NOAH ROTHMAN: A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence.
In our day, the notion of the clarifying and cleansing power of violence has become a key element of activist thinking on college campuses, as embodied not by ignorant young students but by advanced-degreed teachers. George Washington University lecturer Jessica Krug made a name for herself by justifying child murder in the name of anti-colonialism (before being drummed out of the public square for claiming falsely to be African-American). The 2018 slaughter of 15-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz by a machete-wielding Dominican gang in New York City might have been ugly, Krug conceded. But it was also reminiscent of revolutionary reversals like the South African practice of “necklacing,” in which collaborators with the apartheid government had their necks fitted with a rubber tire filled with gasoline that was then set alight. “That kind of violence toward people who are collaborating, or who are working against their communities,” Krug said, “we have to consider a radical moment in 2018 in which people are using machetes to hack apart a 15-year-old boy who’s working with the police.”
Down in South Carolina, Clemson University professor Bart Knijnenburg declared, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy, violent or non-violent” during the “Punch Nazis” craze. Over in Ohio, Oberlin assistant professor Jenny Garcia observed that “protests, even when there is violence, right, can make it a more salient issue and provide greater pressure on elected officials and candidates.” She went on: “When we see the destruction of buildings, when we see violence—either by police or by protesters themselves—we actually see greater response by elected officials.” Former Texas A&M associate professor of philosophy Tommy Curry dispensed with all the high-flown euphemisms and got right down to business. “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die,” he mused.
This intellectual environment is profoundly redolent of the one in which the violent radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s were steeped. Terrorist groups like Weather Underground, the FALN, and the Black and Symbionese Liberation Armies—organizations that engaged in targeted assassinations and thousands of domestic bombings from the late 1960s through the late 1970s—immersed their members in revolutionary literature to help their followers think of actual people as abstractions, the better to disengage their emotions from the maiming and killing they were pursuing.
In his chronicle of the Students for a Democratic Society and its devolution into a variety of factions, Kirkpatrick Sale identified the psychological predisposition that had radicalized so many of the SDS members. “There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of America, inextricably a part of the total system,” he wrote. “Clearly, something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system.”
This explanation is as true of today’s left as it was of the left when it was written in 1973. Just as 1960s and 1970s liberals came to echo revolutionary rhetoric that contributed to the foul atmosphere in the country rather than looking to stem the passions and cool the national temperature, so too do today’s liberals make common cause with those who believe the American system is delegitimizing itself.
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Flashback: Jon Gabriel last year: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.'”