At least one of the organizers of Columbia’s recent anti-war are event is not happy that the media has focused largely on Nicholas De Genova’s comments that “the only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military” and that De Genova hoped to see “a million Mogadishus.”
Daniel Drezner has a quote from Columbia University undergraduate Leigh Johnson saying,
It is curious to me that only his speech was picked up by the press. Keep in mind that there were 30 some speakers, who covered various topics and political positions over the course of 6 hours. But somehow, the remaining remarks hardly raised an eyebrow.
This should go down in the annals of logic as the Trent Lott defense — why did the media focus on poor Trent’s brief defense of segregation when there were plenty of other speakers at that birthday party they could have focused on. Life is so unfair!
Of course anti-war activists saying they oppose the war or Republicans saying they’re glad that Strom Thurmond enjoyed yet another birthday party are hardly news. Calling for millions of U.S. combat deaths or fondly remember segregation are.
Johnson goes on to describe the real importance of the event,
I think we have to resist every attempt of pro-war and conservative reactionaries to turn what De Genova said into an indictment of the anti-war cause, and we have to instead shift the debate to his constitutional right to say those things.
Hmmm . . . Again, I wonder if Johnson would have agreed with someone who made the same defense of Lott,
I think we have to resist every attempt of left wing and liberal reactionaries to turn what Trent Lott said into an indictment of the Republican cause, and we have to instead shift the debate to his constitutional right to say those things.
Somehow I doubt it. Of course people have a constitutional right to wish for millions of dead American soldiers as they have a right to wistfully reminisce over segregation. But don’t expect to hold on to your job for very long in either case.
This illustrates one of the biggest problems that the Left has had in organizing its anti-war protests. Much of the Left has adopted a version of freedom of speech which implies there is censorship not only when government formally forbids certain speech, but also where certain speech is unpopular enough that it lacks a forum.
One of the problems with this is that Leftists then have a lot of difficulty turning away even the nuttiest viewpoints. Rather than limit the topics and purpose of the anti-war movement to actually stopping a war, it quickly expands to every mainstream and marginal left-liberal cause under the sun. This is very reaffirming for the dedicated left-liberal, but makes it extremely difficult for the anti-war movement to reach beyond the usual suspects who are going to show up for the weekly rally anyway.