REVOLT IN LOS ANGELES
[The following declaration, entitled "The Negro Rising," was issued to the press by Bertrand Russell on August 22.]
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I have read with a certain incomprehension reactions of many liberal and Negro leaders in the United States to the revolutionary uprising of American Negroes in Los: Angeles.
Who can deny that the entire Negro population rose up as one against the conditions with which they have had to live for decades? It is instructive that those who placed such emphasis on formal legislation involving voting rights (yet unimplemented) only discover the true situation of the American Negro when he takes to revolutionary action.
Los Angeles has placed its Negro population in slums where crowding and insanitary conditions are so appalling that there is no alternative but to seek the streets for air and release,
The white police function as an occupying army keeping a helot class in order. Supression of deprived people historically has inspired revolution, but when those people suffer humiliation and contempt on racial grounds the cruelty of the oppression is magnified and the uprising assumes..a national character.
The oppressed Negro nation is rising against its three hundred years of subjection. Why should people not revolt against conditions wherein they are shot down or beaten to death in police cells? The density of population in the Negro section of Los Angeles is five times that of white people in Los Angeles. The incidence of disease is equally high. It is increasingly clear that American Negroes are discovering the unreformability of the system which oppresses them.
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It is not possible for the American military industrial system to depend upon exploitation and domination as in Vietnam and, also, to effect a revolutionary transformation of the conditions of the Negro within the United States. I suspect that only the American Negro is able to understand fully the nature of U.S. oppression in Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic or other areas of Latin America, Asia and Africa.
The. ‘President has decried what he calls violence and rioting. I had never before realised that the President was an advocate of nonviolence, He is not an advocate of nonviolence in Vietnam or in the Congo, nor when he encourages State police in their use of dogs, gas and bullets. It is only when the Negro, in desperation, defends himself by violent means against long-endured violent oppression that President Johnson, and those who think Tike him, discover their antipathy to violence,
What is to be done? The elementary step is the tearing down of every slum in the United States and the construction of new and adequate houses, schools, hospitals and cultural facilities in their place. Beyond this, professional training programmes and full edu-~ cational opportunities should be made available, particularly to the oppressed sections of the United States. Such a programme would require an end to military expansion and domination on the part of -America., It could not be undertaken at the same time as a war of oppression in South East Asia, nor could it.be undertaken without a. fundamental transformation of social and economic relations. in the = United States. Is it likely that large industry, its military part-. ner and the intelligence agencies which guard this partnership will countenance the transformation of social relations in the United States or abandon their control over sixty per cent of this world's natural resources? It is unlikely, and no amount of reformist legislation would appear to have a chance of effecting such a transformation.
It is my hope, therefore, that the revolutionary mood which is taking hold of the oppressed Negro people will find an organised political expression and that sections of the white population, particularly the more deprived, will come to see the way they have been used.
Such an alliance may, in time, change the United States. The absence of one will bring America to the threshold of overt fascism, in which martial rule and terror will be needed. It will be neces-= sary to continue the oppression of the Negro nation and those whites who suffer comparable conditions.
The very least middle class and professional white people can do is to understand and support the Negro in his struggle. Such understanding and support must encompass Los Angeles.
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THE WAR BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN
By Pierre Frank
The war between India and Pakistan has not stopped, although the "big two," the United States and the Soviet Union,are supporting the efforts of U Thant, the secretary~general of the United Nations to at least get a ceasefire. These steps are doubtlessly being accom panied by various pressure moves, The United States and Great Britain have already suspended all shipments of arms. The question of econ-" omic sanctions has been raised.
. Will this pressure prove sufficient to halt the fighting or will the war become extended? It would be hazardous to offer a fore= cast on this; the conflict has deep causes.
It is necessary to go back to 1947 when the British government of that period (the Attlee Labour government) granted independence to the colony that constituted the crown jewel of the British empire, The Labour party glorified this action.
But the Labour government in London favored installing in power a bourgeoisie which for the past eighteen years has let India stagnate in the worst misery. In addition, faithful to the old maxim of "divide and rule,” which British- imperialism has applied throughout the world, the Labour government supported the demands of the Moslem League headed by Jinnah; i.e., one of the most reactionary political factions, in order to divide the Indian subcontinent along religious lines into two countries, India and Pakistan.
Still worse, since the former British colony was made up of a number of states and principalities, it was the maharajahs and other princes, and not the people living there who were called on to decide the fate of their states, choosing either India or Pakistan. The massacres at the time affected millions of persons; and the new war could set off new bloodbaths since 50,000,000 Moslems still live in India and 10,000,000 Hindus still live in Pakistan.
Upon reaching power, the bourgeoisie failed to carry out one of the traditional tasks of the bourgeois revolution; namely, unification of the country. On the contrary, Pakistan was set up as two separate pieces almost 1,000 miles apart. And many disputes remained between India and Pakistan, the most important one concerning Kashmir.
This territory was inhabited in the great majority by Moslems but the maharajah was a Hindu. After some equivocation, he came out for attaching Kashmir to India. This leg to fighting which ended in 1948 with a ceasefire, the division of Kashmir between the occupying forces, and a decision agreed to by both sides for a referendum that would enable the population to choose which country they wished to join.
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There was every reason to believe that in a referendum the big majority of the population of Kashmir would come out for joining Pakistan. In any case, it has been this consideration that has determined the policy of the New Delhi government since 1948. It has con= tinually blocked holding a referendum. The prime minister of the part of Kashmir occupied by India, Sheik Abdullah, who cooperated with the Congress party before independence, was ousted and arrested in August 1953 and not freed, as we will see later, until April 1964 when he was released for a short period. His assistant, who became his successor, Baksi Ghulam Mohamed, was eliminated in turn in 1963. Beginning in 1948, the Indian government took a series of legislative and constitutional measures to convert the part of Kashmir under its occupation into an integral part of the Indian Union. Recently Prime Minister Shastri declared that the territory belonged to the Indian Union like any other territory, without any different status.
.. Pakistan at no time. subscribed to the concept that guided the New Delhi regime,
Pakistan. was created as a reactionary bastion designed to block any advance of the Indian revolution, This was the reason why it was favored from the beginning by British imperialism. In February 1954, American imperialism, which at that time looked with disfavor on : Nehru'ts "neutralisn, a began to send military aid to Pakistan, military aid which in its view was to be aimed against China and not against India, In 1962,-when the first frontier incidents broke out between India and China, the United States likewise sent arms to India to fight China.
But India and Pakistan had not forgotten the Kashmir business and this moved into the forefront. It appears that Nehru, before he died, thought of making a turn on this question, In April 1964 he freed Sheik Abdullah and permitted him to go to Pakistan. Whatever the truth about Nehru's intentions, the Shastri government continued to follow the line practiced by New Delhi since 1948. Sheik Abdullah only had to interview Chou En-lai in Algiers to be arrested again upon his return to India in May 1965. American and British arms were to serve India as well as Pakistan for an attempt to settle the dispute.
It is known that in recent weeks guerrilla fighters appeared in the part of Kashmir occupied by India. The Indian government, claiming that they were not guerrilla forces but regular troops of the Pakistan army, moved in the Indian army and hostilities flared,
The underlying cause of the war, as we have seen, lies in the way British imperialism, through the Labour government, granted independence to India, building in multiple explosive charges -~ religious, racial, etc. In other words, the struggle led by the Indian bourgeoisie against British imperialism ended in a form that has for many years blocked the development of the Indian revolution into a social-
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ist revolution, which alone would have enabled the enormous difficulties to be overcome through a socialist federation of the peoples of the whole subcontinent, The example of India constitutes one of the most characteristic verifications in a negative way of the theory of permanent revolution. The Indian bourgeoisie have proved incapable of carrying out scarcely a single one of the bourgeois~democratic tasks (unification of the country, agrarian reform, rights of minority peoples),
Among the immediate causes of the outbreak of the conflict the following should be noted in particular:
(1) The bankruptcy of the leadership of the Congress party in India. This is to be seen all the more glaringly in light of the fact that despite the aid constantly received from the United States and the Soviet Union, India has stagnated economically whereas neighbor-= ing China has made impressive progress during the same fifteen-year period. The crisis in bourgeois leadership in India took on wider scope with the passing of Nehru. Reactionary tendencies grew more virulent in India and the idea of a military dictatorship has taken on more substance. It is a plausible contention that the army, in order to refurbish a prestige tarnished by its defeat on the Sino- Indian frontier, initiated hostilities against Pakistan in hope of an easy success, oS
(2) In India, as in Pakistan, in face of the tragic misery of the masses, the war is a diversion aimed at channeling the anger and passion visible in recent months in the hunger revolts,
(3) The development of the war in Vietnam and the American Nescalation" there could not help but strongly affect the neighboring countries, particularly by encouraging tendencies to try to resolve difficult problems by force. A London newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, reported that the CIA was involved in the Indian government's decision to unleash hostilities, The report, of course, has been officially denied as is always the custom in Washington. Nevertheless, one cannot fail to notice that the Indo-Pakistan war has captured interest, that it is getting the major headlines, and that it has diverted attention from Vietnam as American reinforcement of troops there mounts day by day.
The attitude of China and Indonesia in the Indo~Pakistan con-= flict, has been singled out by the press ~= and not only the press -= as a scandalous opposition to the "peace" efforts of the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations. However, skepticism may well be expressed over the "pacifism" of the one side and the “belligerency" of the other.
Long before the war broke out, the United States armed both India and