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Once upon a time, in another era, maybe even another universe, the head of a university refused to call on the police, the National Guard, or even federal troops in the face of student and other protests. Instead, he opened the doors of his school to the demonstrators.
I'm thinking of Kingman Brewster, who was the president of Yale University on May 1, 1970, as peaceful protests over racial justice and against the Vietnam War were taking place in New Haven, Connecticut. It was just days before, thanks to the killing of four demonstrators by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, anti-Vietnam War protests would -- rather like the present Gaza ones -- spread across hundreds of college campuses nationwide. Yale avoided the worst of it, when Brewster, among other things, said: "I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States. In large part, the atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against Panthers in many parts of the country. It is also one more inheritance from centuries of racial oppression." I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew promptly and publicly called for Brewster's ouster, while the students united behind him.
No such luck these days, of course. The police are being called onto ever more campuses, starting with Columbia University where the Gaza demonstrations were first launched. Had its president, under pressure from the Spiro Agnews of this day, not called in the police to arrest students, there might be no nationwide Gaza protest movement today. Instead, as I'm writing this, more than 2,000 students have been arrested across the country, including -- yes! -- 44 for "trespassing" at Yale.
Rare indeed has been Brown University, where "only" 61 were arrested after two sit-ins and a hunger strike before its president finally agreed to let its governing body vote this fall "on a proposal to divest the school's $6.6 billion endowment from companies affiliated with Israel" and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment there ended peacefully. With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, fill you in on the ways in which American students have bravely risked their college careers and their futures to reject what he calls an all-American death culture amid a horrifying war in Gaza to which this country continues to supply the most devastating of weaponry. Tom
War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young
In the Thrall of a Dominant Death Culture
Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people -- least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage -- are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.
I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn't sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel -- literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.
A familiar saying -- "the more things change, the more they stay the same" -- is both false and true. During the last several decades, the consolidation of corporate power and the rise of digital tech have brought about huge changes in politics and communications. Yet humans are still humans and certain crucial dynamics remain. Militarism demands conformity -- and sometimes fails to get it.
When Columbia University and many other colleges erupted in antiwar protests during the late 1960s, the moral awakening was a human connection with people suffering horrifically in Vietnam. During recent weeks, the same has been true with people in Gaza. Both eras saw crackdowns by college administrators and the police -- as well as much negativity toward protesters in the mainstream media -- all reflecting key biases in this country's power structure.
"What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic," Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1967. "Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."
Disrupting a Culture of Death
This spring, as students have risked arrest and jeopardized their college careers under banners like "Ceasefire Now," "Free Palestine," and "Divest from Israel," they've rejected some key unwritten rules of a death culture. From Congress to the White House, war (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it) is crucial for the political business model. Meanwhile, college trustees and alumni megadonors often have investment ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where war is a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Along the way, weapons sales to Israel and many other countries bring in gigantic profits.
The new campus uprisings are a shock to the war system. Managers of that system, constantly oiling its machinery, have no column for moral revulsion on their balance sheets. And the refusal of appreciable numbers of students to go along to get along doesn't compute. For the economic and political establishment, it's a control issue, potentially writ large.
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