Essay: THE DANGER OF PLAYING AT REVOLUTION

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UP against the wall!" The slogan, usually in combination with a few supplementary obscenities, has become the battle cry of the U.S. protest movement—or at least a sizable part of it. The words express a temper of growing violence, brutality and authoritarianism among protesters. Sometimes in the exultation of a demonstration, sometimes in recoil from police clubs, sometimes out of sheer gall, protesters cry out for "revolution" as the only solution to the nation's ills. Those who urge revolution and sanction violence remain a minority, but they are influential beyond their numbers on the campus, to a lesser extent in the ghetto, and in print.

The problem is not protest as such. In some ways, it can be considered encouraging that more and more young Americans refuse to accept any disparity between U.S. ideals and U.S. realities. There is something gallant about a generation that questions a doubtful war, racial injustice, poverty amid plenty and ecological destruction. But the danger is that the reckless invocations of revolution and violence will defeat the very reforms that the most thoughtful of the protesters desire.

To some extent, the tone has been set by the black radicals. Speaking for the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael announced: "We believe in violence. I am using all the money I can raise to buy arms. It is now necessary to attack police stations and kill policemen." Despite such outbursts, there are some signs that other black leaders are developing a greater sense of reality about what can be accomplished through violence of word or deed; certainly the ghetto riots have been cooled. But a sense of reality is distinctly missing in many of the student protesters, for whom hate-filled tirades have become commonplace. At a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society in Princeton, N.J., a representative from Rutgers expressed the apocalyptic mood: "I'm a nihilist. I'm proud of it, proud of it! I want to—this goddam country. Destroy it! No hope, not in 50 years. Tactics? It's too late. Let's break what we can. Make as many answer as we can. Tear them apart."

Assault on Liberalism

It may be only rhetoric, but such rhetoric can have corrosive and hypnotic powers of its own. At its core is not merely hate but a vision of power. During an antiwar demonstration in Washington, New Left Historian Staughton Lynd had an almost mystical vision of mob rule: "It seemed that the great mass of people would simply flow on through and over the marble building, that had some been shot or arrested, nothing could have stopped that crowd from taking possession of its Government. Perhaps next time we should keep going."