Empires in the Sun by Lawrence James

Author:Lawrence James [James, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gnv64
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

1919–1945

17

‘Contagious excitement’:

The Rise of Nationalism

I

The end of the war marked the beginning of what turned out to be a twenty-one-year truce in Europe. New ideologies emerged, seduced nations and generated the tensions that led to the Second World War in 1939. Communism, Fascism and Nazism required submission to a totalitarian state which, in return, promised stability, security and an end to recurrent economic crises and mass unemployment. The new charismatic rulers of Communist Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany set about rebuilding their countries from scratch. There was no place in the new orders for pre-war liberalism, parliamentary democracy and laissez-faire capitalism, none of which seemed to offer remedies for new sicknesses.

The new parties thrived on latent hatreds and violence. Mussolini, who came to power after an armed coup in 1922, later told Italians: ‘Every society . . . needs a certain proportion of citizens who had to be detested’.1 The Duce also expected the reborn Fascist man and woman to be ready to fight for their country and Fascism, for ‘war alone can carry to the maximum tension all human energies and imprint with the seal of nobility those people who have the courage to confront it’.2 Tumults and bloodshed marked Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, and his vision of Germany’s past, present and future was one of an endless life-or-death struggle for survival between the superior Aryans and the rest of the world. Europe’s radical Right had nothing to offer Africans: Nazi racial ideology relegated them to the lowest level of humanity and Mussolini’s racial pundit Lidio Cipriani insisted that all Africans suffered from ‘an irreducible inferiority’.3

Soviet Communism treated the African as a potential revolutionary, as yet unaware of his historic destiny in the global struggle against capitalism and its servant, imperialism. Russia was the powerhouse of world revolution and its propagandists endeavoured to foment it in the capitalist states and their Asian and African colonies. In 1920 they were predicting imminent uprisings by the downtrodden masses in India, Persia, Egypt and Algeria. There was spasmodic unrest which was suppressed by the authorities and in none of these countries did local Communist parties make much headway. No African delegates appeared at the first and second Comintern Congresses in 1919 and 1920, and it was only in 1923 that a Comintern Black Bureau was established in Hamburg specifically for black workers in Africa, Latin America and the United States.

Communist parties in Britain and France toed the Moscow line, denounced their countries’ empires and called for the militant solidarity of all races. In 1927 the Communist newspaper L’Humanité reminded the French workers that the labourers of Paris, the miners of the Moselle and the poorly paid dockers of Tunis shared a common cause.4 The same paper used the death in 1934 of the imperial hero Marshal Lyautey to denounce the French Empire and its rulers. He was ‘un Coloniste et Fasciste’, and an ‘ultra réactionnaire’, whose Jesuit education and military service had convinced him that it was the

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