The Left is now attacking the Tea Party movement as being violent. The only thing violent in that movement is my anger at this charge. How dare the Left, steeped in a long bloody record of violence, make this claim?
The public’s memory may be short, but mine isn’t. I remember the 60s. I personally witnessed the violence at Columbia in 1968, including the burning of the life’s research notes of a moderate history professor, Orest A. Ranum. I remember the bombings of Bank of America branches, for the sin of being capitalist bankers. I recall the leftist students at Cornell marching around campus with rifles in their hands.
I saved an article from New York Magazine from about 1970, by Gail Sheey, “Bombing on the Mind.” Here is an excerpt:
[Quoting one Leftist identified only as “Marc”]: “There are literally hundreds of people living around this university [Columbia] who don’t show up for rallies,” Marc says. “They have spread a lot of explosives around the city. They all relate very strongly to BOOM. I do myself.”
With false cool I borrow one of Marc’s Camels. “What about the people in the buildings? They were cleared about before IBM, Mobil Oil and General telephone were bombed, but can people count on a courtesy call before every explosion?”
Marc rips a silver coil off his Camel pack.
“I’m not sure the kind of people who work in those buildings shouldn’t be blown away too.” . . .
“There are people here willing to do their part . . . It may be an abortive revolution but it’s inevitable and its going to be violent.
And that means the possibility of dying. Many people I talk to now tell me they can accept their own death.”
[Quoting another Leftist, “Patty”]: “Bombings,” Patty believes, “hit the system where it shows. Everybody can see its regard for property over people.”
You say: Oh, but that was a long time ago, and now people know better.
On December 11, 1994, the august Editorial Board of the NY Times published an editorial entitled, “In Praise of the Counterculture.” You get the idea from the title, but here’s some excerpts:
“Now, in an excess of Republican triumphalism, the party’s new leaders have decided to make ‘counterculture’ into a pejorative.
What flapdoodle. Only a few periods in American history have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom [!] and creativity [!] . . .
“The 60’s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual’s responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption. . . . The counterculture, in sum, produced a renewal of the Thoreauvian ideal of the clear, defiant voice of the dissenting citizen [with a bomb in his hand].”
And what about Obama’s friend, Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground? On the day of 9/11, the NY Times published an interview with Ayers in which he refused to repent of their bombings. (I also remember the 5-story Greenwich Village brownstone which blew into rubble when Weathermen mishandled the explosives they were brewing in the building’s basement.)
But we don’t have to go all the way back to 2001: what is the Left’s attitude toward the monumental, unremitting terrorism of the Islamists and Palestinians? The Left’s outrage goes not against them, but against the Tea Partyers, for using such words as “crosshairs.”
I don’t like the current use of the word “hypocrisy,” because it is too relativistic. And this latest exercise of a double standard in regard to who is violent goes way beyond anything that could be called “hypocrisy.”
