What Do Those Campus Gaza Demonstrations Mean?

I started college in 1962 and got my first taste of political demonstrations when I handed out leaflets on campus promoting Marrin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963. The following year a bunch of us stood outside the Armed Forces Recruiting Station in Times Square and gave people who walked by a leaflet which read — ‘U.S. Out of Vietnam.’

People who took the leaflet were polite, most had never heard of a country called Viet Nam. We explained that we were protesting LBJ’s decision to increase our military commitment to 50,000 men, because Johnson didn’t want to be the first American President to lose a war.

From that time until I left to go to France in 1970, I don’t think there was a single college campus anywhere in the United States, except maybe some little Bible college somewhere in the Ozarks which didn’t at one time or another experience a demonstration against the war.

By the 1990’s when the kids who had been students in the 1960’s became middle-class and middle-aged adults, it became fashionable in some quarters to say that even though you were on a college campus thirty years earlier, you had never demonstrated against the Viet Nam war.

Anyone who ever made such a statement either didn’t go to college, or was lying, or both.

But a funny thing happens when people get to the age when thy really get concerned about saying the ‘correct’ thing because it goes with the job, or maybe you want your college-age children to avoid facing what those kids protesting the war in 1970 faced when they were shot and killed at Kent State.

Until the Kent State massacre, a majority of American adults held ambivalent feelings about the college anti-war demonstrations at best. Most adults didn’t necessarily subscribe to J. Edgar Hoover’s claim that Angela Davis and all the other anti-war demonstration leaders were being financed by the ‘Reds,’ but neither did most older people bother to ask themselves why the United States needed to immolate two entire countries in order to keep them ‘free.’

Know why America’s adult population found it convenient to ignore the wholesale violence that our country’s political leadership was sanctioning in Viet Nam? Because until Kent State, what was then called the ‘mainstream’ (now ‘fake’) media kept saying that the war was no big deal.

I may not agree with all the ins and outs of the demonstrations about Gaza that are currently sweeping across college campuses, but I am pleased that colleges have once again become a ferment of political activity about an issue which a majority of Americans, and certainly the media, and most certainly the college administrations would like to see simply go away.

After the President of Columbia was warned by an asshole group of GOP politicians not to tolerate campus ‘anarchy,’ she called in the cops who arrested 100 demonstrators camped out on the South Lawn and chased the rest of the troublemakers away.

This is exactly what happened on the Columbia campus when the cops were called in to break up a sit-in which had been called both to protest the war as well as to protest the University’s plan to construct a new gymnasium on publicly-owned property whose use would not be granted to the surrounding neighborhood residents who just happened to be Hispanic and black (see pic above.)

Gee — what a surprise that it took a bunch of students to remind the adults that an unjust war and an unconscionably racist redevelopment project might actually be considered two strategies which needed to be stopped.

So, here we are, once again being forced by some college kids to debate whether another political conflict which may end up requiring the insertion of U.S. troops, never mind the billions of dollars in munitions which have already been spent, will be considered a just or an unjust war.

Which is why, incidentally, the alt-right has always been against all those ‘egg heads’ who teach on college campuses, because they know that educations breeds liberalism and liberalism breeds political dissent. And if you want to criticize the government, it’s a liberal government whose excesses and failures need to be addressed.

But what happens when the critique of a liberal government policy comes not from the Right but from the Left?