By Robert C. Koehler
Freedom of speech is kind of like eggs nowadays – too expensive! For Columbia University, the cost imposed on it by the Trump administration was suddenly $400 million in rescinded federal funding, at least if the speech was pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel.
What choice did the school have, except, as Jennifer Scarlott writes, “to appease the Trump administration by expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of a growing number of students accused of peaceful protest and exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly . . .?”
“The shameless capitulation of Columbia to government pressure,” she goes on, “is reflective of the corporate, neoliberal selling-out of academia. Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.”
Can you believe it? An academic clampdown on peace protests! Reading about this, I couldn’t help but feel my own college days come back hard and strong, and I started reading the current news in a larger context.
Education isn’t just a matter of absorbing a bunch of dead facts and certainties. As we gain – as we claim – our education, we bring our expanding awareness into the world we’re entering. An essential part of the world during my own college years, back in the late ’60s, was of course the Vietnam war. This war wasn’t simply an abstraction; it was anxious to claim us as obedient participants.
Many of us chose not to be obedient. We saw the hell and pointless horror of the war and decided that the only way we could participate in it was by standing against it, by ending it . . . and, ultimately, by working to be create a world where war was no longer the unquestioned norm: a world, you might say, not defined by the lurking, soulless enemy (who must be killed), but by our connection to everyone and everything.
Yeah, this work is still in progress. War remains humanity’s cancer – with no funding rescinded for its endless waging, at least not by the U.S. government. But five-plus decades ago, free speech did eventually bring the Vietnam war to an end and, indeed, precipitated an era of “Vietnam syndrome,” where the public basically opposed war in general. No small problem for the nation’s warmongers! It took almost two decades, but the U.S. eventually found itself an enemy equal in evil to the commies: the terrorists. Specifically, Muslim terrorists.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm, a.k.a., Gulf War I, a quick, brutal assault on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. The Bush administration employed some highly effective public relations to push the war, including the false assertion that the evil Iraqis had ripped Kuwaiti babies from their hospital incubators and left them to die on the floor. The war lasted a little over a month, ending in the bombing and slaughterer of retreating Iraqi troops, as well as civilians, along what became known as the Highway of Death.
Afterward, Bush extolled the real victory his assault on Iraq had achieved, declaring: “It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
The public was OK with war again. God bless America!
And it’s been at war, in various ways, ever since. This is also part of the context in which I ponder today’s news about the Gaza genocide protests. Federal control over public relations is crucial, and if the protest movement is allowed to continue – and spread – sheerly because of the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, the funding of which is our declared national policy, this could be . . . uh, problematic.
In the ’60s, college campuses were at the hub of the nation’s antiwar protests, with faculty members seriously involved as well, and the various college administrations across the country mostly remained aligned with and committed to the principle of free speech. That meant the military-industrial complex had a serious domestic enemy: those loud-mouth college critics and their ability to punch holes in the official government PR about its military initiatives.
So what’s it going to do? Go total fascist and simply shut those students up by banning free speech? As appellate attorney Joseph Pace writes:
“There’s a malign genius to the administration’s approach. Trump and his enablers know they can’t directly muzzle students or faculty without facing First Amendment lawsuits. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the administration won’t try. ICE has already begun arresting foreign student activists, and DOJ has signaled plans to charge protestors under federal counterterrorism laws. But the administration surely understands that most of those actions will be thwarted in the courts.”
So start squeezing the college cash flow! That way, as Pace notes, it can force private college administrations to do the dirty work – banning protests, expelling protesters – legally. Pace quotes Trump strategist and former Heritage Foundation board member Christopher Rufo, who explained in a New York Times interview that the plan was to put the schools in a state of “existential terror” unless they went after the protesters.
I would call this flipping the reality, a crucial aspect of war-related public relations. Here, for instance, is a small sliver of a United Nations report from Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, noting that Israel’s latest ceasefire violation on March 17 resulted in hundreds of deaths. Furthermore:
“Since 2 March, Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people. Repeated requests to collect aid sitting at the Karem Shalom border crossing have also been systematically rejected, no further hostages have been released and Israel has cut power to southern Gaza’s desalination plant, limiting access to clean water for 600,000 people.”
But criticizing this is what the smugly powerful call antisemitic. The irony here, as Pace noted, is in the nature of the Trump administration itself, which he described as a “den of antisemites.” This is no doubt most flagrantly represented by Elon Musk, who infamously gave two Nazi salutes at a recent rally and, among much else, spoke at a right-wing convention in Germany where he lamented that “Germany’s real problem was ‘too much focus on past guilt.’”
We’re on a dark and dangerous road to nowhere. The protests are keeping human sanity alive.
