I saw a very interesting essay at the "Inheritance of a Thousand Generations" Substack:
I am writing to you under the shadow of brick and limestone-clad buildings on the campus of Columbia University where I am presently examining archival documents from a demonstration on this campus nearly six decades earlier. A few weeks after King’s assassination, students at this university launched a protest of unprecedented size and impact. Protesters occupied five university buildings and kidnapped Columbia’s dean, Henry Coleman in his own office for 36 hours. The occupation lasted for eight days until, finally, the NYPD forcibly removed the protesters. More than 700 people were arrested, and 100 sustained injuries.This protest was organized in part by Mark Rudd, then chairman of the Columbia chapter of a radical student organization, Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS). Initially, SDS was committed to nonviolence, but in 1967 began embracing the slogan “from protest to resistance”. While the organization itself was becoming more radical, a few, specific individuals within it, including Rudd, were beginning to embrace revolutionary extremism. By the end of 1968, this coalition, known as the Weathermen, took control of the national SDS office, co-opting the entire organization. By the end of the decade, the Weathermen had turned to domestic terrorism and when they were forced to go on the lamb, became known as the Weather Underground.Over the decade that Weather Underground was active, they took credit for bombing the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department, the California Attorney General’s office, the Harvard Center for International Affairs, and 20 other sites....By 1968, a small cadre within [SDS] had become convinced that injustice in America was so intolerable, that it can only be resisted by force. Their objective was to shock regular people out of their apathy, see the world as they did, and join in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the government and institute what they believed to be real democracy. Part of this they accomplished. This extremist sect within a radical organization managed to convince hundreds of normal students to join them in their occupation of Columbia University. These students were not aware of the extremist ideology animating the organizers; what they were animated by was the moral aegis of resisting racism and an unjust war.
My moral philosophy project is based on the idea that bad philosophies are what animate radical movements like this. Indeed, SDS embraced revolutionary theory to justify their actions. At the time it was founded, universities had not started teaching those theories, although they routinely do so today. But the original student organizers used philosophy to underpin their beliefs:. They denied universal truth (relativism,), redefined tolerance as repression (Marcuse), romanticized violence as cleansing (Fanon, Mao, Che) and absolutized moral purity and urgency (apocalyptic Marxism).
In fact, radical movements can start without a guiding philosophy - like Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street - but without leaders applying a philosophical framework to their ideas, they tend to sputter out in short order. In those to cases the philosophies (like critical theory) were introduced after the fact and that is why elements of those movements endure.
Other protest movements, like Los Angeles riots in the 1990s, burn hot but fade away quickly.
In SDS' case, pamphlets and underground newspapers fueled the ideas for years among student activists, and even though many of those who joined weren't conversant in the theories behind the violence, the leaders were and used the ideas that they are anti-war or other simplistic ideas to attract larger numbers.
The same philosophies that fueled Columbia ’68 - relativism, Marcuse’s ‘repressive tolerance,’ Fanon’s valorization of violence - are now taught formally in universities and echoed in slogans like ‘speech is violence.'
Philosophy is what turns grievance into ideology, ideology into permission structures, and permission structures into durable action. It is an essential component of the political violence we are seeing today. Mark Rudd, mentioned above as an SDS leader, sees no difference between his 1960s activism and the anti-Israel protests on campus today.
The problem is that these philosophies are not moral. They justify violence, binary thinking and brainwashing. They disregard truth and paint their perceived enemies in absolute terms of evil ("fascist," "genocidal.")
But how can one judge a philosophy as moral? What makes Zionism moral and decolonial theory immoral?
Stay tuned. I have been building a non-partisan political and moral philosophy audit to determine the answer to exactly this question. So far, it works quite well.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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