Learning From Columbia
What can we learn from the student solidarity camps springing up in US Universities?
An important question we can ask, observing how terrified US Universities administrations have become of their own students only for demanding divestment from the clearest ongoing genocide in the 21st century, is what can we learn from how effective these forms of protest, the decentralised solidarity camps in Universities, are proving to be?
Let’s take a look at what is going on: some American Universities (eg Portland State) are already divesting from Israel's genocide. Has this been achieved via voting, online petitions, or memes? No this has achieved by people putting their bodies on the line.
All our freedoms are reliant on us using our bodies to defend them. Freedom can only be achieved by acting in the real physical world, and only later enhancing these actions in the digital representation. This is why they push us onto the digital instead of the physical. This was the logic of lockdowns: remove our bodies from the public space and they can do anything they want to our minds. Our freedom is reliant on us returning to the physical world to defend it, and using the digital to amplify the physical, not the other way round.
This is what American students are teaching the freedom movement: permanent, continuous, decentralised and escalatory physical action works, not sporadic protest marches once every few weeks, online petitions, or digital action alone.
We can lean from these forms of protest that the key to our freedom in the digital era remains putting our physical bodies on the line.
Freedom only comes from the physical world.
Freedom only comes from the human body.