How Columbia Protest Ends
How Columbia Protest Ends
With the greenlight of Columbia President Minouche Shafik and her administration, NYPD has entered Hind Hall through the windows and begun to mass arrest students inside. Let this be remembered as Columbia and Shafik’s legacy: one of mobilizing the violence and terror of the state against their own students and faculty, solely to prevent an end to Columbia’s complicity in a genocide.
They took Occupy in the night, too. Coordinated strike on the remaining camps. It always comes down to the government’s monopoly on violence.
The Panthers were right. Revolutionaries should be armed.
The Panthers were right. Revolutionaries should be armed.
If I recall correctly, the tenet was that every movement needs a non-violent faction and a radicalized faction. The non-violent faction is the carrot to the radicalized faction's stick. A comparison might be labor unions: unions are supposed to be a reasonable compromise to managers not getting dragged out of their houses and beaten to death in the middle of the night (or assassinated in other ways). See: Renault CEO Georges Besse.
Unfortunately, so many pro-citizen, pro-labor movements have been overrun by the "strictly non-violence!" mindset and thereby defanged. Additionally, we're the labor, for fuck's sake! We could absolutely hit every oligarch and politician right where it hurts, yet here we are.
Everyone remembers either MLK or Malcolm X, but both were needed for the success of the civil rights movement.
However, the steady escalation from peace is good. When it eventually gets to violence, people can point back and go, "We tried peace, they kicked our faces in. They started the escalation, we're just responding in kind"
Fuck this
Columbia University's Shafik, the Neoliberal https://www.salon.com/2024/04/28/columbia-crisis-another-massive-failure-of-liberalism/
"If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of “neoliberalism” for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse. Shafik holds an economics PhD from Oxford and a résumé of high-ranking positions at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, three institutions that have been instrumental in driving developing nations into unsustainable debt in pursuit of a disastrously failed model of progress. She came to Columbia after six years of pushing fiscal austerity as director of the London School of Economics, where just last spring she helped defeat a student/faculty strike, reportedly by slashing salary payments and lowering graduation requirements to hustle student protesters out the door."
I think they're still going strong at McGill.
The protesters should have been armed so that they could repel this.
I don't know why this is downvoted. I guess people just have believed the neoliberal lie that peaceful protest accomplish anything. Things get accomplished when there's violence. The reason you aren't all locked onto an assembly line in a factory somewhere from age of 8 to 80 is because your ancestors had guns and fought. It wasn't peaceful. There was a war we fought.
I read the stats on how little America students care about the Gaza conflict but then you look at lemmy and every post is about these small protests.
The islamic/tankie propaganda teams are working hard on this.
I really have not noticed that it is Islamic/tankie people per your words, but rather just everyday people who hate to see others getting killed be it Jewish people or Palestinians. I know I fall into that camp and just wish for the violence to stop. If you read the comment history of most here, there is no evidence of the types you claim outside of a small %. You have to look to know.
Maybe, just maybe, the stats you read saying nobody gives a shit, were completely fucking wrong. 👍
So perhaps you care little about the Gaza conflict, why are you calling out other people for caring? I suppose less people should care because, 'islamic'? Your 'stats' are doubtful, the impact the protests have had is greater than it's been for many, many decades.
People who talk about 'stats' all the time forget, or very well know, that statistics is both art and science. Often the realm of self-serving or misguided intellectuals or marketing depts. This is not some science experiment.
I recommend watching the documentary "Fog of War", and pay attention to Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
NYPD going in through the windows is much better than a bunch of protestors breaking down the doors and locking themselves in there.
This protest is not a thing that matters. No one will remember this in a year, probably less than that. Because you can't just break random rules as a protest. You have to break the specific rule that is unjust. This building is not the center of Israeli government or the IDF.
If these students went downtown to the Holocaust museum and held up signs saying "Gaza is a modern Holocaust", that would work better. They could protest outside the Israeli Consulate too. It would also be more efficient to just call a bunch of representatives and senators every day. Get 100 students to spend one hour making calls per day and you can tie up the Congressional switchboard. Do that for a month and you will get a response.
These students are mainly protesting to feel good about themselves. They are taking the easiest and coolest route. Actually organizing for change is tougher than just occupying your own school. It's your school, you aren't taking it from anyone.
These protests have a list of specific demands, especially a demand to divest Columbia's money from arms manufacturers supplying the genocide. Do not infantilize this. It is an organized maneuver with a specific goal.
Columbia was founded by slavery money. Most Ivy League schools are. They weren't clean before and divesting from arms manufacturers is not going to make them clean.
Did these students care about that when they enrolled? No, they were all excited to go to a "good school" to get a high paying job. They don't care about the investments. This is just a thing to do.
They are protesting the University’s investments in Israel…..
I'd like to present this piece of
evidence: MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail! In particular, I believe this section is most relevant: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.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
I have been trying to verbalise this for a while. Thank you for this comment, it's a perfect explanation and precisely encapsulates how I feel about these protests.
I agree with their intention, but they're not actually helping their cause.
Breaking and entering has never been a form of protest that's acceptable. At this point the protest has just devolved into doing everything they can to get arrested like that.
No they just want to be cool and have control over some part of their lives. Like we all do. I completely understand but it's not an effective way to protest.
Breaking and entering can easily be a good form of protest but it matters where you break into. The Jewish dude who broke into an American Nazi meeting in Madison Square Garden was a great protester.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden