Notes to Help Students Prepare for the Mid-Term Test in IDST 3050n “Capital, Culture and Globalization” Prepared by Professor Anthony J. Hall

The test will look something like what you see below.


Describe and give the significance of (say) seven of the following (20 marks each):

Hosni Mubarak

Wael Ghonim and “We Are All Khalid Said”

The Transformation from the Bipolarism of the Cold War, to Unipolar and then Multipolar Configurations of Power After the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

The Assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud on Sept. 9, 2001

The Cuban Government as an Agent of Decolonization in Africa

Richard Falk, Palestine-Israel and 9/11 Studies

Corporate Charters and Imperial Expansion

Bertrand Russell and the International Peace Movement

Niels Harrit and the Academic Analysis of the Pulverization of the Three World Trade Center Towers

Charlie Wilson’s War

The Attitude of Malcolm X to Race Before and after his Hajj to Mecca in 1964

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s Zeal to Prevent the Rise of a “Black Messiah” in the USA

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Quest to Address the Legacy of Slavery in the United States

Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Global Geopolitical Exercise of US Power

Sun Yat-Sen and the Decolonization of China

The Recent Politics of Islamophobia in North America and Europe

Oliver Cromwell and Changing Constructions of Sovereignty in the British Isles

The United States and the Tension between Its Republican and Imperial Personalities

The Chinese Community as a Global Community

The Replacement of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba with the dictatorship of General Mobutu

Kwame Nkrumah and the Pan-African Idea

Total Possible Marks: 140


Sample Answers

Sun Yat-Sen and the Decolonization of China

When Sun Yat-Sen was born in Guangdong province in 1866, China was subject to many forms of European and Anglo-American domination stemming from the military weakness its leaders had displayed internationally during the Opium Wars. As a student of medicine and politics educated largely in Hawaii and Hong Kong, Sun Yat-Sen determined early on that his life’s mission was help China cast off the imperial heritage of the Quing Dynasty and to adopt more modern, industrialized forms of national development. To advance these ideals Sun Yat-Sen took part in various attempts to overthrow the antiquated regime of the ruling Manchus and to adopt instead a republican form of self-governance. Drawing on Abraham Lincoln’s ideal of government of the people, by the people and for the people, Sun Yat-Sen brought forward in 1905 his three-pronged program aimed at making nationalism, democracy and socialist prosperity as the basis of good lives for all China’s people.

In 1911 the Quing Dynasty fell, briefly catapulting Sun Yat-Sen to power. Attempting to seize the opportunities of the moment, he quickly shifted ground from that of a revolutionary to that of a politician seeking electoral advantage for the Kuomintang, the Chinese National People’s Party which the activist helped to found. With backing from the Soviet Union, Sun Yat-Sen sought to integrate communists into a political coalition with nationalists whose leadership would prove to be vehemently anti-communist in the civil war ahead. These nationalists found their leadership in Chaing Kai-Shek, the general appointed by Sun Yat-Sen to lead up his party’s military academy.

Sun Yat-Sen died prematurely of liver cancer in 1925, just as the Northern Expedition he helped set in motion began its military efforts to unify China by defeating the warlords who had filled the vacuum of power left by the downfall of the Quing Dynasty. The tension between the nationalists and the communists would later break upon into a full-fledged civil war, from which the founders of so-called Red China emerged victorious in 1949 under the leadership Mao Zedung. While the communists dominated the mainland, the defeated forces of the US-backed Chaing Kai-Shek withdrew to the island of Taiwan, establishing a regime that remains antagonistic to the People’s Republic of China to this day. Nevertheless the dual systems of Chinese governance that dominate both sides of the Straits of Taiwan continue to embrace the memory of Sun Yat-Sen as the Father of Modern China.

The leadership of Sun Yat-Sen helped to transform China from a pawn of foreign powers into a sophisticated engine of productivity. Sun Yat-Sen’s life and his ideas have provided much inspiration for many leaders of the still-unfulfilled movement for global decolonization.


Bertrand Russell and the Peace Movement

Bertrand Russell was one of the premier philosophers and mathematicians of the twentieth century who near the end of his 98 years on this planet provided the peace movement with inspiration, guidance and organizational savvy. Born in England in 1872, he would go on to co-author with A.N. Whitehead the seminal three-volume text, Principia Mathematica. Throughout his lifetime Russell was consistently a prolific writer of books, opinion pieces and scholarly articles. Published first in 1945, Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy sold well year after year, providing him with a decent income for the rest of his life. In 1950 he was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature,

Russell was a lifelong activist on behalf of peace, disarmament and governance through the rule of law rather than the rule of force. He moderated this stance somewhat in 1943, determining that Hitler’s regime was so savage and expansionist that he would, under the circumstances, adopt a position of “relative political pacificism.” In 1955 at the height of the Cold War Russell issued along with Albert Einstein and a number of other intellectuals the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for global nuclear disarmament and the resolution of international conflicts through negotiation rather than violence. One outcome of this Manifesto was the mounting of an annual peace conference in Pugwash Nova Scotia sponsored by Russell’s Canadian friend and patron, Cyrus Eaton.

In 1967, after publishing the book, War Crimes in Vietnam, Russell chaired a citizens’ juridical process aimed at determining the guilt primarily of US officials in the military incursions that had taken place in Vietnam since that country had been divided in two following the defeat of French Armed Forces in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The International War Crimes Tribunal, sometimes known as the Russell-Sartre Tribunal, met twice in 1967 in both Stockholm and Copenhagen. The 25 members of this citizens’ agency of arbitration hailed from 18 countries. The judges included Jean-Paul Sartre, Stokely Carmichael, Tariq Ali, Simon de Beauvoir and James Baldwin. The activities of the International War Crimes Tribunal helped draw attention to the need for consistency in applying principles which the US government had itself advanced in the juridical proceedings at Nuremberg and at Tokyo following the Second World War.

Even after Russell’s death in 1970 there have been periodic efforts to revive the proceedings of the Russell Tribunal with special focus on the crimes against humanity that have been alleged to have taken place in, for instance, Chile, Brazil and Palestine. The Bertrand Russell papers are under the custodianship of the Peace Studies Centre at McMaster University. This Centre was founded by Professor Graeme MacQueen who participated in our class on “The Responsibility of the Academy to Illuminate the Truths and Lies of 9/11.” Bertrand Russell’s efforts to transcend the violence of war through adherence to the rule of law has helped keep alive the human aspiration to build rational societies around principles of peaceful coexistence between all branches of the human family.