Amy Goodman interviewed Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn. Interesting info.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/14/exclusive_in_first_joint_broadcast_interview

And ACORN was threatening the “fabric of democracy” (whatever that may be) by registering people without trust funds or stock portfolios to vote. The foolish hyperbole coming out of the right was made that much more ridiculous by their ho-hum reaction to Obama winning, such as the GOP hack recently claiming Obama ran a great “moderate Republican campaign” only weeks after calling him a Socialist.

The right to revolution is right there in the freaking Declaration of Independence.  And those crazy conservatives say that liberals don’t respect the principles this country was founded on…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I’ve done extensive reading about El Salvador and their civil war back in the 1980s. It seems to me that it was only after being faced with a long decade of rebellion from leftist guerillas and their base of support among the impoverished majority that the 1% of the population that made up the oligarchy decided to give in and allow for a politically tolerant democracy. Supporting the fascist military and nun-raping security forces did indeed prevent leftists from ever obtaining getting enough power to overthrow the regime, but it was never enough to produce a lasting peace. So the more moderate segments of the oligarchy decided it was in their best interest to sit down with the commies and negotiate a settled accord.

The U.S. is very different, because it tolerates a great deal of dissent at home while engaging in savagery abroad that the domestic population either does not know about or does not care to know about. Revolutionary violence in the context of the U.S., aside from being immoral and unnecessary, would probably only serve to make the American people more supportive of U.S. aggression abroad. In short, it would be deeply counter-productive to the leftist cause.

I believe that we need to do a better job of educating people about the horrors and misery inflicted by the U.S. military and economic apparatus on the populations of the Third World. Not through a Gramscian subversion of the institutions, but by being straightforward about our views and appealing to a more general sense of American compassion. Americans are indeed ignorant about the world, but they are not heartless.

“I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled.”

- Noam Chomsky

There’s an interesting theory that’s been kicking around in lefty religious circles about the Myth of Redemptive Violence.  I first saw someone reference it on Slacktivist and it’s a pretty interesting look at the idea we have in our culture that violence will solve our problems.  It’s definitely not an idea that’s reserved to the left or the right—both sides have decided to try violence as a solution to the problems they see in society.  Beating up the people who pushed for Prop 8 to be passed not only won’t do any good, it will certainly do more harm than good in the long run.

It’s understandable that people get frustrated with nonviolent resistance since it requires that you allow other people to hurt you and it’s human to want to strike back, but it is still a very powerful way to resist and to get people onto your side.  Look at the cycle that the Israelis and Palestinians have gotten themselves into—neither side can resist being the last one to hit the other, and the grievances on both sides just keep getting bigger and bigger the longer the violence goes on.

(Obviously, we’re talking about political resistance and not war here—I may be a pacifist when it comes to social change within a society, but that doesn’t mean that a country can or should only resist nonviolently when attacked.)

Amanda: Which is why I got upset when I read at Pam’s place that a group of Castro residents chased a bunch of hateful bigots who hang out on street corners to taunt gay people while pretending to “witness” to them.  Because as understandable as it is to explode with rage at such hateful people, all you end up doing is giving the homobigots an excuse to play the victim.

I don’t know, A, where is the line of civility drawn? Who draws it? It’s frustrating to hear criticism of protests from those on the left- I marched with and for my LGBT friends here in Seattle on Saturday, and beforehand the local (lefty!) blogs were a flurry of “Stop acting foolish. Don’t be loud/crude/silly. Don’t look, act or sound like hippies. Marching is wasted effort”. One commentor suggested that everyone wear their ‘straight’ clothes- “Republicans only respect those who look like Republicans”, was the approximate advice.

At a certain point any response is “wrong”. Is rude, cruel, boorish, stupid, wasted, moot, silly, etcetera. But this is real, and people feel intensely about it. If someone had voted away my civil rights then came to MY neighborhood to coyly gloat I’d be tempted to do a lot more that blow a police whistle in their poor widdle ears.

To make it worse for people on the left, people on the right are pretty much in a perpetual projection and rationalization loop, as you have to be when your worldview is fundamentally based on oppression.

A very good way of putting it.

I don’t know, A, where is the line of civility drawn?

I’m thinking that making actual physical threats is where the line should be drawn.  Yes, surrounding people so they can’t get away and blowing whistles in their ears counts as a physical threat.

I don’t get the people telling you not to march because it’s “foolish”—they sound like the little old lady in Blazing Saddles who comes to the back door of the jail to apologize, but swears the sheriff to secrecy.  The “Free Mumia” contingent who shows up at every goddamn rally drives me nuts, too, but that’s no reason to tell people not to march at all.

I don’t know—the American revolution is a bad, bad, bad, bad model. The people revolting weren’t the colonized, they were the settlers. They didn’t have a non-violent movement. They actively supported coercion, in their attempt to put women, immigrants, Indians, and enslaved people under their control instead of British control. It was more like a military coup handing power over to a different segment of the ruling class than a democratic revolution, and I think that using it as a model falls into that redemptive violence thingy. Other movements, like feminism in the US and mid-century civil rights, have a lot going for them because of non-violence, and the LGBT movement is going to go pretty far as long as it sticks to that route. No one has achieved the ideals of our violent-as-hell American dream through violence, in part because the idea of progressive liberty is to liberate people *from* violence. I think queers will have more meaningful success being liberated from violence than we will being liberated to marry.

I thought the whole Ayers thing was a farce when you consider how much bombing of non-combatants that McCain was doing.

Who killed more innocent people: Ayers or McCain?  Do we even know?

I think calling the Weather Underground counterproductive because it gave ammunition to the McCain campaign is shortsighted. That would make John Kerry’s participation in the Winter Soldier project counterproductive as well, and probably most of Martin Luther King’s career. If it hadn’t been the weather underground that McCain tried to come after Obama with, it would have been the Panthers, or the SLA, or MOVE.

If the WU was counterproductive, it was because it was counterproductive at the time. And blowing stuff up didn’t get a lot of people on board with the antiwar movement at the time, nor (because, unlike, say, the white supremacists, the weather underground wasn’t actually willing to kill lots of people to achieve its aims) did it put a significant dent in pro-war activities. Or maybe not, but that’s a different discussion.

I don’t know if I believe in the myth of redemptive violence, but I know that the mismatch in believers has certainly gotten a lot more liberals beaten up or killed than conservatives, at least in the private sphere.

I heard Ayers on democracy now as well and frankly I am kind of sick of this “you had to be there” boomer shit. The 60s are over. Long over. And when I hear the way a lot of the activists from the 60s talk it sounds so trite and too easy. I’d like to think that the modern left has learned that things aren’t simple. That just wearing a shirt that says “peace” is going to have little effect on the world.

And I’ve been to marches. And at least in america they are a waste of time. I support the GLBT people/allies marching right now because they are mad and need to put that energy. But as a vehicle for social and political change marching is absurd. That time is over, and as the right learned, and we are learning real change can happen through the political process.

I would put violence of any kind in the “last resort” category. Revolution and war should be the last thing anyone does.

implying that your kindergartner was going to be witness to fisting classes

No. That’s not what it was about. Though not as blatant as in the past, this was about calling us pedophiles. Not that long ago it was still fairly common for gays to be directly accused of being pedophiles in political rhetoric. Those ads were all about capitalizing on that—plenty of people still believe that shit.

So when you’re talking about reactions to extreme situations take that into account. When our people have been labeled something so repulsive for so long and then they come into one of the few bubbles in this country where we don’t have to fear violence, some portion of people are going to react in a volatile way. Not everyone, but some. That’s just nature—religion largely sustains the motivation behind violence against gays so when those people show up an element of real fear of physical harm is liable to strike more than a few people. I don’t disagree with the point that the reaction is poor, on many levels. But let’s not minimize what contributes to it.

True, Laura, but I think that the American revolution’s success was built on the fact that America was really its own place at that point, and thus the revolution, for all the talk of freedom and democracy, was mostly about independence.  Revolting against your own people, and not for independence but to change the direction of your government, is a much different thing.  It gets ideological and thus all too easily slips into tyranny.  As long as the democratic process is in play, then shedding blood instead of working through the system strikes me as ill-advised.  It’s got too much potential to backfire as the powerful majority sees you as a violent threat.

Yes, the AR was obviously a very different circumstance, in part due to the physical distance of the colonies from Great Britain—that certainly makes the “we’re going our own way now, thanks, bye” argument more convincing.  Our government is not so tyrannical that it needs to be overthrown, by any stretch of the imagination.  But in the passage I quoted, TJ et al make clear that revolution is not always necessary: That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,

I dunno, it just irks me when conservative pundits blather on about activist judges and blah blah respect the Constitution this and the Founding Fathers believed that and on and on and on.  Meanwhile they’re not too clear on what’s actually in those documents.

Since I’ve been on a Thomas Jefferson kick of late, here’s another timely quote: A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it’s true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt. But who can say what would be the evils of a scission, and when & where they would end? Better keep together as we are, hawl off from Europe as soon as we can, & from all attachments to any portions of it. And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake.

The whole letter, which is well worth reading, is here.

Serena, I’m not sure what you mean by this:  “I think queers will have more meaningful success being liberated from violence than we will being liberated to marry.”

Cripes this thread is such a pleasure to read—thoughtful intelligent comments and so on—after that nonsense in the Cinemark thread.

I disagree about the “be silly” advice to marchers. I’ve been in a couple myself, and it really bothers me when the kids show up to play 60’s radicals. Numbers are important, but you’re supposed to be there for a reason. DO NOT STEAL FOCUS.  It’s not all about you.

Amanda, have you read Saul Alinksy? He’s the most nuanced - dare I say principled? - treatment of the place of violence in political life that I’ve read. Violence and coercision is a tool like any other; the beauty of the US is that it is rarely the only tool available to marginalized groups

That said, it’s likely that the Weather Underground was reading him too. I think Rules for Radicals came out in the 60s.

But reading that letter, I get uneasy, because the feeling of frustration, while intolerable, just can’t be used as a reason to engage in coercive violence.

The government engages in coercive violence, whether direct or veiled all the time.  The government is coercive violence or the threat to coercive violence; the primary quality of sovereignty is the practical ability to apply force capable of trumping all other parties within a territory.

What legitimizes government force, at least in our cultures, is democratic participation and a bedrock of human rights which even the majority will will not violate.

When a government ignores democracy or blatantly violates human rights, there is *already* a level of coercive violence involved.

Let me suggest that the best response to the Iraq or Vietnam War is civil disobedience. Encourage the army to desert or mutiny.  Help them into Canada, and agitate for amnesty. Support them to say “no” when ordered to Iraq, and give them help fighting against any prison sentence.  Make it more honourable to have a “dishonourable discharge” than to “serve your country” by going to the lands of foreigners and shooting them.  Let entire battalions be thrown in prison, and let a lawyer show up for each and every one of them, forcing as long and expensive a trial as possible, and requiring the Army to justify an illegal war again and again and again.  Throw sand into the gears of the State until it screams.

Naturally enough, this is illegal.  Governments really don’t like these ideas.

One thing that’s really stark between Now and Then was that Then you would have actual news reporting. Like, for example, when the leader of the local chapter of the Black Panthers was gunned down in his home in the middle of the night by the Chicago police… they actually reported it in the news. The nightly news. Today, if that happened, it would have been pushed off to alternative weeklies, blogs, and other “plausible deniability” sources (much love to both, natch) so that the important news of the day can focus on whether or not Lindsay Lohan is a lesbian.

People don’t know. And if they know, most of them don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as it is, because there’s distractions and counter-spins. If people knew, I think we would have Weathermen today. Hell, maybe we do have Weathermen, and we just don’t know about it because Jennifer Aniston gave an interview and said Angelina Jolie was totally uncool and shit for stealing her husband.

The government engages in coercive violence, whether direct or veiled all the time.

Which is why coercive violence is inherently helpful to the status quo (as in my link above).  Either people welcome the government crackdown against the scary violent people trying to overthrow everything, or the scary violent people win and become the new status quo who gets to direct coercive violence.  You should definitely watch John Adams when it makes it to your side of the globe (assuming it hasn’t already).  It does a really good job of pointing out in the early episodes that the American Revolution started as mob action by a disgruntled few who then catapulted themselves into the positions of power.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

It’s frustrating to hear criticism of protests from those on the left- I marched with and for my LGBT friends here in Seattle on Saturday, and beforehand the local (lefty!) blogs were a flurry of “Stop acting foolish. Don’t be loud/crude/silly. Don’t look, act or sound like hippies. Marching is wasted effort”.

Digby reminded me that your complaint about your friends has been made before:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Personally, I would take the resemblance as a sign that you’re on the right track with your “foolish” marches. 

Moral correctness is very difficult. I want to agree with Nacho Daddy, but… it’s problematic. In specific instances I do agree with him. But like the youtube video, what is that? Is it helpful? I don’t fucking know. I think not, but to me the issue of gay rights isn’t nuanced. You treat people equally, including LGBT people. Marriage sanctity people are fucking stupid. But I also wouldn’t be willing to go so far as to beat up a Fred Phelps sign holder. The Colbert Report works. The Daily Show works. SNL worked. I think pointing out how foolish right wingers are works. But then in the case of Vietnam, real people were dying every day. WTF do you do? It’s troublesome.

Mnemosyne- Something tells me MLk didn’t have “protestors” carrying on and laughing it up during an anti-war march that was supposed to draw attention to the dead and wounded from Iraq.  Too many people go to these things for the primary purpose of partying(WOO! Look how cool and rebellious I am!) and the cause is a distant second.

Is it too much to ask that you take the subject of the protest seriously, and have a sense of decorum?

Patton Oswalt expresses it better than I.  Go to 4:58.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFI9siGOT7s

...

I’m torn.  I really am.

On the one hand, you’re right.  In the end, keeping the moral high ground is probably the right strategy for us.  As you say, guilt-by-association sticks to us to a degree that it never does to wingnuts - I mean, hell, Palin’s husband was a secessionist and nobody seemed interested in that.  What’s more, this is a situation where we’re trying to win people over; street-fighting and those fools who went into a Mormon church and disrupted services aren’t helping anyone. 

But.

But as you also said, they don’t need any facts to make up all sorts of accusations.  Remember the baby-raping and the rampaging gangs of lesbians?  Even if every single gay person in the US was a model of Christlike, self-sacrificial nonviolence, these lies would still be told, spread by the Right-wing Noise Machine, and believed.  If they didn’t have this, they would find some example of some other gay person, somehwere, sometime, who was not a saint.  Or they would make something up.

But.

But most of the lies told about gays are along the lines of “they’re going to use the government to force us to (x)” (as if they don’t have any influence in the government themselves), or “they’re going to come after your children”.  Stuff that’s good for whipping up a lynch mob, in other words, but nothing that suggests that gays might be dangerous to you, personally.  Nothing about “a gang of fags will chase you down and kick your ass”. 

The Mormon church is shocked - shocked! - that they’re experiencing such a backlash.  They thought that homosexuals were safe targets!  And I bet this pack of Christianist bullies thought that gays were safe targets, too.  What did they, a bunch of real men, have to fear from a bunch of near-women? 

Now, maybe there’s a touch, just a touch, of awareness that gays can fight back.  I live in New York, and I can assure you that there aren’t many groups of skinheads shouting “white power” on the street corners in Harlem.  As Merle Hoffman pointed out over on RH Reality check, now is the time that the wingnuts are liable to turn more violent, now that they feel they aren’t in power anymore.  But maybe the knowledge that they, too, are vulnerable, might prevent a bashing or two.

Political violence does not turn the public against you (necessarily). This is a myth. The reality is that the Left is moribund in North America, a shadow of its former self in Europe, and at its most dynamic and popular in scope in South America, Africa and Asia. Not coincidentally, the willingness of the Left to engage in political violence is lower in North America, somewhat more common in Europe (Greece, Italy, France, the poll tax riots in the UK, etc) and at its highest in the Third World.

The correlation is, of course, not a cause. My opinion is that the fact the Left is unwilling to use political violence in North America is caused by that it is already isolated and without a popular base, and that without a strong popular base to support it as a movement any use of violence would turn the public away.

Harassing the homobigots is conterproductive. It gives them heroic tales to tell when they get back to Tomball, Anahuac, or Vidor. Best option is inside support. Get the cops to have undercover gaybash-tempting agents as we had for a while here. That’s what we had after the Broussard murder here and it worked well.

If you can’t swing that level of inside support, try to find out who these people are and where they live. Findo out where they work and take pictures of them and send the pics to their employers. And if that doesn’t work, you know where they live….

BlackBloc, on what are you basing the idea that the left in Latin America is more willing to engage in political violence? There have not been guerilla movements or leftist groups using political violence in any significant way for at least a decade. Bolivia is kind of borderline, but Bolivia has some particular structural problems with their elections that delegitimize their democratically elected leaders (no run-off in a multi-party system - allowing a president to win with only 20 percent of the vote) and the culture there is very, uh, protesty, for lack of a better word in English. They just don’t take shit lying down there, in my admittedly limited experience. But seriously, all the leftists in power now are center-left parties who won office through electoral politics. The few groups still engaging in political violence are very marginalized.

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Is it too much to ask that you take the subject of the protest seriously, and have a sense of decorum?

I think you missed mir’s point entirely.  She’s not being told that the protests she’s attending in favor of gay marriage aren’t decorous enough—she’s being told she shouldn’t be doing them at all and sit back waiting for the nice people to grant gay marriage as a gift out of the goodness of their hearts.

I thought my referencing the “Free Mumia” crowd would make it pretty clear where I stand about keeping protests focused, but I guess not.

But really, the main thing with the gay rights protests were that they were extremely focused.  It didn’t feel like a routine protest, but a genuine outpouring of rage.  The anti-war protests, for better or for worse, didn’t have that focus.

If you’re talking about anti-Iraq war protests, I agree.  Mission drift has been a problem for many if not most organized protest marches for at least a decade.

But if you’re talking about Vietnam War protests, you’re wrong.  They were focused, remarkably so looking at them in retrospect.  The only real division was whether we should actively promote the idea of a Vietnamese National Liberation Front victory or simply be indifferent to it in favor of bringing our troops home as safely and as soon as possible.  The last big march of at least 500,000 was in April, 1971, the one that included the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which Kerry headed, throwing some 700 medals onto the Capitol Steps.  Kerry, of course, famously tossed some ribbons and medals, but not (as revealed years later) his own bronze star and silver star. 

There wasn’t nearly as much stomach for real civil disobedience.  The May, 1971 protest was an attempt peacefully to shut down the traffic in Washington for as long as possible and only some 12,000 people showed for that.  While there was a willingness of many to give up a day or two of work (or classes) and spend some travel money, there was not a lot of appetite to go to jail or worse, as the previous May of 1970 at Kent State and Jackson State had proved was possible.

This entire discussion reminds me of my great moral philosophical contribution: “Right” and “Least Wrong” are not mutually inclusive terms.

The prime example is that the use of violence is ALWAYS wrong. period. without exception. It cannot be morally correct. However, protecting yourself and others from physical violence with physical force can be less wrong than the alternative to simply allow the use of force and coercion. In such a circumstance, there is no Right action. Allowing the use of coercion is wrong, as is using coercion to prevent further coercion.

So you do the thing that is Least Wrong, and try very hard to live with what guilt you should have.

You can shoot Hitler. That works. But you still have to feel bad about it, because your moral failing was not committing the Least Wrong act. It was your inability to, giving limited knowledge and human failings, to find the solution which is simultaneously Right and Least Wrong.

Which is why coercive violence is inherently helpful to the status quo (as in my link above).  Either people welcome the government crackdown against the scary violent people trying to overthrow everything, or the scary violent people win and become the new status quo who gets to direct coercive violence.

Mmm.  As a counter, Solzhenitsyn made some comments (pardon me if I don’t have the exact reference to hand) along the lines that what really kept the Soviet Union in power was vans of men in black uniforms bursting down doors at 2 a.m., and what kept them able to do that was the knowledge that they would come back.  If, for every three or four times they had burst open a door, the first one through the door had been shot, then they would have had to stop.  And the Soviet Union would have fallen.

I believe violence is a given.  We can push it back to potential violence, and hide it behind lawyers and nice little forms, but it is something that is ALWAYS in a society.  The trick is to channel it so those with a legitimate claim to use it do so only within the bounds of that legitimacy.  Much better the government than the mafia, and much better the government acting within laws respectful of rights.

You should definitely watch John Adams when it makes it to your side of the globe (assuming it hasn’t already). 

Noted.  Thank you.

I don’t know Amanda, I think I may have too disagree with you a little hear as others have here.
As important as Martin Luther King was, there was also a real important part to play for both Malcolm X and the Black Panthers Party in the Civil Rights Movement (both in how Black Americans viewed themselves and how they projected themselves outwardly). I think whats going on right now is that we are very, very pissed and are refusing to be stepped on anymore. This video might scare some Christian or Mormon bigots and make them realize that they can’t just continue to push us around like subhuman garbage because sometimes we will fight back. If people are going to be scared of us I’d much rather it be at our anger at our not having equality then, for instance, some kind of irrational heebeejebees of the girly men who have butt-sex .

Actually, the more I think about it, the more torn I am. I do agree that violence is wrong and incidents such as this need to be kept to a minimum and under control but…I am just so angry right now.
I am tired of being patient to get my equal rights.

I have friends who lived in London when the Irish Republican Army was using bombs in a terrorist campaign, and they agreed that it was ineffective so long as people alone were being targeted; Brits are brought up to keep a stiff upper lip and all that. Once the bombing switched to more valuable targets, the companies sustaining losses became alarmed and the government became more accomodating.

It’s actually a rather congenial thought: killing random people is generally counter-productive, but threatening profitable enterprises just might not be. Maybe. If you do it right.

And, as always, it isn’t worth doing if you don’t enjoy doing it. We don’t have an eternity in which to bask in the glory of our righteousness. Here and now, boys and girls, here and now.

I hate to say it, but I will believe that these demonstrations and marches are a change or a turning point when some more time has passed. I am afraid that they are a passing fad and aren’t the basis for any meaningful large change. It is very easy to go to a rally then go home.

I know that the majority of people here are probably not the people I am talking about.

But how many of the people who showed up for last weekend’s protests aren’t out to their families, neighbors, and employers? How many of them have ever written their elected officials? How many of us (I haven’t) have written polite letters to the companies and celebrities that rely on gay money and even thank them for their support, but also ask them to support us more, and more publicly?

The next round of pro-marriage equality ads needs to include explicitly gay couples. And so on.

Among the most effective things all the studies agree that we can do is come out to those around us, and make our elected officials know we are watching.

I am not talking about the gay kid in the evangelical family in Arkansas - though a lot of them show a hell of a lot more courage than many others. I am talking about the closeted or semi-closeted architects and financiers and doctors living in San Francisco, Chicago, LA, etc - where the consequences of coming out are pretty damn minor.

If the stats are accurate, only half the registered voters in San Francisco turned out. WTF?

Not in any way to delegitimize the concept of civil disobedience, or the very real likelihood that it may be necessary, even a lot. But one thing that the black civil rights movement never had to address was getting black people to admit to their families and friends that they were black to begin with.

If Prop 8 had any enduring legacy, I for one would far more prefer that we turned it into the end of the voluntary closet rather than the beginning of a focused movement of civil violence.

Um, Stonewall?

Based on what I’ve read about Stonewall, Stonewall itself was a a gay bar, and the NYPD cops who were there that day were there to shake the place down. This sort of uniformed protection racket was very typical of the “relationship” between gays and the authorities all across the nation; on paper, gayness was officially a “disease” if not a crime and many were the politicians who ran rabble-rousing campaigns to eradicate it, but in fact a sort of tolerance, based on severe discrimination, was the reality, and part of the deal was that cops got a cut in the form of bribes not to shut a particular venue down. Well, that day, for some reason or other, patrons of the bar resisted instead of running for cover; at some point the resistance escalated to actual (though I think, never lethal) violence—and the upshot was a radically changed relationship all over the country.

I’m not saying the NYPD was suddenly terrified of mobs of GLBT people (and from what I’ve read individuals of every category under that rainbow-umbrella were involved) stomping down their precincts and ruling the city. I think a lot of what happened in this case had to do with the specific role that “queerness” played in the gender hierarchy.

Based on my own reflections on the gender role messages I got growing up, I think the root of homophobia in our society is that it is a side effect of our society’s definition of masculinity and its relationship to violence. The major purpose, objectively speaking, of taunts about not being a “sissy” or worse terms (which I heard out of the mouth of my father, for instance, long before I had any clue whhat these stronger terms were supposed to mean) is to shame boys into being more violent than they often want to be, as well as aiming that violence against any kind of deviance. The image of the “sissy” is intended as a demon to avoid; that it gets attached to particular individuals is sort of a side effect—but a potent one; it certainly helps reinforce the system to have real demons to physically attack.

When gay men who had hitherto submitted to the obvious threat of a much larger majority apparently united monolithically against them suddenly were not taking it any more, the comfortable gender assumptions that cops and City Halls had swaggered under were dissipated. Some reacted with more fear and anger, others rethought and realized that actually they didn’t have any real problem with gayness, and many at least backed off and started to listen and pay attention.

Like others here, I think the general issue of violence is not simple and cut and dried. I don’t think that any movement of oppressed peoples can get by if their oppressors are convinced that they pose no potential threat to seriously disrupt them whatsoever. Conversely, it often works in a carrot/stick, good-cop/bad-cop sort of dynamic, with the authorities being much more willing to listen to, and even accord respect (all too often posthumously) to the “nice nonviolent” leaders while moving viciously against the “bad guys.” I agree that without Malcolm X, probably MLK wouldn’t have got the hearing he did.

OTOH, one reason I respect Malcolm X is that he did moderate himself, not out of any toadying agenda but because he had the wisdom to learn it was the right thing to do.

As human beings, we will always have the potential for violence; I don’t know if it is basic realism or just an ugly reality that we will probably always need to at least hint at the threat of it to get a fair hearing. But I think we also respond well to more intelligent solutions.

Perhaps it is just necessary to backdrop the brightness of such better ways with a dark curtain hinting at the alternatives for everyone to see…

I heard Ayers on democracy now as well and frankly I am kind of sick of this “you had to be there” boomer shit.

Bingo.  There’s something about a former terrorist sitting in a comfy tenured position lecturing the rest of us about peace and security that really, really, really rubs me the wrong way.  It’s so typical of the rest of those smug sellouts looking down their noses at at all the generations that followed them, even though they had the most advantages (fiscally, professionally, culturally) of any generation in human history, and are hanging on to them with a vicious death grip while writing arrogant little articles about how they’re revolutionaries and `isn’t privilege such a terrible thing’??

I would also note as a contemptuous aside:  Look at how fucking incompetent the Weather Underground were.  The most casualties they ever inflicted was on themselves when they accidentally blew up their own headquarters. 

Face it: one of the reasons that people like Ayers like bombs is that they get to scuttle away and let the mechanics of the device do their dirty work.  Michael Collins would have picked his teeth with these poseurs.

Rock on, Mark Foxwell. This is what I’ve been trying to say.

From the accounts of people actually there, and not just from the hasty, unclear video and the fundies’ bizarre claims (gay men were trying to molest their women? Ooookay), only one Castro denizen turned violent, and everyone else apprehended this individual and turned them in to police. “Violent” is entirely the wrong term to describe what happened here.

I don’t get the hubbub about good PR and worrying what hateful bigots think of us, anyway. No matter what, they are going to hate us. We might as well let it be known that disrespecting our neighborhoods, our few truly safe spaces, will not be tolerated.

I wish Americans would get outraged about the evil done in our name.  But we seem to have lost all empathy for other human beings.

If Obama had run on a platform of “Stop the War, Stop the Torture, Bring Back The Constitution”, he would have lost.  It took the economy going into the toilet to get America to toss out the assholes.

Really sad and embarrassing…

MikeEss on 11/17 at 08:39 PM

Sorry MikeEss, you’re leaving out some important media changes and psychological reactions. 

1) Emmet Till - when Mamie Mobley insisted on the casket being open, that did change a lot.  People were horrified confronting the evidence of the Jim Crow South.

2) One reason that we didn’t react similarly to the death tolls in Vietnam was that we became desensititzed, (first most televised war) and, it’s very hard to FEEL for large numbers - unlike Emmet Till’s ONE face or the “Kent State girl” photo.  Today, between violent video games and in your face TV coverage, we are completely desensitized and disconnected.  Not to mention that protests are regulated and sanitized as a rule - innocuous street theater not expressions of deep emotion.  Prop 8 protests being an exception..

3) Bush hasn’t forgotten the power of images, though.  That’s why the US gov’t still doesn’t let photographers shoot caskets coming home.  I can’t help but wonder if that’s the real reason the Gitmo detainees are hooded - to prevent us from connecting with them as human?

4) Amanda you’re also guilty of a little selective editing of history.  While today, the idea of change through democratic, peaceful means has just been proven a valid avenue, this wasn’t the case in the ‘60’s.  Large portions of the electorate didn’t dare vote, let alone stage peaceful rallies with police and municipal cooperation in public parks, and peaceful protestors could and were attacked-routinely.  Your Miranda rights came at the end of a billy club as late as the ‘68 Democratic Convention. 

5) Indirect inspriation: The WU did leave some lasting impressions.  Though I’ve never done or desired to any violence, their stories of fighting injustice did cause things like a reading Thoreau, childhood ecology club, and civic involvement today.  So don’t discount that celeb coverage that unfortunately didn’t happen to non-violent protestors.

I would also note as a contemptuous aside:  Look at how fucking incompetent the Weather Underground were.  The most casualties they ever inflicted was on themselves when they accidentally blew up their own headquarters.

I’ve often thought that violent protest has seriously overlooked the potential of simply abandoning cars or trucks at the right places during rush hour.  It might be because I live in a city with some noticable chokepoints, but I have to wonder just how badly a coordinated campaign could tie up a city, especially if it had some way to make it that more difficult to remove those vehicles (such as, say, faux-bombs in the backseat).

This might show up should I ever start writing.

Now, maybe there’s a touch, just a touch, of awareness that gays can fight back.  I live in New York, and I can assure you that there aren’t many groups of skinheads shouting “white power” on the street corners in Harlem.  As Merle Hoffman pointed out over on RH Reality check, now is the time that the wingnuts are liable to turn more violent, now that they feel they aren’t in power anymore.  But maybe the knowledge that they, too, are vulnerable, might prevent a bashing or two.

Seraph on 11/17 at 11:34 PM

Of interest: Public television just aired a NAtional Geographic on the “new KKK.”  Much of it was about how irrelevant and “non-frightening almost mainstream” the old KKK had become.

“I would also note as a contemptuous aside:  Look at how fucking incompetent the Weather Underground were.  The most casualties they ever inflicted was on themselves when they accidentally blew up their own headquarters.”

...you’re contemptuous that a movement which deliberately focused on property damage and tried to avoid killing people had a low casualty rate?  Do you also look down on ELF for not having the gonads to wait until SUVs are occupied to set them on fire?

An interesting take on psychological violence as opposed to actual violence. PTR.

My own point was rather more limited: if you choose violence and advocate violence then perhaps you should actually be good at violence.  Think about the 60s and the nature of American military power.  Key figures in the Pentagon—both civil and military—lived ordinary lives and walked around without security.  Select assassinations would have had more impact than anything else, especially if they had been as coordinated as Collins’ Bloody Sunday.  But that would have involved (gasp!) personal risk!  Face-to-face confrontation!  Personal courage!  And none of these candy-asses had the guts—or the group coordination skills.  My god, men in the Intelligence sections of the US Army even wear identification

Hell, Hoover’s house was unguarded at night! Killing the head of the FBI could have been done in less than two on-scene minutes with two people armed with pistols and a getaway car.

I’m not saying that these folks should have done these things.  I’m saying that people advocating violent revolution were, for the most part, poseurs, wanna-be’s and gutless.  But they want to be thought of as if they were marching with Mao and, for the most part, they have been treated that way.

even though they had the most advantages (fiscally, professionally, culturally) of any generation in human history, and are hanging on to them with a vicious death grip while writing arrogant little articles about how they’re revolutionaries and `isn’t privilege such a terrible thing’??

seeker6079 on 11/18 at 09:16 AM

At your peril, child.  Right - women couldn’t even sign contracts or establish credit on their own at this time, and domestic violence perpetrated by the male was family business.  Rape victims were “asking for it” and a woman’s sexual history was permissible evidence in court.  African Americans were routinely denied rights and beaten, de facto confined to ghettos, kept out of jobs, etc.
For many, college wasn’t attanable no matter the grades due to financial problems.

So, for a privileged few, as today, life was all rosy - that wasn’t the case for the majority.

...you’re contemptuous that a movement which deliberately focused on property damage and tried to avoid killing people had a low casualty rate?  Do you also look down on ELF for not having the gonads to wait until SUVs are occupied to set them on fire?

By my own standards, no.  I’m not a fan of killing.  By their standards, yes.  They chose a route of violence, and then avoided any effective use of violence.  That makes them contemptible poseurs by their own standards.  If a revolutionary group is determined to make a difference then it targets people and institutions which have the most impact on their enemy.  The IRB didn’t blow up empty English Tea shops; they gunned down the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the middle of London.  Collins’ IRA Intelligence systematically planned and executed the murders of almost two dozen key British & loyalist Irish intelligence officers in one go.  These are, whatever the morality of it all, daring and effective acts of violence.  (Do you think, honestly, that the British would have signed the Free State treaty without the newfound certainty in their ruling class that they were vulnerable even in the very epicentre of the Empire?  Not a bloody chance.)

About the only effective act of violence the WU ever did was the bombing at the Pentagon, and I rather wonder whether that wasn’t more luck than judgment.

phylosopher, child, are you actually taking the position that the boomers, taken as a whole, were not the most privileged generation?  And that they’re not ferociously hanging on to all the advantages produced by their unique demographic position?

To Amanda and anyone else interested,

This is a link to a 1967 debate between Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt on “The Legititmacy of Violence as a Political Act.” It’s very relevant to the discussion.

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm

Ayers (and Jeremiah Wright) served a valuable purpose in this election: both men allowed Obama the opportunity to draw a clear distinction between his generation’s (“Jones” or X) approach to effecting change (cool, patient, methodical, quiet, reason-driven, goal-focused) and that of the Boomers (hot-headed, impatient, ad-hoc, loud and showy, emotional, process-focused).

Good riddance to the Boomer approach, applied on either the political left or the right.

I read an article by Ann Coulter, who used the fact that most of the formert members of the Weather underground are now teachers and college professors, as a blanket condemnation of all college professors and teachers.

None of these right-wingers can acknowledge that these people served their time, and actually REFORMED, and BECAME LAW-ABIDING, PRODUCTIVE CITIZENS, who GAVE BACK TO THE COMMUNITY, and ENRICHED THE LIVES OF OTHERS through their current work as teachers, or are considered by their peers and neighbors to be nice people.

In the eyes of a conservative, it seems that once you are convicted of a crime (or even just accused or suspected), you’re just forever guilty of much more. Ayers damaged property, but he’s cast by the right as a murderous brute. G. Gordon Liddy, on the other hand, who currently tells his listeners to shoot at law enforcement officers, and to break federal laws by not registering firearms, is a hero.

If given the choice, I’d rather have a nation of former radicals turned teachers, than a nation of right-wing thugs turned radio pundits.

I’ve often thought that violent protest has seriously overlooked the potential of simply abandoning cars or trucks at the right places during rush hour.

Yes, but then how will the protest leaders get to appear on the evening news? How will the protestors get to show off their Che T-shirts, “Free Mumia” signs, Keffiyahs, and puppets? How will the Anarkiddies be able to throw rocks and bottles at the riot police and smash the windows of The Gap?

I mean, really, Where are your priorities?

If a revolutionary group is determined to make a difference then it targets people and institutions which have the most impact on their enemy.

I think you’re a little confused about the difference between a revolutionary group and an insurgent group.  The IRA and al Qaeda are insurgent groups.  They’re not trying to change their own societies—they’re trying to force other societies and/or governments to do what they want.

The Bolsheviks were a revolutionary group, but I think it’s pretty hard to argue that they were morally justified in bringing Lenin and Stalin to power.  Mao was a revolutionary.  Michael Collins was not.  It’s not a revolution if you’re trying to drive out a foreign occupying force—it’s an insurgency.

It may be a fine distinction, but there is a difference.

I think one point I meant to make, and didn’t really make very well, was that to the other side, any response is ‘wrong’. Can and will be construed as violent. The impression that a protest, or a mob reaction, or civil disobedience, or a personal display of rebellion, makes to those already in your corner is moot- it’s how those doing the oppression perceive the protest that counts.

And in this case, anything short of the LGBT communites and their allies DISAPPEARING, falling silent, can/is/will be perceived as a wrong, violent, outrageous, illegitimate response. To me personally, on this side of the battle, blowing police whistles, following people down a street and screaming “Get out of our neighborhood!” is a far cry from shooting or blowing people up. To those on the other side of it, any response will be inflated to Them Crazy Gays Acting Like Violent Animals.

So when I ask where the line of civility is drawn I suppose I answer myself with “Screw them. Don’t hit them, shoot them or set stuff on fire but scream your everloving heads off in every single thing you do until the tide turns”.

Thank you Lesliek for that link.  With indulgence of the board, I’ve clipped some of the material there directly relevant to the debate about the use of violence as a political tactic to remedy an oppressive state of affairs.  This is not rehashing the old 60’s debates, it is historical perspective:

CHOMSKY:  [a] new society rises out of the actions that are taken to form it, and the institutions and the ideology it develops are not independent of those actions; in fact, they’re heavily colored by them, they’re shaped by them in many ways. And one can expect that actions that are cynical and vicious, whatever their intent, will inevitably condition and deface the quality of the ends that are achieved. Now, again, in part this is just a matter of faith. But I think there’s at least some evidence that better results follow from better means.

[A]just society cannot really be imposed on the masses of people but must arise out of their own spontaneous efforts, guided by their own developing insight.

HANNAH ARENDT: ... I very much agree with Mr. Chomsky’s assertion that the nature of new societies is affected by the nature of the actions that bring them into being.

SUSAN SONTAG: ...It’s personally hard for me to understand how in December 1967 in New York the discussion has at no point turned actively to the question of whether we, in this room, and the people we know are going to be engaged in violence.

CHOMSKY:  As to the tactics of the peace movement, I think there are very strong reasons in favor of nonviolence. The first reason . . . is that the government happens to have a monopoly of terror. Therefore violence is simply suicidal.

The second reason for nonviolence, I think, is that clearly violence antagonizes the uncommitted. And what we want to do is not antagonize them, but attract them to, involve them in, the resistance to the War.

Another very convincing reason for limiting oneself to nonviolent action is that in a way that’s pretty hard to characterize, immense harm is done to the individual who participates in violent action. Almost invariably he becomes much the worse for it. On the other hand, the participant in nonviolent action very often does achieve a kind of transforming effect.

[Responding to an audience comment:] Now, you talked about the fact that the blacks in the ghettos had been provoked to the use of violence by the failure of democratic procedures and the failure of nonviolent action. I’m sure that’s accurate. But I don’t think that deals with the question of whether they were correct in having acted upon this provocation. Maybe they were very justified because they were provoked beyond reason, but it still doesn’t follow that that was the most politically effective and rational reaction. Frankly, I doubt very much that it was.

It’s not a revolution if you’re trying to drive out a foreign occupying force—it’s an insurgency.  It may be a fine distinction, but there is a difference.

Noted.  I hadn’t considered that, and it is an important point.  I don’t think, however, that it applies to the underlying goal-and-means of violent groups, whether insurgent or revolutionary: (1) you want something; (2) you decide that violence is the way to achieve that something;  so, (3) what do you destroy and/or who do you kill (and/or both), and how do you do go about it as to best achieve this goal?  The WU were pretty pathetic at that, in large measure because they were largely risk-averse, narcissistic, spoiled brats who were more in love with the fact that they were revolutionaries than they were with any revolution.  And, like most children, they moved away from their toy when it lost its appeal.  Ayers has noted in the past that the WU “didn’t do enough”, a comment which encompasses a mature awareness that there was more that could have and should have been done (in all areas, violent and non-violent) that they did not do. 

Dave Irish noted the concept of being reformed, above, and Gracchus cuttingly commented on the desire to be centre stage.  Both are correct, and it is one of the things that stands to Ayers’ credit.  The US election gave him a sweeeeeeet opportunity to be centre-stage again, lapping up the attention.  Instead, he STFU and let his considerable body of positive academic and community service stand alone as its message.  Kudos to him for that.  It shows a rare awareness for a prominent boomer that hard, often uninspiring day-to-day work over decades is what makes a difference and is worthy of note, rather than a self-indulgent fetishization of one’s own grandiose youthful shenanigans which many boomers have raised to almost religious reverence.

If its true that only one person in the Castro resorted to any kind of vioelnce and then was turned in by the other gay people in the crowd, then I think their response was spot on.

Its not something I think they should do everywhere that they see intolerance, but I think they have to defend their own neighborhood. You do have to stand up for yourself to a bully, but you don’t go looking for a fight. And they should do it peacefully.

I am a minority. I go out of my way to live in areas where I will feel safe. If groups that oppose the very idea of me are going to start to target those areas with their hate, then I have to do something to maintain the safety of my home base. It’s one of the few things we have. I live in a place where many of my friends have moved here from places where they couldn’t be themselves. Its not just our ideas, its how we look and are that are protected here. That is something we couldn’t live without.

These people that showed up in the Castro have gone beyond all their rhetoric about gays forcing anyone to do anything and have gone right to the homes of these people.

Were this group anywhere else, I wouldn’t think it was the correct response. They might want to use a few less f-words and such so that it plays well on TV, but otherwise, I think its neccesary.

Otherwise, I am also unsure of how to proceed otherwise. I think focused boycotts and protests are a good start. We should take the high ground.

But I don’t think that blowing whistles and yelling “shame on you,” is the low-ground as long as it isn’t accompanied by violence.

I think people repspect it when they see people stand up for themselves. That is why this acceptable in their neighborhood. It would seem like too much in any other place.

Instead, he [Ayers] STFU and let his considerable body of positive academic and community service stand alone as its message.

It’s probably good for Obama that he did.  Ayers continued ambiguity on his position on violent forms of protest would have hurt, though probably not fatally.  He denied the NYTimes quote about not regretting setting the bomb with the statement that he never set a bomb, he apparently did not send a note to the Times asking for a retraction of the quote, and he seems content not to disavow the “enhanced vandalism” of the WU.

All action is aimed at 3rd party people watching.

This statement is at odds with the boycott commentary in a different thread.  Nonviolent action is also aimed at those who oppose you; this is why boycotts are so effective, if done right: commercial enterprises supporting anti-civil-rights initiatives suffer a direct and measurable price for such unpleasant acts on their part.  Were I a business facing a boycott I know that I might not only lose customers until I relent, but I may lose those customers permanently, either by design or inertia.  (As an example of the latter: I refused to buy from the famous Canadian chain “Pizza Pizza” many, many years ago because of their exploitative treatment of their franchisees.  I still don’t buy from them even though I have no idea whether they still act that way.  It’s just that my business has “moved on”.)

>>How will the Anarkiddies

Ageism ftw.

Ageism ftw.

Age has nothing to do with it—Anarkiddies were around when I was in college, too (so were the Keffiyah Krowd and the puppeteers, and the “Free Mumia” was just starting to roll). I found anarchism intriguing myself at the time, except unlike my Anarkiddie contemporaries I actually knew who Kropotkin and Bukharin and Goldman were. From what I’ve seen of the current crop, not much has changed: reading and critical thinking is boring, but wearing gas masks and setting stuff on fire is awesome ma-an.

Age has nothing to do with it

Then why use a term like Anarchokiddies which presumes that teenagers are dumb, excitable, or otherwise irrational?

Then why use a term like Anarchokiddies which presumes that teenagers are dumb, excitable, or otherwise irrational?

The “kiddie” part refers to the lack of seriousness, which for good and bad is a major characteristic of adolescent or childhood behaviour—it isn’t an identity politics slur. Heck, I used the term “kiddie” to describe an immature person when I was a teenager (ok, a college student, but still…). If you want to consider that ageism, feel free.

BlackBloc, Gracchus:

I’d have considerably more sympathy for the young anarchists or protestors today.  Boomer kids could protest secure in the knowledge that there would be a place for them when they stopped throwing things… and they were right.  Today’s kids know that just one little blot on their record damns them in a ferociously competitive, high-information employer’s market. 

My god, Ayers was a frikkin’ terrorist—albeit a comical, KAOS-y one—and he’s a professor.  A kid of today with one “resisting arrest” protest conviction on his record probably wouldn’t even be considered for any employment with a university, even for a sessional’s position doing all the work (at a quarter the pay and no benefits) that the tenured profs like Ayers can’t be bothered to do.  “Whoa!  Criminal record!  Toss that one in the circular file!”

I’m also a tad nonpluxed at the ‘Free Mumia’ dig. I will simply assume it is an attack on the general quality of the protesters that have taken over the movement (mostly A.N.S.W.E.R. people, who like all Stalinists generally limit all their action to taking over leadership of social movements as a recruitment tool) and not an attack on the idea that it’s important to provide solidarity to, and ask for the liberation of, political prisoners.

Amanda, I think you are setting an impossible goal for any political strategy when you go from what happened forty years ago to now, as per this:

“And that’s where I find myself agreeing with Shapiro and not with Ayers—-the Weather Underground was counter-productive.  How could they not be?  All this shit happened 40 years ago, and the right is still wrapping themselves in the fuzzy blanket of victimization at the hands of a group of young people who destroyed property (which is treated as worse than taking life).  It didn’t work, but what if the Ayers smears had helped push McCain over the top?”

The same reasoning could be, and has been used to stop any gay activism - after all, it is just used by the right to stir up the troops. This is a self-punishing criteria - I don’t see its usefulness.

I think a better way of judging a strategy is whether the goals it set for the middle term were met. It is here that violence plays a role. Take unionization. Unions were besieged by the companies and the state, which tried to outlaw them, in the period between 1870 and 1930, and if they hadn’t fought back, often through violence, they would have disappeared. The mining unions who abjured violence benefited from the IWW bombers who didn’t and assassinated governors and killed strikebreaking thugs because, in the end, the status quo didn’t want to go down the route - they compromised. Similarly, the civil rights leadership under King - who to my mind are exemplary, and whose non-violent philosophy I generally believe - still lost battle after battle - for instance, over housing in the North - but, because the militant black power movement was so publicized, and because riots - in truth, insurgencies, like in Detroit - were occurring, grudging success was made in civil rights - and that still has taken forty years, and that still hasn’t “wiped out” racism.

There is no universal law to be deduced from this. In certain periods, the threat of violence and real, marginal violence can cause the establishment to compromise with liberal, non-violent groups. But those compromises are always shaky. The unions, abjuring civil disobedience and violence, have been beaten down to a pre-Gompers level, for instance. It is hard to believe that, in the future, there will be any great liberal success without the accompaniment of violence on the margins. Not in the U.S.

Today’s kids know that just one little blot on their record damns them in a ferociously competitive, high-information employer’s market.

Well, if revolution is not a dinner party (per the Little Red Book), it’s also not a job interview. Anyone can head out to throw Molotov cocktails, but a serious person understands not only why he’s doing it, but also what the potential consequences are.

William Ayers was very lucky, and not just because he was young in less surveilled times. If COINTELPRO hadn’t been so incompetent, he might be sitting in prison right now.

Mir:

I’ve seen an interesting point made… in oppressor/oppressed relationships, the oppressor is the one who grants the right to be angry.

White men are allowed to be angry over affirmative action, but black men aren’t allowed to be angry about discrimination.

Accusations of rape are *much* more damaging than actual rape.

And yes, gay folks aren’t allowed to be angry, to take prop 8 personally.

You’re right. To a lot of people, the people who are part of the tacit-oppressors, any reaction *will* be too much. And I think that folks should realize that, when they are warning people not to show real anger, real passion, that they are part of the tacit-oppressors.

Boomer kids could protest secure in the knowledge that there would be a place for them when they stopped throwing things

I would take issue with that.  Subjectively at the time there was no such security, certainly not while J Edgar Hoover was alive (died in ‘72).  Turned out there was, but that’s in retrospect.  There was security, at least temporarily, in the 2-S draft classification (student deferment).

I will simply assume it is an attack on the general quality of the protesters that have taken over the movement (mostly A.N.S.W.E.R. people, who like all Stalinists generally limit all their action to taking over leadership of social movements as a recruitment tool)

In the context of this discussion, that assumption is somewhat correct. As an opportunistic Stalinist org, ANSWER’s main focus is, as you observe, power. But in the process of claiming all those other causes in the name of “solidarity,” they lost message discipline at the 2003 demonstrations. “Free Mumia” was one of a number of hobbyhorse causes that took the focus from where it belonged during that protest: ending the war.

Who killed more innocent people: Ayers or McCain?  Do we even know?

Ayers killed no one, although the Weather Underground itself was responsible for one death, not including its own members/associates.  But, IIRC, McCain participated in very few bombing runs, and I believe the bombing run he was on when he was shot down and captured was one of the first, if not the first.  McCain was an ineffectual, reckless pilot and it took a long time for him to convince anyone to give him any responsibility.

LongHairedWeirdo:

I am not convinced that you’re correct.  It is difficult to reconcile, on one hand, the fact that most of the 60s radicals are now established and secure members of the larger community, and, on the other hand, the fact that kids coming out of college now are being blackballed because of silly pictures on Facebook.

Seeker, I think you were responding to me.  I didn’t agree with anything LHW said just above my last.

The part I disagreed with was the idea that those who engaged in relatively radical actions did not have a subjective feeling that all would be forgiven in the end.  It was assumed there was surveillance and any serious actions would likely be recorded somewhere.  As it turned out most stuff done was done by so many it didn’t matter.  But there was no sense of security at the time, rather a sense that lines might well be crossed. That sense of insecurity might have kept many from “throwing things” and limited their activities to more mundane forms of civil disobedience and protest.  Dohrn after all took quite awhile to come back in as herself and she’s still not a member of any state bar as a lawyer.

It is a little odd that Ayers become the poster child for BO’s “terrorist pal” and not Dohrn, come to think of it. 

I dont’ mean to be quarrelsome with you.  I usually track right with you.

Umm, seeker, the fact that some people 40 years after the fact are doing well does not mean they were not blackballed back then. How do you know there will be any long term consequences for current radicals (and where do you get the idea that the ‘60s radicals didn’t suffer consequences)?

“Free Mumia” was one of a number of hobbyhorse causes that took the focus from where it belonged during that protest: ending the war.

I want to make sure I’m getting your message straight.

You are claiming that if there had been more message discipline (less ‘Free Mumia’ signs), that the protest movement could have ended, or maybe even stopped, the Iraq war?

And I thought some of the utopians who claim the label ‘anarchist’ were naive.

I dare say message discipline is the least of the problems the anti-war movement had. The biggest being that it was not really serious about ending the war, in that it limited its actions to indirect whining to political leaders that had a vested interest in doing war, instead of actual steps to make the war economically or tactically unfeasible (the type of actions which would be deemed seditious or even traitorous by any militarist State). It seems to my mind that for many activists, it is more important to show that they are against the war (a sort of moral disengagement) through protests than to actually oppose it *in actions*. Like, say, kicking recruiters off campus, laying down on train tracks where supplies are being transported (like they did in Ireland), and in general throwing a spanner in the works of the war machine, the General Strike being the ultimate expression of that strategy (though clearly unfeasible in the reactionary United States).

MiddleagedLiberal: Sorry on the misnomer to you and LHW; my bad.

MiddleageLiberal and John L: I amicably and respectfully disagree.  (God it’s nice to do that.  Some of the other threads of late have gone real ugly, so thanks.)

I think we can examine the actions and expectations of consequences of such 60s radicals both subjectively (which the two of you so accurately note, and on which I do not disagree) and objectively: their privileged place within a privileged generation and the lack of durable consequences of their actions.  One of the most valuable lessons that feminism and African-American writing has taught me is the awareness that just because I may be blissfully unaware that privilege operates in my favour [and, given that I’m white, male, Canadian and educated, it does] does not mean that privilege isn’t there.  Just because these folks subjectively thought that they might end up in stir for twenty years doesn’t negate the fact that as boomers they have landed very much on their privileged feet:  Ayers is a professor , Dorhn’s a professor , Klonsky is a retired professor, Rudd is a retired college instructor of mathematics, Bobby Seale is a professor .......  (I think that’s enough for now.)

My point is rather more simple: a student who came through college in the 80s or 90s or now hasn’t got a tapdancing multicoloured, singing snowball’s chance in hell of landing as smoothly in the academia as these folks have.  Period.  Ever.  Even the most minor transgression means that you would be winnowed out at the first review of applications in this demanding marketplace.  (Hell, you might not even make it into graduate school to get the credentials which will be rejected!)  I note that nobody has challenged me on that pretty much inarguable fact.  It’s hell getting into and staying in and getting tenure in academia today.  These folks, by way of comparison, glided right in like so many of their generation.

I’m not advocating that people with their contentious pasts be blackballed.  Far from it.  I’m making the far narrower point that they have, in the long run, not suffered anywhere near the economic and employment consequences that a student of subsequent generations would have done—or would do now—for far, far lesser transgressions.

Face it: as a general economical and workplace rule (and thus not without exceptions) being a boomer means being born on third compared to the generations which have come after you and the student radicals of the 1960s are excellent examples of this rule.  Whether they or we are aware of that own privilege or whether they think they hit a triple is simply a matter of subjective perception of that objective fact.

Yeah, and like I said, using your enemies (and when protesting a war, the government is the established enemy), using them instead of your higher angels as a benchmark breeds paranoia and other problems.  It feels fair, but fair isn’t always effective.

As a support for your point (and, of course, working against my own stance on this debate), I recommend reading up on Parihaka.

JohnL:  Just so I don’t seem to evade your questions:

“How do you know there will be any long term consequences for current radicals[?]”
I don’t, and lay no such claim.  I’m talking about the Now.  I’ve seen university applications boards at work, for student slots, for academic positions and for support positions.  I can tell you right now the chances of getting somebody with a criminal record past them is slim.  Not impossible, but very slim; the circular file is used freely and often for anybody who has any glitch whatsoever in the perfection of their CVs.  YMMV, so please feel free to provide examples to the contrary.

and where do you get the idea that the ‘60s radicals didn’t suffer consequences?
Again, please feel free to provide examples to the contrary.  My own admittedly limited and wiki-based check reveals that pretty much everybody who wanted to go “legit” suffered no durable obstacles.  Many stayed active in opposition and social justice politics, but that seems to be out of deep commitment to those ideals rather than for reasons of external obstacles.

You are claiming that if there had been more message discipline (less ‘Free Mumia’ signs), that the protest movement could have ended, or maybe even stopped, the Iraq war

No, I’m claiming it they would’ve been a lot more effective in getting the message out to non-activist Americans (via a reluctant MSM) that all those tens of thousands of people were there for one main reason: their opposition to the war. That’s the sole purpose of a street demo in 21st century America.

Whatever your opinion of that form of protest, that’s what they chose, and that’s the particular failure I’m critiquing. You want to see an effective street demo, look at the immigration reform marches of 2006—they stayed on message and got legislative results.

Seeker, it may seem like a fine point since we agree on the subjective perception part, but I’ll pursue it a little further.  I stayed on the peaceful disobedience side of the fence on stuff back then, being dragged off and arrested for sitting in the street being the most serious.  But those of us who went that far and more had a serious belief that we didn’t care if the larger society or some theoretical club wouldn’t accept us, we wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the machine (We were more like fine grains of sand, but that’s a different discussion.) and fuck the consequences to our personal futures.

Guess what, a certain amount of self-confident risk taking is useful in the world.  The same drive that pushed some people to do more than their peers to change the world helped them become reasonably successful.  The fact that inherited privilege also had something to do with it (except for your odd inclusion of Bobby Seale in that privileged class) is a little beside the point.  There are millions of similarly privileged kids in college now who will be competing for a smaller pool of jobs for the next several years.  Gumption is maybe something that will help them distinguish themselves from their likewise privileged companions or maybe distinguish the non-privileged go getter from the the privileged lump.

There are a lot of very interesting, thought-provoking comments on this thread, starting with a well-written post. I guess that is because considering whether violence is ever a morally acceptable choice tends to force people to think in uncommonly deep ways. Good job, folks.

MaL:  Thanks for things to ponder.  The risk-taking element simply never occurred to me and it is an important part of success.

I guess my point lies in a genuine concern for the kids coming up now.  They have one-tenth the opportunities and ten times the hurdles.  I wonder what some kid feels when (s)he sees profs who have job security despite the fact that they used to blow shit up! and (s)he can’t even get an interview for a postgrad TA position because of some drunken grope shot on Facebook.  When you combine that with an often overbearing, self-satisfied boomer metaculture which seems to feel that nobody did anything worthwhile after 1972 it gets a bit wearying.  That whole “born on third” thing springs to mind.  It’s not denigration of the sixties generation’s worthier efforts to say that they had safety nets and do-overs that kids today can only wistfully dream of.

Since I’ve got one kid in his last year of college and one just a few years out (still employed thankfully) I know what you mean.  The current employer voyeurism of Facebook data mining is an unfortunate present-day reality.  When kids ask why do the employers care, the answer is pretty weak.  The problem with grope and other hijink pictures is not so much that employers won’t tolerate an employee doing “naughty” things on their own time. The worry is that to memorialize the hijinks on a public forum for the world to see may be an indicator of a lack of discretion that could carry over to the workplace. 

In the current economy the only job security is in tenured faculty positions, as long as that lasts. 

I don’t mean to glorify all that went on.  I really was just picking a nit.  A lot of it was self-indulgent, self-congratulatory and useless b.s. particularly when I came along which was after the truly dangerous pioneering stuff. One of the things that Bill Clinton pissed me off about was not reigning in his self-indulgent side.

I didn’t see it as nit-picking, I saw it as discussion.

The “discretion” rationale from an employer troubles me, too, not least because we are at a generational crossroads on how privacy is defined and exercised.  You and I (it seems we are roughly the same age) have children who are entirely generationally typical in that they don’t draw the line between private conduct and publicized conduct in the same manner as previous generations did.  To have goofy, embarrassing pictures of themselves scattered all over cyberspace is no weirder to them than, say, appearing on a security camera is to us. 

I’m also not sure that Facebook etc. is a valid winnowing tool.  It puts me in mind of how the LSATs were once explained to me by a Prof: They could, (he said) take all the applications out in a high wind, throw them in the air and accept only those ones which landed in a painted circle.  They obviously can’t get away with this so they come up with something almost as pointless and lacking in evaluative worth.  Maybe he was right.

I have mixed feelings on tenure.  On the one hand we need protect academic freedom.  On the other hand it has allowed privileged, long-established profs to sit on their fat asses at the apex and draw the lion’s share of salary and benefits with the minimum amount of work while hordes of grossly undercompensated TAs, sessionals and the like do all the heavy lifting (and, no doubt, frequently watch in resentful, don’t-risk-your-chances silence as their work is appropriated by those aristos at the top).  I’ve seen some friends who do sessional work struggle like mad, and sometimes in dark humour feel that they should just get around some prof’s tenure the same way that Stalin dealt with Red Army seniority problems.

Oh, and blogs.  Blogs being held against candidates really frost me.  Blogs are often a midway point between the blogger writing in his/her own voice and writing “in character” using the first person singular.  It’s not purely fiction, in the way that, say, a novelist or short story writer writes fiction.  But it often ain’t autobiographical, either.  The content might be all real but the what and how content is presented?  That’s often often an exercise in alter ego and it wouldn’t be fair to treat that as the “real voice” of the candidate any more than Poopsie Tribble was the real voice of the Canadian Ambassador’s wife back in the 1980s Washington Post.