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Portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, China, 1972.

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Portrait of Mao Zedong from propaganda poster

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Conversations with Mao Zedong

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Jawaharlal Nehru, 1949

Nehru, Jawaharlal

1889- 1964

Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party

Cleaver, Eldridge

1935- 1998

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February 1927	Statement of the Delegation of the "Etoile Nord Africaine" ("North African Star") by Hadj-Ahmed Messali The presenter of this address, Ahmed Ben Messali Hadj (1898-1974), is known as the “father” of Algerian nationalism, one of whose foremost biographies is Benjamin Stora’s Messali Hadj, 1898-1974 (2012). Having served in the French army in 1918-1921, Messali Hadj for economic reasons moved to Paris. There, he met his French wife, the leftist Emilie Busquant. In 1925, he was recruited to the French Communist Party’s (PCF) colonial commission. In June 1926, he co-founded, and became Secretary General of, the Etoile Nord Africaine (ENA), which at first demanded political and legal equality for France’s Muslim North Africans. As this text shows, demands shifted by February 1927. That month, ENA functionaries including Messali Hadj travelled to Bruxelles. Together with leftists and delegates from three dozen colonized countries, they participated in the founding conference of the League against Imperialism (LAI), which was initiated by the Moscow-headquartered Comintern and organized by the PCF and the German communist Willi Münzenberg; the experience in Bruxelles of one non-Arab delegation, India, has been analyzed in Michele Louro’s Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2020). It was in Bruxelles that Messali Hadj held the below address, speaking ex catedra as his notes had disappeared. The LAI was soon paralyzed by discord between communists and activists for whom allying with communists was a means to an anticolonial end; in 1936, it dissolved. Even so, it was the first truly international attempt to combat imperialism, as shown by the edited volume The League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (2020). As for the ENA, it in 1928 cut its ties with the PCF, being too independent-minded and -organized and vexed that the PCF, following the Comintern line, was moving away from ENA’s ideas about self-determination. In 1929, the French government outlawed ENA. In the 1930s Messali Hadj became closer inter alia to Shakib Arslan, translated excerpts of whose work Why Muslims Lagged Behind and Others Progressed is included in this collection. Even so, in 1936 to early 1937 a rebranded ENA shortly joined the leftist French Front Populaire, but then again was closed down. Messali Hadj reacted by establishing the clandestine Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA), which—a shift—demanded absolute Algerian autonomy within the French Republic. Condemned by the Vichy government to hard labor in 1941, Messali Hadj returned to Algeria in 1945. He continued to play a leading political role, founding in 1946 a PPA successor, the Mouvement pour la triomphe des libertés démocratiques. But from 1954, his star declined. By 1957, the Front de Libération Nationale, the new organization that in November 1954 started the War of Independence, ravaged the Mouvement National Algérien that Messali Hadj had founded that month, too. Politically neutralized, he stayed in France. He was allowed to return to Algeria only after his death, in 1974, for burial in his hometown of Tlemcen.
May 18, 1925	J.V. Stalin, 'The Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the Far East: Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Students of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, May 18, 1925' 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.
June 29, 2020	Interview and Discussion with Sir Malcolm Rifkind Discussion with Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Defense Secretary and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, about the 1990s and the new relationship that formed after the Cold War.
June 17, 2020	Interview and Discussion with Andrzej Olechowski Discussion with Polish Minister Andrzej Olechowski about his life and Poland in the 1990s.
April 16, 1968	[Mao Zedong's] Statement of Support for Black Americans’ Struggle Against Violence Mao discusses the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and connects the struggles of Black Americans to the struggles of oppressed people around the world. He calls for people around the world to unite against American imperialism.
January 27, 1964	[Mao Zedong's] Remarks on the Recent Patriotic and Just Struggle of the Japanese People to Oppose American Imperialism Mao expresses support for an anti-American demonstration that recently occurred in Japan. He calls for Chinese people, Japanese people, and all other oppressed people of the world to unite against the United States.
January 12, 1964	[Mao Zedong's] Remarks to a Reporter from the People's Daily on the Patriotic Struggle of Panamanian People to Oppose American Imperialism Mao expresses support for opposition to American imperialism in Panama and calls for unity in the global socialist camp.
August 8, 1963	Statement [from Mao Zedong] Appealing the People of the World to Unite against the Racial Discrimination of American Imperialism [and to] Support Black Americans' Opposition of Racism At the request of Robert F. Williams, a former NAACP leader who fled to Cuba, Mao condemns racism against black Americans in the United States. He discusses several notable events in the American civil rights movement, from the Little Rock Crisis of 1957 to the then-upcoming March on Washington, and calls on "enlightened people of all races around the world" to support the struggle of black Americans.
July 10, 1966	Conversation from [Mao Zedong's] Audience with Japanese, Cuban, Brazilian, and Argentinian Friends Mao calls for the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to unite against American imperialism.
January 9, 1965	[Mao Zedong's] Conversation with American Journalist [Edgar] Snow This is a Chinese translation of an article that Edgar Snow wrote after he met with Mao for four hours. Topics that they touched on included: anti-imperialism around the world, the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam, the possibility of normalizing Sino-US relations, the atomic bomb, and Khrushchev.