The ‘Bandung Spirit’ Must Replace Geopolitics

The Global Majority—represented through organizations such as BRICS, the SCO, the Eurasian Economic Union, ASEAN, and others—is bringing about a new era of Mankind, an era of peaceful cooperation based on the economic development of each and every nation on the planet. This is based on the spirit of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence which were enunciated by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states, a watershed moment for the Global South in the post-war era, which declared the principle of non-alignment against bloc mentality.

During this time, in the United States, former Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. took a stand against the imperial narrow-mindedness of the U.S. State Department, run by the Anglophile John Foster Dulles, who with his brother Allen had helped fund the Hitler war machine. Powell, Jr. decided to attend the Bandung Conference as a representative of the U.S. Congress when he had learned that the U.S. State Department would not be participating, let alone sending any observers, and had discouraged Powell, Jr. from attending at all.

In a moment of true independent action, Powell, Jr. ignored these orders. The United States, and the other nations of the Global North, must act in that same fashion today. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in the Sept. 5th International Peace Coalition meeting, proposed a statement which encouraged the unity of the ‘Western’ nations and the Global Majority. The end of that statement makes our mission clear:

“The nations of the Global Majority are now overcoming an era of 500 years of colonialism and asserting their right to independent economic development.... It is in the fundamental self-interest of the nations of the collective West, no longer truly united, to cooperate with the states of the Global Majority and jointly address the great challenges facing humankind: Overcoming poverty and under-development; ensuring lasting world peace; and securing the right of every person on the planet to fulfill their potential for the realization of a shared community for the future of humanity."

A new, security and development architecture, under such an orientation, would make all wars, conflicts, and tensions in the world solvable. This, of course, includes the unspeakable genocide going on in Gaza today.