Academic literature on the topic 'Freedom Front Plus (South Africa)'

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living t

Abstract Theodore Bilbo served as a US senator from Mississippi throughout World War II. Bilbo saw the war years as presenting existential dangers to the southern way of life. During World War II, Bilbo and other White Southerners believed that the nondiscrimination stance of the federal government posed challenges to the South’s system of race relations. Federal initiatives also helped create an atmosphere where Black activism—even in places as hostile to Black freedom as Mississippi—could begin to flourish. Bilbo feared a coming race war and proposed as a solution that all Blacks be removed from the United States and returned to Africa. During the war, Bilbo became the most outspoken opponent of any efforts to weaken racial segregation and White supremacy in the South and the nation, and by the summer of 1945, a sustained and national anti-Bilbo movement (mostly among Northerners) emerged.

Liberation struggles were just that: struggles. Freedom fighters across southern Africa—FRELIMO in Mozambique; the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA in Angola; ZAPU and ZANU in Rhodesia; the ANC and PAC in South Africa; SWAPO in South West Africa—faced mixed success but even so added pressure on the white regimes. After a military coup in Portugal helped alter the dynamics of the region, the Ford administration and Henry Kissinger became deeply involved as southern Africa came to the front burner with Washington contesting a hot Cold War there. The liberation movements and the involvement of the Cubans and Soviets made the white regimes' existence increasingly tenuous. The extent to which Washington pushed for majority rule mattered, and while the scorecard remained uneven, more than at any previous time the Carter administration, backed by the Congressional Black Caucus and TransAfrica, moved US policy to definitively and meaningfully helped secure majority rule to Zimbabwe. By 1980, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, covering an area larger than all the former European colonial powers in Africa combined, were independent nations under majority rule. Yet human rights were not so clearly at the fore in engaging South Africa; nor were economic sanctions.

Abstract Between the late 1920s and the late ‘40s, the Communist parties of the United States and South Africa made strenuous efforts to place themselves in the forefront of black protest against white supremacy. Although they never achieved the mass support that the Garvey movement or the ICU had attracted during the ‘20s, Communists did manage to play a significant role in the struggle against white racism. The orthodox Leninist conception of the party did not require it to be a mass movement like the ICU or the UNIA; it was meant to be an elite or “vanguard,” composed of carefully selected and highly disciplined revolutionaries who would give direction to the masses at appropriate times but needed to be wary of admitting to actual membership people who had not fully assimilated the Marxist-Leninist ideology. If such people were willing to accept Communists as allies in the struggle against racial oppression, antiimperialist or anti-racist “fronts” of one kind or another could be established, within which Communists could hope to exert an influence far beyond their actual numbers. The parties generally enforced ideological and tactical consensus in their own ranks through the practice of “democratic centralism,” which meant that once a decision was made no one could question it. This policy was a strength in the sense that it gave the party cohesion and ideological coherence, especially in comparison with populist-type movements, but it could also be an obstacle to cooperation with non-Communists who shared some but not all of its goals. If at any given time the party was turning “leftward” and refusing to have any truck with democratic socialists or “bourgeois nationalists,” it limited its influence over other movements seeking change; if it was moving to the right and seeking to ally itself with the broader progressive tendencies through “popular front” activities, it aroused suspicions of ulterior motives and conspiratorial aims. Radical black intellectuals who were attracted by Communist opposition to capitalism and racism often found it difficult or impossible to surrender their minds and talents to a party bureaucracy that had little respect for the free play of the intellect and the imagination. If they cooperated with Communists at all, their affiliation as members or “fellow travelers” was likely to be troubled and brief (although there were some conspicuous exceptions, especially in cases where the Communists deliberately and pragmatically refrained from imposing their usual discipline over particularly prominent members or fellow-travelers from the intellectual and artistic world).