Today's history lesson from dad to sons: Robert Bork, Ted Kennedy, and the coercion of the ugly and deplorable: the son responds

In response to my email, my son sent me a link to this article without any further elaboration.

I responded to him.

Son,

I assume that what you mean to say by sending me this link is that when the state is killing people unjustly (or allowing people to be killed unjustly), then the people (for example, the protesters in Berkeley) are justified in destroying property to protest and fight back against the state. To quote from your article:

One cannot discuss the immorality of damaging property without devaluing the rage that brought protesters to this point. You, too, have to decide which one you value more: human life or property. As Vinz so eloquently says in the film La Haine, when rage spills into the streets after a brutal police beating left a young man from the ghetto on life support: “A homeboy’s dying; fuck your car.”

Of course, why should those fighting against murderous injustice stop with the destruction of property? Thomas Jefferson famously said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." On the other hand, it must be noted that it is not a very long step from this kind of thinking to the worst excesses of the French and Russian Revolutions, which also started out as movements to overthrow tyranny and injustice, but devolved into nightmarish reigns of terror, where all who did not "think correctly" were guillotined or shot in the head. For example, I am reminded of the exchange between Zhivago and the correct-thinking Red rebel leader Strelnikov. Strelnikov has destroyed an innocent village as an example to reactionary Whites:

Strelnikov: The private life is dead - for a man with any manhood.
Zhivago: I saw some of your 'manhood' on the way at a place called Minsk.
Strelnikov: They were selling horses to the Whites.
Zhivago: It seems you've burnt the wrong village.
Strelnikov: They always say that, and what does it matter? A village betrays us, a village is burned. The point's made.
Zhivago: Your point, their village.

In other words: if the movement so requires, fuck your village.

All that said, I find myself forced to acknowledge the validity of the point you make, Son, namely, that there are times when oppression has become so great that it requires resistance in the form of destruction of property or even of life itself. Perhaps the best summary of this kind of thinking is in that other famous work of Mr Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. ... Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. ... They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. ... And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.