Cold Warriors by Duncan White

Author:Duncan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062449825
Publisher: HarperCollins

WRIGHT’S JOURNEY TO BANDUNG was a fitting prelude to the conference, a whirlwind tour of North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. He flew from Madrid to Rome, and from there, as they crossed the Mediterranean, he saw the “far flung lake of shimmering lights” of Cairo. In Egypt the plane picked up its first load of delegates, “red-fezzed North Africans from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.”43 As the plane headed east to Baghdad, Wright was shown pictures of emaciated Palestinian refugees and was told their plight would be brought up at the conference. Wright struck up a conversation with an Indonesian student returning from his time at the University of Leiden. “You an American?” the student asked. “Yes.” “Negro?” “Yes.” The student relaxed. “I was to get to know that reaction very well,” Wright wrote.44 As a victim of racism, he was on the inside at Bandung.

In Karachi, Sikhs boarded—“they had bushy black beards, Oxford accents and they sat together in a knot”—and in Calcutta, Hindus—“they wore Western clothes and seemed urbanized.”45 He took a sleeping pill and awoke to Japanese and American reporters boarding the plane in Bangkok. “High over the jungles of Malaya and political discussions raged,” Wright wrote.46 As people shouted to make themselves heard over the noise of the engines, those discussions kept coming back to the same subject: what role China was going to play at the conference.

The decision to invite Communist China had prompted much skepticism in the West about whether this was a genuinely neutral meeting in the context of the Cold War. Nehru, who was understood to be the driving force behind the conference, had visited China as a guest of Mao the previous November, and that Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai was now coming to Bandung appeared to be evidence of Communist conspiracy, even though the Indian leader was not a Communist himself. “A group of American newspapermen had made a list of all the delegates going to Bandung and had checked them all off according to their political leanings and had come to the conclusion that the West would emerge victorious from its clash with China’s evil genius Chou En-lai [sic],” Wright wrote. “I was baffled. Were we going to a football game?”47 Wright believed the approach of Western governments and the Western press betrayed their fear of what was happening. Claims that the conference, by excluding white nations, was itself racist showed how defensive the Europeans and the Americans were. “There’s gonna be a hot time in old Bandung,” Wright thought.48

The fear that the Cold War was also about to turn hot was real. In the American press, stories circulated that the Chinese were preparing an operation to launch an attack to take the islands of Quemoy (Kinmen) and Matsu in the Taiwanese Strait, an act of aggression against U.S.-supported Taiwan (then still known as Formosa). In the American press, there was bullish talk of the use of nuclear weapons. It was precisely this kind of aggressive posturing on the part of the United States, Wright believed, that brought about Bandung in the first place.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.