Honoring their anger

Campus unrest and the beginning of the end of history

From my brief and, at times, painful stint at the United Nations, I only remember the corridors of the Secretariat building. If you take the time, which I only did when I had visitors, you can see the post-war optimism in all the gifts adorning its walls. Member countries had genuine hope in the hangover that followed WWII. Since then, the Secretariat has been perpetually stuck between elation and despair. Its bureaucrats like to tell you otherwise, but idealists never lasted long there. The place crushes your soul.

The UN peaked with the 1949 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States, in particular, seemed almost immediately to find a perverse pleasure in undermining what it had built. It culminated in 2019 when some reality TV star President created the Commission on Unalienable Rights stacked with obscurantists. His administration tasked them to “modernize” the UDHR which was getting a little too often in the way of the country’s interests. We were now in a full-blown “post-human rights world” - a message that wasn’t lost on Hamas, Netanyahu, Putin, or Museveni. They all crawled from under their rocks to test the new order. Like alcoholics and a drink, history always walks away or toward the Stone Ages.

Of course, 1949 was not our only moment of clarity. During our brief time on Earth, other civilizations tried more harmonious ways of living, alternative economic systems, and healthier ways of making decisions.

Photo: Columbia University, courtesy of E. Muller

Dismissing the fire on American campuses as a misreading of the situation in Gaza is akin to reducing BLM in 2020 to the murder of George Floyd, MeToo in 2017 to Weinstein abuses, or Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to Lehman Brothers’ greed. You might disagree with the tone, but you must listen to the message. All these uprisings are part of growing generational anger at the cruelty of what we claim to be the “best” economic, political, and geopolitical system. A rejection of the American delusion that a Christian God decided how resources would be shared, elections would be funded, the order would be maintained, international conflicts would be solved, or bodily autonomy would be limited. When really, all of it remained negotiable.  

This anger has been flaring up at an increasing pace as we stubbornly charge ahead with more corruption, more inequalities, more consumerism, and more destruction: a vicious cycle of greed, dominance, trauma, and then more trauma.  

The French Revolution was never about Marie-Antoinette and her farm, as Americans love to think. It did not even start in 1789 but over a hundred years, beginning under the reign of Louis XIV. Revolutions have this strange way of brewing slowly, with increasingly frequent revolts, until severed heads start rolling on the pavement.

It’s hard not to see what motivated the Biden people’s swift and disproportionate response to the campus demonstrations: disorder is not a good look in an election year. This is already a cynical assessment in itself. And for billionaire university donors to openly assert their right to control what is to be said on campus - well, because they have the money - is even more telling. The appearance of the system's stability matters to Biden's entourage, which has already started dividing the power and business opportunities a second mandate will bring; it matters less and less to anybody else.

It is a reciprocal feeling. I asked a Democrat operative if they were concerned with the impact on the elections, and he candidly responded, "We are concerned about the black vote; young people don't vote.”

Photo: Columbia University, courtesy of E. Muller

The Biden camp’s delusion that it could address campus unrest by sending the police stems from our generation’s contempt for the next one as “lazy” when it opts out of our insane brand of capitalism, as “naïve” when it refuses the idea that genocides are inevitable, as “snowflakes” when it challenges the norms we are the most attached to. Democrats might signal they understand, but rather than embracing change, they are trying to channel it in a way that does not affect the fundamentals: elite capture, resource control, and the rigged political game.

It reminds me of my grandfather, who allegedly watched the 1968 demonstrations from his Avenue Bugeaud balcony, repeating, “Ah les cons!”.

I, too, don’t know anybody who is 20. I am not sure how that happened; it crept on me. It feels like only yesterday I did not know anybody who wasn’t in their twenties. It is one of life’s many mysteries. Generations briefly share a habitat but never a world. And then, they get swept away and replaced by other estranged overlapping generations until their time on earth, too, joins the great lump of history.

I love history—the forensic art of piecing together not events but the long-forgotten human emotions that surrounded them. Our suffering—the human condition—in history's great rearview mirror is always more palatable. It almost makes sense as a “passage obligé” because you find long-forgotten famines, poverty, and wars wherever you look. But looking at history this way is already an act of defeat, the hallmark of a disappearing generation.

The campus anger and Biden’s misguided and disproportionate response continue the end of history. That is the silver lining to a horrendous year.

Photo: Columbia University, Courtesy of E. Muller