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4 - Repression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2023

Salar Mohandesi
Affiliation:
Bowdoin College, Maine
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Summary

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.

Type
Chapter
Information
Red Internationalism
Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies
, pp. 159 - 194
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Repression
  • Salar Mohandesi, Bowdoin College, Maine
  • Book: Red Internationalism
  • Online publication: 05 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009076128.006
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  • Repression
  • Salar Mohandesi, Bowdoin College, Maine
  • Book: Red Internationalism
  • Online publication: 05 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009076128.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Repression
  • Salar Mohandesi, Bowdoin College, Maine
  • Book: Red Internationalism
  • Online publication: 05 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009076128.006
Available formats
×