And Beyond

Is there reason to hope today? I first asked this—rhetorically, I thought—in 1975 in the aftermath of two watershed events, one personal with its political side, the other world-historical but profoundly felt personally. Unemployed for 7 months, battling for 18 months to save my academic career, I was awarded tenure at Wayne State University in a politically fought reversal of what had been determined in arbitration to be a political rejection. Four months later the NLF and North Vietnamese army entered Saigon, finally and fully liberating Vietnam from foreigners after 50 years of anticolonial struggle, defeating the barely restrained intervention of the world's greatest imperial power.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website

Arbitration · Economic history · Intervention (counseling) · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Vietnamese · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies