https://archive.org/details/Columbia1969
https://archive.org/details/Columbia1969_2
There's a lot revisionist history on both sides, but it ultimately boiled down to young people attempting to assert their visions of the world, while entrenched, older power structures attempted to avoid change.
Personally? I think it's inspirational for people to get off their ass and try to effect change they believe in.
Action, not anger.
Mentioned in another comment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
> Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture:
> > The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages...The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to...both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission
Yes, I bet a some anti-social people used the protest movement to engage in their own oppression ("killing pigs" and "killing commie charlies" is the same thing in a way), but using them as a fig leaf is blatantly profiting of their deeds to hide yet other vile deeds, and to smear the best parts of a generation that at least tried.
That professor may never know even just one first-hand account of a person murdered as they looked away, and in turn may never know the life they actually lived. People don't like to hear that, but sometimes, who you think you are is just a shiny consolation price for being distracted from what you're actually serving. People can fool themselves and beyond a threshold, they're usually too weak to ever stop fooling themselves. They fell down the gravity well, let them serve as a warning. See them, see the well, and judge their words accordingly.
It was in Polish (the professor in question was Czeslaw Milosz), in Milosz's letters to Jerzy Giedroyc.
The professor was a declared lefist since the 30ties, but, having witnessed Stalinism first-hand, he was very opposed to blind and brutal use of "revolutionary" force. Actually, by his account, most of the other professors were very conforimist in caving in to the anarchists' violence and appeasing their demands.
Late teen and early twenty-something kids have some amount of knowledge, but zero experience. We are reliving the same problem today. Antifa, just like the protesters in the 60s are a bunch of naive kids led by people exploiting that naivety for political gain.
Just like the kids the US government sent to Vietnam. That war was "Moral-based violence" and the idea that the counter reaction was the real evil is insane.
Edit: There are plenty more recent examples of the government using moral justifications for war - "They hate our freedoms". "Axis of evil". "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists".
If "Moral-based violence" is scary, the US government is its number one peddler, not the protestors.
You know, it's possible for both of them to be the bad guys, right?
The class of '68 were petit totalitarians. Thankfully we had no Chairman Mao in the USA to really set them loose (like the Red Guard was in China).
The people building these bombs and such were cruel and violent. Hiding behind a shield of a "peace, love, and equality" ideology.