By: Mike Billington
April 24—Representatives from 92 African and Asian inspiration for the Non-Aligned Movement, was organations gathered this April 22-23 in Jakarta and Bandung, Indonesia, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Asian-African Summit held in Bandung in April 1955. What is immediately apparent, and striking, from reading and comparing the speeches presented this last week, and those given 60 years ago at the original Bandung Conference, is that in both cases, the leaders of the nations of Asia and Africa were (are) confronting the threat of thermonuclear war emanating from the dominant powers of the “West.” In both cases, these leaders recognized that it was a primary responsibility of the nations of the formerly colonized world, to counter the war-mongering and geopolitics of the advanced sector leaders, with a moral outlook toward the future, based on the common aims of mankind.The primary difference between 1955 and 2015, is that the former colonial nations, which were economically and strategically weak after achieving independence, are now increasingly prosperous, and, under the leadership of the BRICS nations, capable of challenging the Western policies of war and austerity with one of Peace through Development for the world as a whole.
Looking especially at the speeches in Bandung by Chinese President Xi Jinping on April 22, 2015, and by Indonesian President (and the father of Indonesian independence) Sukarno in 1955, it is evident that the new paradigm for peace and development being led today by the BRICS, their New Development Bank, the Chinese-initiated Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and through China’s Silk Road initiatives, represents the fulfillment of the Spirit of Bandung.
The Spirit of Bandung
The Spirit of Bandung, which became the driving inspiration for the Non-Aligned Movement, was organized primarily by Indonesian President Sukarno and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and brought together 25 national leaders from Asia, Africa, and the Mideast. It was the first meeting of former colonial nations without the presence of their former colonial masters. A major focus of the conference was mitigating the severe threat of war between the United States and China, and China’s then-Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai played a leading role there. In 1954, Zhou, India’s Nehru, and Burma’s Ne Win had jointly adopted “The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” which were subsequently adopted by the Bandung conference.
They were based on mutual respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, cooperation for mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.President Sukarno’s speech opening the 1955 Bandung Conference (see following article) captured both the danger of a new thermonuclear world war, and the moral responsibility of the African and Asian nations—which had won their independence through bloody wars, as in Indonesia, or by equally bloody violent and non-violent resistance, as in India—to take actions to prevent that war, and to create a world based on harmony and development. Sukarno warned: “Our unhappy world is torn and tortured, and the peoples of all countries walk in fear, lest, through no fault of theirs, the dogs of war are unchained once again.” He noted that in the age of the rmonuclear weapons, civilization itself was at risk.
He added: “Perhaps now more than at any other moment in the history of the world, society, government, and statesmanship need to be based upon the highest code of morality and ethics. And in political terms, what is the highest code of morality? It is the subordination of everything to the well-being of mankind.”
He praised the gathered leaders for the successful liberation of their countries from colonialism, while also warning that “colonialism also has its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, and actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation.”
London and Dulles
Such truthful talk from colonial “wogs” was not appreciated in London, nor by London’s assets in the United States—and most emphatically not by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA chief Allen Dulles. Sukarno was
marked for elimination.1But the primary target of that planned elimination was China. John Foster Dulles was itching for a war with Maoist China, and was already fuming that President Eisenhower had rejected his advice to use nuclear weapons to aid the French in their losing colonial war against the Vietnamese. He ostentatiously refused to shake the outstretched hand of Zhou Enlai at the 1954 Geneva Peace Conference (which addressed both the Korean and the Vietnamese wars). The 1955 defeat of the French by the Vietnamese at Dienbienphu, together with the successful Asia-Africa Conference at Bandung, was the last straw for the Dulles boys and their Wall Street/City of London sponsors. A three part strategy was devised and implemented:
- Bring down Sukarno in a manner that would serve as an ugly example to other former colonial nations that might reject what Sukarno had identified as neo-colonial status;
- Bring about a U.S. war in Vietnam, to complete the job the French had failed to accomplish; and
- Encircle China militarily and economically (as Obama is doing today) in such a way as to either provoke a war (with U.S. use of nuclear weapons), or to so isolate China that it collapsed internally.All these plans were successfully implemented, resulting in six decades of tragedy for mankind.
The history of the U.S. self-destructive and genocidal war against Vietnam is well-documented. Here we need only add that the triggers for unleashing that bestiality were the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy had already decided that he would not deploy troops into the Vietnamese civil war, and that he would move to establish diplomatic ties with China in his second term. Diem had made clear that he would rather strike a deal with the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, than allow the United States to take over the battle with the insurgents, and plunge his country back into colonial warfare.The assassination of Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu was accomplished on Nov. 2, 1963, on the orders of Ambassadors W. Averell Harriman and Henry Cabot
Lodge, behind the back of President Kennedy. Kennedy was eliminated three weeks later on Nov. 22, as assonated by the British. London and Wall Street had their new colonial war in Vietnam within a few short months.
The Indonesia Bloodbath
In Indonesia, the CIA instigated revolts in the late 1950s against Sukarno, utilizing dissident military factions, directly funded, armed, and trained by the CIA. The United States then used air power by unmarked bombers from the U.S. base at Clark Airfield in the Philippines to back up the dissidents. But these failed to unseat the wildly popular Sukarno. Dulles and his fellow criminals in London and Australia then blamed an obscure coup attempt in 1965 on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and on Sukarno himself.
The targeting of the PKI had two strategic purposes. First, the party was part of the broad base of support for Sukarno’s Indonesia National Party, which had established cooperation between nationalists, communists, and religious institutions. Second, the PKI was the world’s largest communist movement outside of China, and, like the Sukarno government itself, had excellent relations with the Chinese government. To wipe it out would send a strong message to Beijing.What followed was one of the greatest genocides of the 20th Century, as approximately half a million people (the exact number will never be known) were slaughtered, mostly by mobs of radical Islamists wielding machetes. These mobs were openly backed by the U.S.,
British and Australian Embassies. While the slaughter was aimed at members of the PKI, any supporter of Sukarno was conveniently labeled a communist, and therefore targeted for killing.Cables released years later from the western embassies, showed their direct support for the slaughter. The U.S. Embassy provided a list of as many as 5,000 “communists” in villages where CIA operatives were active, marking them for death. There was virtually no resistance from the peaceful Sukarno supporters.
Inside China, the military threat represented by the launching of full-scale U.S. war on its border in Vietnam, together with the slaughter of its political allies in Indonesia, led to the defeat of the Zhou Enlai faction within Mao Zedong’s leadership circle. Zhou’s global effort to establish peaceful relations with all countries, East and West, based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, had been absolutely rejected by the Wall campaigns, the modern form of subversion and de-Street/British forces which had taken control in Washington, and was therefore discarded. Mao then unleashed the ten-year nightmare known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a self-destructive attack on science, Classical Confucian culture, and on life itself.
The British imperialists, and their Washington cohorts, were pleased.Restoring the Spirit of BandungThe 2015 Anniversary Bandung Conference came at a time when the world is facing the greatest threat of global thermonuclear war in modern history—a threat far greater than at the peak of the Cold War, when the first Bandung Conference took place. The Western world—the former colonial powers—are undergoing a general economic breakdown crisis. At the same time, they see their former colonies, united under the leadership of the BRICS nations, now economically strong enough to resist the economic dictates of austerity and forced backwardness, from their former masters.
The BRICS global dynamic is creating a new paradigm based on a commitment to building infrastructure projects spanning Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America, and to forging what Chinese President Xi Jinping calls “win-win” cooperation. The BRICS countries have the support of nearly all the nations of Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America, and, united in this way, are also capable of defeating the evil “color revolution”.
Instruction of sovereign nations.
It is this threat to the power of the London and New York banking oligarchs, which is creating the new thrust toward global war. The financial oligarchy, Obama firmly in tow, would rather go to war than relinquish their power over the world.This issue was implicitly taken up in the opening speech by the newly elected Indonesian President Joko Widodo: “The idea that the world’s economic problems can be solved only through the World Bank, IMF, and ADB is obsolete and must be abandoned. I am of the opinion that the fate of the global economy should not only be left to those three financial institu-tions. It is imperative that we build a new international economic order that is open to new emerging eco-nomic powers.” He called on the Asian and African nations to push for reform of the United Nations, describing it as powerless to resolve problems of global imbalances and injustices, pointing to the Palestinian conflict in particular.President Widodo, known as Jokowi, is a member of the Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P), a party headed by former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Sukarno! In Chinese President Xi’s speech to the conference, he expressed agreement with Jokowi’s call for a new world economic order. Praising the Spirit of Bandung which “galvanized a movement of national liberation throughout the world,” he said in his speech: “It is important to prod developed countries to earnestly deliver on their commitments, and step up their support for developing countries with no political strings attached.” He said that by the end of the year, China would extend zero-tariff treatment to 97% of taxable goods coming from all the least-developed countries that have diplomatic ties with China.President Xi pointed to the AIIB and the “One Road, One Belt” Silk Road policies, as being dedicated to connectivity and development throughout Asia and Africa and beyond. “We are different among ourselves, and together we face the challenges ahead,” Xi said. “However, we have learned to see things in common. We believe that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together—and we know that together we are strong. In April 2015, history awaits a new miracle of Asia and Africa at the Bandung Conference.”
posted by: Rhea Razon
