Asia

The Widest Front

Asia's liberation movements encompass a broader range of ideology, tactics, culture, and historical circumstance than any other continent's. What unites them is not a shared political tradition but a shared structural experience: the imposition of colonial rule by European and, in East Asia, Japanese imperial powers, and the refusal — conducted in dozens of languages, across vastly different social formations — to accept it.

The Indian independence movement is the largest single body of liberation history in Asia, and in some respects in the world. The archive documents more than fifty Indian figures — from Mangal Pandey, whose 1857 rebellion against the East India Company ignited the first major national uprising, to Subhas Chandra Bose, who built the Indian National Army in collaboration with Japan during World War Two and whose reputation remains fiercely contested in India today. Between those poles lies a vast spectrum: Gandhi's mass non-cooperation movement, which demonstrated at continental scale that civil disobedience could undermine an empire; Bhagat Singh, who was twenty-three when he was hanged by the British and who regarded Gandhi's non-violence as a tactical rather than a moral commitment; the Bengal revolutionaries — Surya Sen, Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Dutta — who mounted armed attacks on British installations and whose executions produced the first significant wave of mass nationalist sentiment in Bengal; and the women — Kasturba Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sucheta Kriplani, Matangini Hazra — who have been systematically sidelined in accounts that reduce the independence movement to a single male figure.

Vietnam's liberation history is one of the most extraordinary military and political records of the twentieth century. Ho Chi Minh spent thirty years — from the founding of the Viet Minh in 1941 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, which he did not live to see — building a movement that defeated, in succession, the Japanese occupation, French colonialism at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the United States military at a cost of over three million Vietnamese lives. General Vo Nguyen Giap, who commanded the military campaigns at Dien Bien Phu and through the American war, is one of the most studied commanders in modern military history. Nguyen Thi Dinh organised the first armed uprising in the Mekong Delta and commanded the National Liberation Front's forces in the South. Nguyen Thi Binh led the NLF delegation at the Paris Peace Talks. These are the figures who won that war — not the American generals who lost it.

Korea's liberation history spans two phases of colonial resistance. The first is the Japanese occupation of 1910–1945, which produced the March First Movement of 1919 — in which an estimated two million Koreans participated in nationwide demonstrations — and the generation of independence fighters who organised from Shanghai and Chongqing in exile. Ahn Jung-geun was executed at thirty-one for assassinating the Japanese Resident-General of Korea in 1909 and remains the most revered figure in Korean historical memory. Yu Gwan-sun, who organised demonstrations at sixteen and was tortured to death in Seodaemun Prison at seventeen, is the Korean independence movement's most powerful symbol of youthful sacrifice.

Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia produced resistance movements as diverse as their populations. José Rizal of the Philippines wrote two novels — Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo — that so effectively articulated the colonial condition that the Spanish colonial government executed him in 1896 at thirty-five, igniting the revolution he had tried to prevent through peaceful means. Andres Bonifacio, who founded the revolutionary Katipunan, was subsequently murdered by the revolution's more conservative wing — an early example of liberation movements consuming their most radical members. Sukarno of Indonesia and the Dutch colonial regime fought a four-year independence war from 1945 to 1949 that ended in a negotiated settlement only after sustained international pressure and a US threat to cut Marshall Plan aid to the Netherlands.

The Palestine and Middle East section documents a liberation tradition whose context — the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory — makes it unlike any other in this archive in that it has not yet produced a final political resolution. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam organised armed resistance to both British mandate rule and Zionist settlement in the 1930s and was killed in an ambush in 1935. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni commanded Palestinian forces in the 1948 war and was killed at the Battle of al-Qastal. Ghassan Kanafani, the PFLP spokesman and novelist whose fiction — Men in the Sun, Return to Haifa — remains the most powerful literary account of Palestinian dispossession, was assassinated by a Mossad car bomb in Beirut in 1972. The names in this section come with the weight of a conflict that continues.

Iran and Iraq's liberation history is among the most complex in the archive, encompassing the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution, Mohammad Mosaddegh's democratically elected government nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and being overthrown in a CIA and MI6 coup in 1953, Ali Shariati's synthesis of Islam and Marxism that shaped the 1979 revolution, and the Kurdish independence movements that have been suppressed across four countries. The archive documents these figures with the same rigour applied to every other section — acknowledging the ideological differences and internal contradictions that all liberation movements contain.