2025/05/01 by Marc Becker · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Communism, Protests, Social Movements
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609901
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
How best to support a struggle that is not your own? That is the fundamental question that underlies Salar Mohandesi’s work on opposition to the United States’ war on Vietnam. Mohandesi frames the entire book through the lens of Vladimir Lenin’s views on imperialism and how those ideas influenced and shaped that antiwar movement. He expertly traces both the contributions and the shortcomings of Leninist influences on solidarity movements, and how activists presented competing notions of how to conceptualize their struggles, including how to translate international concerns into a local environment.The book begins with a detailed examination of Lenin’s anti-imperialism, and Mohandesi carries this theme as a guiding light throughout the text. I suspect that many readers will find his theoretical introduction particularly rich and rewarding. Mohandesi explains how Lenin’s views on imperialism gained an outsized presence, even though he drafted those ideas in the context of specific historical events. As World War I broke out, Lenin accused Karl Kautsky of class collaborationism and refuted his reformism by demonstrating that imperialism was an inevitable consequence of capitalist development. To Lenin’s left, Rosa Luxemburg criticized Lenin’s views on national oppression and self-determination, which in the 1920s became deeply inscribed into the political line of the newly created Communist International. Mohandesi skillfully charts these debates, showing how they influenced Mao Zedong’s ideas on a two-stage revolution, Leon Trotsky’s belief in a continuous revolution process, and Joseph Stalin’s strategy for building socialism in one country. This all leads, of course, to questions of whether Hồ Chí Minh is best understood as a nationalist or a communist, a debate which has not yet been—and probably never will be—satisfactorily resolved. (Incidentally, on Mohandesi’s preferred Vietnamese spelling of the revolutionary leader’s name, the book begins with a fascinating and particularly useful discussion of the complexities of choices for spellings and translations when writing across multiple languages for a general audience.)Mohandesi structures his study as an examination of antiwar activism in the North Atlantic. While he includes some discussion of events across Europe and makes passing mention of Che Guevara’s famous call to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966 to create “two, three, many Vietnams” as a way to fight imperialism in the Global South, most of the book concentrates on events in the two countries of France and the United States (119). In a way this makes perfect sense, as France was the previous colonial overlord in Vietnam and the United States supplied the lion’s share of military hardware and foreign troops in the subsequent war. For readers in the United States, it is also a breath of fresh air to break from a US-centric view of the war that characterizes most of the writings on that subject in that country. But it also is limiting in what could be a truly transnational perspective in a book titled “Red Internationalism.” Even Vietnam—which Mohandesi presents as part of a triad in the story—receives relatively minor attention, and China even less.Mohandesi examines how, as the war wound down in Vietnam in the 1970s, political discourse shifted from revolutionary critiques of imperialism to concerns with individual human rights. Groups like Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) emerged in the aftermath of intense political struggles that had been diminished by fatigue, repression, and sectarianism. A third Indochina war between the purportedly socialist countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and China in the late 1970s contributed to a growing disillusionment with anti-imperialist discourse and a crisis of Marxism. In part, Mohandesi blames Leninism for problems in those countries, as their actions began to look too much like capitalist imperialism. While Mohandesi criticizes human rights movements for their relatively conservative fixation on individual salvation that flattened historical specificities, he also applauds them for being more civil than previous militant movements and for being able to achieve attainable goals.Mohandesi provides an example of how the folk singer Joan Baez and her new human rights organization Humanitas hosted a concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on July 19, 1979. She then led a march of ten thousand supporters with lit candles to the White House to urge President Jimmy Carter to send the US Navy to the South China Sea to rescue Vietnamese exiles. Carter responded by doing exactly that: He sent the Seventh Fleet. Two things are missing in this discussion. First, who was leaving Vietnam and why? Revolutions inherently have winners and losers, and a class analysis is necessary to understand those dynamics. This is precisely the problem with human rights discourse that purports to be apolitical by remaining above or outside class struggles but by its very nature can reinforce a status quo that maintains unjust systems in place.Second, as a Latin American historian, the irony of this date did not escape my attention: This concert on July 19, 1979, fell on the same date that the Sandinista guerrillas marched into Managua, Nicaragua, having successfully led an armed struggle that removed the staunchly pro-US government of Anastacio Somoza from power. Somoza killed thousands of his own people while still receiving military aid from the United States. It was not until Somoza’s National Guard murdered one US citizen, the ABC journalist William Stewart, that Carter finally cut that aid off. Carter was never a friend of the Sandinista revolution, which promised to provide food, housing, and health care to the Nicaraguan people. Instead, he called for “Somocismo sin Somoza,” the continuance of a conservative, pro-US government led by wealthy individuals but without the extreme excesses of the Somoza dictatorship. As much as anything, Carter’s position underscored the limitations of human rights discourse in addressing very real human needs. The election of Ronald Reagan the following year and his making the overthrow of a small Central American country a centerpiece of his foreign policy objectives launched a new wave of anti-imperialist solidarity movements.