Chapter Eight turns to what became a growing preoccupation for Rogers in the 1920s: politics. In his journalistic writing and live appearances, the humorist’s habitual survey of current events and public issues increasingly focused on the tendencies and foibles of American political life. He especially took aim at the pretension, dissembling, selfishness, and pomposity of both political parties and delighted in skewering Congress and various president’s for ineffective or foolish policies. He often described politics as "bunk." Rogers covered Republican and Democratic conventions, interviewed Presidents Harding and Coolidge, and spoke frequently with influential figures such as Bernard Baruch and Al Smith. Throughout, he stood squarely in the tradition of American populism, upholding the interests of average citizens and criticizing the privileges of social and economic elites. Rogers’ own political reputation peaked in 1928, when he was convinced to run a tongue-in-cheek campaign for the presidency.

Mexico City in the mid-1920s was a crucial gathering point for Latin American anti-imperialists. This chapter retraces the emergence of a common agenda among Communists, radical Mexican peasant movements, and exiled dissidents from across the region, focusing on the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) and its publication, El Libertador. While it drew on the region’s deep anti-imperialist traditions, the convergence that took place in the wake of Mexico’s 1910–1920 Revolution was decisively shaped by transnational connections with the Communist International, which served as a conduit to anticolonial movements across the world. In the second half of the 1920s, LADLA and El Libertador not only animated movements for regional solidarity – notably against the US occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti – they also showcased a newly global anticolonial sensibility, drawing parallels between Latin America’s situation and those of peoples subject to direct or indirect colonial rule in Africa, India, and China.

Although the North Atlantic was plunged into crisis in the early 1970s, radicals proved unable to seize the opportunity as they entered a crisis of their own. In France, to a degree unparalleled elsewhere, prominent former radicals not only disavowed anti-imperialist internationalism but rallied behind the rival human rights internationalism. In so doing, they brought with them a set of experiences, which strengthened human rights activism. Despite their fading fortunes, and the growing strength of their rivals, radicals struggled to reinvent anti-imperialist internationalism. But they found themselves trapped in an uphill battle facing one obstacle after another. One of the most devastating blows was the internecine war between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Revolutionaries in all three countries had developed a revolutionary strategy based in Leninism, joined hands in the struggle against imperialism, and claimed they were transitioning to communism together. Now they slaughtered each other in the name of national self-determination. Although the Third Indochina War did not destroy radicalism, it severely destabilized radical politics. While much of this failure can be traced to deeper histories of colonialism, imperialism, and American intervention in the region, revolutionaries, and the ideas that guided them, played a role as well. In this context, the idea of the right of nations to self-determination specifically, and the Leninist problematic more generally, suffered a terrible blow. The horrific events in Southeast Asia deepened the gnawing crisis of Leninism, which would ultimately bring down the project of anti-imperialist internationalism as such, creating a perfect opportunity for the rival human rights internationalism to take the stage.

In their opposition to American imperialism, radicals pursued many actions. They synchronized protests, helped deserting GIs find safety, strengthened ties with Vietnamese revolutionaries, put the United States on trial for genocide, and even organized international brigades to fight in Vietnam. But at this stage, they prioritized the ideological struggle, which was precisely what Vietnamese officials themselves sought most from their comrades in this part of the world. Indeed, Vietnamese revolutionaries believed that the war would be fought not only in the jungles of Vietnam but on the terrain of ideas. Collaborating closely with Vietnamese communists, radicals in the North Atlantic radicalized the discourse around the war. In fact, by the end of 1967, the general antiwar struggle grew far more radical. Radicals defined the enemy as imperialism, coded their internationalism as anti-imperialism, and revived the Leninist problematic of self-determination. This approach to internationalism became so popular that even those who did not consider themselves radicals adopted some of its core elements. By the late 1960s, anti-imperialism was beating out its many internationalist rivals – such as individualist human rights – to become the dominant way in which activists in the North Atlantic imagined international change.

In the early 1960s, Vietnamese resistance to US aggression galvanized a generation of activists, prompting the French in particular to forge an international antiwar alliance with their peers across Western Europe and North America, especially the United States. Together, they came to believe that the Vietnam War was caused by a broader “system” that made such wars possible in the first place. Searching for a way to not only explain this system, but overthrow it, they increasingly turned to Leninism. Radicals in the North Atlantic named the system imperialism, defined their internationalism as anti-imperialism, and called for a coordinated worldwide revolution based in the principle of the right of nations to self-determination. Following the lead of African American, Latin American, and Vietnamese revolutionaries, they argued that the best way to combat this imperialist system was to open new fronts inside the imperialist centers, triggering a wave of domestic upheaval that reached new heights in May 1968. But when this anti-imperialist front faced state repression and imprisonment in France, the United States, and South Vietnam, these same radicals began to advocate individual rights alongside anti-imperialist revolution in the early 1970s. In so doing, they lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of Leninist anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights. When genocide, internecine war, and refugee crises in Southeast Asia eroded faith in national self-determination in the late 1970s, former French radicals sided with the US government in a global movement championing human rights against the sovereignty of states like Vietnam.

The expansion of empires in the late nineteenth century prompted leftists to invent a new kind of internationalism targeting what they called “imperialism.” Although there were many ways to combat imperialism, one approach soon came to dominate: the Leninist problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. The ideas that formed the basis of this problematic grew out of highly contingent debates in the twentieth century, but after Lenin’s death in 1924 were codified as the only radical way to change the world on a global scale. It was embraced by millions across the globe, especially by Vietnamese revolutionaries, who soon distinguished themselves as the leading force in the larger anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam. In fact, Vietnam emerged as a kind of test case for the Leninist problematic. It helped Vietnamese revolutionaries score many victories, but the experience of revolution in Vietnam revealed some of Leninism’s core tensions, the most important of which was the contradiction between nation-building on the one hand and universal communist emancipation on the other.

Although individualist human rights achieved supremacy in the 1990s, they found themselves the center of a series of crises in the early 2000s. Perhaps the most horrific of these was the US government’s mobilization of human rights to justify its brutal invasion of Iraq. Human rights began to lose its luster. The growing rejection of human rights was only one aspect of a generalized crisis across the North Atlantic. By the 2010s, fissures appeared in every sphere of life, putting the entire political order into question. Today, people are searching for alternative ways of doing politics. In this context, it is imperative that we return to the anti-imperialist politics of the 1960s and 1970s. This is not simply to draw lessons, but to find a way to relate to these prior attempts to change the world. After all, those of us who care about making the world a better place are faced with a vexing problem: some of the most popular, inspiring, and revolutionary forms of anti-imperialism were intimately tied to the far left, and above all Leninism, a project that not only fell short of its goals, but whose undeniable failures in some cases led to terrible disaster. It is only by taking stock of this history, and finding a way to reconcile ourselves to it, that we can rethink emancipatory internationalist politics today.

The combination of changing international circumstances alongside significant developments in China’s domestic politics made 1960 a turning point in Chinese international scientific outreach. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of these on Chinese engagement with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and the World Federation of Scientific Workers, considering the reasons for the significant divergence in how each was viewed and, consequently, those relationships evolved into the early years of the new decade. As had been the case in the 1950s, elite Chinese scientists and scientific organisations worked with foreign affairs officials, but in the context of the early 1960s this meant significantly adjusting and adapting their approaches to such external events and organisations. In all, Chinese science diplomacy via united front work was less well suited to the combative context of the Sino-Soviet split than when the two powers were not so overtly locked in competition for influence.

This chapter taks Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s re-approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in 2019 as a starting point to understand the productive tensions between hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, and grassroots political formations. On the same day Trudeau re-approved the pipeline, a stunning display of counter-hegemonic solidarity occurred, as representatives from the Tsliel-Waututh, Squamish, and Musqueam nations, alongside elected officials from the City of Vancouver and the Grand Chief of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, redoubled their commitment to protecting their shared coastal ecosystem. Days later there was yet another display of resistance to Trudeau’s policies: this time in the form of a 20 km march, at the head of which was a Tiny House. Destined for Secwepemcul’ecw, in the interior of British Columbia, this Tiny House was pulled by a coalition of grassroots Indigenous leaders and settlers. Placing these tactics into relief alongside one another reveals the remarkable diversity of anti-imperialist struggles at work today and shows the possibilities of collective liberation that emerge through committed internationalism grounded in local struggle.

The introduction offers an overview of the Tricontinental worldview and its place in the historiography. Secular, socialist, and militant, Tricontinentalism aimed to empower states in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to mount a revolutionary challenge against the unjust international system and Western imperialism through armed revolts and confrontational diplomacy. More closely aligned with communism, this iteration of Third Worldism broke with Bandung’s self-conscious neutralism by reuniting socialism and the global revolution for national liberation. In recognizing this shift, the introduction offers a revised framework and chronology of Third World internationalism by challenging the idea of a single, evolving movement. Instead, it argues Tricontinentalism was one component of a century-long Anti-Imperial Project that existed in the overlapping goals of diverse movements that ultimately informed the Third World challenge to the Cold War. This project encompassed an array of competing ideologies and alliances that hoped to achieve sufficient unity to advance the interests of the Global South, with Tricontinentalism emerging as the most prominent worldview in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter focuses on defectors to the far-left ideological spectrum of extremist milieus, for example, anti-fascist groups, anarchism, or communism. The case studies and storylines presented here belong to individuals who were active as right-wing extremists or even terrorists before they made the transition to the extreme left. In most cases, this transition is explained by frustrating and disillusioning experiences within the far-right environment, especiallydysfunctional and toxic relationships with other members. A feeling of guilt and shame moved these side-switchers to attempt to make good on their former errors and assist left-wing groups in destroying the far right. Another set of motives belongs to the category of anti-establishment and ant-imperialism. Some switchers began feel that the struggle for a strong nation culminates in liberation from so-called imperialist capitalism.

The Gospel of Mark unites ideas of christology and discipleship within a hermeneutical framework of Jewish apocalyptic. Mark’s story of Jesus, characterized by urgency, action and conflict, tells of the anointed warrior king who comes to establish his kingdom and liberate the oppressed from powers imperial and satanic. He does so, paradoxically, by submitting to death on a Roman cross, a death interpreted in the light of the scriptures as a ransom for many.

Chapter 1 traces the common ideological grounds that made possible the formation of an alliance in the early 1920s between Reform-minded students in Peru and a number of Christian missionaries and religious pacifists from Europe and the United States. These students, many of whom formed the APRA movement shortly after, viewed in continental solidarity a remedy to the moral crises they sensed around them. For many Christian pacifists, who like the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves feared belligerent forms of nationalism, the references they saw in the Peruvian student reform movement to the Bolivarian ideal of a united America was inspiring. They viewed in these young Latin American radicals an opportunity for spiritual renewal in the Western World. Whereas these groups of historical actors often disagreed on the means to the end, still they agreed on which end to pursue. For all of them, the Americas provided a foil for the wrongs of Western civilization.

Chapter 2 studies how personal self-transformations in exile triggered the rise of new social and hemispheric consciousnesses among Apristas who were deported abroad in the 1920s. It traces as a case study the rocky relationship that the young student activist and future APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre maintained during his first years in exile with the foreign allies, specifically the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves, who assisted him, and who tried to politically influence him. Transnational solidarity networks, the chapter shows, would herein assist in crucial ways APRA’s early formation as a persecuted political group. But this reliance on foreign assistance came with a price for the movement’s autonomy: it cracked open a space for progressive US allies and Christian missionaries to peddle their own agenda to Latin American critiques of empire.

The search for an alternative and non-Western concept capable of challenging “Hispanic America” or “Latin America” did not culminate in the Indo-American project. APRA’s Indo-América was by the 1940s much more a product of north–south conciliations than of the anti-colonial vindication of Indigenous’ rights in once claimed to represent. Nevertheless, the work of trying to envision the rebirth of the Americas in new ways did contribute to nourishing the ethos of continental unity and Latin American solidarity as a catalyst for opposing oligarchic rule and foreign hegemony. Radical elements from APRA’s continental program passed on to subsequent generations in Latin America. These new generations borrowed from APRA’s anti-imperialism while adding their own visions of social utopias, just as Apristas had inherited from their predecessors dreams of better futures that nestled within the mystique of united geographies.