4 - Repression

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.