Workers World, Vol. 2 No. 19
It is too early to make a definitive evaluation of the new turn of world events as reflected in the struggle at the current UN session. Nevertheless, certain tentative conclusions can already be drawn.
The world balance of power has been drastically altered in favor of the oppressed as against the oppressor Powers. Imperialism is everywhere on the defensive. Even where the imperialists have crushed in blood the rising of the revolutionary masses, as in South Africa, they have emerged in an extremely weakened and debilitated condition. And although the UN Command, in collusion with Belgium and the U.S., had virtually destroyed the Congo Republic even before the Assembly had convened, the last word has not yet been said. Far from it.
The installation of Mobutu by the U.S. embassy as a supposed military arbiter between the Kasavubu (pro-imperialist) and Lumumba (anti-imperialist) factions is a thinly disguised fraud. The attempt to quickly liquidate the Congolese Republic by a swift military coup has foundered. And not because of benevolent intervention of world public opinion as expressed through the spokesmen at the UN.
Unquestionably the strong support rendered by the governments of Guinea, Ghana and the UAR helped substantially, as certainly did the governments of the USSR and other workers’ republics. But again, as has happened so often in the history of previous counter-revolutions, it was and is still the “unreliability” of the very troops under Mobutu’s command that stayed the hand of the would-be executioner of the Congolese Republic, and made at least the partial re-emergence of Lumumba in Leopoldville possible.
This is the key fact, hidden behind the heaviest fog of imperialist press handouts, which should have been emblazoned in the headlines of all the newspapers, if there were a free rather than a kept press in this country.
Even this is overshadowed by the fact that these very troops originally initiated the rebellion that set off the tidal wave of revolution in the Congo, following the pronouncement of freedom, which the Belgian imperialists pledged – but never intended to grant.
It is the army rank and file, drawn from the mass of the people, who saved the day in Leopoldville (at least as of now), as distinguished from the military brass, who were trained, nourished and indoctrinated by their Belgian taskmasters.
It is only in the light of the crisis arising out of the situation in the Congo that one can examine some of the proposals made by Khrushchev at the current UN Assembly. Undoubtedly the most significant one concerns the liquidation of colonialism.
The absolutely unprecedented campaign of vilification, slander and calumny directed at Khrushchev by the imperialist press should not be permitted to drown out an objective appraisal of the proposal’s actual significance. Unquestionably it was a good, progressive, and timely thing to present.
In the heroic age of the early Communist movement, such a proposal would have been regarded as routine, and as a matter of course. It was then understood everywhere in the world, both by the oppressors as well as the advanced section of the oppressed peoples, that the leadership of the youthful Soviet Republic was wholly and unconditionally committed not only to the liquidation of colonialism but to the struggle for world socialist revolution.
A proposal such as this, coming from Lenin, would have been taken completely for granted as the Soviet Union’s unshakeable stand, but coming from Khrushchev, it comes as a surprise and an unexpected bombshell to the imperialists.
Nevertheless, in the context of the present international situation, and especially in the light of the tremendous power and prestige of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s proposal has aroused not only the ire of the imperialists, but it has instilled new hope and vigor in the colonial peoples.
If we assume that the main and fundamental task of the USSR at this Assembly was to draw a clear dividing line between the imperialist and anti-imperialist forces in the UN, then the Algerian question was the issue par excellence for promoting this objective in the UN and would have been admirably suited and timed for the occasion.
To give substance to Khrushchev’s proposal, he should have confronted the Assembly with the recognition by the Soviet government of the Provisional Algerian Republic.
The imperialists did not hesitate to confront the Assembly with what amounts to a virtually accomplished fact in the Congo. Why shouldn’t the USSR do the same thing, in reverse, with respect to the Algerian struggle, and present the UN with the accomplished fact of USSR recognition of the Algerian Provisional Government – as China has done?
Many people ask what the diplomatic recognition of the Algerians by the USSR would accomplish. A great deal indeed!
For one thing, it would give a renewed impetus to the Algerian Liberation Movement, and would add an enormous amount of political as well as material support to the struggle.
If by diplomatic recognition is meant more than the mere technical term implies, it would operate as a commitment by the USSR to give it active material assistance. The eastern European countries would certainly follow suit. And others would be impelled one way or another to offer, to one degree or another, political or other support.
By this very act alone, Khrushchev would not only expose the Gaullist administrators of the Paris Bourse, but would also have forced the MacMillan and Eisenhower government to show their hand. It’s the kind of an issue which has a tremendous potential in the given situation in the UN of drawing a sharp line between the imperialist and anti-imperialist countries.
But, say the apologists for Khrushchev, this would run counter to the wishes of the masses of the French people.
On the contrary, never in recent years have the French people experienced such an overwhelming spirit of sympathy for the Algerian revolution as at the precise moment when Khrushchev was delivering his talk to the UN.
This was dramatically demonstrated by the stand taken in Paris of the 26 defendants who were accused of helping the Algerians and were before a military tribunal at Paris’ Cherchemidi Prison, where they heroically upheld the cause of the Algerian Liberation Movement in the very teeth of the Gaullist military camarilla. And the symptom of the general feeling permeating France on the Algerian issue was the formation of a committee which the New York Times was forced to admit in its Sept. 25 issue, was “a formidable array of French writers, stage personalities and teachers (who) jeopardized their careers by supporting the defendants’ right to back the Moslem Algerian struggle for independence.
“Most prominent among the ‘names’ supporting the defendants were Jean-Paul Sartre, playwright and philosopher; Simone de Beauvoir, author, and Simone Signoret, the actress.
“Considerable support came also from lesser-known writers and schoolteachers. Altogether 121 of the ‘intellectuals’ signed a manifesto, while the trial was in progress, upholding the right of a Frenchman to refuse to fight against the Moslem rebels if his conscience was against it.
“The manifesto said that the Moslems were fighting a legitimate war for their national independence and the French Army in Algeria, faced with guerilla warfare, was using Nazi-like techniques of torture and imprisonment.”
It should be scarcely necessary to add that the French working class is the most internationalist and class conscious on the west European continent, and has at all times been in sympathy with the Algerian liberation movement. It is only the leaders that stand in the way.
Thus the old moth-eaten apology for Khrushchev, that recognition of the Algerian National Republic would run counter to the wishes of the French, stands exposed as a naked lie.
Why then should Khrushchev spurn the outstretched hand of the embattled Algerian people?
Is it because he feels it would constitute a definitive rupture with the De Gaulle regime – which it surely would do in such case? Does he feel it would consolidate the Western imperialist bloc, or does he fear it would endanger his schema for a “world settlement” with the imperialist powers on the basis of his much cherished dogma of “peaceful co-existence”?
Whatever the present calculations of Khrushchev and his ruling group, in the eyes of the Algerian people, peace with De Gaulle means war against Algeria! Peace with MacMillan will strengthen the stranglehold on Kenya and all the colonial and semi-colonial people under British domination. Peace with Eisenhower strengthens the hand of the Pentagon madmen and their Wall Street masters against Latin America, Asia, Africa, the European proletariat, and last but not least, in the struggle against the working class in the USA. Peace with imperialism means a continuation of the unceasing struggle of the predatory monopolists against the peoples of the world.
The only road to a real genuine peace is an unceasing struggle against imperialism.
“In these conditions, the slogans of pacifism, international disarmament under capitalism, courts of arbitration, etc., are not only reactionary utopias, but downright deceptions of the toilers designed to disarm the proletariat and distract it from the task of disarming the exploiters.” – by Lenin, Program of the Third International, 1919.
How right Lenin was then! How right he is now!
Last updated: 11 May 2026