Red Internationalism: Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies

by Salar Mohandesi

In Red Internationalism, Salar Mohandesi returns to the Vietnam War to offer a new interpretation of the transnational left's most transformative years. In the 1960s, radicals mobilized ideas from the early twentieth century to reinvent a critique of imperialism that promised not only to end the war but also to overthrow the global system that made such wars possible. Focusing on encounters between French, American, and Vietnamese radicals, Mohandesi explores how their struggles did change the world, but in unexpected ways that allowed human rights to increasingly displace anti-imperialism as the dominant idiom of internationalism. When anti-imperialism collapsed in the 1970s, human rights emerged as a hegemonic alternative channeling anti-imperialism's aspirations while rejecting systemic change. Approaching human rights as neither transhistorical truth nor cynical imperialist ruse but instead as a symptom of anti-imperialism's epochal crisis, Red Internationalism dramatizes a shift that continues to affect prospects for emancipatory political change in the future.

Genres: History, Politics

354 pages, Hardcover

Published February 23, 2023

About the author

Salar Mohandesi is an Assistant Professor of History at Bowdoin College and a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine. His current project, From Anti-Imperialism to Human Rights, traces the history of transnational anti-Vietnam War activism.

Reviews

[Gautam Bhatia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Red Internationalism is Salar Mohandesi’s fantastic account of the global struggle against the Vietnam War, and how it was also a battleground between competing visions to rebuild an unjust world on the one hand (the anti-imperialist vision), and partially mitigate suffering within unjust structures on the other (the human rights vision). Mohandesi notes how the anti-imperialist vision was ascendant throughout the sixties, and the human rights vision - which we now consider to be ubiquitous - was peripheral and marginalised. However, a combination of State repression, infighting, intellectual exhaustion, and internecine conflicts between a unified Vietnam, Cambodia, and China, finally led to the triumph of the human rights vision - whose consequences we are dealing with to this day.

Other than the core argument, what really struck me about the story told in this book was just how widespread, and how deep, the struggle against the Vietnam War was. We’ve all heard stories of how it went down in the US, of course, but Mohandesi talks about struggles in Europe (especially France), how they were connected to the May ‘68 revolutionary movements, and - perhaps most interestingly - how the Vietnamese leaders were in constant engagement with the global anti-war movement: it wasn’t just a one-way street.

The complicity of western regimes - especially that of (then-West) Germany in the war felt starkly relevant to today’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. The echoes, however, went beyond just that: at one point, Mohanedesi chronicles how international students took a leading role in the US-based struggle. As I witness the US government unconscionably trying to crack down on international students for their support for Palestine so many years later, the parallels have never felt sharper. I was reminded of Yesterdays’ Tomorrow, the book that traces the history of the left through inflection points - from the Kronstadt Rebellion to Stalin’s terror. I wonder what traces a chronologically updated version of that book would draw, from Vietnam to Palestine.

[Casey Wellock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome. Congrats, Salar!

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent review of the Viet Nam anti-war movement, concentrating on the fortunes of the socialist left.