Revolutionary Vengeance
2024's protesters are the heirs to 1968
The general thesis of Christopher Rufo’s new book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, has proven to be a correct one: Americans are reliving the year 1968. Nowhere is this clearer than witnessing the ongoing protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza. Just as the timing of Hamas’ attack on Israeli soil was eerily apt - on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War - the Columbia protests of 2024 occurred exactly 56 years after the protests of 1968. And, just as Hamilton Hall was occupied by the students of ‘68, it was again occupied in 2024.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” so said the prophet of Ecclesiastes. “what has been will be again.” (1:9) The protesters of 1968, just like their present-day counterparts, were voicing their opposition against a war abroad - Vietnam was their battleground. The year before, an activist affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) named Bob Feldman claimed to have discovered documents linking the Columbia administration with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a think-tank associated with the Department of Defense. According to Feldman:
At Columbia SDS’s general assembly meeting a day or two later, I summarized my IDA research for the rank-and-file members who had shown up for the meeting, and someone nominated me for a Columbia SDS steering committee position. I was elected to the steering committee and was re-elected the following year. Were it not for my discovery of Columbia’s IDA ties, I would not have been elected to the Columbia SDS steering committee.
Vietnam had been a controversial front-page news item in America in the years leading up to 1968. The Tet Offensive (or Tổng Tiến công Mậu Thân in Vietnamese historiography), which began at the early hours of January 31st that year, shook the US military establishment to its core. Although it was not a military success for the North Vietnamese, it was a political one - American support for the war began to decline, and young radicals elsewhere had their fill of outrage. Within the Columbia campus, their anger was directed at the university administration for their alleged ties to the American war machine.
Gaza, in place of Vietnam in 2024, has become the location of choice for campus performative anger. The Palestinian flag has replaced the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) flags as a banner of “solidarity”. But the nature of the protests remains the same - outrage was aimed at a foreign war deemed unjust, the American empire, and its perceived client state of Israel.
But the protesters of ‘68 had a domestic source of anger as well. On April 4th of that year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while visiting Memphis, Tennessee. With the great minister’s tireless quest for racial equality and reconciliation came to a abrupt halt, cities across America became fuel for the fire of racial division. In Columbia, allegations were made that the university’s proposed gymnasium project in Morningside Park was going to be segregated - some students would label it ‘Gym Crow’. So the foreign war was entangled with the domestic unrest, as protester outrage against the war in Vietnam was mixed in with the anger against alleged institutional racism.
Fast-forward to 2024, when the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have also been entangled with the causes of Black Lives Matter. In the American-staged grand drama of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Zionists play the whole of the white oppressor, and the beleaguered Palestinians the black oppressed. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), then, has a role similar to American white policemen, and the Palestinians that of the unarmed black civilians. The infamous slogan ‘Globalize the Intifada’, becomes removed from a regional context to a cry against perceived oppression across the world.
In a note of irony, Columbia students occupied campus facilities to protest the alleged occupation of Gaza Strip (which Israel unilaterally disengaged in 2005). The real occupation is that of fashionable ideas upon the minds of the young Ivy Leaguers. In 1968, such ideas were those of the New Left, Black Power, and women’s liberation. Today, they are associated with the phrases ‘anti-racism’, ‘critical race theory’, ‘social justice’, ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)’, among others. The radical philosophy associated with Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon were just as alien to the Vietnamese historical context as that of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo to those of the Israelis and Palestinians. If colonialization represents the imposition of Western culture to non-Western peoples, then the student protesters of 1968 and 2024 are participants in the same ideological project as the imperial entity they claim to loathe.
Inevitably, the politics of race tainted the objective of both protests. In 1968, the SDS was protesting the allegedly segregated gymnasium project alongside the Student Afro-Society (SAS), when the predominantly-black latter group asked the predominantly-white former to leave Hamilton Hall, which both groups had been occupying the day prior. This opened up a gulf of separation between the white and black members of the protest, as the groups’ common agenda fell apart along racial lines. In 2024, just as James Baldwin foresaw, the anti-white politics of the pro-Palestinian protesters neatly translated into antisemitism, as Columbia’s Jewish students and faculty members have been targeted for harassment. A favorite among supporters of the Palestinian cause is the chant ‘From the River to the Sea’, a slogan used by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Hamas to indicate the expulsion and displacement of Jews across the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The slogan’s blatantly anti-semitic connotation is unfortunately lost on the pro-Palestinian camp in the Western world. However, it serves as an indication of what the student campers of Columbia want all along - vengeance, thinly veiled as ‘justice’. It was the case in 1968, and it is still the case at present.
"The real occupation is that of fashionable ideas upon the minds of the young Ivy Leaguers." - that pretty much sums it up!