RECREATE ’68! (PART II) VIDEO: Harvard students debate whether whites should kill themselves due to ‘[white] privilege.’

There’s a lot of jump cuts in the Drudge-linked post; and I wonder if there’s some “ransom note editing” going on to produce the desired result. On the other hand, regarding what can be heard, as Amy Alkon writes in linking to the clip, “If speaking comprehensibly is part of debating, this starts off with a fail.”

But in any case, haven’t we seen this all before? As veteran lefty author Todd Gitlin wrote in 1987 book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage:

Over the next few months, Weatherpeople rarely surfaced among unbelievers. When they did, one of their themes was that all white babies were tainted with the original sin of “skin privilege.” “All white babies are pigs,” one Weatherman had insisted in Flint. [Feminist poet] Robin Morgan recounts that one day, a Weatherwoman saw her breastfeeding her baby son in the [radical journal] Rat office. “You have no right to have that pig male baby,” said the Weatherwoman. “How can you say that?” said Morgan. “What should I do?” “Put it in the garbage,” was the answer.

In a December article in the Politico, Josh Zeitz, another lefty historian, suggested that today’s “Campus Protesters Aren’t Reliving the 1960s:”

In some ways it is: Today, as in the 1960s, a collegiate generation raised with an expansive understanding of its own rights and entitlements is fusing macro political issues to personal, everyday experience and demanding changes both in the halls of government and in the college dining hall.

But there is a startling inversion of logic in the progression from the 1960s and today. Fifty years ago, college students self-identified with repressed minorities at home and abroad and demanded freedom from the shackles of in loco parentis supervision and stewardship. They clamored to be treated as emancipated adults and foisted on their elders a noisy and disruptive free speech culture. Today’s students, who are certainly no less politically minded than their forbearers, are demanding the opposite. Far from freeing themselves of stewardship, they demand faculty “create a home” in which they remain children in the protection of more powerful elders. They insist on protection from ideas and voices that upset them and require a nurturing and therapeutic environment that bears no relationship to the real world of politics (or, for that matter, of business, technology, art or culture).

Today’s protesters may think they are marching in the footsteps of those who came before. In fact, they are undoing much of that generation’s enduring accomplishment.

Perhaps – but they’ve sure internalized the radical racist vocabulary of their late 1960s predecessors haven’t they?