Alliance of the Colored Peoples DOCX

Title	Alliance of the Colored Peoples
Author	Jay Clarke
Pages	11
File Size	37.3 KB
File Type	DOCX
Total Downloads	343
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J. Calvitt Clarke III. Alliance of the Colored Peoples: Ethiopia & Japan Before World War II. Woodbridge, Suffolk, GB: James Currey Ltd, 2011. https://www.academia.edu Publicity Blurb: We are grateful to J. Calvitt Clarke for this account of how his early research led him to study the Italo-Ethiopian War. He also explains the magnitude of its wider long-term impact, most obviously the later alliance between Japan and Italy. ***** In 1991, I published Russia and Italy against Hitler in which I described the developing relations in the first half of the 1930s between the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy. This work was an outgrowth of my Ph.D. dissertation in Russian and Soviet History at the University of Maryland in College Park. For the Kremlin, I argued, Italy had a vital role to play in forging the incipient collective security coalition designed to keep Germany in its place and to protect Russian and Italian interests in the Balkans. Until 1936, Italy was the one power with the will and the means to stop German expansionism in its tracks through direct political and military intervention against Anschluss in Austria—the gateway to the Balkans. My current work focuses on Ethio-Japanese relations. Culminating in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935 and 1936, it follows logically from my earlier monograph. How could this be? After all, Ethio-Japanese relations seem obscure and at best tangential to Italo-Russian relations and the momentous political events in Europe of the 1930s. Soviet historians, as well as many in the bourgeois West, have long trumpeted the Soviet Union's principled and altruistic position on the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Marxism- Leninism, after all, was steeped in anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-Fascism. These observers say the Soviets consistently and guilelessly defended Ethiopia's sovereign rights against Italy's colonial predations to the detriment of their own relations with Italy. While working on Russia and Italy against Hitler, I found many contemporary accounts in the communist press supporting this opinion. Yet . . . occasionally . . . there was the odd comment, often using the foreign press to create distance and "plausible deniability," that Italy's opposition to Japan's penetration of Ethiopia justified its military preparations against Ethiopia. The Japanese, some said, hoped to use Ethiopia as a springboard to attack Europe's white civilization politically, economically, and even militarily. Alliance of the Colored Peoples began as my effort to unravel the meaning of these thoroughly unMarxist-Leninist utterances. While working on my doctorate, to earn money, I taught history onboard US Navy ships in the Mediterranean and later at American bases in Italy. My first job was on the flagship of the 6th Fleet, then homeported in Gaeta, Italy. A lovely town halfway between Rome and Naples, the first night there, I fell in love with Italy. Within a short while, I figured out that almost nothing had been written about relations between Communist Russia and Fascist Italy. I had found the subject for my dissertation....