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.
You're not wrong, but if they had been armed, there would be more dead people in this story.
Maybe. It's also possible that the administration would have negotiated a settlement with the protestors to avoid escalation.
Seems like escalation is all that the higher ups know how to do these days.
If they ever descalate they may find themselves living in the system they created and whoa-ho do I kinda get why they’re so goddamn afraid of that. If only they hadn’t made it so awful down here.
Meaningful change is written in blood.
Perhaps, but sometimes bloodshed is just tragic and does not change anything meaningful.
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"