Aiken made an immediate impression on his arrival in the Twelfth Session of the UN General Assembly in September 1957. He adopted an impartial posture of assessing each issue on its merits and campaigning to remodel international politics around self-determination, humanitarianism, and peace. His exhortation was that only the UN had the moral authority and political legitimacy to put forward global solutions. While he did not propose nuclear disarmament measures specifically, his intent was signaled by his recommendation for a mutual drawback of foreign forces (including their nuclear weapons) in central Europe and his endorsement of a proposal to discuss the representation of China in the United Nations. The Eisenhower administration was hostile to Aiken’s course as outlined in the U.S. ambassador’s audience with Taoiseach Eamon de Valera and Aiken in Dublin on 2 October. The record underlines the Irish concerns about accidental nuclear war due to the proximity of opposing U.S. and Soviet forces in central Europe.  

Süha Umar is a Turkish Ambassador (Rtd.) He served as Head of the Turkish Delegation to ACRS.

Yezid Sayigh is a former Palestinian diplomat. He served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to ACRS. 

Fred Axelgard is a former US diplomat. He served as a member of the US delegation to ACRS.

The text printed here is the resolution to the Conference for Combatting Fascism held in May 1939 held in Beirut, originally printed in Arabic in an issue of the Beirut-based leftist journal Tali‘a.

Led by leftists, including communists, the conference was a well-publicized and well-attended call for action against Nazism and Fascism. It affirmed an alliance, against Nazi Germany (and Fascist Italy) with France, the Mandate occupier of Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, it insisted on the pressing need for political progress. Most important was the ratification by the French parliament, of the 1936 Franco-Syrian and Franco-Lebanese agreements that, like the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Agreement, would have ended the Mandate and granted Lebanon and Syria far-reaching sovereignty while preserving key French strategic interests. (Ratification never occurred.) In August 1939, the Soviet-German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact forced communists to adjust their language also in the French Mandates. Here and in other Arab countries like Palestine and Egypt, a majority of people whose written records we possess and perhaps also many other inhabitants, felt caution if not aversion towards Nazi Germany and Fascism Italy. They disliked how those two states organized their societies; were concerned about those states’ territorial ends in the Middle East (which, however, were in the late 1930s actual only in Italy’s case); and feared especially Nazi racism for potentially targeting them, like the Jews, as “Semites,” as Israel Gershoni’s edited volume Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion (2014) and Götz Nordbruch’s Nazism in Syria and Lebanon (2009) show.

At the same time, a considerable minority drew open inspiration from Nazi (and other European extreme rightwing) authoritarianism: its cult of a strong leaders, its emphasis on youth as national(ist) revivers, and its style and organizational forms, including salutes, uniforms, marches, and street brawls. Moreover, a small minority from the later 1930s sought to create a political-military alliance with Germany. Until 1939, Germany prevaricated, loath to provoke Britain, the principal power in the interwar Middle East. Thereafter, it did work with colonized nationalists who, as David Motadel’s “The Global Authoritarian Moment” (2019) has shown, were willing to work with Berlin to become independent. Among them were some Arabs like Hajj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), an exiled Palestinian leader whose wartime deeds and open anti-Semitism soon was, in the eyes of many, proof that Arabs in general had supported the Nazis.

After World War I, several communist movements tried to replicate the Bolsheviks’ take-over of Russia in European countries, most importantly and most often in Germany. All failed. As a result, the Soviet leadership and communists worldwide from around 1920 focused more energies on colonized countries, especially in Asia. As most of these seemed to lack the economic and sociopolitical conditions necessary for a communist revolution, the aim was to weaken if not overthrow European imperial rule, serving the interests of both the USSR and the local petit bourgeoisie, peasants, and few industrial workers. The perhaps greatest price was China. Moreover, India was seen to be (exceptionally) ripe for direct communist action.

Communists and some anti-colonial nationalists were also active in and across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, often sharing resources while being networked with the Communist International. Abbreviated as the Comintern (also the Third International), the latter was thekey international communist organization: founded in 1919 in Moscow, headquartered there, and employing through its dissolution in 1943 thousands of professional cadres from around the world, principally from Europe and Asia, as Brigitte Studer’s Reisende der Weltrevolution: Eine Globalgeschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale (2020) shows. Also in the Soviet Union, the year 1920 saw the landmark Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku. And in 1921, the Communist University for Laborers of the East (Kommunistichyeskii univyersityet trudyaschikhsya Vostoka, KUTV) opened its doors in Moscow. It became the first full-fledged Soviet training center for Soviet Muslims and for foreign communist cadres, principally from Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, and it impacted Soviet views of the East, as Lana Ravandi-Fadai and Masha Kirasirova have shown in “Red Mecca” (2015) and “The ‘East’ as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology and Comintern Administration” (2017), respectively. The text here is the English translation, published in 1954 in the collection J. V. Stalin: Works: Volume 7, of a Russian text published in 1925 in the principal Soviet newspaper, Pravda, rendering a speech that the 1924-1953 Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) held to KUTV’s students in 1925.

The Journalist informer learns that the Communist parties of Algeria and Morocco have invited the communist parties of the rest of the Arab countries to form a group for joint action.

Document regarding the activities of Israeli communists supported by the Israeli government in Arab countries.

Request from the Lebanese Communist Party's central committee for the plans of action from the communist parties of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Sudan and Israel with all documents related to the countries and their plans of action.

Document describing the history and development of communism in Lebanon, the founding of the Lebanese Communist Party, the magazine “Humanite,” links between the LCP and foreign countries, with a separate section for Armenia. Document also discusses Egyptian communist groups in Lebanon and the relationship between communist groups in different Arab countries.