked: Will the example of Cuba be applicable to the actual situation or other parts of the continent? In the course of polemics those who advocate guerrilla warfare are often accused of forgetting mass struggle, almost as if guerrilla warfare and mass struggle were opposed to each other. We reject this implication. Guerrilla war- fare is a people's war, a mass struggle. To try to carry out this type of war without the support of the popula- tion is to court inevitable disaster. The guerrillas are the fighting vanguard of the people, stationed in a specified place in a certain area, armed and prepared to carry out a series of warlike actions for the one possible strategic end - the seizure of power. They have the support of the worker and peasant masses of the region and of the whole territory in which they operate. Without these prerequisites no guerrilla warfare is possible. We consider that the Cuban Revolution made three Iundamental contributions to the laws of the revolu- tionary movement in the current situation in America. They are: Firstly, people's forces can win a war against the army. Secondly, we need not always wait for all the revolutionary conditions to be present; the insurrection itself can create them. Thirdly, in the underdeveloped parts of America the battle-ground for armed stcuggle should in the main be the c.ountryside. ("Guerrilla Warfare") Such are the contributions to the development of the revolutionary struggle in America, and they can be applied to any of the countries on our continent where guerrilla warfare may be developed. The Second Declaration of Havana points out: In our countries two circumstances are joined: . underdeveloped industry and an agrarian regime of , a feudal ~haracter. That is why no matter how hard the living conditions of the urban workers are, the rural population lives under even more horrible con- ditions of oppression and exploitation. But, with few exceptions, it also constitutes the absolute majority, sometimes more .than 70 per cent of Latin American populations. Not counting the landlords who often live in the cities, the rest of this great mass earns its livelihood by working as peons on the plantations for the most miserable wages, or they work the soil under con- ditions of exploitation indistinguishable from those of the Middle Ages. These are the circumstances which determine that the poor population of the countryside constitutes a tremendous potential revolutionary force. The armies are set up and equipped for conven- tional warfare. They are the force whereby the power of the exploiting classes is maintained. When they are confronted with the irregular warfare of peasants based on their own home-grounds, they become absolutely powerless; they lose 10 men for every revolutionary fighter who falls. Demoralization among them mounts rapidly when they are beset by an invisible and invincible army which provides them no chance to display their military academy tactics and their fanfare of war, of which they boast so much to repress the city workers and students. The initial struggle of small fighting units . is constantly nurtured by new forces; the mass movement begins to grow bold, the old order bit by bit breaks up into a thousand pieces and that is when the working class and the urban masses decide the battle. What is it that from the very beginning of the fight makes those units invincible, regardless of the number, strength and resources of their enemies? It is the people's support, and they can count on an ever-increasing mass support. But the peasantry is a class which, because of the ignorance in which it has been kept and the isolation in which it lives, requires the revolutionary and political leadership of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals. Without that it cannot alone launch the struggle and achieve victory. In the present historical conditions of Latin America the national bourgeoisie cannot lead the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Experience demonstrates that in our nations this class - even when its in- terests clash with those of Yankee imperialism - has been incapable of confronting imperialism, paralyzed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the clamour of the exploited masses. ("Second Declaration of Havana") Supplementing these statements which constitute the essence of the revolutionary declaration of America, the Second Declaration of Havana in other paragraphs states the following: The subjective conditions in each country, the factors ' of consciousness, of organization, of leadership, can accelerate or delay revolution, depending on the state of their development. Sooner or later, in each historic epoch, as objective conditions ripen, consciousness is acquired, organization is achieved, leadership arises, and revolution is produced. Whether this takes place peacefully or comes to the world after painful labour, does not depend on the revolutionaries; it depends on the reactionary forces of the old society; it depends on their resistance against allowing the new society to be born, a society produced by the contradictions of the old society. Revolution, in history, is as the doctor who assists at the birth of a new life: it does not use forceps unless it is necessary, but it will unhesitatingly use them every time labour requires them. A labour brings the hope of a better life to the enslaved and exploited masses. Revolution is inevitable in many countries of Latin America. Nobody's will determines this fact. It is determined by the frightful conditions of exploitation which afflict mankind in America. It is determined by the development of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, by the world crisis of imperialism and by the universal movement of struggle of the world's subjugated peoples. ("Second Declaration of Havana") We shall start from this basis to analyse the whole question of guerrilla warfare in America. We have asserted that it is means of struggle to achieve an end. Our first concern is to analyse the end and to see whether the winning of power here in America can be attained in any other way than by armed struggle. ,,, Peaceful struggle can be carried out through mass movements -and can - in special situations of crisis- compel governments to yield, so that the popular forces eventually take power and establish a proletarian dictatorship. Theoretically this is correct. When analys- ing this on the American scene we must arrive at the following conclusions: Generally speaking, on this continent there exist objective conditions which impel the masses to violent actions against the bourgeois and landlord governments; in many other countries there exist crises of power and some subjective conditions too. Obviously, in the countries where all these conditions are given, it would be criminal not to act to seize power. In others where this situation does not occur, it is right that different alternatives should emerge and that the decision applicable to each country should come out of theoretical discussion. The only thing history does not permit is that the analysts and executors of pruletarian policy should blunder. No one can claim the role of vanguard party as if it were a university diploma. To be a vanguard party means to stand in the forefront of the working class in the struggle for the seizure of power, to know how to guide this struggle to success by short cuts. That is the mission of our revolutionary parties, and the analysis should be profound and ex- haustive in order that there will be no mistakes. At present there is in America a state of unstable balance between oligarchical dictatorship and popular pressure. By "oligarchical" we mean the reactionary alliance between the bourgeoisie and the landlord class of each' country . with a greater or lesser preponderance of feudalism . These dictatorships continue within certain frameworks of legality which they set up for themselves to facilitate their work during the whole unrestricted period of their class domination, while we are undergoing a stage in which the pressure of the people is very strong and is knocking at the doors of bourgeois legality which its own authors have to violate in order to check the impetus of the masses . The barefaced violations of all established legislation - or of legislation especially instituted to sanction their deeds - only heighten the tension of the people's forces. The oligarchical dictatorship, therefore, endeavours to use the old legal order to change constitutionality and further suppress the proletariat, without a head-on clash. Nevertheless, this is just where a contradiction arises. The people now do not tolerate the old, still less the new, coercive measures adopted by the dictatorship, and try to smash them. We must never forget the authori- tarian and restrictive class character of the bourgeois state. Lenin refers to it thus: The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when , where, and to the extent that class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. ("State and Revolution") In other words, we must not allow the word democracy, used in an apologetic manner to represent the dictator- ship of the exploiting classes, to lose its deeper meaning and acquire the meaning of giving the people certain liberties , more or less good. To struggle only to restore a certain degree of bourgeois legality , without at the same time raising the question of revolutionary power, is to struggle 'for the return of a certain dictatorial order, established by the dominant social classes; it is only a struggle for a lighter ball to be fixed to the convict's chains. In these conditions of conflict, the oligarchy breaks its own contracts, its own mask of "democracy", and attacks the people, although it always tries to make use of the superstructure it has formed for oppression, At that moment, the question again arises: What is to be done? Our answer is: Violence is not only for the use of the exploiters; the exploited can use it too, and what is more, ought to use it at the opportune moment. Marti said: "He who wages war in a country that can avoid it is a criminal; so is he who fails to wage a war that cannot be avoided." And Lenin said: Social-democracy has never taken a sentimental view of war. It unreservedly condemns war as a bestial means of settling conflicts in human society, But Social-democracy knows that so long as society is divided into classes, so long as there is exploitation of man by man, wars are inevitable. This exploitation cannot be destroyed without war, and war is always and everywhere begun by the exploiters, by the ruling and oppressing classes. He said this in 1905. Later, in "The War Programme of the Proletarian Revolution" in a profound analysis of the nature of class struggle he affirmed: Whoever recognizes the class struggle cannot fail to recognize civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions, inevitab1.e continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. All the great revolutions prove this. To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, would mean sinking into extreme opportunism and re- nouncing the socialist revolution. That is to say, we should not be afraid of violence, the midwife of new societies; only such violence should be unleashed precisely at the moment when the people's leaders find circumstances most favourable. What will these be? Subjectively, they depend upon two factors that are complementary and that in turn deepen in the course of the struggle: the consciousness of the necessity of change and the certainty of the possibility of this revolutionary change. These two factors, coupled with the objective conditions - which in nearly all of America are highly favourable for the development of struggle ~ with the firm will to attain it as well as the new correlation of forces in the world , determine the form of action. However far away the socialist countries may be, their favourable influence will make itself felt among the fighting peoples who will be given more strength by their enlightening example. On the 26th of July this year, Fidel Castro said: And the duty of the revolutionaries, especially at this moment, is to know how to recognize and how to take advantage of the changes in the correlation of forces which have taken place in the world, and to understand that these changes facilitate the struggle of the peoples. The duty of revolutionaries, of Latin- American revolutionaries, is not to wait for the change in the correlation of forces to produce a miracle of social revolutions in Latin America, but to take full advantage of everything in it that is favourable to the revolutionary movement - and to make revolution! There are people who say: "We admit that in certain specific cases revolutionary war is the proper way to attain political power; but where can we find those great leaders, the Fidel Castros who will lead us to victory?" Fidel Castro, like every human being, is a product of history. The military and political leaders, merged if possible into one man, who may lead risings in America, will learn the art of war in the exercise of war itself. There is no job or profession which can be learned from text-books alone. In this case, struggle is the great teacher. Naturally the task is not simple, nor is it exempt from serious threats all the way along. During the development of the armed struggle there appear two moments of extreme danger for the future of the revolution. The first of these arises in the pre- paratory stage and the way it is dealt with gives the measure of the determination for struggle and clarity of purpose of the people's forces. :when the bourgeois state advances against the positions of the people, obviously there must emerge a process of defence against the enemy who attacks in this moment of superiority. If the minimum subjective and objective conditions have already been developed, the defence must be armed but not in such a way that the people's forces become mere recipients of the enemy's blows; nor should the stage of armed defence be transformed into nothing but a last refuge for the pursued. Guerrilla 10 fighting, though at a given moment it may be a defen- sive movement of the people, carries within itself the capacity to attack the enemy and must constantly develop it. This capacity is what determines , as time goes on, the cataclystic character of the people's forces. That is to say, guerrilla fighting is not passive self-defence; it is defence with attack, and from the moment it is recognized as such, it has as a final perspective the winning of political power. This moment is important. In social processes the difference between violence and non-violence cannot be measured by the number of shots exchanged; it depends on concrete and fluctuating situations. And one must know how to recognize the exact moment when the pe0- ple's forces , conscious of their relative weakness but at the same time of their strategic strength, should take the initiative so that the situation does not worsen. The balance between the oligarchic dictatorship and the pressure of the people must be upset. The dictatorship constantly tries to function without resorting to force. Being obliged to appear without disguise, that is to say, in its true aspect as a violent dictatorship of the reac- tionary classes, will contribute to its unmasking, and this will deepen the struggle to such an extent that it will not be .able to turn ·back. The resolute beginning of long-range armed action depends on how the people's forces fulfil their function , which amounts to the task of forcing a decision on the dictatorship - to draw back or to unleash the struggle. The skilful avoidance of the other moment of danger depends on the ability to develop the growth of the people's forces. Marx always advised that once the revolutionary process has begun, the proletariat must Q strike and strike without rest. A revolution that does not constantly deepen is a revolution that goes back. The combatants, once wearied, begin to lose faith, and then some of the bourgeois manoeuvres to which we have been so accustomed may bear fruit. These can be the holding of elections to hand over the government to some other gentleman with a more honeyed voice, and a more angelic face than the outgoing dictator, or the staging of a coup by reactionaries, generally headed by the army and supported, directly or indirectly, by progressive forces. There are others as well, but it is not our intention to analyse such tactical stratagems. Let us focus our main attention on the operation of the military coup mentioned above. What can militarists contribute to true democracy? What kind of loyalty can be asked of them, if they are mere instruments of domination by the reactionary classes and imperialist monopolies and, as a caste whose worth rests only on the weapons in their hands, they aspire only to maintain their prerogatives? When in situations difficult for the oppressors the military men conspire to overthrow a dictator, who in fact is finished , it Can be taken for granted that they do so because they are unable to preserve their class prerogatives without extreme violence, a procedure which generally does not coincide with the interests of the oligarchies at that moment. This statement certainly does not mean rejecting the services of military men as individual fighters who, separated from the society they have served, have, in fact , rebelled against it. And they should be made use of in accordance with the revolutionary line they adopt as fighters and not as representatives of a caste. 12. 1 1 T 1 1 1 Long ago, Engels, in the preface to the third edition of "The Civil War in France", remarked: The workers were armed after every revolution; .. therefore the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois at the helm of the stage. Hence after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers." (Quoted by Lenin, "The State and Revolution") This play of continuous struggles in which some formal change is brought about and then strategically withdrawn, has been repeated for decades in the capitalist world. · But the continuous deception of the proletariat along these lines has been practised periodically for more than a century. There is also a danger, that the leaders of the pro- gressive parties, desiring to prolong conditions more favourable for revolutionary action by using certain aspects of bourgeois legality, lose sight of the goal , something that is very common in the course of action, and forget the definite strategic objective: the seizure of power. These two difficult moments of the revolution which we have briefly analysed can be surmounted when the Marxist-Leninist party leaders are capable of clearly seeing the implications of the moment and of mobilizing the masses to the maximwn, leading them on to the correct path of resolving fundamental contradictions. In elaborating the thesis, we have assumed that eventually the idea of armed struggle as well as the formula of guerrilla warfare as a method of fighting will be accepted. Why do we think that guerrilla 13 warfare is the correct way in the present situation in America? There are fundamental arguments which in our opinion determine the necessity of guerrilla action as the central axis of the struggle in America. First, accepting as true that the enemy will struggle to maintain itself in power, it is necessary to consider destroying the oppressor-army. To do this , it is neces- sary to confront it with a people's army. This army is not born spontaneously, it must be armed from the enemy's arsenal and this demands a long hard struggle in which the people's forces and their leaders will always be exposed to attack by superior forces and be without adequate conditions of defence and manoeuvrability. On the other " hand, the guerrilla nucleus, established in areas suitable for fighting, ensures the security and continuity of the revolutionary command. The urban forces commanded by the general staff of the people's army can perform actions of the utmost importance. But the eventual destruction of these groups would not kill the soul of the revolution, its leadership. This would continue to spark the revolutionary spirit of the masses from its TUral stronghold, organizing new forces for other battles. Moreover, in this area begins the construction of the future state apparatus entrusted with leading the class dictatorship efficiently during the whole period of transition. The longer the struggle, the greater and more complicated the administrative problems, and to solve them cadres will be trained for the difficult task of con- solidating power and economic development at a later stage. Secondly, the general situation of the Latin American peasantry and the increasingly explosive character of its 14 struggle against feudal rule in the framework of an alliance between local and foreigner exploiters. Returning to the Second Declaration of Havana: At the outset of the past century, the peoples of America freed themselves from Spanish colonialism, but they did not free themselves from exploitation. The feudal landlords assumed the authority of the governing Spaniards, the Indians continued in their painful serfdom, the Latin American man remained a slave one way or another, and the minimum hopes of the peoples died under the power of the oligarchies and the tyranny of foreign capital. This is the truth of America, to one or another degree of variation. Latin America today is under a more ferocious im- perialism, more powerful and ruthless than the Spanish colonial empire. What is Yankee imperialism's attitude confronting the objective and historically inexorable reality of the Latin American revolution? To prepare to fight a colonial war against the peoples of Latin America; to create an apparatus of force to establish the political pretexts and the pseudo-legal instruments under- written by the representatives of the reactionary oligarchies, in order to curb, by blood and by iron , the struggle of the Latin American peoples. This objective situation demonstrates the latent, un- used strength in our peasants and the necessity to utilize it for the liberation- of America. Thirdly, the continental character of the struggle. Could this new stage of the emancipation of America be conceived as a confrontation of two local forces struggling for power in a given territory? Hardly. The ~5 struggle between all the forces of · the people and all the forces of repression will be a struggle to the death. This too is forecast by the passages quoted above. The Yankees will intervene because of solidarity of interests and because the struggle in America is decisive. In fact, they are already intervening in the preparation of repressive forces and the organization of a continental apparatus of struggle. But from now on they will do so with all their energy; they will strike the people's forces with all the destructive weapons at their disposal. They will try to prevent the consolidation of revolu- tionary power; and if it should be successful anywhere, they will renew their attack. They will not recognize it . They will try to divide the revolutionary forces. They will introduce all types of saboteurs, create frontier . problems, engage other reactionary states to oppose it , and will try to strangle the new state economically - in a word, to annihilate it. This being the picture in America , it is difficult to achieve and consolidate victory in a country that is isolated. The unity of the repressive forces must en- counter the unity of the people's forces. In ' all the countries in which oppression becomes unbearable, the banner of rebellion must be raised, and this banner of historical necessity will have a continental character. As Fidel said, the Andes will be the Sierra Maestra of America, and all the immense territories that make up this Continent will become the scene of a life-and- death struggle against the power of imperialism. We cannot tell when this struggle will acquire a con- tinental character nor how long it will last; but we can predict its advent and its triumph, because it is the inevitable result of historical, economic and political 16 conditions and its direction cannot be changed. It is the task of the revolutionary force in each country to initiate it when the conditions are present, regardless of the situation in other countries. The general strat- egy will emerge as the struggle develops. The pre- diction of the continental character of the struggle is borne out by analysis of the strength of each contender, but this does not in the least exclude independent out- breaks. Just as the beginning of the struggle in one part of a country is bound to develop it throughout its area , the beginning of a revolutionary war contributes to the development of new conditions in the neighbour- ing countries. The development of revolution has normally produced high and low tides in fuverse proportion; to the revolu- tionary high tide corresponds the counter-revolutionary low tide and conversely ; at moments of revolutionary decline, there is a counter-revolutionary ascendency. At such moments the situation of the people's forces becomes difficult, and they should resort to the best defense measures in order to suffer the least loss. The enemy is extremely powerful, continental in stature. Therefore the relative weaknesses of the local bour- geoisie cannot be analysed with a view to making de- cisions within restricted limits. Still less can one think of an eventual alliance of these oligarchies with . an armed people. Ti;le Cuban Revolution has sounded the alarm. The polarization of forces is becoming complete: exploiters on one side and exploited on the other. The mass of the petty bourgeoisie will lean to one side or the other according to their interests and the political skill with which it is handled; neutrality will be an exception. This is how revolutionary war will be. 17 Let us consider the way how a guerrilla centre can start. Nuclei of relatively few persons choose places fa- vourable for guerrilla ' warfare, sometimes with the in- tention of launching a counter-attack or … Persepolis Volume 1 000.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 001.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 002.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 003.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 004.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 005.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 006.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 007.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 008.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 009.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 010.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 011.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 012.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 013.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 014.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 015.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 016.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 017.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 018.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 019.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 020.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 021.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 022.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 023.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 024.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 025.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 026.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 027.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 028.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 029.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 030.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 031.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 032.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 033.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 034.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 035.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 036.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 037.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 038.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 039.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 040.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 041.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 042.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 043.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 044.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 045.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 046.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 047.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 048.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 049.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 050.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 051.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 052.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 053.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 054.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 055.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 056.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 057.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 058.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 059.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 060.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 061.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 062.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 063.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 064.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 065.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 066.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 067.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 068.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 069.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 070.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 071.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 072.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 073.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 074.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 075.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 076.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 077.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 078.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 079.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 080.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 081.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 082.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 083.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 084.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 085.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 086.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 087.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 088.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 089.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 090.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 091.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 092.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 093.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 094.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 095.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 096.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 097.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 098.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 099.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 100.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 101.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 102.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 103.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 104.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 105.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 106.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 107.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 108.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 109.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 110.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 111.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 112.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 113.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 114.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 115.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 116.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 117.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 118.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 119.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 120.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 121.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 122.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 123.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 124.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 125.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 126.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 127.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 128.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 129.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 130.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 131.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 132.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 133.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 134.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 135.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 136.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 137.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 138.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 139.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 140.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 141.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 142.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 143.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 144.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 145.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 146.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 147.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 148.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 149.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 150.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 151.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 152.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 153.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 154.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 155.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 156.jpg Persepolis Volume 1 157.jpg shoshanna lande shoshanna lande shoshanna lande shoshanna lande shoshanna lande shoshanna lande shoshanna lande shoshanna lande