Soviet Pin in Honour of the Centenary of Lenin's Birth, 1970 -- Daily LIFT #179

Soviet Pin in Honour of the Centenary of Lenin's Birth, 1970 -- Daily LIFT #179

Today is the 150th anniversary.

Amilcar Cabral:

We are not saying anything new. Today everybody, even the colonialists and imperialists, fully realizes that without the victorious Great October Revolution, without the establishment and consolidation of the world's first socialist state—the Soviet Union—and without the successful continuation of Lenin's cause, the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America would have remained in the darkness of colonial slavery. The political map of the world would have looked quite different, for the anti-imperialist, national-liberation movement would not have assumed the scope and power it has today. Everybody knows that the Leninist analysis of imperialism and imperialist domination is a powerful weapon for the national-liberation movement and all forces fighting imperialism. 

Fidel Castro:

Lenin is a truly exceptional phenomenon in human life ... It is rare when in some process—and perhaps, never in the political process generally —someone's mind, thought, perspicacity were able to make such a huge contribution to the development of that process as the mind, thought and perspicacity of Lenin. 

Tim Buck:

Lenin didn't speak, or write, about the necessity for audacity in the way that Danton did but he showed his capacity for it in a greater variety of engagements and on a greater scale than the famous French revolutionist had opportunity to know of. Lenin demonstrated the decisive role of audacity in revolution more clearly and more dramatically than has any other revolutionary whose activities are recorded. The fact that so little is written about this characteristic of his is striking evidence of the fact that mankind at large, including Communists, is still discovering so much that is new in Lenin's theoretical and ideological work that admiration of his remarkable intellectual audacity attracts the main attention. The personal audacity which was the physically decisive factor in some of the greatest of his historical achievements is usually accepted as though it flowed naturally and automatically from his theoretical conclusions—come to think of it, in his case it did. That's the sort of man that he was. Lenin's personal audacity, the superficial appearance that he didn't even realize the extent of the risk involved, was the more inspiring because it was in fact always the result of conviction, arrived at by careful study, and never of unthinking recklessness. 

Students and the African Liberation Movement, International Conference, Helsinki, Finland, 14-18 February 1971 w. Photos and an interview w. Amilcar Cabral

Vintage Leftist Leaflet Project

Leaflet: Students and the African Liberation Movement, International Conference, Helsinki, Finland, 14-18 February 1971

Flowing out of a conference held in Helsinki in 1971, this booklet looks at the struggles and circumstances of the national liberation and anti-imperialist movements at the time in Africa. It has reports about the fight in countries like Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa as well as extensive sections, with interviews and photographs, from the parts of Guinea-Bissau and Angola that had been liberated already by freedom fighters.

In the sections about the liberated zones we learn of the efforts of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC) and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola's (MPLA) to defeat the brutal NATO and American backed Portuguese colonial forces, to build medical and educational facilities, vaccination campaigns and other steps.

There are interviews and quotes from a number of revolutionary leaders including Amilcar Cabral of PAIGC. This includes a lengthy excerpt from a discussion with Cabral that was held in January, 1971. Cabral is regarded as one of the great anti-imperialist writers and thinkers of the African and global anti-colonial struggle. Fidel Castro once said of Cabral that he was “one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation.”

Tragically Cabral was assassinated January 20, 1973, only eight months before Guinea-Bissau became independent.

"Naturally Salazar, his substitute Caetano, and the Portuguese in general, as well as some of the Western press present us as great terrorists and Communists paid by Moscow, Peking, Havana and so on. We think that if really being a Communist means to fight for the independence of one's country, for freedom and for the right to progress, then this is very good propaganda for Communism," Cabral says. A reminder that the western media has always demonized and lied about anti-imperialist and socialist movements and governments just as it does today about countries like Venezuela and Bolivia.

(Click on scans to enlarge)