Kep quotes Daniel Ellsberg on the stop-the-inauguration list:
From Daniel Ellsberg’s “Secrets: A memoir of the Vietnam War and
the Pentagon Papers”pg. 336
“… The big event on that campus, just before our talks, had been the burning of the ROTC building. In the question period a student referred to this, with much applause and cheering from the audience, and asked me challengingly what I thought of it. The implication was that my questioner had taken part in the burning, though he didn’t say that, and it was clear that it had been a popular act among the students. ” I said that I had been trained in the Marine Corps to do violence and that I had seen a lot of it in Vietnam. Its effectiveness, which was ultimately its justification, wasn’t just a hypothetical question for me. I had had a good deal of experience on which to judge that, and I was no longer so impressed with it, and I knew much more about how it could go wrong than when I had been a marine. I very well understood, and shared, the frustration of the students at their inability to stop the war. But it seemed to have a lot in common with the frustration of the troops in Vietnam, who were the same age as the students in this audience, at their inability to win the war. And the response I had seen in Vietnam was very similar. As I spoke, the memory seemed very fresh to me, as if I had just come back, though three years of war had passed since I’d returned from Vietnam. I told them of the soldiers in Rach Kien, burning down every hut they came to, for no real reason than to leave some mark that they had passed that way, that they were not just plowing the sea. It was understandable, but it didn’t really help anything, it didn’t change the situation. “It was very American, I said, to think that to be willing to use violence was to show seriousness and to be effective, but that was not what I’d learned in Vietnam. I said I could see that many people in the audience felt proud of what had just happened on their campus but that I couldn’t tell them I believe that burning down ROTC buildings would be any more productive for ending the war than burning down villages in Vietnam. It would take commitment, and courage, and tenacity to end this war, not the imitation of the government’s own destructive tactics. “
I think that this is a very good perspective, and articulates the reasonable concerns for violence as political dissent. I think if there are concerns, they should lie in these arguments and not from peoples prejudices about black-clad anarchists.