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Strife Feature | Escalation in Action: An Addendum to ‘Clausewitz On Campus’

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By M.L.R. Smith

 

The entrance of King’s College London Strand Campus, where the violence took place on the 5th of March (Credit Image: RoarNews)

 

Last December Strife published an article, ‘Clausewitz On Campus’, by me on the militarisation of the university environment. The article pointed to the increasingly violent rhetoric on campus and the manner in which this was, in some instances, manifesting itself in actual cases of physical violence. The piece sought to conceptualise the contested domain of free speech within higher education as a form of war, using Carl von Clausewitz’s theories to illustrate how the culture war on campus could be interpreted with a degree of analytical detachment.

The commentary charted how the so-called culture wars were unfolding ostensibly within American higher education. The article expounded upon the increasing tensions that are clearly observable in the U.S., but it did not anticipate that King’s College itself would come to feature so prominently in the growing culture wars on this side of the Atlantic. On Monday, 5 March 2018, an event organised by the KCL Libertarian Society, involving a debate between Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and YouTube commentator Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) was violently disrupted by masked ‘antifa’ protestors, who forced their way into the lecture hall, assaulting students and staff, as well as engaging in threatening behaviour that included the throwing of smoke bombs and flares outside the venue. According to reports a number of security guards sustained injuries.

This piece is, therefore, an addendum to the original article. It aims to elaborate on what these events tell us about how this conflict is evolving and where ultimately it might lead. In particular, it seeks to enlarge upon Clausewitz’s understanding of escalation in war: namely, the irresistible momentum that is created, once contesting forces engage, which begin to push their way towards maximum exertion. It also dwells upon the moral responsibilities incumbent on students and academics who are committed to a pluralistic academy, dedicated to the exchange of ideas, free from censorship, self-censorship, physical intimidation, and threats.

 

Civility or surrender?

‘Clausewitz On Campus’ assessed how some conservative and classical liberal thinkers were seeking to meet the frequently violent challenges of anti-free speech activists by seeking to escalate their response, not through counter-force but by intensifying their willingness to take on their adversaries by laughing at them through jokes and satire. The article sought to conclude on a conciliatory note, hoping that the prospect of jokes and humour as an accompaniment to political discourse offered the prospect of containing any spiral towards physical confrontation.

After events like those at KCL in early March, and other protests elsewhere, I am not so sure that such qualified optimism is warranted. Moreover, it seems that some free-speech advocates, who may once have held that arguing through evidence, facts, reason, and logic would be enough, are losing confidence in the idea that simply demonstrating one’s ability to debate better than one’s opponents is sufficient even to get their voice heard.

Writing in the National Review, the conservative journalist David French argues that the religious zeal of the intersectionalist warriors  ‘steamrolls right over the lukewarm, leaving them converted or cowed’. Yet, ‘the answer’, he believes, ‘isn’t to steamroll back… but rather to respond with calm conviction’. He sees the maintenance of civility as a key weapon in the free-speech arsenal. ‘Civility is anything but surrender’, French declared. ‘In fact, I’d argue that in the long run it’s the path to ideological expansion, not retreat. It’s the path to becoming a reliable, trustworthy communicator. It’s the best way to get a hearing outside your tribe, and it still leaves room for righteous, necessary anger – while choosing its targets carefully’.

Civility in public conversation has, of course, everything to recommend itself. It is premised, nonetheless, on the willingness of the other side to listen and to respond with equal courtesy. That is the essence of the free-speech compact: we might disagree profoundly, but I will listen to you respectfully, and reply accordingly after hearing you out. You will do the same when I am talking. And, who knows, maybe one – or both – of us will modify our thinking as a result, because we both understand that firm though our convictions might be, neither of us is in the possession of the ultimate truth.

A problem arises, however, when one side, convinced of holding the ultimate truth, seeks to shut the other down and prevent people from having their voice heard altogether. This may occur through ‘no platforming’, a hecklers veto, or physical intervention and threats of force to stop events or bully venues into curtailing their support for speaking engagements. When this happens, the pact breaks down. Civility and honour count for nothing. The choices are stark. Either you are converted, cowed, or you escalate, and seek to steam roll back.

 

Fighting fire with fire?

Voices on the conservative/classical liberal spectrum are coming to exhibit exasperation at the forcible shutting down of speaking events, the banning or exclusion of speakers, and the growing atmosphere of intimidation and threats that are being directed their way. Arguing against David French, Milo Yiannopoulos has stated: ‘Being nice and polite and playing by the rules has become a strategic disadvantage. I don’t think it has worked for us. I think it is holding us back. I think it is ineffective’. While eschewing any remedy through violence, he maintained: ‘I think it is time to fight fire with fire. I think it is time for us to respond in kind to these people. I think it is time for us to do to them what they have spent the last thirty, forty years doing to us’.

What ‘fighting fire with fire’ might entail will be examined further below. For the moment, it is necessary to reiterate the remorseless strategic logic inherent in this increasingly volatile situation, namely, that physical force eventually begets physical force. Bursting into a lecture hall, roughing up the speakers and shouting down presenters is not an act of free speech – an attempt at persuasion – it is an act of force, aimed, as Clausewitz averred, to compel our opponent to fulfil our will. That is to say, it is intended to defeat an adversary, and shut them up for good.

 

Free-speech and escalation?

The analogy Clausewitz provided to illustrate how the dynamic develops is that of a pair of wrestlers: ‘Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will: his immediate aim is to throw his opponent, in order to make him incapable of further resistance’. Thus, individual increments in force from one side will bring an equal and opposite increase in effort from the other. Applying this logic to the culture wars over free speech, it is easy to see where this leads. If the argument is that certain forms of speech constitute ‘violence’, which should be suppressed through actual violence, then all this does is to legitimate a similar reaction in kind. This is the strategic logic of escalation.

In a liberal-democratic society it should be clear, therefore, that respect for free speech is, in fact, the safety valve that prevents escalation. Once that respect is eroded, either by groups determined to prevent the other from speaking, or worse, by the state itself through legislated speech codes or the suppression of political dissent, then polarisation occurs and a process of escalation and counter-escalation is likely to take root.

Here we can return to the violent events at KCL on 5 March, because we can see what the sequence of escalation begins to look like. For all the claims by the groups behind the violent disruption to have shut down the event (which was interrupted but was continued at another location), it is clear that the confrontation did not proceed as they may have hoped. Members of the audience resisted verbally, and ultimately physically, with one intruder being wrestled to the ground (remember Clausewitz), while the ‘antifa’ flag was taken off the protestors, and is now proudly displayed by Sargon of Akkad on his YouTube channel. Meanwhile, King’s security staff physically ejected ‘antifa’ trespassers who had tried to vault over the security barriers in the Strand.

 

Self-defence as escalation?

Evidently, ‘antifa’ disruptors encountered more resistance to their activities at KCL than they seem to have experienced elsewhere. Symbolically, it didn’t go their way at all, with Sargon himself making it clear about what he thought of the proceedings with a post, entitled the ‘The Battle of King’s College London’, which displayed video footage of the violence: ‘As you can see antifa burst into the event. They pushed me around. They pushed other people around. And then we defended ourselves to victory by punching the crap out of one or two of them’. He went on: ‘I actually did try reasoning with them on stage [which can be heard on the audio of the video]… And, honestly, if they attack you, I recommend you defend yourself as vigorously as you feel necessary. Don’t let these thugs get away with intimidating you or being violent to you. You have every right to defend yourself’.

Invoking the concept of self-defence in response to events like the ‘Battle of King’s College London’, with the very title of the video itself espousing the logic of war, represents one obvious way in which escalation is taking place: the use of physical resistance to repel violence being directed towards oneself. Self-defence, though, is unlikely to be the only method of escalation for those on the pro-free speech/conservative/classical liberal spectrum, and could presage any number of non-physical forms of resistance based principally on copying – or adapting – the tactics of those that they oppose. This might encompass more systematic campaigns to expose the origins of those groups and individuals involved in the counter-free speech movement (an activity known as ‘doxing’ in the online world) or the more organised ‘trolling’ of such organisations.  It might also embrace other tactics such as resort to legal actions or the reporting of left-wing opponents for ‘hate-speech’. There might be any number of other methods. At the harder end of the spectrum ‘fighting fire with fire’ might see the evolution of counter-demonstrations and disruption tactics. The free-speech movement, of course, is in danger of being caught in a bind. If it adopts tactics that seek to close down opposing systems of thought, no matter how much they have been provoked, it risks undermining the premises of their own argument about the primacy of freedom of expression.

 

Returning the serve?

Other elements along the political spectrum, however, might feel less compunction towards adopting the methods of their enemies, from whom, in effect, they seek to learn, especially if their tactics are seen to be successful. For strategic theorists this is another observable phenomenon. In this regard, we might come to discern a variant in the escalation dynamic. Rather than the somewhat involuntary process of escalation that Clausewitzian theory enunciates, one might see the development of a process known as ‘Returning the serve’. This is a form of strategic interaction identified by University of Nottingham criminologist, Lyndsey Harris (a former War Studies graduate), in her analysis of the operation of loyalist paramilitary organisations during the Northern Ireland conflict.

Towards the latter part of the conflict, loyalist paramilitaries would respond to particular Irish Republican military acts with a specific action of their own (often of greater ferocity). The explicit intention was to counter the original action – ‘return the serve’. This is not so much a reflexive slide into escalation, more a conscious attempt at political signalling: ‘If you do this to our side, we will hit your side back… much harder’. Needless to say, retaliation as a form of escalation has been a feature of many wars in the past. In Northern Ireland it certainly became a murderous reality. The statistics show that in the final years of the conflict, roughly between 1989 and 1994, the loyalist paramilitaries were outgunning all the Irish Republican groups by a ratio of about 3 to 2, forcing the Irish Republican movement itself into an ever more constrained strategic position; one factor, it might be contended, that led it into a ceasefire and peace negotiations a few years later.

The Northern Ireland case is a salutary illustration of escalation and strategic signalling: an example not to be repeated, one hopes, under any circumstances. But we should be under no illusions about where the escalatory cycle can lead if individuals and authorities do not assume responsibility for what is currently happening on our campuses and in society at large. There are commentators who have argued that an actual ‘war’ of sorts over culture and society in the West has been going on for years – since September 2001, if not for a number of years before that. Many books and commentaries have appeared on that topic already. It is an interesting proposition, but not the direct concern of this article. Nevertheless, the point is that to have violence seep directly into the university environment is an ugly development and a disastrous prospect should it spread. Should this occur, radicalisation towards the extremes is the only likely result, which benefits no one apart from those who want to see society polarised. And that cannot end well. As Clausewitz knew, once passions are inflamed further escalation is never far away.

 

A question of responsibility

First and foremost, the principal responsibility for the deterioration of the atmosphere on campus resides squarely with those who seek to shut down the speech of others. This is an arbitrary and self-proclaimed arrogation of power to decide who can and who cannot be heard in the public square. It is a muscular and – if you wish to analyse it in this manner – a deeply masculinised assertion of power too (it is interesting to note the acute gender imbalance in the ‘antifa’ protest). Any person of a liberal conscience should resist those who would seek to assert such domination over others, and who thereby further seek to militarise the university campus more than they have done so already, let alone those whose actions endanger the safety of students and staff.

At one level, any ‘escalatory’ response should be to ensure the provision of adequate protection around speaking events if necessary. The firm but proportionate response of KCL’s security personnel to the events of 5 March is perhaps one, albeit minor, positive development in that regard. Equally, the College administration has the responsibility to ensure that any members of the KCL community who put the lives of others at risk are held fully accountable under College disciplinary rules; and that includes the prospect of expulsion and police investigation. Above all, it is incumbent upon students and academic staff to assert, uphold, and defend the foundational principle that should underpin any university worth its name in a liberal polity, that of freedom of thought and freedom of expression. That really would be a measured and worthy form of escalation.

 

Conclusion: a warning from history

There is no doubt that we are in a curious epoch in the affairs of modern higher education. The decline of viewpoint diversity and the threat to the free exchange of ideas jeopardises the very essence of what makes the concept of a university an enlightened project: one that is tolerant, pluralistic and dedicated to the expansion of knowledge and human progress, and where the only criteria for judgement is based on facts, evidence, and reason. That the modern university in Britain and the United States is becoming a theatre where such foundational values are violently contested is remarkable.

This article has expanded upon a number of themes related to the concept of escalation to illustrate how and why the culture wars might evolve in this phase where we are witnessing an increasing recourse to violence by those who wish to escalate their struggle in order to close down avenues for debate. As ever, the hope is that reason and moderation prevail. Yet, values once held to be core and which have sustained the modern university, and the liberal society as a whole, are under challenge. The future appears likely to be characterised by more confrontation and more escalation. We should, though, make no mistake about where the path of escalation can take us, which can be to a very dark place indeed.

Historical analogies tend to be misleading, and students of our subject should be wary and reject direct comparisons. Analogies can however offer insights, illustrations, and warnings. The closest parallel to our current condition that might suggest itself in terms of where we are heading is the period of instability that Italy experienced from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. This was a period that saw the descent of Italian politics into a confused miasma of fear, radicalisation, and violence that came to be known as the Anni di Piombo – the years of lead or, more prosaically, the years of the bullet. For many years I taught the Anni di Piombo era in Italy to third year undergraduates. In the years to come I hope that I will not be teaching a version of the Anni di Piombo about my own country.

 

M.L.R. Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory and Head of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He specialises in the nature of dissent and the strategies of non-state actors. He is author of ‘Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement’ (Routledge, 1995) and, most recently, with David Martin Jones he is author of ‘Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age’ (Palgrave/Macmillan 2014), and ‘The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes’ (Columbia University Press, 2015).

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Clausewitz On Campus: The Militarisation of the Universities

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By M.L.R. Smith

Protesters against a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos on the University of California at Berkeley campus march Wednesday, 1st of Feb. 2017. The protest escalated to violence and the event was cancelled. (Credit: AP Photo/Ben Margot)

 

What is going on in modern universities? Campuses seem to have become the theatre for an increasingly toxic struggle for control over what can and cannot be said within the confines of the educational environment. Protecting vulnerable minorities from offensive behaviours and hate-speech versus the right to express one’s opinion freely is a tussle that is now commonly referred to as a ‘culture war’, especially in the United States, where tensions are running high in the aftermath of a polarising presidential election campaign one year ago.

The widespread use of the term ‘culture war’ should attract the attention of students of war to discern in what ways this state of affairs can be usefully dissected and analysed. As a concept, ‘war’ can be conceived in the terms of Prussian soldier-scholar, Carl von Clausewitz, who enunciated it as an ‘act of force to compel our opponent to fulfil our will’: or more prosaically, as a clash of organized armed force to achieve political goals. The actual use of physical force, however, is merely the overt manifestation of conflicting passions, again as Clausewitz perceived. War ultimately originates in the mind, and it can express itself in thoughts, intellectual dissent, language, argumentation, and ultimately violence.

If we try to bring a dispassionate, Clausewitzian, understanding to what is becoming an increasingly hostile setting, we might be able to detect some evolving trends and strategies in these culture wars. In particular, attention can be drawn to one thus far little remarked on phenomenon, which is the growing militarisation of the rhetoric on campus. Terms like ‘offence-taking’, ‘word weaponisation’, ‘triggering’, and ‘micro-aggressions’ are now commonplace in higher education. They illustrate that the vocabulary of war is increasingly infiltrating university life. Let us examine, then, the rise in the militarisation of the language within the university context and its implications.

 

The rhetoric of war

To some degree, war-like language and analogues are integral to understandings of the modern university. As Lady Bird Johnson once remarked: ‘The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom’. The quote highlights the belief that intellectual ‘combat’ is an entirely healthy enterprise. Sparring between different viewpoints based on facts, argument, and robust debate is the foundation of scientific investigation and the mainstay of a just and free society. It is also regarded as the handmaiden of progress more generally because only through the testing of ideas through disputation can positions be clarified, refined, improved, disproved, and ultimately overthrown. This last term will be especially familiar to the observers of Clausewitz’s wrestlers. It is the classic rendering of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, which is premised on notions of disagreement, contention, and conflict of a non-violent kind.

In recent decades peaceful debate and intellectual exchange within the academy have been slowly giving way to something altogether less peaceable, which is the remorseless constraining of speech. It is the growth of this phenomenon that is exacerbating the militarisation of campus rhetoric. Trends toward this direction have been in evidence for years. Though, for many, the ‘no platforming’ of oppositional speakers began as a movement within student unions only recently, this tradition in Britain stretches as far back as the 1970s. This essentially ‘passive’ idea of denying speakers a forum for expressing their views has over time been extended to the ‘disinviting’ of speakers and disruption activities aiming to prevent speakers from having their voices heard. These actions have systematically reduced the potential for contending viewpoints to debate each other. Indeed, the rise of the idea of ‘safe spaces’ explicitly denies the very notion of intellectual scrutiny and challenge.

Designed to limit intellectual space on campus, these acts have followed a logic that Clausewitz might recognize. Were he perhaps to be an exceedingly ‘mature’ postgraduate student looking on at these events, he might point to the tendency of passions, once inflamed, leading towards the escalation of even ‘passive’ measures into threats of physical intimidation. To illustrate, in September 2017, ‘serious and credible threats of personal violence’ were directed towards the editor of the journal Third World Quarterly, which published an article that questioned whether colonialism was necessarily all bad. The publisher, citing a ‘duty of care to all our academic editorial teams’, withdrew the article. In this manner the traditional belief that universities exist to advance understanding through the ‘clash’ of ideas, appears in some quarters to be giving way to censorship and the erosion of viewpoint diversity.

The decline of viewpoint diversity, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, has also been in evidence for a number of years. According to one study, in U.S. universities ‘liberal’ professors outnumber conservatives by a ratio of 12 to 1. A less pronounced but similar trend is identifiable in Britain with eight in ten academics being reported as ‘left-wing’, according to a survey conducted by the Adam Smith Institute. This is a concern that does not only worry conservative critics. Academics and commentators on the free-speech left are equally uneasy with what they see as the collapse of competing opinions and the consequent infantilisation of the university system, its retreat into regressive identity politics, and the return of paternalism. In 2015 Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at New York University, helped found the Heterodox Academy network, which aims to strengthen the plurality of thought and expression in U.S. universities. The association possesses a membership of over 1,300 professors, adjunct professors, and post-doctoral researchers from across the political spectrum, highlighting the disquiet about the ideological homogeneity of U.S. campuses among a wide range of constituents.

 

Prussian military theorist, author of ‘On War’, Car von Clausewitz (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Escalation into physical force

Central to Haidt’s project is the belief that there is an increasing tendency for students on campus to interpret certain words as ‘violence’, leading in some cases to actual physical violence. What we are witnessing, it seems, is acceleration in the culture wars away from simply the clash and disagreement of ideas towards something less benign.  As the Marxist editor of Spiked, and free speech advocate, Brendan O’Neill argues: ‘If you say speeches are violence you justify violence in response to speech… Because how should violence be met? Violence…. often need[s] to be met with violence. So the more we tell young people that speech is violence, the more we encourage a culture of violence designed to prevent speech’. Nor are such views merely impressionistic. Survey evidence indicates that on U.S. campuses about 19 per cent of students endorse the use of violence to close down speech deemed to be hateful and offensive.

In a sense, therefore, it is possible to observe the operation of an escalation dynamic. Clausewitz’s theories hold that once a conflict has been initiated it would contain its own irresistible momentum that begins pushing towards a theoretical extreme. The reported musings of one college professor that ‘The only answer to a microaggression is a macroaggression’, are a classic demonstration of this point. If words and speech are now perceived as ‘violence’ then physical force is the next logical step. Overt armed force to attain political objectives has thus been visible in the actions of those taking part in the far left ‘Antifa’ movement, which resists what it claims to see as ‘fascism’ through violent protest. Its black clad, hoodie wearing members were in evidence at  University of California, Berkeley, in February 2017. Armed with batons, pepper spray and bike locks Antifa activists rioted against a speaking event by conservative free speech activist Milo Yiannopoulos (of whom more later), causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage and resulting in the cancellation of Yiannopoulos’ appearance. Further anti-free speech violence and disruption has occurred at Evergreen University, California State, and Middlebury College among others.

 

A Dangerous Strategy?

What this underlines is that ‘war’ is an entirely appropriate lens through which to interpret what is happening. The growing use of threats and violent protest to disrupt speaking engagements or force the withdrawal of articles from journals illustrates that the conflict is real and that the notion of a ‘culture war’ is far from a euphemism. If the Clausewitzian concept of war is an accurate frame of reference, then what strategies, it may be asked, are being employed to counteract the rise in anti-free speech protest?

To consider this question we might examine the case of Milo Yiannopoulos. Known simply as Milo, he is a prominent personality in the American free-speech movement that has seen conservatives and libertarians pushing back at what they see as the political correctness and stifling leftist conformity on college campuses. Milo embarked on a lecture tour of U.S. universities in 2016 and 2017. His fruity language and willingness to face down audience disruptors won him a legion of fans in conservative circles on campus and on YouTube, whilst simultaneously earning him the villainy of many on the left. The mere prospect of his appearance on campus provoked the mayhem that broke out in Berkeley.

Milo is flamboyant and controversial. His political opponents interpret his views as highly provocative. It is not the intention of this article to offer an assessment of his views and the manner in which he chooses to express them. Readers can make up their own minds about that. However, the point about him is that he is at the centre of these campus culture wars, which is exactly the way he likes it and where his significance resides. He is not the perpetrator of violence and not an advocate of censorship. His ostensible interest is the promotion of free expression: the right to say and to do anything within the law. Given that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right of free speech, he sees his role as defending legal and constitutional propriety against those who are attacking and undermining this principle.

Although undoubtedly articulate, by his own admission Milo is neither the most erudite or learned critic of the social justice left. There are any number of commentators, both on the right and left of politics, who are more established. Equally, he is but one of many activists in the online space who also promote free speech, libertarian, and conservative causes. Yet, he is interesting for two reasons. First, he was a vocal supporter of the Donald Trump candidacy in the presidential election of 2016 and by calling the election correctly and being empirically validated, he can claim credibility over his detractors who uniformly predicted that Trump did not stand a chance.

Second, he has evidently thought about how to counteract the influence of the left and has developed a clear idea – a strategy – about how to intensify the ‘war’. This puts him at the forefront of a countercultural movement that already existed but which both he and his backers have now, largely successfully, escalated.  Yet, interestingly, as we shall discover, the weapons he advocates using to counter-escalate the culture war are not those of violence.

Earlier in 2017, Milo published his book, Dangerous. In this volume and his other media pronouncements it is possible to discern the stages of thought that inform his thinking about how to prosecute the culture wars:

1 – That the conflict should categorically be conceived in terms of war. Milo explicitly uses the term ‘war’ to frame his understanding of what he sees as the clash of values, a battle for the pre-eminence of ideas and arguments over what can and cannot be said in the public square.

2 – That the battle space is the cultural domain: that is, one that is concerned about the ideas, customs, and social behaviours of a particular society. Politics, he perceives, is downstream from culture (a view extolled by the conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, the Breitbart news organization being Milo’s former employers). Once ‘politics’ begins to be framed in cultural norms – be it identitarianism, collectivist ethics, etc. – then the space for dissenting opinions is systematically constrained.

3 – That traditional conservatives – and especially establishment Republicans – have manifestly failed to engage in the cultural battle, ceding ground to the identitarian left without a fight, and retreating into a world that speaks only to itself. The lack of effort to persuade a wider audience, especially amongst the young, thus warrants a rejection of the conservative establishment and the embrace of new forms of resistance and leadership.

4 – That the key battlefield is the university campus, and the American one in particular. It is here where Milo holds that future opinion formers are indoctrinated by an academy that is increasingly imbricated in the ideas of a leftist cultural orthodoxy, which is antagonistic towards the notion of free speech.

5 – That it is therefore necessary to confront the opposition directly on the college green. ‘You have got to fight it where it lives’, he states. ‘And conservatives before me have failed to make significant inroads in culture because they haven’t shown up and fought where the enemy is’. ‘What I try to do’, he continues, ‘is go and park my glittery pink tank on the lawns of the enemy. Take the fight to them’.

6 – That the fight can be escalated and won with the application of humour. Indeed, laughter and ridicule are the principal means in his strategy. ‘They hate the sound of you laughing at them. They hate it more than anything else’, he maintains. ‘It’s why they hate me so much because I will just stand-up and crack jokes about them… They can’t bear being laughed at, and it is the most powerful weapon’.

Whether one finds Milo funny or entertaining is likely to depend on where one stands politically and what one understands to be the role and source of comedy. As a gay immigrant of Jewish background, married to a black man, he rejects the categories of victimhood into which – he argues – the social justice left classifies people like himself. It is this rejection that enables him to rile and bait his political adversaries mercilessly. There is no doubt that part of his modus operandi here is to use trolling tactics that initially aim to shock, exaggerate, and disgust with a view to opening up the space for ideological argumentation. In that sense, one can dispute any number of his positions. He claims, for example, that university subjects that end with ‘studies’ are all useless. Plainly, he’s wrong on that point (at least in one instance). To reiterate, whether one finds these assertions humorous is a matter of perspective and taste. It is nevertheless interesting to detect in the rhetoric the unambiguous articulation of the political context as war where words are intended, not as a prelude to physical violence, but certainly as weapons of provocation, as one Milo sponsored YouTube post starkly relays: ‘leftists want us silenced. We choose war’.

The teasing, jesting and trolling is not, however, seeking amusement for its own sake. Larking around is, pace Clausewitz, intended to fulfil a purpose. As Milo explains: ‘if you tell lots of good jokes, all of which contain a little kernel of truth, as I try to do, suddenly you find huge numbers of people reconsidering positions they have held for years and re-evaluating how they vote in elections, what books they want to buy and how they want to interact with other people’. Milo is, in this respect, conducting a war of the mind, aiming to change people’s views of the world. He is not, of course, the first to understand the potential power and political symbolism contained in comedy. As George Orwell noted, being funny can be highly subversive and a means of expressing dissent. A ‘joke’, Orwell said, can be a ‘sort of mental rebellion’.

 

Laughter as rebellion, jokes as escalation?

Is a rebellion of sorts going on? Twenty years ago the liberal-left philosopher, Richard Rorty, predicted that ‘badly educated’ Americans would eventually revolt against ‘having their manners dictated to by college graduates’. Of course, a mutiny of the left-behinds may explain part of the Trump phenomenon, but the audiences Milo speaks to at universities are plainly not ill-educated. They are college students who are themselves fed up with the speech codes and political conformity on campus. Moreover, with social trends suggesting that the youngsters moving up behind them – Generation Z (those born after 2000) – are more willing to challenge the values of the ‘millennials’, those like Milo might well be riding the crest of a new political wave.

None of this is to say that an inter-generational revolt is inevitable. Who knows how the future will unfold in this volatile political environment. Whether the kind of plan and tactics that the likes of Milo are offering will be effective in opening up the discursive space for intelligent dialogue (rather than merely fuelling emotions on all sides), is of course arguable. For all that, he concludes in Dangerous that people should disagree with him. The challenge he throws out to his opponents is that they should turn up and debate him with facts and arguments rather than with slogans and riots that aim to shut down speech.

To answer the question, then, set out at the beginning about what is going on in modern universities, the explanation can be said to be simple: it is a case of Clausewitz’s process of escalation. As the contending arguments engage, and passions are stirred, the momentum to push to the extremes is established. However, if jokes as an accompaniment to fact based debate represents an escalation then perhaps it is possible to hope that further turmoil on campus will be avoidable, and that the culture wars will resound to the healthy clash of ideas and not violence.

 

 

M.L.R. Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory and Head of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He specialises in the nature of dissent and the strategies of non-state actors. Along with David Martin Jones he is author of ‘Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age’ (Palgrave/Macmillan 2014), and ‘The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes’ (Columbia University Press, 2015). He would like to thank the authors and editors for their comments and suggestions.

 

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