Author Archive

I always get confused by February, by which I mean that March always sneaks up on me quicker than I expect, and this year is no exception. Which is why I only just realized that March 2 is only six days away.

March 4, 2010 saw a huge co-ordinated national day of action in support of public higher education, with well over one hundred campuses in more than thirty states participating. The March 2nd day of action, organized along the same loose lines, promises to be similarly impressive, kicking off a monthlong series of actions throughout the United States and beyond.

I’ll be putting together a map of planned actions over the next few days, as I did last year, and updating it as Wednesday draws closer. On the day itself, I’ll be liveblogging events as they occur. If you’ve got information about plans on a particular campus or links to state or national resources, please let me know!

A British judge ruled this morning that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange must be extradited to Sweden to face questioning from prosecutors on allegations that he raped two women there last year. This ruling is likely to revive debates on the nature and merits of those allegations, a subject I’ve addressed at some length in this blog. Here’s a summary.

I first addressed the Assange rape allegations in an early-December post that attempted to separate out fact from fiction based on the limited information available at the time. In those posts I noted that “sex by surprise” isn’t a crime under Swedish law, and that Assange’s accusers alleged non-consensual acts which would, if proven, constitute sexual assault under any standard definition of the term. (In a follow-up post I addressed the question of his guilt or innocence, and the question of prosecutorial misconduct.)

In early January I discovered that one of Assange’s accusers had given an interview to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet last August — the only time either of the accusers has discussed the case at length in the press. I summarized that interview in this post, and later published its first-ever English-language translation.

Naomi Wolf has been one of Assange’s most prominent defenders, and she has consistently misrepresented the allegations against him. I first addressed those misrepresentations in this post about a Democracy Now television interview she gave in December. Later, I responded to Wolf’s argument that rape accusers’ names should be made public over their objections, addressed new oddities in an interview she gave on BBC radio, and fact-checked both a bizarre essay she wrote for Huffington Post in December and her later incomplete and dishonest “update” to that post.

I’ve also discussed the “honeypot” theory that Assange’s accusers were in the pay of the CIA or Karl Rove, and defended the journalistic practice of not naming rape accusers even when those names are readily available on the internet.

Oof. That’s a lot. By now some of you may be wondering why a blog called “Student Activism” has devoted so much energy to a story that’s not directly related to the campus. The short answer is that sexual assault policy is an important campus issue, and that I originally saw this case as a mechanism for addressing issues that have direct campus relevance. The slightly longer answer is that once I started writing about the case, I realized that there were a lot of misrepresentations and misunderstandings floating around, and didn’t want to let them stand unanswered when I could pitch in and help clear them up.

Last night I wrote a short piece on the White Rose, a small group of young Germans who organized against the Nazis during the Second World War. Three White Rose leaders — Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst — were discovered leafleting at the University of Munich in mid-February 1943, and tried and executed sixty-eight years ago yesterday, four days after their arrest.

I’ve been thinking about the White Rose a lot recently as I watch young people throughout the Arab world rise up at great risk to themselves to stand non-violently against the governments that have been holding them and their families down. I’ve been thinking about the power of that kind of witness, that kind of organizing, and its fragility. Thinking about the calculus that says “maybe you will decide that there is greater risk to you in killing me than to let me live, or maybe the young people you send to kill me will refuse, or maybe you will kill me and that itself will topple you.”

Because it is a calculus, right? People don’t generally take to the streets of such dictatorships out of pure despair, or pure rage, because when they do they are picked off one by one and disappear without notice. When people set out to stand against such a government they plan, they organize, they weigh the tools they have at their disposal and how to deploy them to be most effective against their targets and most effective in providing protection to themselves.

Which is why I found Malcolm Gladwell’s sniffy dismissal of those tools of communication so infuriating. “Surely the least interesting fact about” the protests in Egypt, he wrote right before Mubarak’s fall, “is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.”

Yes, they did. And many more protested and failed to bring down governments. They failed and they died. And many, like Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst (and their friends and comrades Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and Hans Leipelt) died precisely because the tools for communication they had at their disposal were tools that put them at incredibly high risk of discovery and betrayal.

Now, the last thing I want to do here is start getting into counter-factuals like “what would have happened if the White Rose had had access to Facebook?” That’s just silliness. It doesn’t do anyone any good.

But Sophie Scholl was twenty-one when she died in 1943, which means that if the Nazis hadn’t beheaded her sixty-eight years (and one day) ago, she’d be eighty-nine now. I’ve known eighty-nine-year-olds who were sharp and active and engaged with the world.

And that, for me, brings up a question that I don’t consider silly. Would Sophie Scholl agree with Malcolm Gladwell that “how … people with a grievance communicate with each other” is “less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place”?

That seems unlikely.

People who stand up against oppressive regimes don’t always win. Often — most of the time — they lose. And, as we have seen in Egypt and Algeria in recent weeks, when they do win one of the ways they win is by finding ways to communicate with each other and with possible converts.

This basic project was a central pre-occupation of the White Rose. They wanted to get the word out. They wanted to share what they knew. They wanted to let allies and potential allies know that they weren’t alone. And so they scrambled to get access to printing facilities, they mailed their leaflets to random addresses, they scrawled slogans on walls with tar and paint. And — in the act that led seven of them to their deaths — they climbed to the top of an atrium at the University of Munich and scattered papers to the floor below.

Why Hans and Sophie Scholl turned against the Nazis is still only imperfectly understood. Their father was an anti-fascist who was jailed earlier in the war for speaking out against Hitler. As a teenager, Hans appears to have been persecuted by the Nazis for a sexual relationship with a male friend. Many members of the White Rose were radicalized against the Nazis by their experiences of military service.

All of these issues — the “why” of Gladwell’s formulation — are to my mind fascinating and worthy of study. But is the “how” really any less intriguing, any less riveting, any less important? It’s the “how,” after all, for which the White Rose is now known. It’s the “how” that we honor today.

It’s the “how” that made them heroes.

I’m having a busy day today, so I haven’t had time to post before now, but it happens to be the 68th anniversary of the execution of Christoph Probst and Hans and Sophie Scholl, leaders of the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany, and I didn’t want to let that pass without mention.

“Resistance” is perhaps too big a word here. Hans and Sophie were twenty-four and twenty-one when they died, and Probst was twenty-three. None of them ever got any further than printing up and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and painting a few slogans on walls.

In the summer of 1942 the White Rose began writing anti-Nazi essays and distributing them anonymously any way they could. On February 18, 1943, the Scholls and Probst dropped stacks of leaflets in the corridors of the University of Munich for students to find when they left their classes. Impulsively, they decided to fling the last few in their possession from the top floor of the university’s atrium. They were observed in that act by a janitor who turned them in to the Gestapo.

Four days later the three were tried. Found guilty, they were sentenced to death and beheaded that same day.

I’ve been thinking about the White Rose a lot recently, in the context of the recent youth uprisings in the Arab world. The Scholls, Probst, and their friends and allies were young people willing to risk death to attempt to bring freedom to their country.

More about this tomorrow.

Update | I’ve posted part two of this essay here.

“I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something — whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — moderation — or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”

–Malcolm X, speaking at Oxford University on December 3, 1964. Malcolm was killed just eighty days later; 46 years ago today.