Nasser’s Bandung participation was motivated by domestic anti-communist and anti-Brotherhood consolidation

Evidence

When he came to Bandung, barely a year after consolidating power in Egypt, he desperately needed an international profile and a bloc of support for a showdown with the British over Suez the next year, which was to lead to nationalization of the Canal, the tripartite invasion of Egypt, the building of the Aswan Dam and the Halwan steel complex with Soviet aid, and Nasser’s rise to unassailable hegemony in Arab nationalist politics for the next fifteen years; those golden years of Nasserite nationalism during the late 1950s were also those when he broke the Communist Party of Egypt with unspeakable brutality. Bandung was inseparable from such exigencies of the main leaders. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 575

Categorization

• QUESTION: The account ties Nasser’s Soviet aid to his simultaneous brutal suppression of Egypt’s communists — a tension worth chasing into the details of how the aid and the repression coexisted.