Cartoon captioned “On the
International Slave Plantation” on the front page of the Daily Worker, June 27,
1925. (Credit: Robert Minor).
A cartoon drawn by Robert
Minor, a political cartoonist who was also a member of the American Communist
Party, has been rediscovered by a new generation who have avidly shared it various
social media platforms. It portrays three hulking figures representing China,
India and Africa who tower over three cowering, horsewhip-wielding figures who represent
US, French and British imperialism. A Soviet soldier can also be observed grinning
in the background. Considered an incendiary image in its time for inciting hatred
against “the white race”, many of those who share the image today are not invoking
the original intended goal of international communism liberating oppressed
non-whites, and instead are drawing parallels with the developing multi-polar
world envisioned by BRICS which seeks to break free from the neocolonial
stranglehold held by the West on the conduct of international trade and
development.
When the cartoon appeared on
the front page of the Black American newspaper The Negro Champion, which
dubbed it "The Big Three", Joseph Wise, the Staff Correspondent of
the International Labor News Service, referred to it as a "vicious
cartoon" and Minor as "the notorious communist cartoonist".
Wise complained that the
"entire contents of the publication are designed to arouse race prejudice
and antagonism and to array the peoples of China, India and Africa against the
white race."
The editor of The Negro
Champion, Lovett Fort-Whiteman (1889-1939), was a functionary of the
Communist International (Comintern) who was the lead organiser of the American
Negro Labor Congress. Fort-Whiteman would die from malnutrition in a Stalinist
gulag in 1939 after he was accused of being a Trotskyist.
Victor A. Olander, the
secretary-treasurer of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, to whom Wise
would refer to in his syndicated article, saw Fort-Whiteman as a Soviet proxy
whom he likened to a man "carrying a flaming torch through dry grass."
Yet, while Olander criticised the cartoons which appeared in The Negro
Champion of ignoring "economic and political issues almost
entirely" while making "a direct appeal to racial antagonism", he
was ignoring the fact that race lay firmly at the heart of economic relations
in the United States, a state of affairs which applied to the globe because the
Chinese, Indians and Africans were at the time victims of long-term colonial
exploitation of their lands and human resources.
In 1925, China was still in
its "Century of Humiliation" which lasted from 1839 to 1949. India
was Britain's most prized colony, and most of Africa was ruled by the French,
British and Portuguese.
Even after the ostensible
process of decolonisation, the Western-run global economic institutions have
maintained a grip on the economies of the Global South through the Bretton
Woods institutions. The policies of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund have typically indebted nations regardless of whether those
policies were encouraging of socialist-orientated development economics or were
inspired by neoliberalism.
Former colonial powers also
continued to wield economic power in regard to their former vassal states. The
economic relations between France and its former
colonies, as well as the extractivist rationale for the creation of the European
Union in relation to the minerally-rich African continent affirm the racial
context of global economic relations.
The quest of the Western
world to maintain global economic hegemony is no less the case when it comes to
post-Soviet Russia and China.
There has been an enduring
project aimed at pressuring Russia to surrender its sovereignty so as to enable
the West to have unfettered access to and control of its vast resources, while
China’s rise in economic power has caused apprehension on the part of the
United States.
A closer examination of the
relations between the West and these two powers reveal a racial subtext which
few are willing to admit.
In the provocatively titled “Slavs
and the Yellow Peril are ‘niggers, brutes and beasts”, in the eyes of the
Western Empire”, Jeff J. Brown explained that:
Westerners
cannot write about their racial superiority and the perceived subhumaness of
non-Westerners, like they were able to do so freely until the 1950s. But it is
still manifestly the fundamental principle that drives America’s
“exceptionalism” and the West’s “shining beacon on a hill” superiority, thus
legitimizing ongoing Western genocide, wars, government overthrows and economic
and resource exploitation, through the “benign, invisible hand” of capitalism,
across Planet Earth.
This attitude was reflected
in the writings of the late Zbigniew Brzeziński, a hugely influential US
foreign policy theoretician, who wrote the following in his 1997 book The
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives:
To
put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient
empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent
collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep
tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming
together.
Japan may once have had the
opportunity of breaking away from Western economic domination through its Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a plan which boldly proclaimed "Asia for
the Asiatics". But the extreme cruelty and intense chauvinism that it
deployed in its quest to expand its empire alienated its neighbours in east
Asia and the Pacific.
Japan’s chief competitor for
the allegiance of the countries in this area, the United States, militarily
defeated it and incorporated it into its post-war alliance of nations. But the new
global hegemon, now involved in an ideological war with the Soviet Union on a
global scale inherited the attitudes and methods of its Anglo-Saxon predecessor
in enforcing the compliance of states to the dictates of resource control.
An excerpt from an editorial
written for the New York Times on August 5th, 1954, the year after
“Operation Ajax”, a regime change endeavour in Iran which was orchestrated by
the American Central Intelligence Agency with help from the British Secret
Intelligence Service, will suffice:
Underdeveloped
countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that
must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical
nationalism.
The coup overthrew the
democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh which had
nationalised its British-controlled oil industry and replaced him with the
pliant Shah who ruled Iran as a dictator. It would, of course not be the last
such endeavour where American economic interests were threatened by independent
thinking political leaders.
Minor's cartoon may resonate
strongly with those who can relate it to the growing Eurasian world and
development of BRICS at the heart of which are Russia, China, and India. The
developing multipolar
world order which is being characterised by the phenomenon of
de-dollarisation and various geopolitical confrontations such as Russia
withstanding the "shock and awe" sanctions regime imposed on it by
the West and the ejecting of France from a number of Sahelian countries, in a
sense represent a movement away from the so-called "international slave
plantation".
© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer
based in London, England.
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