The Student Movement for Palestine
Tonight is the night of the ram and the truncheon. The arm swinging it wears a Democratic Party armband. Push just a little against the ruling class, and they will band together in a slavering mass of ghouls and devils. We see you; the students and the workers see you.
To the conciliators: you have your choice. Stand with the people or with their enemy. To the ruling class: you have overplayed your hand. Tonight you have shown the students and workers of the cities your contempt, and treated them like the colonies and semi-colonies.
Look to Washington, and see them for what they are: the craven and cringing lackeys of wealthy masters. Look beyond their charade at the skin-and-bone; they are wearing your blood as rubies, they are slurping the marrow of your kin.
But what will their ram bring them? Their truncheon? Their armored trucks and towers? Tonight these cronies give birth to the future red brigades who will prepare on earth the hell that does not wait for them in another world – the hell they so rightly deserve.
Together, we will walk through the inferno to destroy them. They, the parasites who feast on our flesh and delight in our misery; who grow gravid with the wine of our suffering, will know fire, as we will know fire. And when we are done, the world will be the better for burning.
All it takes is a single spark – a single spark to start a prairie fire. They have struck the spark. The fire is burning. It will race beyond their control. The old wood will burn, the ancient groves will be cleared away, and the sun will shine again on a new forest.
The time is coming when we will bring their feast – the feast of two centuries! – to an end. We will drive the ghouls down into the dark corridors of history. Children will grow with only faerie stories of the monstrous exploiters. They will grow knowing them only as myth.
But when those children ask “where were you when the fire was struck” and “where were you when the fire raged,” you will look back and know that you took part. You will be able to say with sorrow and joy, “I was one who helped make this new world, for you.”
On the night of April 30 going into the morning of the first of May, May Day, the New York City police department piled into armored trucks and troop carriers. They went armed with batons and truncheons, with ladders, towers, and rams, to Columbia and CUNY, intent on shattering the resistance to the regime’s war on Palestine. In the nighted hours, before the rising of the sun, it became clear that the war is not the zionist war on Palestine, but the U.S. war. The representatives of imperial law and order stood together and declared with one voice, Democrat and Republican, from the mayor of New York City, the Democrat Eric Adams, to the trumpets of the White House and the Biden regime, that they are the unabashed servants of monopoly capitalism. Together all forces of “order” are lackeys of a single master: U.S. imperialist capital.
At the same time, across the country, UCLA’s encampment suffered attacks by paramilitary zionists: gas canisters, bricks, and lit fireworks were hurled into the camp, sending twelve student-radicals to the hospital. As we would expect, the police in LA stood back and permitted this brutal attack on the camp. Despite the violence, when the sun rose on May Day, the encampment had survived. The UCLA camp holds their ground.
Hours before the troops arrived at Columbia and CUNY, the student encampment at Brown was broken by the cowardice and capitulation of its leading committees, who chose to protect themselves rather than their mission, and broadcast an order to disband after the Brown made them empty promises of hearings on divestment…in October.
It is clear that this concerted effort on the camps was coordinated by a central strategy. We can see the hand of the White House behind the stooped pawns in blue. It is no mystery that Biden’s regime moves the pieces, even while Biden himself sipped warm milk and geriatric vitamin supplements peacefully in his cushioned bed.
In New York City, the NYPD closed off four blocks surrounding the Columbia campus. They marched in columns of armored officers, supported by a fleet of combat vehicles and jail buses, sometimes forcing patrol cars through crowds of students and workers, to approach the gates of the campus. In a crowning irony, student journalists were corralled and penned in Pulitzer Hall so they could not report on the brutality the NYPD were about to unleash on the defenders at Columbia.
Bringing up their siege towers, the NYPD forced entry to the defenders’ fortress at Hind (Hamilton) Hall, smashing through the windows and plowing into the defenders ranks. All told, some hundred or more students and workers at the encampment were arrested and shunted into prison buses to be transported to the city’s decaying prisons and lockups. The members of the encampment, with a high degree of political awareness, knew that despite the raid, they had won. Unlike the cowardly or duped leadership at Brown, they accepted nothing from the university, made no self-destructive bargain. Although they were ultimately arrested, the movement itself is in-tact and they can soon begin their work anew.
The Night of the Ram has shattered the domestic quiet of the empire. Crises are coming at an accelerating rate: between Ferguson and the 2020 June Uprising, eight years passed. Between the June Uprising and the 2024 Student Revolt, a mere four years have elapsed. We will see these crises come faster, with greater effect, and with ever-escalating crackdowns from the parties of law and order.
The bourgeois politicians in the form of the centrist and even the “progressive” Democrats have revealed themselves to the people as mere lickspittles for imperialist capital. They have let loose the dogs of war on their own people, treated the workers and students the very same way they treat the semi- and neo-colonies abroad. Cesaire’s thesis — the barbarization of the homefront with the savagery of the colonial front — has been proven true, even in the eyes of workers unaffected by the student movement.
Moreover, the Night of the Ram will inevitably produce hundreds of new radicals. From the wreckage of Hind Hall there will come the future red brigades, the theorists and armed battalions that will overthrow this unjust society which has, for too long, deserved annihilation. The days of capital are numbered, and the parties of law and order should tremble. The children of the revolution have raised their cry: I was, I am, I will be!
