‘We Have a Mass Movement of Young People Advancing Horrifying Ideas’

In 1968, Paul Berman was a freshman at Columbia University and a central organizer of the protests that convulsed that university and then spread to other campuses across the country and around the world. He was part of the group that seized Hamilton Hall; he occupied the office of Columbia’s president, Grayson L. Kirk; he was arrested — though not beaten, as many others were — by the police. “The uprising of 1968 receded into the past, and, even so, the embers went on smoldering,” Berman wrote in the foreword to a collection of remembrances of those events, A Time to Stir, published by Columbia University Press in 2018.

Berman, who has taught at Columbia, New York University, Princeton, and the University of California at Irvine, went on to become one of the most astute chroniclers of the ’68 generation. In two books — A Tale of Two Utopias (1996) and Power and the Idealists (2005) — he traced those smoldering embers around the world and through the decades, showing how the insurrectionary spirit of ’68, in time, morphed into political movements both laudatory (gay rights, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia) and deplorable (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Weather Underground). Berman has aptly been described in The New York Times as “not only an alumnus of the rebellion” but “the keeper of its yearbook and its funeral director.”

As a new campus protest movement exploded at Columbia and elsewhere, I wondered what Berman made of recent developments. I reached him at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been awash in comparisons to the events of ’68, especially at Columbia. Is that a clarifying lens to understand what’s happening now?

I don’t know if the comparisons are clarifying, but they’re unavoidable. The ’68 uprising at Columbia set the model for what a student uprising should be: occupying buildings, making demands, beginning with amnesty for oneself, and that sort of thing. It also set a model for student uprisings to be grandiose — for students to think of their protests as world events and to make demands regarding the entire world. In all those ways, Columbia ’68 set the model. It’s not an accident that the students took over Hamilton Hall.

What about the role of the faculty — in ’68 and now?

The instinct of a university is to think that riots or protests can be dealt with by instituting some sort of internal reform that will make the university more democratic. That happened in ’68. I thought at the time and continue to think that all of that stuff is completely irrelevant. They were the fantasies of university administrators about how to respond to protests. We’re going through the same thing today. Universities are consumed in a debate about how to solve the main problem that these uprisings have revealed, and we’re told that the main problem is a lack of civility on campus. Administrators want to re-establish civility, to foster civil discourse. But I don’t think that’s the main problem. The problem is larger than that.

Let’s talk about that larger problem. In The Washington Post, you described your reaction to the current protests as twofold: First, amusement, even pride as a former campus protest leader. But then your amusement and pride gave way to something darker.

This is the horror. The students — many of them on campus and all their supporters off campus — describe the protests as a humanitarian uprising to save lives in Gaza and to advance the rights of Palestinians on the West Bank. All of that is commendable. But I don’t think that’s actually at the heart of the uprisings. The heart of the uprising is to oppose the existence of Israel. And this to me is audible in the most famous chants: “From the River to the Sea” and “Globalize the Intifada.” Those slogans are horrifying. People will say that the chants are calls for the human rights of Palestinians. And people will say that in chanting those slogans that’s what they mean. But this is an example of bad faith.

Bad faith is when you don’t like the truth so you lie about it. Then you lie about having lied about it. You might even convince yourself that in lying about lying you’re not lying. That’s bad faith. It’s a twisted consciousness. We’re seeing a mass movement for a twisted consciousness.

The real meaning of the “river to the sea” is that the state of Israel should not exist, that 50 percent of the world’s population of Jews should be rendered stateless. And the real meaning of “globalize the intifada” is that there should be a globalization of the events that introduced the word “intifada” to the world, namely the intifada of circa 2001, which was a mass movement to commit random acts of murderous terror. But people don’t want to acknowledge that. They get red in the face denying that’s the case. But they can’t explain why the students want to chant these things. The students want to chant these things, of course, because these slogans are transgressive. But no one wants to say what the transgression is because it’s too horrible. So we’re having a mass euphemism event: Horrible things are being advocated by people who deny that they’re advocating it.

I blame the professors for this, not the students. I know from personal experience that students can be uninformed. But the professors have created a climate in which this stuff can go on. The professors for the most part don’t use these slogans. But they find ways to defend them. So I see a tremendous intellectual crisis.

So you don’t think most of the students chanting those slogans necessarily know they’re advancing terrible ideas? They’ve managed to fool themselves into thinking otherwise?

Yes, but you don’t fool yourself totally. Some part of you knows. My student movement was quite similar. Students for a Democratic Society was a complicated thing. It was a social-democratic organization, yet people began to advocate ideas that were basically communist. I was not a communist. I was not for a communist dictatorship in Vietnam or Cambodia. But what would we chant sometimes? “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” We were chanting for communist victory. I was consciously not for that, but I was chanting for that. So I was acting in bad faith, and so were a lot of other students.

Your 2010 book The Flight of the Intellectuals is an indictment of the way some Western academics and journalists are unable or unwilling to see clearly what’s in front of their faces. Do you see echoes of that tendency at work on campuses?

Yes. It’s very difficult for people with liberal ideas to recognize the extreme and frightening views that are actually upheld by totalitarian movements. In Hamas we have radical Islamists who’ve shown us in real life what they’re actually for by acting on their principles. And there’s an inability or reluctance to see that. So we have a mass movement in defense of Hamas that calls itself a mass movement in defense of human rights. It’s a blindness, but within the blindness is a seduction and a fascination. That’s evident in the transgressive thrill students feel in chanting those chants.

Imagine that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, calls you today and asks for advice.

I would advocate pardoning the students because they’re not really responsible for what’s happened. The professors are responsible. And I’d make clear that, within the universities, the very bad thing that’s happened isn’t that university life has been disrupted. The very bad thing that’s happened is that we have a mass movement of young people advancing horrifying ideas.