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FREEDOMWAYS    THIRD QUARTER 1973

Martinique and the Virgin Islands both in the West Indies; the 70th anniversary of the publishing of Du Bois' classic The Souls of Black Folk; the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Cuban Revolution and the 10th anniversary of our Movement's historic March on Washington. I refer to these dates out of deference to the wisdom of the person who once wrote that "those nations and peoples who do not study history are doomed to repeat its mistakes."

After World War II the world entered a watershed period, a dividing line in history in which the vast majority of the world population moved out of the old epoch, with its oppressive relations into a transitional new stage in history, a new stage in social and world development. A turning point of this period occurred during World War II when the racist war machine of Nazi Germany was basically crushed by the might of the Soviet people at Stalingrad. This was a historically significant defeat for the racism of the Western capitalist world which Hitler's armies symbolized. Following this, within a few short years, ancient India saw its people mobilized in a great non-violent national movement of mass action combined with the working-class technique of the General Strike which swept away the British Imperial State forever.

And India has emerged with a woman, Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of a sub-continent of 550 million people. In 1945 the Vietnamese people rallied to the Independence Movement and the leadership of the great Vietnamese national patriot, Ho Chi Minh. This was the beginning of a twenty-five year struggle to consolidate their independence, a democratic struggle just completed this year with the defeat of the United States military in the Vietnamese Civil War. In 1949 China's peasant and working class movement had mobilized the power to deal the final blows sweeping away the rule of the feudal war-lords and the foreign privileged elite, giving way to a new China embracing the lives of a quarter of humanity.

a new period in our movement's history

So from the Isles of Indonesia to the mountains of Tibet this Asian drama of revolutionary change unfolded in the decade of the forties and set the tone for this period in which we live. Early in the decade of the fifties a new Egypt and a new Ghana were born under the banner of freedom as years of struggle were brought to a climax. The old system of colonial rule crumbled into the ashes of history; a torch was lit illuminating the freedom road on the African Continent under the revolutionary leadership of Kwame Nkrumah,

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