Against the Stupor of Privilege: "We Must March, My Darlings"
For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger...
- Walt Whitman
in memory of Todd Gitlin
On October 21st in 1967, tens of thousands of Americans arrived in Washington, DC to put their bodies on the line to protest the war in Vietnam. By then the war had been going on for twelve years, leaving over 11,000 dead on the US side, with 140,000 casualties among the North Vietnamese. Numbers are numbing, but they are also telling. The stories they tell underscore the meaning of asymmetrical war, of human ruthlessness, and of human determination.
The protests which erupted across American campuses after Israel unleashed its assault on Gaza, in reprisal for Hamas' slaughter of over 1200 Israelis on October 7th, were met with a harsher response from administrators than any I remember since the days of Vietnam. Returning to campuses this fall, many students and faculty discovered procrustean restrictions imposed on future protests. In some cases, these were prohibited entirely; in others, areas designated for protests were fenced off in such lightly trafficked corners of the campus as to render them practically invisible. Protestors might as well have gathered in their own living rooms. Many would-be protestors were further intimidated by threats of arrest and expulsion--consequences serious enough to give any young person pause. This past week, Harvard administrators took the extraordinary step of suspending 25 faculty members from entering Widener, the university's main library, after they conducted a silent "study-in" protest against the ongoing killing. According to the article in The Harvard Crimson, a student-run newspaper, "the decision to suspend professors from a library for protesting appears to be unprecedented."
In May of 1971, many of us watched on television as tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators again descended on Washington with the expressed intention of disrupting the operations of the federal government. "If the Government won't stop the war, we'll stop the government," was their battle cry. The nation had been witnessing the effects of our bombs on Vietnamese civilians for years--what human with a conscience could ignore the images of maimed and bloodied children, night after night?
Those protests led to the largest mass arrests in US history. By the end of the week, some 12,000 protestors had been swept up. The justice department filed charges against several of the organizers, including Abbie Hoffman and "Rennie" Davis. In the end, only 79 of the 12,000 were prosecuted. According to organizer and historian LA. Kauffman, the event contributed toward hastening the end of the Vietnam war while pioneering "a new model of organizing that would shape movement after movement in the decades to come."
Everyone understood that the goal of the protest was to disrupt "business as usual." The disruption created an inconvenience, which was hardly comparable to what was being experienced by a population on the receiving end of our napalm. It is far too easy for us in the United States, thousands of miles from where American-made munitions are used to shred not only buildings, but also the bodies of expectant mothers. Power, my friend of Oksana Zabuzhko once noted, "is the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful."
In my junior year of high school, in the fall of 1970, I wrote a paper on the history of student dissent in the US, beginning with the religious feud between "Old Light" and "New Light" believers at Yale in 1741, all the way up to the killing of four students, and the wounding of nine, by the National Guard at Kent state that every spring. For some reason (shoddy research, no doubt) the paper did not include the story of the first recorded student protest, the so-called Butter Rebellion at Harvard.
In 1766, students, disgusted by the poor quality of the butter fed them by the college, made their displeasure known by taking a cannon and blowing out the gate to Harvard Yard. Their leader in the protest, Asa Dunbar, issued an ultimatum, insisting the school offer its charges "butter that stinketh not." Asa Dunbar, incidentally, was Henry David Thoreau's grandfather.
Since the start of this current war, and not counting the casualties in Lebanon, the death toll has mounted: some 1700 Israelis have been killed; over 43,000 Gazan and Palestinian people have been killed, the majority of them children and women. Translating these figures into what I call American numbers--something I began doing in my Agni columns during the first Iraq War in 1990 by pro-rating for a population of 300+ million--an equivalent number of American dead on the Palestinian side would equal roughly six million souls.
That students today, witnessing the industrial slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents (along with an untold number of committed militants) by the IDF, under the stewardship of a mass-murderer named Netanyahu, establish largely peaceful encampments on university campuses is a moving reminder of the abiding existence of conscience among some members of their generation.
I grew up attending protest marches. Whenever another Ukrainian dissident was jailed, whenever another was murdered, the community would rally in front of the Soviet Embassy or the UN building in New York, chanting and holding up signs. These gatherings, rarely consisting of more than a couple of hundred people, may not by themselves have torn down the Iron Curtain, but they nevertheless played their part. They signaled solidarity with those under siege in the old country, while showing an American audience that there was more to the story of the "Soviet Union" than most popular media were letting on. I never really enjoyed the marches, but my pleasure was beside the point.
Despite some distracting slogans, which protest organizers might reconsider, student restraint stands in stark contrast to the barely controlled hysteria of administrators, university presidents, trustees, and now library administrators. That the elders' radical response is cloaked in anodyne language about the importance of creating a safe space for students to continue with business-as-usual shows just how out of touch with the real world our "leaders" have grown.
Instead of acknowledging the horrific reality inspiring the protestors to inconvenience themselves and their classmates--a reality that includes, among countless unspeakable acts, the murder of thousands of children, dozens of aid workers, and more journalists than during any other conflict in history--instead of praising students for their civic engagement, administrators papered over the cause of student dissent with bland concerns about disruptions. By inviting a militarized police force to clear away the protestors, administrators showed students the ugly face of power--though I suppose the lesson is not without value.
The real question is why more students aren't joining in. Vietnam divided my family, as it did many American households. I'd expected my parents' experience of World War II would have rendered them either principled pacifists or, at the very least, resistant to state terrorism against a civilian population. An ardent anti-communist ideology, however, blinded them to what was then commonly referred to by government officials as "collateral damage": the murder of nearly two million civilians. Our arguments were bitter but necessary.
And what do we imagine will be the fate of the thousands of orphans the war on Gaza has created? How will the millions of displaced weather the coming winter? These are the urgent questions I'd like to see our university administrators, as well as our students, and indeed, the rest of us contemplating at this moment.
Because this is appearing on the cusp of perhaps the most consequential election in my lifetime (I'm not ready to agree that it's the most important in the nation's history), I'll add that those considering "punishing" Biden and Harris' for failing to stop Netanyahu by withholding their vote are taking an enormous risk. Should Trump return to office, the punishment will be felt most acutely by the people of Gaza, Ukraine, and the twelve million refugees our felonious candidate is threatening to deport. It will be felt by many others as well. And that suffering will weigh heavily on those who let it happen. Elect Harris and Walz, then press the case. The declaration of a cease-fire will mark only the beginning of a healing process which will take decades, even generations--as I know too well from what I have seen in my family of Ukrainian refugees.
In 2003, Todd Gitlin, one of the most storied activists of the generation preceding mine, with whom I had the privilege of working in the last two years of his life on building up an organization called Writers for Democratic Action, published a little book titled "letters to a young activist." Rereading it today, I'm struck by the optimistic note Todd strikes: "Human rights, interdependence, sustainable development--these watchwords have become cliches because the principles and claims are inescapable....there are international courts...international police powers...the growth of institutions such as the Hague human rights courts." We have backslid considerably since Todd wrote those words two decades ago. Why that's happened is a story for another time. Now is the moment to regroup and move forward again.
Askold Melnyczuk has published five books of fiction. His first novel, What Is Told, was the first commercially published novel in English to bring to light the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. He guest edited a special issue of Irish Pages on The War in Europe available here on November 1st. His first collection of poetry, The Venus of Odesa, will be out from Mad Hat in the spring of 2025. A selection of essays and reviews, The Dangerous Tongue: Why Literature Matters More Than Ever, will be out from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2026.