An epilogue assesses the impact of the antiwar movement. Both activists and scholars disagree over its significance. Despite common misperceptions of the movement by the public, antiwar activists generally represented mainstream American political values. While the movement did not stop the war by itself, it imposed real limits upon presidential decisions to escalate American military expansion. Movement activists overwhelmingly waged peace using the tools of democracy to align the nation’s practice with its most righteous vision.

A liberal reformist core dominated antiwar activities through the end of 1966. That year the movement maintained a predominantly decentralized orientation, both lacking and resisting true national coordination. Primarily through grassroots activity, the movement incorporated new constituencies and provided alternative sources of information that challenged the government’s credibility. Antiwar activists pursued change largely through the established political system, but also in coalition building for mass demonstrations and draft resistance. Dissent within the government became more visible, which gave wartime dissent a degree of respectability. Protesting napalm production signified an early economic challenge, and the case of the Fort Hood Three exemplified cooperation between active-duty military and civilian antiwar activists. Despite continued growth and some impressive achievements, the movement also faced more significant government and right-wing opposition, and the war’s continued escalation left many activists feeling frustrated and alienated.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

This chapter investigates how advantaged group members perpetuate and deepen inequality, setting the stage for Chapter 4, which addresses their actions to reduce inequality in solidarity with disadvantaged groups. The chapter begins by discussing various forms of material, symbolic and systemic advantages that benefit advantaged groups. It then explores the psychological mechanisms that enable these groups to deny their privilege and engage in competitive victimhood, positioning themselves as aggrieved to justify their entitlement to discriminatory and repressive tactics. Further, this chapter also addresses more extreme manifestations of these behaviours, such as repression, hate crimes, genocide, and colonisation. The psychological processes that sustain these actions, including diffusion of responsibility, system justification, and desensitisation, are discussed. The chapter also considers the intersectional nature of privilege, highlighting how different identities, such as gender and economic status, influence the experience of advantage and perpetration of discrimination and violence.

In chapter two, Helen O’Connell explores the idea of cultural repression as an unintended consequence of a program of language and cultural renewal. Too often, the early Irish Revival promoted the rewards of cultural renewal without at the same time emphasizing the hard work of education and social improvement that such renewal entailed. Revivalists such as Douglas Hyde and D. P. Moran attempted to reverse social and cultural decline by creating resources out of the cheerless forbearance, that is to say, the suffering of ancestors, all in the name of an Ireland free of any debased and debasing foreign culture. Hyde and Moran were dedicated to the Irish language and the importance of elevating Irish culture and Irish industries and both advocated the rejection of deleterious English influences. But each occupied a different position: one was an Anglo-Protestant and the other a Catholic, one minimized politics and ideology, the other amplified both.

After the departure of the 93rd Infantry Division, the 92nd, which had hitherto been trained at various camps, assembled at Huachuca under the leadership of General Almond, a follower of the strictest regime of segregation. Under his command, the arrival of these men and their officers provoked a brutal change: the compromises and racial adjustments initiated by the fort commander were called into question by reinforced segregation (despite the general staff’s recommendations for arrangements), yet another level of humiliation, and even more repressive court martials. The imposition of a southern racial regime on the fort came close to provoking mutinies.

In the summer of 1942, the governor of Arizona and the Secretary of War planned to enroll black soldiers from Huachuca to harvest cotton, which had become an essential raw material for the war. Faced with what was experienced as a humiliation, the infantrymen began to speak of the fort as “a plantation” on which Southern ante bellum slavery would be perpetuated. It is true that training conditions there were harsher than on other camps, repression more severe, and military justice racially biased.

Like many well-known Irish writers, O’Casey chose to spend much of his life away from his homeland. However, this chapter examines how O’Casey rarely succumbed to sentiments of loss and exile that can be found in other similarly positioned writers. He was, in fact, far more likely to use the dual position of the migrant – simultaneously familiar with the home country and able to view it anew from a space of geographical and ideological distance – to query, critique, and satirise Ireland. The chapter spends time examining the way in the late plays Oak Leaves and Lavender, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, The Drums of Father Ned, and Behind the Green Curtains deal centrally with Irish migrant characters.

The history of Guatemala is, sadly, one of Latin America’s richest in coups d’état and bloody civil wars. This chapter analyzes the processes that combined to result in Efraín Ríos Montt’s bloodless coup against Romeo Lucas García in 1982. In the 1970s, the military fought rural guerrillas while expropriating peasants of their land to benefit new landowners from the officer corps. In the cities, the military assassinated numerous leaders of political, union, and student movements. As the Comité de Unidad Campesina attempted to unite indigenous peasants and poor ladinos, the military responded with repression. In this context, the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo became less important than the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres and the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas. The military unleashed a counteroffensive in 1981, supported by Israel, as the US government, under Jimmy Carter, had less tolerance for human rights violations. Under the pretext that peasants were arming themselves to fight the guerrillas, Ríos Montt led a group of junior officers in the overthrow of Lucas García, who had lost legitimacy in the eyes of soldiers. The coup initiated a new strategy against the guerillas and promoted Evangelical Protestantism to marginalize progressive elements in the Catholic Church.

How did an English state torn apart by sectarian conflict, civil war and a revolution in the late seventeenth century become the most powerful in the world by 1819?