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I was by nature the mildest and least courageous of young men. And yet, in April 1968, I well remember standing with two friends on the Boston Common, amid a large demonstration of young people, and turning in my draft card to protest America's brutal and bloody war in Vietnam about which I had been feeling increasingly outraged (as so many students today are by Israel's nightmarish set of crimes in Gaza). I then returned to my apartment and promptly wrote a letter turning down a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship for which I had previously applied to study the Chinese language and history. In that moment, fearing I would be called up and sent to Vietnam, I had no idea whether I would end up in Canada, in jail, or indeed in the U.S. military. It was my striking luck that five women, who called themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks, would later break into my draft board and destroy many of its 1-A files, including my own.
From that moment on, I was mobilized into a version of antiwar activism, like so many students horrified by the nightmare in Gaza today. In some strange fashion, the horror of that all-American war (and set of war crimes in a distant land) would quite literally change my life -- I was then a graduate student in Chinese history -- and turn me into an activist. So, I remember well how the feeling of needing to do something -- anything! -- can drive you into another world. That's a reality (or perhaps I mean a surreality) so many of the students now getting arrested across this country are undoubtedly experiencing in a distinctly up-close-and-personal fashion.
Today, TomDispatch regular William Hartung, a leading expert on the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex, considers his own years of student activism in the context of what's happening now. He reminds us of just how a gut sense of what's right and truly wrong on this planet of ours can mobilize us, whether we ever meant to be mobilized or not. Tom
Reflections on Student Activism
And the Struggle for a Better World
I've spent most of my life as an advocate for a more peaceful world. In recent years, I've been focused on promoting diplomacy over war and exposing the role of giant weapons companies like Lockheed Martin and its allies in Congress and at the Pentagon as they push for a "military-first" foreign policy. I've worked at an alphabet soup of think tanks: the Council on Economic Priorities(CEP), the World Policy Institute (WPI), the New America Foundation, the Center for International Policy (CIP), and my current institutional home, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI).
Most of what I've done in my career is firmly rooted in my college experience. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy at Columbia University, class of 1978, and my time there prepared me for my current work -- just not in the way one might expect. I took some relevant courses like Seymour Melman's class on America's permanent war economy and Marcia Wright's on the history of the colonization of South Africa. But my most important training came outside the classroom, as a student activist.
Student Activism: Columbia in the 1970s
As I look at the surge of student organizing aimed at stopping the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, I'm reminded that participation in such movements can have a long-term impact, personally as well as politically, one that reaches far beyond the struggle of the moment. In my case, the values and skills I learned in movements like the divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s formed the foundation of virtually everything I've done since.
I was not an obvious candidate to become a student radical. I grew up in Lake View, New York, a rock-ribbed Republican suburb of Buffalo. My dad was a Goldwater Republican, so committed that we even had that Republican senator's "merch" prominently displayed in our house. (The funniest of those artifacts: a can of "Gold Water," a sickly sweet variation on ginger ale.)
Although I fit in well enough for a while, by the time I was a teenager my goal had become all too straightforward: get out of my hometown as soon as possible. My escape route: Columbia University, where I expected to join a vibrant, progressive student movement.
Unfortunately, when I got there in 1973, the activist surge of the anti-Vietnam War era had almost totally subsided. By my sophomore year, though, things started to pick up. The September 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chile's Salvador Allende and the ongoing repression of the Black population in apartheid South Africa had sparked a new round of student activism.
My first foray into politics in college was joining the Columbia University Committee for Human Rights in Chile. It started out as a strictly student organization, but our activities took on greater meaning and our commitment intensified when we befriended a group of Chilean exiles who had moved into our neighborhood on New York's Upper West Side.
In 1974, I also took time off to work in the New York branch of the United Farm Workers' boycott of non-union grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wine. I ran a picket line in front of the Daitch Shopwell supermarket at 110th and Broadway in Manhattan. One of my regulars on that picket line was an older gentleman named Jim Peck. It took a while before I learned that he had been a central figure in the Freedom Rides in the South during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He had first been arrested for civil rights organizing in 1947 in Durham, North Carolina, alongside the legendary Bayard Rustin. He and his fellow activists, black and white, went on to ride buses together across the South to press the case for the integration of interstate transportation. On a number of occasions, they would be brutally beaten by white mobs. In my own brief career as a student activist, I faced no such risks, but Jim's history of commitment and courage inspired me.
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