5. Nay

Attribution (front or state): Front (International Union of Students (IUS))
Author/publication: World Student News (Prague)
Publication date: Feb.-March 1962

Remarks: If efforts to attract more member organizations from the West was the Communist fronts’ Achilles heel a decade after Stalin’s death, then anti-colonialism was their trump card. A great majority of young people from all three Cold War “worlds” opposed colonialism, including the West, and even the United States government inveighed against its allies to grant full sovereignty to their African colonies a decade after having done so in Asia—led by the United States’ departure from the Philippines. The United Nations designated 1960 the “year of Africa” to celebrate the entry of seventeen new countries onto the map, and the time this magazine appeared in 1962, the bloodies colonial conflict on the continent, between France and the Algeria’s National Liberation Front was drawing to a close. So it is not at all unthinkable that a Western, pro-capitalist student publication like this one could have printed a magazine with a rhinoceros butting a British colonial in his khakis off the continent. Nevertheless, the tendency to caricature an entire system of rule, from the portly capitalist in a top hat to the colonizer in khakis, was a distinctive feature of Communist political cartoons.

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