Student violent protesters “serve as the militant wing of the establishment”

Kevin DeAnna, a member of Youth for Western Civilization which hosted Tom Tancredo at last night’s disrupted event at UNC, has a brief article at Taki’s Magazine, including videos of the violent actions by the “protesters.” His description of them as “the militant wing of the establishment” is chilling. Indeed, why did Chancellor Thorp initially do nothing but express his “disappointment” about the “student” violence, and even in his second statement fail to condemn the “students” as they deserve to be condemned? And why did President Bollinger of Columbia do essentially nothing against the violent “students” who stopped Jim Gilchrist’s speech a couple of years ago? Is it not because the “students” are but the militant wing of the same program to destroy our civilization that the entire liberal elite of the West, including elite university presidents, support? It would appear that, just as there is no such thing as moderate Islam, there is no such thing as moderate liberalism.

DeAnna writes:

I’ll have some more on this, but I want to pay tribute to our members at the University of North Carolina and Elon who attended last night as well as our other active and start up chapters who have been working hard this semester. These kids put up with left wing reporters looking to smear them, professors and administrators condemning them and threatening to ban them, and the threat (and reality) of left wing violence from the thugs who serve as the militant wing of the establishment. Especially if you are a bit older, you simply can not imagine how bad it is. So far, with almost no training or assistance, and with YWC building off almost no foundation, we’ve attracted some of the smartest, most dedicated, and certainly the gutsiest young people in the country. These are college kids who are standing up to violent mobs screaming “we know where you sleep!” and talking about the crucial issues of our time in the most hostile environment imaginable.

I could not be more proud of all of them.

- end of initial entry -

Gintas writes:

They’re the Red Guards, they are.

From Wikipedia:

Red Guards were armed groups of workers formed in the time frame of the Russian Revolution of 1917. They were the main strike force of the Bolsheviks.

April 16

Ken Hechtman writes:

Student violent protesters “serve as the militant wing of the establishment”?

They would laugh out loud if they heard you say that.

They’re No One Is Illegal, the anarchist open-borders group I used to work with a few years ago.

This is how they describe themselves:

No One Is Illegal in Montreal comes together in a context where the policies of the Canadian state increasingly aim to consolidate “Fortress North America” using free trade to open borders to capital, while exploiting the people whose free movement is restricted. We reject the racist “War on Terror” and its domestic manifestations in various laws, policies and agreements.

No One Is Illegal acts to expose and educate against injustice from an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal, anti-authoritarian and a queer positive perspective, while asserting a vision for open borders and social and economic justice. We work to combat racial profiling, detentions, deportations, police and state brutality, wage slavery and all forms of indignity. We respect a diversity of mutually reinforcing tactics, including popular education and direct action.

LA replies:

Without any ill will, I say that this is a classic example of how you miss the forest for the trees, or, alternatively, of how you affably try to pull the wool over my eyes. Did you really think I would fall for this? Your e-mail is like saying that because China and USSR had tensions, or because China and Vietnam got into a war, or because Vietnam and Cambodia got into a war, that the Communist threat was not real. There are always differences, but that doesn’t take away the commonalities.

The left and business elites want open borders. The crazies of “No One is Illegal” want open borders even more, they want it so much that they regard the pro-open borders left and business elites as fascists supporting “Fortress North America.” The left and business elites on one side and “No One is an Illegal” on the other are advancing the same purpose. which is also your purpose, the destruction of Western society through the blending of all societies in a single world order. Yes, the business interests envision this as a single world under the power of business; the anarchists envision it as a single world under an all providing state (their anarchism is only directed at the existing order, not at the communist order they want to create). Though different, they share the same goal of tearing down all distinctions and reducing mankind to a single lump.

Again, did you really think I would fall for this?

Ken Hechtman replies:

The differences between the business elite and the anarchists don’t matter to you. I understand that. I even have enough perspective to understand why not. But they matter very much to the anarchists, so much so that *they* will never understand why the differences don’t matter to you.

I’m not expecting you to fall for anything. I’m making a factual observation—these people will never understand why you described them the way you did and they would laugh out loud if they ever heard it. Don’t read anything more into it than that.

And another thing, “purpose” is too strong a word to describe the anarchists and destroying the West. It’s definitely too strong for the business elite. In both cases, it’s a side effect of their (diametrically opposed) economic goals.

April 17

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Ken Hechtman is a good sport to deal with the torrent of criticism he gets at VFR, but allow me to add a few remarks if I may. In a thread some time ago about liberal intolerance he wrote that “We [liberals] are the culture now,” and that they would have to find some way of being as tolerant as they expected non-liberals to be. There’s so much one could say in response, and the comment really stuck with me. One is moved to ask him what planet he’s living on that he believes that option is still before liberals, as though left-wing repression and thuggery were simply a hypothetical that had to be guarded against, rather than a present and ever-more-ubiquitous reality.

But his latest comment, that of course militant brick-throwers and corporate suits are not part of the same establishment, really calls for a reply. He claims on the one hand that liberals are the establishment, that the culture is in their hands, and yet also that the corporate powers that be are not part of this establishment. [LA replies: excellent catch.] How could that be possible? He holds, as many liberals do, to the gratifying notion that they’re better represented by the little guy, the street radical, the student speaking truth to power, etc. But at the same time he realizes that liberals are completely dominant in the key institutions of society. Thus he says that “we are the culture,” but must also for the sake of liberals’ ongoing war against the West make the parallel admission that the current world order is oppressive, requiring an ever-renewed revolt against any tattered vestige of civilization. Question: If liberals are the culture, and if they really are in the driver’s seat, is Hechtman willing to lay the blame for society’s culturally degraded and increasingly violent state at the feet of liberals?

Mr. Hechtman needs to admit to himself that when he says liberals are in the driver’s seat now, he’s right, and that when sub-literate leftist thugs assault men like Tancredo, they are doing the establishment’s dirty work. And maybe that’s what’s really going on here—if I was a leftist, and I saw the increasingly violent and repressive nature of liberalism unopposed, the last place I’d want to be seen as residing would be “in the driver’s seat.” After all, the left’s war on the establishment is never-ending, so admitting that you’re really in the driver’s seat only puts you in the brick-throwers’ cross hairs (see: Revolutions, French and Bolshevik).

LA replies:

In Ken Hechtman’s reply to me posted just above Mr. McLaughlin’s comment, he says that business and the anarchists have very different intentions from their respective points of view. That’s a fair statement. But (1) it doesn’t meet my point that from conservatives’ point of view, both anarchists and business have agendas that are destructive of traditional society; and (2) Mr. Hechtman also needs to meet Mr. McLaughlin’s telling point as well. Since, as Mr. Hechtman has victoriously informed us several times (for example, during the debate on Bristol Palin last September), the revolution has occurred and liberals are now in charge of the culture, and since the corporate business establishment is certainly in charge of a good deal of the culture, is it not the case that business is liberal and part of the liberal revolution, not conservative, and therefore that the conflict between anarchists and the business establishment is not a conflict between radicals and conservatives but a conflict between radicals and liberals? There will always be radicals who see liberals as conservatives and fascists, is that not true? And is it not also true that despite the disagreements between radicals and liberals, radicals and liberals are nevertheless both against traditional society?

Ken Hechtman replies:

“But (1) it doesn’t meet my point that from conservatives’ point of view, both anarchists and business have agendas that are destructive of traditional society … ”

Conceded.

“And is it not also true that despite the disagreements between radicals and liberals, radicals and liberals are nevertheless both against traditional society?”

Again, the one-dimension left-right metaphor confuses more than it explains here. Business is liberal about some things and conservative about other things. It just works out that the one thing it’s most liberal about is the one thing you care most about (open borders). On the other hand, the one thing it’s most conservative about (economics) is the one thing the anarchists care most about.

LA replies:

But it’s not just open borders. Remember, you said in September during the Palin debate that the life-style revolution had won, because even Republicans now think that mothers of small children should work full time and that out of wedlock pregnancy was not a big deal and so on.

And the left-right distinction does apply. Liberalism/leftism, notwithstanding its varieties, breaks down traditional bonds and customs in the interests of equal freedom for all. Globalizing corporations seek that end by reducing all members of society including natives, immigrants, Christians, Muslims, mothers with small children, to identical integers in the global market place. Anarchists seek it through global socialism, which would reduce all members of society to identical integers in a global-socialist, multicultural, sharia-inclusive, homosexual-marriage, incestuous marriage, group-marriage, Ken Hechtman paradise.

Borderless global marketplace and borderless Ken Hechtman paradise seem very different to their respective advocates, and objectively are different; but they are both clearly on the liberal/left side of the spectrum and opposed to conservatism/traditionalism.

The left right distinction remains deeply meaningful and valid, and people who would dispense with it would deliver us into a conceptual fog in which it would become impossible to identify, criticize, and oppose the left. Which is why it is ALWAYS people on the left who say that the left-right distinction is invalid. It is NEVER people on the right who say it.

Shannon H. writes:

Regarding the mob veto of Tom Tancredo’s speech:

You and Hechtman are overthinking this. The loud mouthed, brick throwing brats at UNC are not really idealistic, angry, frustrated young dreamers of a utopian future with “equality for all,” or some such hooey.

It’s merely, the Students for a Democratic Society organization provides a great place to meet chicks, and the “Agitators and Protestors” just wanted the fun of screaming, throwing things and being naughty. Which is the real reason they’d be puzzled or laugh in your face if you called them, to their faces, the militant arm of the Establishment.

They are just tools and don’t know it.

LA replies:

I’m chuckling at your reinterpretation of Ken Hechtman’s angle.

Ken Hechtman replies:

I didn’t say it’s invalid. Anybody who does, as you have rightly pointed out, is selling something. I am in no way trying to dispense with it. We have to call ourselves something.

But the model is limiting. It’s a map. It’s not the territory. It simplifies the discussion of a complicated process by abstracting away some true things that generally don’t matter. But when those things do matter, like now, we need a more detailed map. That doesn’t mean throwing away the 1-D scale. That means figuring out what we need to add to it.

My own first-order map is still the traditional one-dimensional left-right spectrum. It has served us well since before the French Revolution and it still works for most things.

My second-order map is much the same as the Libertarians’. I put race, sex and culture on one axis, economics on the other.

I define the scales in terms of “equality” where they define them in terms of “freedom.” That leaves the “social” axis more-or-less intact but it reverses the “economic” axis. Social freedom and social equality are similar though not identical. Economic freedom and economic equality are polar opposites.

But as this conversation illustrates, even the 2-D model has its limitations. It assumes everyone rates both axes at equal importance. That’s clearly not true.

I have not yet seen or been smart enough to derive anything I can use as a third-order map. Douglas St. Clair Smith (Ivan Stang) has one that uses neophilia-neophobia (love of new things/fear of new things) as a third axis but I don’t really find that that adds anything of value.

Adela G. writes:

Sage McLaughlin writes: “Ken Hechtman is a good sport to deal with the torrent of criticism he gets at VFR.”

He could hardly be otherwise since his presence here is strictly voluntary. Frankly, I’d characterize him as more of an instigator than a good sport. Indeed, he has yet to persuade me that he’s here for any reason other than the amusement he gets from baiting traditionalists with his chipper announcements of how his side has already won.

LA replies:

Also, he doesn’t really get a torrent of criticism, but is treated decently and respectfully. As to what his motive is for posting here, who knows? Maybe he simply enjoys the conversation. Or maybe, as you say, it’s something darker … playing with the prey before eating it… or maybe he secretly regrets the brave new world the left has created and likes talking to a remnant of non-lifetist humanity, as a sort of anthropological curiosity.

Whatever the reason is, one thing I’m fairly sure of: he does not regard us as his fellow creatures.

LA continues:

I say this because the things Ken Hechtman says he wants—the elimination of national borders, the total Third-Worldization and Islamization of Western societies, with Muslim polygamy installed, with sharia recognized, along with his radical sexual rights agenda including not only the legalization of homosexual “marriage” but the legalization of incestuous marriage and group marriage—shows that he desires to destroy the countries of the West as recognizable societies. Logically, then, he must regard any people who are attached to the historic Western countries as obstacles to his “Brotherhood of Man” and as expendable, even though he may enjoy talking to us as curiosities and remnants of a rapidly disappearing world that he wants to see disappear.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 15, 2009 06:51 PM | Send