Let your life be a counter friction to stop the genocide machine
Looking to Thoreau for the moral clarity needed to evaluate the actions of students protesting the genocide in Gaza
The New York Times, yesterday:
Thousands of miles away from the campus protests that have divided Americans, some displaced Palestinians are expressing solidarity with the antiwar demonstrators and gratitude for their efforts.
Messages of support were written on some tents in the southern city of Rafah, where roughly a million displaced people have sought shelter from the Israeli bombardment and ground fighting that Gazan health officials say have killed more than 34,000 people.
“Thank you, American universities,” read one message captured on video by the Reuters news agency. “Thank you, students in solidarity with Gaza your message has reached” us, read another nearby.
Tensions have risen at campuses across the United States, with police in riot gear arresting dozens of people at Columbia University on Tuesday night and officers across the country clashing with pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had erected encampments and seized academic buildings at other institutions. The protesters have been calling for universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel, and some have vowed not to back down.
US President Joe Biden, today:
Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations — none of this is a peaceful protest.
Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law.
Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.
Look, it’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.
Henry David Thoreau, 1849:
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. … Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
…
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth,—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, and it’s doing so with weapons and billions of dollars provided by the United States. The brave students who are protesting this unimaginable evil represent the best our country has to offer. The cops arresting these students — and the president using his uniquely influential platform to lie about them — represent the absolute worst.
Last week, student protesters were attacked by police here in Massachusetts. After students set up an encampment in an alley near Emerson College, Boston cops threw them to the ground, arrested them, and left their blood on the pavement, as GBH reported. The cops were acting on the orders of Mayor Michelle Wu, a phony “progressive” who claimed that the violence meted out by the cops was necessary for public safety.
“We welcome and uphold and respect the right to peacefully protest in public spaces in our city. The issue was with fire hazards from the tents and the public health and safety risks that encampments, and tents in particular, pose in the city,” Wu said.
These deeply cynical people — from mayors to the president — will lie to our faces. They will call peaceful protests violent. They will tell us that actual violence perpetrated by the police is “public safety.” They will tell us that “disorder” is when people use nonviolent direct action to disrupt business as usual, and “order” is when our government uses tax dollars that could fund badly neeeded housing and healthcare to instead blow up children in Middle East.
In his classic essay about civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
He was writing about slavery and the Mexican-American war, but his sentiment is evergreen.
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South,” he wrote, “but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.”
His words apply to university administrators who would rather call the cops to brutalize their students than stop making money off of a genocide. They apply to liberal mayors who oblige those administrators because their vision of “public safety” is not based on justice, which is necessary for true safety. And they apply to all the everyday people making excuses for why these kids had it coming.
“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine,” Thoreau wrote.
These students are using their lives as a counter friction to stop the genocide machine this country’s leaders are intent on running. Yes, they’re setting up tents on lawns and in alleys. Yes, they’re locking themselves inside university buildings. Yes, they’re disrupting things.
But who cares? What’s a little disruption when the alternative is genocide?
These students are facing down the might of the American police state to help people on the other side of the world who they will never meet. They are righteous. Their cause is just. That’s why so many of their detractors are complaining about their methods instead of engaging with the substance of what they are saying.
“[T]he state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses,” Thoreau wrote. “It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
Thanks for reading. As always, please subscribe. I’m not going to do my usual begging for money this time — go do something about the genocide in Gaza instead. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
Also, please check out my story about the Elliott Chambers fire and the James Carver case if you haven’t yet.
That’s all for now.
Thank you Andrew.