Word: sds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...said that perhaps other concerned groups such as YPSL or SDS should have official representation...
...harshly myself, but, after all, they were provoked." It is precisely the secret delight in the violence of others, combined with the moral vision of a sophisticated lynch mob, which makes a sham of liberal tolerance in America. The fact that by the day of the Faculty meeting, SDS had gathered something like 1400 signatures on its petition, suggests that for some. Faculty members cowardice went hand in hand with fraudulent generosity. If they want to practice the politics of fear, they will first have to master their own fearfulness...
...essentially a product of cultural decay with no real relation to political or social reality. Certainly, disaffection with the cultural debris of our society is one important source of radicalism--the significance of that fact has been a matter of intensive debate, within the Left, and particularly within SDS, for some time now. But in the hands of Irving Howe--and the hundreds of magazine writers who came after him--such a fact is used to prove that a young radical has no concern aside from his personal alienation, and is therefore politically and socially irresponsible and potentially a menace...
...responsible," I would never deny that a desparate preoccupation with personal style, a self-pitying concern with one's own alienation, a fascination with violence and confrontation, and an "unreflective belief in the decline of the West" (and of America), are very bad things, and should be combatted in SDS, as well as in the world. Howe wants to leap from those pedestrian warnings to a view of the Left which see those tendencies as almost inevitably coming to dominate the direction of radicalism in America. The leap to that conclusion was made, it seems, without looking...
...very far, as yet. But to view our concern for the interests of workers, or black people, or students, or the third world, as merely our attempt to project our personal failure to "make it" on to those other groups, is to fail totally to understand the motivations of SDS. Worse, I think, it cuts one off from one of the fundamental hopes for a decent politics in America, and the world, namely, that the disaffected and the oppressed, whatever their differences, can unite to struggle against the common causes of their oppression. Perhaps that is utopian, but far less...