Two superpowers, a hundred new states.

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness… The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country.” — Ho Chi Minh, Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Hanoi, September 2, 1945

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) opened Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence by quoting both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The gesture was deliberate: he was using the Enlightenment’s own language to demand that its promises apply to colonized peoples. The United States chose to support French reconquest of Vietnam anyway. This document is the starting point for understanding how the Cold War looked to peoples who had just survived colonialism. Read the source →

“We have known exhausting labor extracted from us by force, morning, noon, and night, in return for pay that allowed us neither to eat enough nor to dress ourselves or sleep in decent lodging. We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon, and night, because we were Negroes.” — Patrice Lumumba, Independence Day address, Leopoldville, June 30, 1960 (translated from French)

Lumumba (1925–1961), the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo, delivered this speech at a ceremony attended by Belgian King Baudouin. When the king praised Belgian colonialism as a gift to the Congolese, Lumumba responded directly, describing what colonialism had actually meant. He was assassinated eight months later, with documented CIA involvement. His speech—and his death—document why the Cold War’s proxy conflicts in Africa were experienced as extensions of colonialism rather than as contests between freedom and communism. Read the source →

“Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European—or later United States—capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work.” — Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 1971 (translated from Spanish)

Galeano (1940–2015) wrote this book as a documented economic history of Latin America’s relationship to external powers from the conquest to the Cold War. It was immediately banned by military dictatorships in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. In 2009, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a copy to Barack Obama at a summit—the book went to the top of the bestseller list that day. It represents the Latin American perspective on why the Cold War’s economic conflicts were not between capitalism and communism but between wealth extraction and self-determination. Read the source →

“The guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and who fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.” — Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 1961

Guevara (1928–1967) was an Argentine doctor who joined the Cuban Revolution and later attempted to spread revolutionary movements across Latin America and Africa before his capture and execution in Bolivia. His writings framed communist revolution not as an ideological abstraction but as a response to specific material conditions—poverty, landlessness, and foreign economic domination. His account shows what the “spread of communism” looked like from the inside: not Soviet conspiracy, but local grievance finding a global framework. Read the source →

“Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon… The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle.” — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 (translated from French by Constance Farrington)

Fanon (1925–1961), a psychiatrist from Martinique who joined the Algerian independence movement, wrote this book as a psychological and political analysis of colonialism and decolonization. He argued that colonialism was not merely economic or political but operated through the systematic destruction of colonized people’s self-image and culture—and that decolonization therefore required not just political independence but psychological liberation. His book was banned in France and became foundational for anti-colonial movements worldwide. Read the source →

“Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa… Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility; and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.” — Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965

Nkrumah (1909–1972) led Ghana to independence in 1957—the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from European rule. His 1965 book argued that political independence had not ended colonialism but transformed it: formerly colonized states were now economically controlled by former colonial powers through debt, trade terms, and political interference. He was overthrown in a CIA-supported coup in 1966. His concept of neo-colonialism shaped economic analysis of the Global South for decades. Read the source →

“I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” — Fannie Lou Hamer, testimony before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, August 22, 1964

Hamer (1917–1977), a Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist, testified before the Democratic Party’s credentials committee to demand that the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party be seated instead of the all-white delegation. President Johnson, afraid of losing Southern white votes, arranged for her testimony to be interrupted. Her question—broadcast after the convention—exposed the gap between U.S. claims to represent democracy globally and the treatment of Black citizens at home. It became one of the defining statements of the civil rights movement. Read the source →

“Our country is not flourishing. The previous regime, armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production. It made out of once-proud citizens mere cogs in a monstrous, thudding, smelling machine.” — Václav Havel, inaugural address as President of Czechoslovakia, Prague, January 1, 1990 (translated from Czech)

Havel (1936–2011) was a Czech playwright and dissident who spent years in prison under the communist government before becoming the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia. His inaugural address described not Soviet ideology’s abstract failure but what it had actually meant to live inside it: the degradation of individuals into instruments of a system, the destruction of civic life, and the poisoning of the environment. His account represents the Eastern European experience of communism from the inside—the perspective missing from both Soviet propaganda and Western Cold War narratives. Read the source →