tho(ugh)ts

On this day in 1948, the Malayan War of Independence started, led by Marxist guerrillas against British colonial forces, a significant chapter in the history of anti-colonial movements and the struggles for independence.

The armed wing of the Malayan Communist Party received significant support from the Malayan ethnic Chinese population, many of whom had been inspired by the Chinese Revolution and the resistance against Japanese occupation during WWII.

The British counterinsurgency, dubbed "Britain's Vietnam", served as a precedent for the later US invasion of Vietnam against communist forces. The British troops employed harsh methods and committed war crimes, including mass imprisonment in concentration camps, torture, and mass executions.

Thanks to @theredstream telegram channel

oh nice, I'm Malaysian and I have stuff to say about this part of our history.

it's more commonly referred to as the Malayan Emergency in our history textbooks, of course that name tends to obscure the anti-imperialist nature of the conflict but Malaysians generally won't know what you're talking about if you call it by any other name.

During this period of time, the government enacted resettlement programs called Chinese New Villages, where they resettle the Chinese away from the jungles where the communist guerillas were in hiding as they were surviving with the help of Chinese villagers who were sympathetic to their cause. By resettling the Chinese villagers, they hope to cut off support with the communist guerillas and drive them out of hiding.

I do know that the British also used agent orange on Malaysians during the conflict, the very same chemical used in the Vietnam War that was happening around the same time. They sprayed the stuff into the jungles to target the communists but it also ended up impacting surrounding villages as well and my mom has witnessed to this day, there are children born in these villages with birth defects due to agent orange lingering in the people.

I would also note that the communists in Malaysia weren't just the Chinese as it plays into the sinophobia here that is fed by communism being merely a Chinese thing and that all Chinese are communists by extension. There were plenty of communists who were Malay and other races, one notable Malay communist was Shamsiah Fakeh, who was quite notable and worth looking up.

This article does a good job of speaking more in detail about the emergency and the related war crimes of the British against people in Malaya.

Also do want to lift up that like the previous poster said there that it wasn't just the Chinese that was a part of this insurgency. In fact, there was also a highly politicized and militant communist and presence on estates and plantations of Indian indentured labor, mostly Tamil.

R.G. Balan was part of CPM and a prolific union organizer, helping with over 85 strikes in Malaysia in 1948 which eventually led to his arrest before the emergency was declared. (x)

SA Ganapathy was executed for possession of firearms in 1949, but was the first president of the Pan Malayan Federation of Trade Unionists which had membership of over half of Malaya's work force at that time. (x)

The British continued oppressive regimes and tactics through the Briggs Plan. This included heavy anti-communist propaganda and in plantations, instead of relocating Indian labor they controlled movements and resources on the plantation including banning the cooking of rice at home to starve out communist guerilla fighters who were getting supplied by sympathetic workers. My uncle told me how if you missed getting the rice from the communal rice bowl you would not get fed that day and sympathizers were heavily punished.

Part of the relocation also included the Orang Asli (trans: original people or the indigenous peoples of Malaya) who also suffered under the attacks on the jungles by the British.

Also Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) did a great graphic highlighting communist women for women's day this year including Shamsiah Fakeh

— Ambedkar, “A Reply To The Mahatma”, re: Bhakti saints

If y'all want to watch a documentary, please watch this and share. Please support the campaign to free the Pendleton 2.

Please support and donate to the campaign linked below. Ask you friends and family. Share the documentary and talk to them. Free them all.

Uncle Ho once said, when the prison doors break open, the dragons will fly out. These are those dragons. Our comrades inside fighting against white supremacy and organising putting their lives on the line.

We all thought about what would have happened if someone picked up a brick instead of a cell phone to help brother George Floyd. These two actually did that and are now paying with their lives.

— Trevor Hoppe, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness (2017), Ch. 1. (via enoughtohold)

Migration in colonial India: The articulation of feudalism and capitalism by the Colonial State, Gail Omvedt

— How Many Well Intentioned People Dehumanise Children | Racheous

The question of the land overwhelmingly forced us to rethink that of reproduction: the reproduction of humanity as a whole, if we want to think in global terms. In industrialized countries reproduction happens essentially through the work of managing money, not the money of its own retribution, which was never granted, but the money coming from the husband’s paycheck or, in more post-Fordist terms, from the two precarious paychecks of his and her jobs outside of the home. In Third World countries, on the other hand (and they remain Third World even when they enter the First World or vice versa), reproduction happens first of all through the work in the fields. In other words, through farming for sustenance or local consumption, according to a system of collective ownership or small property. 

In order to appreciate this issue in all its seriousness, both regarding the privatization and the exploitation and destruction of the reproductive powers of land, we need to reconsider what happened during the 80s. While there’s no doubt that those were years of repression and normalization in Italy, in Third World countries those were the years of the draconian adjustment dictated by the IMF. The adjustment involved all countries, Italy included, but in Third World countries, it called for particularly draconian measures. For instance the cuts to subsidized staple foods, and most importantly, the strong recommendation to put a price on land, thus privatizing it wherever it was still a commons (as it was for most of Africa), basically making subsistence agriculture impossible. This measure (made even more dramatic in those years in the context of other typical IMF adjustments) represents, in my opinion, the major cause of world hunger, and it creates the illusion of overpopulation, while the real problem is that of landlessness. As the implementation of the adjustment policies of the 80s became more severe, reproduction regressed at a global level. This was the preparatory phase of neoliberalism. In fact, creating poorer living conditions and fewer life expectations and a level of poverty without precedent, it provided the prerequisites for the launch of the new globalized economy: for the deployment of neoliberalism worldwide, requiring workers to sacrifice so that corporations can compete on the global market; for the endorsement of new models of productivity with smaller salaries and deregulated working conditions; for the stabilization of an international hierarchy of workers with an ever larger and more dramatic gap, both in the fields of production and reproduction. Starting in the 80s, the wave of suicides among farmers in India reached 20,000 cases in the last three years. All of them couldn’t pay back the debts they had incurred to buy seeds and pesticides. A genocide! 

As mass suicides give us the measure of the amount of hunger and death brought upon people by the Green Revolution and by IMF policies, the 80s were also the years that saw the rise of struggles against these policies (from South America to Africa and Asia), against the expropriation and poisoning of the land, against the distortion and the destruction of its reproductive powers. The protagonists of these struggles created networks, organizations, and movements that we found again in the 90s as components of the big anti-globalization movement, which was called, not accidentally “the movement of movements.” The first moment of unification of these different entities, and with it, the launch of the anti-globalization movement, happened at the end of July and beginning of August ‘96 in Chiapas, when the Zapatistas called for an Intercontinental meeting for “humanity against neoliberalism.” The central demand in the Zapatistas’ insurrection was that of land.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, "The Door to the Flower and the Vegetable Garden"

— Mao Zedong, Oppose Book Worship, 1930

— Awanish Kumar, ‘Ambedkar and his idea of the caste of land’, Indian Express

underrated/understudied dynamic of postcolonial nations is the way colonialism is leveraged as a discursive strategy by local elites - simultaneously to place all intractable problems with an outside interloper (and this may be from religious/ethnic conflict to oppressive systems to poverty), create a convenient enemy to direct rage towards, to obscure their own culpability and role in maintaining (and actively encouraging) oppressive systems within their own country and finally, to position themselves as a necessary antidote to colonial power and oppression and therefore seize power for themselves. westerners fall for it every single time. absolutely incredible and also deeply depressing for the project of international solidarity.

More from the article that I thought was important:

“Just as populations indigenous to the Americas would not be expected to instantly renounce any relationship American lands they aren’t original to, but where they were forcibly relocated via colonial violence such as the Trail of Tears, so too might we develop a necessary grace for Black people who did not choose to live under an anti-Black state here. Rather than demands that Black folks here leave and “go back to Africa” immediately in the name of decolonization—a demand that should sound very familiar—we could collectively work on solutions to the problem of colonization that leave all of us more liberated from whiteness, rather than only some of us.”