Once the smoke cleared and the investigation began into last week’s campus disruption of Tom Tancredo talk on illegal immigration, one left-leaning campus organization whose fingerprints seem to be all over the incident was Students for A Democratic Society (SDS).
If you don’t know what SDS stands for, you should. Don’t let the name fool you. SDS is a radical campus group, first begun in the 1960s and reborn in 2006. The following paragraph, lifted from the UNC-Chapel SDS web site, explains what SDS is all about:
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a national organization which seeks to unite youth and students fighting for social, economic and political justice. Our chapter at UNC-Chapel Hill serves to educate students and to support progressive movements and campaigns including but not limited to, the Iraq War, immigrant's rights, and labor solidarity.
If you can stomach the blather, you may be interested to know:
UNC-Chapel Hill SDS recognizes the connection of all struggles for social, environmental, and economic justice and liberation.
We commit to fight all forms of oppression, recognizing the leadership of the oppressed, and the right of all peoples to self-determination.
We demand an end to U.S. wars of aggression, neo-colonial occupations perpetrated or funded by the U.S., and the social and economic structures that support and profit from them.
We demand an end to U.S. military, political, cultural, and economic imperialism.
We demand a society rooted in social and economic justice, where all people have a right to housing, education, jobs, and healthcare, regardless of race, gender, nationality, class, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation. Such a society must place human need over corporate profit and interests.
We are committed to combating systemic oppressions in society, ourselves, and in our organization through our campaigns, leadership, tactics, and decision-making processes.
We are committed to collective action through principled unity with others, working against oppression with the ultimate goal of justice and liberation for all people
Uplifting prose for the oppressed workers of the world. Makes you want to run out, pick up that hammer and sickle and rail against Amerika. Only problem, SDS conveniently turns a blind eye to the millions slaughtered by Stalin and Mao Tse Tung in their quest to develop a “worker paradise.”
Anyone who is familiar with SDS knows the name Students for A Democratic Society is a misnomer. SDS has no concern whatsoever for democratic principles nor any respect for the constitutionally protected right of free speech.
An open letter submitted by the SDS-Chapel Hill chapter, dated April 16th and addressed to UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp is instructive of the SDS's views on free speeech and what SDS believes happened at the Tancredo talk on immigration. Curiously, after SDS disrupted Congressman Tancredo’s talk on immigration, SDS is asking the chancellor and the university community “in the interests of free speech” to hear their side of the story, a side that in their view, has been missing from press and police accounts.
What does SDS mean by free speech? The SDS letter articulates a ton of qualifiers. It reads:
It has been argued in the past couple of days that supporters of free speech should be tolerant of all speech. While I am of the view that as a democratic society we must be tolerant of dissenting views, in no way does this mean that all speech promotes democratic ends or should be tolerated. Put simply, some stories are better than others. The litmus test for these “better stories” include those that promote tolerance, acceptance, social justice, equality, and yes, free speech. The rhetoric espoused by YWC (Youth for Western Civilization, addition mine) and Mr.Tancredo does not promote tolerance of difference and silences those who are “different.” Why then should we be tolerant of a rhetoric that in no way promotes the goals of a democracy and that creates a culture of fear and hate? Hate speech silences free speech.
These ideas are wholly antithetical to the U.S. Constitution. SDS only favors speech if it promotes tolerance, acceptance, social justice and equality – the supposed goals of the left. Curiously, if “speech” must be consistent with a prescribed set of values and prescriptions, one wonders how in any way the speech can be called "free"?
The very name Students for A Democratic Society belies the organization’s true purpose. Orwell deployed the perversion of language employed in propaganda. Can there be a better example than SDS?
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