Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.

So the Borg were right, Resistance IS futile…

‘every action of destruction and sabotage seems to me a manifestation of class solidarity…. Nor does the pain of my adversary affect me: proletarian justice has the productive force of self-affirmation and the faculty of logical conviction.’

Le Carre’s Absolute Friends starts off in late 60s Berlin (well actually Pakistan but it moves to Berlin quickly).

The scene is a hive of activist squatters who’re slowly cleaving between the violent and the non-violent.

The depiction of those violent is interesting. Unsurprisingly they are dogmatic, motivated by hostility to their upper-middle class background and contemptuous of anyone who thinks for themselves or adopts nuanced viewpoints.

These are the people the follow Ulrike Meinhoff who says it all here:

Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.

This absolutist mentality can crop up anywhere, in any ideological setting. Ayn Rand was famously contemptuous of moderation. She thought it more moral to be an outright Communist.

But then you must wonder about someone who preaches individual liberty and then dictates her disciples’ musical tastes for them.

Disciples? That says it all too.

The essay appeared in this book
It is “Freedom, Liberty, and Rights: Three Cautionary Tales” by Aryeh Neier of the Open Society Institute. The book is a reaction to the use of agit-prop by the Bush administration. I’m not certain what Neier’s personal politics are. He’s a refugee from the Nazis and’s spent his life fighting for rights, civility, the rule of law.

His essay criticized the use of ‘rights’ both by patriotic scoundrels and fuzzy feel good rent-a-crowd types.

Haven’t read the whole book yet. But the few bits I have were good.

That is true civility – and an extraordinary contrast with Antonio Negri’s statement – a mere year after Moro’s killing – that ‘every action of destruction and sabotage seems to me a manifestation of class solidarity…. Nor does the pain of my adversary affect me: proletarian justice has the productive force of self-affirmation and the faculty of logical conviction.’

It’s like certain types of positive liberty – if your state enacts laws designed to produce more of certain ‘positive’ liberties (I’m thinking here of laws designed to protect group rights), it can have a particularly deleterious effect on negative liberty.

Yeah and because people don’t understand what is meant by ‘rights’ they conjur up all sorts of ‘rights’ without thinking of the consequences. If we have a ‘right’ to something the government is obliged to see we have it.
.
As Bob Hawke said viz HECS: There’s no such thing as free education: the question is who pays for it..
.
There was an excellent essay (by a leftist) on this problem; I’ll see if I can dig it up.

protesters of the 1960s were barbarians.

The 1960s was Rousseauian and Romantic – ie the youth culture as a whole tried to strip down civilization’s veneer a little bit. Can’t say I blame ‘em after 5 decades of war and slump it’s possible that the Establishment could use an airing out.

The political movements in various countries (particularly Italy, France, Germany and Japan – funny that) tended to anti-social violence. The Red Brigades and such as Meinhoff testify to where this ended up.

Of course it wasn’t like Conventional Society was exactly ‘liberal’ in dealing with the more reasonable aspects of the 1960s social watershed either. The FBI, for example, seemed to resemble the Gestapo more than a democratic police force in those days.

Of course it could’ve been worse. Better to be a hippie getting conked in Chicago then be a hippie in Prague ’bout the same time.
.
And also: Prague hippies were probably much better company than the Chicago variety. The grooming, the culture and the conversation would’ve been of an altogether higher standard.

Even Stigler qualifies his comments with ‘the more radical of the rebelling students’. There are idiots in every large group (and group IQ in a large lump of people milling about outside in the hot sun probably drops 20 points too).

This is a diversion from the main point, however – no reasonable person is going to argue against police powers being used against violent individuals or groups. Kelling and Wilson (and by extension the ASBO and Iemma’s silly law) deal with ‘annoyance’ and ‘inconvenience’, ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ and using the police to attempt to ameliorate peoples’ feelings about the area they live in or the places where they congregate.

“The more radical of the rebelling students of the late 1960s were barbarians: They were prepared to suppress free speech and other traditional liberal values with violence in order to advance their intransigent demands”.