Bolshevism and the Orient: Ameen Rihani and John Reed

Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous (sdabbous@ndu.edu.lb)

Professor of Political Science and Cultural Studies, Notre Dame University, Lebanon Orientalism and organized labor have rarely been considered within one and the same context. Although Bolshevism, as the most radical mainstream manifestation of the socialist movement, has historically had much to say about the link between imperialism and the Western working class, this has almost completely been forgotten today. The following comparative study will review and then juxtapose the positions taken by two of the early 20th centurys most prolific authors, who both felt strongly about the emancipatory aspirations of the colonialized peoples and oppressed classes of their day.

John Reed and Ameen Rihani are recognized for their significance as voices challenging the hegemony of the cultural and media elites in Europe and North America in the period before and immediately after World War I (WW I). Whereas Rihani is known for his overarching project of cultural translation that ambitiously aimed at reinterpreting the East and the West to each other and bringing about a civilizational synthesis, coupled with a tireless pursuit of Arab independence, first from the Ottoman Empire and then from European colonialism () (Hassan 2008), Reed established himself as one of the primary advocates of the revolutionaries and downtrodden of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Rarely, however, has Reeds Western vantage point been considered as a source of leftist Orientalism. Even less well known are Rahanis links to the labor movement. An analysis of the two texts selected for this study The Descent of Bolshevism and Speech at the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East will attempt, in a very modest manner, to rectify this situation.

The theories and scholarly insights made use of in this paper (based primarily, but not exclusively on Edward Said) are drawn solely from secondary literature on the life and times of Rihani and Reed. The original, empirical aspects of this study will be based on an analysis of the two above mentioned original texts, chosen because they were published in the same year (1920) and for the fact that they both shed light on their respective authors positions on the nature of the organized working class and the mentality of the Orientals of their day. Considering that this paper was presented at a conference dedicated to Ameen Rihani, references to his biography and opus will only be included when they are directly related to the study at hand. Of primary interest will be Rihanis practical, artistic, and philosophical interest in the long-suffering and downtrodden people (Rihani xii) in his two homelands, Lebanon and the United States. Inversely, John Reed will need a bit of introducing, thus a brief overview of his accomplishments

during his short lifetime will be included at the outset of this paper. Emphasis will be placed on both his role in the American and Middle Eastern labour movements, and his Oriental gaze, which has only recently become the subject of inquiry (Sensenig-Dabbous 2011). I am thankful to those who participated vigorously in the discussion of my presentation at the April 2011 conference, Ameen Rihanis ArabAmerican Legacy: From Romanticism to Postmodernism, at Notre Dame University, and especially to NDU Vice President Ameen Albert Rihani for informing me of the close friendship which existed for many years between Rihani and the American radical and socialist publisher, Max Eastman. I also wish to thank a fellow member of the conference panel Rihanis Political Thought, Stacy Fahrenthold, PhD (ABD), for providing me with a copy of her to date yet unpublished conference manuscript, Seeds for the Sower: Ameen Rihani and Revolution.

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The masters in the past were the kings and priests, while in our times they are the captains of industry and the labor leaders (Rihani 1920, xii). Most work done on Rihanis perspective towards the international labor movement in general, and its leftist wing i.e. the Bolsheviki majority faction within the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party and their global allies in particular, has been gleaned from Seeds for the Sower, the two page introduction and four page forward to The Descent of Bolshevism. To date, little is know about his actual ties to middle class progressive and socialist activists and party leaders during his years in the United States. Prior to and in the months immediately following the 2011 Rihani conference, I was unable to dig up any specific information on Rihanis positions on the explicitly political movements and partisan groups he encountered in New York City. What has been documented is inconclusive, extremely spars, and limited to events at which he participated as a speaker along with leaders of the Progressive Party representing the left wing of the then much less conservative Republican Party as well as the editor of the revolutionary socialist monthly, The Masses, Max Eastman (Birney 2002). According to NDUs Ameen Albert Rihani, the ties between Eastman and Rihani were significant enough for Eastman to visit his friend in Lebanon during the interwar period. Several of the Progressive party leaders and socialist artists and journalists known to have associated with Rihani became anti-communists in latter years. It would seem, however, that Rihanis rejection of the Soviet brand of socialism predated the general disenchantment with the Bolshevik experiment during the interwar period within the American left.

Rihanis ties to Eastman, as well as his fellow countryman Gibran Khalil Gibran, during the heading days of pre-war Greenwich Village (Beard & Berlowitz), are an indication that he was at least passively confronted with supporters of the leftist labor movement and its culturally radical fellow travelers. One can, however, only speculate whether Rihanis ties were as intimate as those attributed to Gibran.
Described as the Gypsy-minded Latin Quarter of New York, the village attracted those eager to embrace cosmopolitanism and escape the provincial mind. As a magnet for radical creativity, it had attracted a pantheon of the greatest minds in American literature, including Thomas Paine, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Eugene ONeill, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. Gibran found himself in Manhattan at a propitious time. The anarchist Hippolyte Havel called the village during the first two decades of the twentieth century a spiritual zone of mind; the diverse cultural highlights reminding Gibran of the energy of Paris and the Quartier Latin. He heard the young intellectuals of the village discussing politics, culture, sexuality, syndicalism, Freudianism, Isadora Duncans modern dances, psychoanalysis, Harlem jazz, the Provincetown Players, as they met in the Liberal Club, Pollys restaurant, Albert Bonis bookstore, and Petitpas where John Butler Yeats assured them that the fiddles were tuning up all over America. (Bushrui & Jenkins 1998)

Not mentioned in the quote above, both Eastman and Reed played a key role within the Greenwich Village counter culture of this period. As editor-in-chief of The Masses, Eastman worked closely along with Reed with such leftist socialist (soon to be Bolshevik supporters) and anarchist luminaries as Bill Big Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, Louise Bryant, and Dorothy Day, who later would become a Christian Socialist leader and founder of the leftwing Catholic Worker (Eastman 2010; Masses 2011; Day 2010). Many of the contributors to The Masses were active members of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers of the World (IWW); Reed being one of it main literary backers. It is perhaps significant for the position taken by Rihani to mention here that, at the outset of the Russian Revolution in the spring of 1917, the revolutionaries in Petrograd (later to be renamed Leningrad, and today known as St. Petersburg) enjoyed the overwhelming emotional, intellectual, and political support of the Village counter culture. The second phase of the revolution, spearheaded by the Bolsheviks in the autumn of the same year, was also greeted by many, including Eastman and Reed, with great excitement and expectation.

How Rihani responded to the pro-working class and radically minded socialist milieu in New York City is currently unknown to this author. In-depth research on his links to organized labor and their partisan political allies (both socialist and anarchist) will be necessary in order to determine whether his intense aversion to Bolshevism was not only philosophical, but also the result of negative personal experiences with the overbearing and oft times intolerant leftist labor leadership in the Village.

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I represent here the revolutionary workers of one of the great imperialist powers, the United States of America, which exploits and oppresses the peoples of the colonies (Reed 1920). Before turning to and comparing the positions taken by Reed and Rihani in their little known 1920 texts on Bolshevism, Reeds pre-Baku relationship to the colonial, exotic, underdeveloped, Oriental world will be reviewed in more detail than was the case for Rihanis ties to the leftist labor movement. There are two good reasons for this; one being the fact that Reed will most likely be less well known to the reader of these proceedings than Rihani. Secondly, whereas little information exists on Rihanis real life interaction with specific Bolsheviks in Greenwich Village, Reeds Orientalist gaze is well documented in his treatises on the Mexican Revolution, the Eastern Front during WW I, and the October Revolution in Russia. In Pancho Villa and John Reed: Two Faces of Romantic Revolution, Jim Tuck describes Reeds ideological progression from an advocate of liberal reform capitalism (after graduation from Harvard University he declared two goals in life, to make a million dollars and get married) to an anarchist and later a communist party leader (1984, 58). Tuck portrays his work as an editor for the anarcho-syndicalist journal, The Masses, his support as a reporter for the historically significant 1913 radical textile workers and miners strikes in Paterson, New Jersey and Ludlow, Colorado, respectively, and his sympathies for the Mexico Revolution documented in Insurgent Mexico, published in 1914. He also refers to his portrayal of the European powers with which the United States would ally itself in WW I as being as reactionary and oppressive as their Central European adversaries in War in Eastern Europe: Travels through the Balkans in 1915. All of these led ultimately to his embrace of the Russian Revolution, the events of which were immortalized in his epic portrayal, Ten Days that Shock the World.
The Masses Paterson Mexico Ludlow imperialist England authoritarian France Czarist Russia Teddy Roosevelts sellout the antiwar movement all were milestones on Reeds road to revolution. Coming up was the final marker, the foreign revolution he would embrace as his own and, later, act as its representative in the United States (Tuck 1984, 75).

By reporting from the front during the Mexican Revolution, Reed experienced an ersatz orient, which was to remain his only Oriental (i.e. exotic-colonial) encounter prior to his journey through the Balkans to Istanbul in 1915. According to the American novelist and artist John Dos Passos, it was Mexico that

really taught Reed to write (Tuck 1984, 120). In his portrayal of the Mexican Revolution, Reed attempts, many would say successfully in a Saidian sense, to transverse the great divide between the US and Latin America and effectively undermine the binomial opposition codified in the descriptions of Mexico common in his day.

The following is a case in point. In his description of an Arab and/or Muslim peddler in Insurgent Mexico, Reed seems to use this personal encounter to make a critical political point about stereotyping and prejudice. He indicates how (tongue-in-cheek) he initially expects the worst from the hostile Arab Swayfeta (most likely originally Choueifati indicating that he was probably a Lebanese from the town Choueifat located on the hills south of Beirut), but is pleasantly surprised by the merchants openness and generosity.

A hostile Arab named Antonio Swayfeta happened to be driving to Parral in a two-wheeled gig the next morning, and allowed me to go with him as far as Las Nieves, where the Grenerrl lives. By afternoon we had climbed out of the mountains to the great upland plain of Northern Durango, and were jogging down the mile-long waves of yellow prairie, stretching away so far that the grazing cattle dwindled into dots and finally disappeared at the base of the wrinkled purple mountains that seemed close enough to hit with a thrown stone. The Arab's hostility had thawed, and he poured out his life's story, not one word of which I could understand. But the drift of it, I gathered, was largely commercial. He had once been to El Paso and regarded it as the world's most beautiful city. But business was better in Mexico. They say that there are few Jews in Mexico because they cannot stand the competition of the Arabs. () I knew that the price for such a journey as Antonio had carried me was at least ten pesos, and he was an Arab to boot. But when I offered him money, he threw his arms around me and burst into tears. God bless you, excellent Arab! You are right; business is better in Mexico. (Reed 1969, 14 & 21)

Reed traveled south through the Balkans to Istanbul in the fall of 1915, one and a half years prior to the United States entering the war as a combatant on the side of the Allies. At the time, the war was going well for the Austrians, Germans, and Turks; the Serbs, allies of the British, French, and Russians, were confronted with significant setbacks. Immersing himself in the real Orient, i.e. the predominantly Muslim world, for the first time, Reed could draw from a wealth of experience during his years in Latin America. However, he seems strangely unable to make use of his only previous oriental exposure, i.e. his experiences during the Mexican Revolution in 1913 and 1914. Reeds description of the Balkans has strong binary tendencies. This is particularly significant when compared to his evenhanded reporting on the North American orient as described by Tuck. Reed could be accused here of merely pandering to his readers expectations. However, a comparison with Insurgent Mexico, published just one year previously which is free of binomial opposition illustrates that he has indeed internalized the very Western

mindset that he is otherwise so critical of. He appears to be able to comprehend, analyze, and critique the hegemonic nature of US-Latin American relations, but falls prey to the Orientalist stereotypes so typical of the relationship between the West and the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region.

In the first excerpt below, it is evident that Reed is also critical of the manner in which the Prussians seem to be taking over Istanbul and its environs in 1915. However, his 1001 Nights descriptions of the Ottoman capital, exemplified by the second excerpt, lack the tongue-in-check self-criticism one finds in his article and book on the North American orient, i.e., in Mexico.
The brisk young Prussian who got on at Adrianople was strikingly different. He wore the uniform of a Bey in the Turkish army, with a tall cap of brown astrakhan ornamented with the gold crescent, and on his breast were the ribbons of the Iron Cross, and the Turkish Order of the Hamidieh. His scarred face was set in a violent scowl, and he strode up and down the corridor, muttering Gottverdammte Dummheit! from time to time. At the first stop he descended, looked sharply around, and barked something in Turkish to the two tattered old railway guards who were scuffling along the platform. Tchabouk! Hurry! he snapped. Sons of pigs, hurry when I call! Startled, they came running at a stiff trot. He looked them up and down with a sneer; then shot a string of vicious words at them. The two old men trotted off and, wheeling, marched stiffly back, trying to achieve the goose-step and salute in Prussian fashion. Again he bawled insultingly in their faces; again, with crestfallen expressions, they repeated the manuvre. It was ludicrous and pitiable to watch . Gott in Himmel! cried the instructor to the world in general, shaking his fists in the air, were there ever such animals? Again! Again! Tchabouk! Run, damn you! (Reed 1994, 118). ---------At four hours precisely, Turkish time (or three minutes past nine la fraqnue), on the morning of chiharshenbi, yigirmi utch of the month of Temoos, year of the Hegira bin utch yuze otouz utch, I woke to an immense lazy roar, woven of incredibly varied noises - the indistinct shuffling of a million slippers, shouts, bellows, high, raucous peddler voices, the nasal wail of a muezzin strangely calling to prayer at this unusual hour, dogs howling, a donkey braying, and, I suppose, a thousand schools in mosque courtyards droning the Koran. (Reed 1994, 121).

Finally, John Reeds seminal masterpiece, Ten Days that Shock the World, deals with the Russian Revolution on an almost day-by-day, real time basis. It has long been considered a benchmark in war reporting for generations throughout the 20th century. Reed deals with the rise of the Bolsheviks to power as the culmination of the aspirations of the international organized industrial working class. His vantage point is that of a Western communist among equals and thus portrays Russia, as opposed to his description of the backward, oriental Balkan Slavs in War in Eastern Europe (Sensenig-Dabbous 2011), as revolutionary peers and intellectual contemporaries. This author is unaware any other attempts to locate Orientalist discourse within the writings of John Reed. The assessments presented above are based on my

work done over the last decade on labor and anti-imperialist culture and journalism (Sensenig-Dabbous 2004; 2006; 2011) and should be considered preliminary.

====================== The Orientals are the extremists of the world. () The Oriental in the Russian has set the House of Socialism on fire; and the European in the Russian has not yet found the fire extinguisher. (Rihani 1920, viii) Peoples of the East: () There is only one road to freedom. Unite with the Russian workers and peasants who have overthrown their capitalists and whose Red Army has beaten the foreign imperialists! (Reed 1920) In following, a brief presentation of the state of research on Orientalism and the labor movement will lay the groundwork for an attempt to apply Edward Saids theory, developed in his classic Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1995), to both Rihani and Reed. Although the beginning of the debate on Orientalist tendencies within the progressive media, counter cultural production, and leftist political parties is often dated back to the early 21st century, and more specifically after the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, it is in reality much older. A limited number of publications dealt with this issue in the two decades between the first publishing of Orientalism in 1978 and the events of 9/11, dealing, for example, with Western responses to the Islamic Revolution Iran, feminist criticism of the burgeoning Islamist movements throughout the MENA during the 80s and 90s, and especially the renewed religious tensions throughout the Islamic world, but most specifically in the former Soviet bloc following its implosion in the years 1989-1991 (Sensenig-Dabbous 2011, 61).

To date, this author is unaware of any scholarly research or journalistic surveys dealing specifically with expressions of leftist Orientalism during the historical period prior to the publication of Saids groundbreaking study. Ironically, the hundred years leading up to the publication of Orientalism, i.e. between c. 1870s and 1970s, are the very period in which the Marxist labor movement, and the progressive world view in general, enjoyed its greatest support, both in the West and the Orient. It should be noted here that Said makes no attempt to justify why he ignores left wing labor Orientalism in the Afterword of the 1995 second edition of Orientalism, in which he otherwise deals with a myriad of controversies, debates, and misreadings surrounding the book (330).

Nevertheless, the tools developed by Said to study center-right and openly imperialist writing, graphic art, music, and cultural theory can be applied with some success to the labor movement and the left in general.

Of particular interest will be Saids notion that an author, artist, or researcher can traverse the divide between the Orient and Occident. We will attempt to determine whether Reed and Rihani, based solely on the two works at hand, have been able to transcend the East-West divide when it comes to labor and the Orient.

Established as a key indictor in the first edition of Orientalism (46) and reiterated in the Afterword of the second (336), Said maintains that a binary juxtaposition of the East and the West is one of the revealing attributes of the Orientalist mindset. He coins the term binomial opposition to illustrate how this binary approach i.e. the culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalizations by which reality is divided into mutually exclusive categories is applied in Orientalist writing and art. Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of ours and theirs, with the former always encroaching upon the latter (even to the point of making theirs exclusively a function of ours) (227). By traversing the imperial East-West divide Said states that personally he entered into the life of the West. The procedure of crossing, rather than maintaining, barriers in Orientalism, enables him to challenge the binary opposition between the East and the West and abjure the sense of fixed identities battling across a permanent divide that is so typical of Orientalist literature (336).

Progressive scholarship and leftist partisan political texts have often been guilty of resorting to this very binomial opposition when dealing with the impact of colonialism in the regions today referred to as the Third World or the global South. Both the Marxist and progressive-liberal branches of the international labor movement have traditionally considered Western imperialism to have had an overall positive historical impact in that it forced the colonialized populations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America out of their socio-economic backwardness and into modern industrial relationships with their employers and the international corporate elites of the time. As cited in Sensenig (1987, 151), Thomas Mitschein quotes Karol Sobelsohn (alias Karl Radek), one of the leaders of the revolutionary socialist movement in Europe prior to WW I and a key player within the Soviet backed Communist International (Comintern) after the Russian Revolution, as calling on the proletariat in the industrialized regions of Europe and North America to not only overthrow their capitalist oppressors, but to provide genuine cultural support to the underdeveloped peoples in the colonies in order to enable them to become part of the European cultural sphere. According to Mitschein, as well as Inge Kircheisen, Michael Wortman, and Leonhard Mahlein (Sensenig 1987), prior to WW I, the leftist workers parties and labor unions allied with them were convinced that the colonized peoples were incapable of developing without the support of the socialist movement in the countries which today are referred to as the West (Sensenig 1987, 150-152). It was this

approach to the peoples of the colonialized world, and for this study of particular interest, the peoples of the Orient, which permeated the Soviet Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in September, 1920. According to the congresses opening statement it held a special place in the history of the Communist movement. It was the first attempt to appeal to the exploited and oppressed peoples in the colonial and semi-colonial countries to carry forward their revolutionary struggles under the banner of Marxism and with the support of the workers in Russia and the advanced countries of the world (Baku Congress 1977). In his own speech at the Baku Congress, Karl Radek echoed these sentiments.

And when we, comrades, hand to you the banner of struggle in common against a common enemy, we know very well that, together with you, we shall create a civilisation a hundred times better than the one created by the slave-owners of the West. The East, subjected to oppression by capitalists and propertyowners, has developed a philosophy of resignation. We appeal, comrades, to the warlike feelings which once inspired the peoples of the East when these peoples, led by their great conquerors, advanced upon Europe. We know, comrades, that our enemies will say that we are appealing to the memory of GenghisKhan and to the memory of the great conquering Caliphs of Islam. But we are convinced that yesterday (NB: referring to the first day of the Baku conference, ESD) you drew your daggers and your revolvers not for aims of conquest, not to turn Europe into a graveyard you lifted them in order, together with the workers of the whole world, to create a new civilisation, that of the free worker. And so, when the capitalists of Europe say that a new wave of barbarism threatens, a new horde of Huns, we answer them: Long live the Red East, which together with the workers of Europe will create a new civilisation under the banner of Communism! [Tumultuous applause.] (Radek 1920).

In following, the attempt will be made to analyze the writings of Ameen Rihani and John Reed with respect to their sentiments concerning the link between the Bolsheviks and the Orient; to determine whether their portrayals of the Peoples of the East conform with Saids concept of binomial opposition; or whether they were they inversely, like Said himself, able to transverse the great divide between West and East in their writings? This study will merely attempt to establish preliminary results. For this reason, as opposed the highly sophisticated tools developed by Said in Orientalism in order to test this phenomenon, the analysis which follows will focus on one aspect only. Using a relatively simple approach, I will attempt to locate binaries in the writing of both authors with respect to their portrayal of the link between the Russian revolutionaries and the future of the Orient. To do this, the binomial opposition often found in pre-WW I leftist political literature with respect to the colonialized peoples will be used (Kircheisen 1981, Sensenig 1987).

Western progressive modernity vs. Eastern traditional conservatism Rational analysis vs. emotional subjectivity Progressive (or revolutionary) development vs. reactionary stagnation or regression

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Rihanis Descent of Bolshevism is a somewhat surprising book for someone, like myself, who has been schooled in traditional Central European approaches to labor historiography. With the exception of a prelude of sorts, i.e. the Seeds for the Sower, and the Forward, this book actually ignores the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary labor movement altogether. For this reason, I will concentrate on the last passages of both afore mentioned introductory sections of this short volume.

Seeds for the Sower Revolution is glorified by intellectuals, apotheosized by poets, sanctified by visionaries, and bled white by politicians. Revolution applies a local anaesthetic to one class of Society and operates on the other, Bolshevism may be Marxian in theory, but it is Hulagoesque in practice. It may be of European descent, but it is Oriental in tradition. Oriental in mood. Oriental in temperament. The Orientals are the extremists of the world. As individuals, they are slaves of Caprice; as types, they are slaves of Authority, The one knows no law, the other knows no exception to the law. The Oriental in the Russian has set the House of Socialism on fire; and the European in the Russian has not yet found the fire extinguisher. (viii) In this passage, Rihani juxtaposes Marxist theory with the barbaric practices of the great Mongolian warrior Hulagu Khan (1217 1265). Know for his destruction of the Grand Library of Baghdad, Hulagoesque practice can only be understood as the exact opposite of all forms civilized endeavor, which Rihani seems to be associating with the labor movement in general. Building on this binary, he distinguishes between the European bloodline (descent) of Bolshevism and the Russian (Oriental) traditions which have seemingly perverted it. Being Oriental is linked to mood and temperament, assumedly opposed to the enlightened and rational Marxist origins from which Bolshevism has deviated. Orientals are portrayed as being both irrational (slaves of Caprice) and fundamentally conservative (slaves of Authority). The irrational (Oriental) Russian soul has caused Socialism, which Rihani seems not to reject outright, to descend to the deepest depths of the East. He leaves it up to the European roots of the Russians to pull them back out of this Orientalist pit. In this context, Rihani appears to be playing with the double meaning of descent, i.e. the decline as well as the origins of Bolshevism. The East has led to the

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descent of Marxism from its European heights to into its current Bolshevik depths. The Western decent of Bolshevism, one should not forget the formative years Lenin spent in Switzerland, would seem to be its only hope of recovery. Forward As a rule, however, the tyranny of inequality has been at the bottom of all revolts and revolutions. Only that in the past it was embodied in religions and autocracies, today it is embodied in industrialism. The masters in the past were the kings and priests, while in our times they are the captains of industry and the labor leaders. Under either condition, however, a long-suffering and downtrodden people will be driven ultimately to extremes of materialism expressed in universal negations. In his Forward, Rihani returns to his criticism of Western materialism in a tone which is more familiar to the reader. Criticizing the coalition of what the West would later refer to as the social partners, i.e. big business and big labor, he chastises Western materialism for betraying the legitimate aspirations of the masses. Here he seems to be calling for a curse on both houses, on the East for its barbaric and irrational extremes, and on the West because of extreme materialism, which negates the emotional and ultimately spiritual needs of the long-suffering and downtrodden people.

Reed, in his speech to the peoples of the East, which included Persians, Turks, Indians, and representatives of the predominantly Muslim parts of former Czarist Russia, appears to be reverting to the same duality described above with respect to the North American (exotic, underdeveloped, and backward) orient, i.e. Mexico, one the one hand, and the real Orient on the other. He attempts to illustrate the hypocrisy of American foreign policy by describing how it is in no way different then the imperialist aspirations of the British, French, and Italians in the East. In so doing he describes the Mexicans, as he does in a variety of other historical examples (including the Philippines, Cuba, the republics of Haiti and San Domingo, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and finally a long description of events in Armenia), as masters of their own fate. Be it for reasons of rhetorical logic, brevity, or simple ignorance of Middle Eastern history, the peoples of the East are not described as having the same historical agency. He recommends to them that their sole path to freedom and development is not (as in the case of the indigenous Mexican Revolution) a democratic one, which would merely keep the wealth for their respective populations and tax the foreign capitalists, but rather to overthrow the capitalists, beat the foreign imperialists, and follow the red star of the Communist International.

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You, the peoples of the East, the peoples of Asia, have not yet experienced for yourselves the rule of America. You know and hate the British, French and Italian imperialists, and probably you think that free America will govern better, will liberate the peoples of the colonies, will feed and defend them. () In Mexico live a backward people who were enslaved for centuries, first by the Spaniards and then by foreign capitalists. There, after many years of civil war, the people formed their own government, not a proletarian government but a democratic one, which wanted to keep the wealth of Mexico for the Mexicans and tax the foreign capitalists. The American capitalists did not concern themselves with sending bread to the hungry Mexicans. No, they initiated a counterrevolution in Mexico, in which Madero, the first revolutionary President, was killed. () World capitalism will be destroyed, and all the peoples will be free. We appreciate the need for solidarity between all the oppressed and toiling peoples, for unity of the revolutionary workers of all the countries of Europe and America under the leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks, in the Communist International. And we say to you, peoples of the East: Do not believe the promises of the American capitalists! There is only one road to freedom. Unite with the Russian workers and peasants who have overthrown their capitalists and whose Red Army has beaten the foreign imperialists! Follow the red star of the Communist International! Both Reed and Rihani, in the excerpts studied above, have illustrated the difficulty writers experienced in the early 20th century in their attempts at traversing the imperial East-West divide, as described by Edward Said. Both authors make use of a binomial opposition between the rational, modern, and progressive European and American labor and anti-colonial movements, on the one hand, and the authoritarian, conservative, emotional peoples of the East. Thus these two progressive voices, indicative of the spirit of the revolutionary decades of the early 20th century, remain caught in a binary as old was Western thought itself. Aristotle asserted that oriental despotism is based not on force, but on consent. Hence fear cannot be said to be its motive force, instead the power of the despot master feeds upon the servile nature of those enslaved (Oriental Despotism). The peoples of Asia () are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery, (Aristotle) a position that seems to have been perpetuated to this very day. Much work remains to be done both with respect to researching Rihanis links to the labor movement during his years in the United States and to a more in-depth analysis of Reeds thinking and writings on the Orient. Only then will we more clearly understand the actual foundations of their respective texts, dealt with in this preliminary study. In conclusion it can be stated with some certainty that both authors attempted to traverse the existing divisions between the East and the West. They also shared an appreciation for the link between the labor movement and the anti-colonial aspirations of the peoples of

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the East. In the end, however, they were unable to overcome the imperial East-West divide, which dominated progressive thinking a century ago, and still plays an important role in determining the interactions between organized labor and anti-imperialists, activists, and thinkers within a now global community of those dedicated to promoting the interests of the long-suffering and downtrodden people in both the East and the West.

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