A replay of 1968 it wasn’t. While months of pro-Palestine protests stoked fear among the chattering classes that this year’s DNC in Chicago would be derailed by the same tumult as fifty-six years ago, that did not come to pass. Thousands did descend on the city last week to righteously demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, including during a roughly twenty-four-hour sit-in on the steps of United Center, but the protests were largely peaceful—and widely ignored, so enraptured was the media by the slickly produced lovefest unfolding inside the convention center walls.
But not that long ago, journalists and pundits couldn’t turn away from those who struck out in opposition to Israel’s war, especially the students who set up encampments on college campuses across the country. Between April and May, the New York Times alone ran well over a dozen op-eds on the protests—with many echoing a version of the argument that if only activists would just conduct themselves more civilly, they would be more successful in winning over the average American to their cause.
But when pro-Palestinian protesters obstruct a highway or blockade a weapons manufacturer, their immediate goal isn’t to enlighten the mythical median voter. They’re looking to halt, however briefly, the system’s functioning and jolt an anesthetized body politic out of its stupor. It’s these types of actions, on the vanguard of protest, that trouble the manufacture of consent by the pro-war media and Washington establishment.
Daniel and Philip Berrigan, two radical Catholic priests, understood this. During the Vietnam War, these two brothers of the cloth became the figureheads of the Catholic Resistance, which led more than a dozen draft board raids in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where activists seized and destroyed draft files to sabotage the administration of the draft. The Berrigans—much like those protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza—rejected the strictures of civility, and pressed on even in the face of public contempt. They knew it’s never a fair fight when the institutions that determine the acceptable bounds of dissent are the same ones conducting or enabling mass slaughter.
Philip Berrigan, the younger of the two brothers, developed a progressive political consciousness after witnessing segregation in the military while serving across Europe during World War II. Shortly after the war, he enrolled in seminary with the Josephites, a Catholic order founded in 1893 that primarily ministers within black communities and has historically been more open to integrating Catholic liturgy with African American customs and culture. Philip spent the latter half of the 1950s in New Orleans, where the vast majority of his parishioners were subjected to the brutality of Jim Crow. As Brad Wolf details in his introduction to A Ministry of Risk: Writings on Peace and Nonviolence, Philip threw himself into civil rights activism. He became the first Catholic clergyman to participate in a Freedom Ride and marched in Selma and Montgomery alongside stalwarts of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.