It is hard to click Like on this article, even though it is a well-written exposition of the horrible truth. But like all the current news, so deplorable. Thank you for having the courage to publish this indictment against the inhumane and self-serving people of the so-called Free World.
Been reading Chris for years, it isn't easy reading. But then again, the times we've come to live in and the road here are what he's been writing about for years. One friend described reading Chris to drinking battery acid - I get it. But look where we are now after listening to PBS, NPR. NYT, etc. I'd rather drink battery acid than the swill the previously mentioned liars have told us.
The disgusting and absolutely false premise that criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza is fueled by antisemitism is no different than the early 2000s lie that criticism of America’s aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq was fueled by support for Al-Qaeda. The establishment’s use of propaganda gets rebranded, but it never changes.
Institutions of higher learning – especially the ones regarded as the best in the country – should be at the forefront of challenging such narratives, not reinforcing them by bending to our authoritarian leaders.
I was a student at Barnard and Columbia during the Vietnam war. This crackdown on the pro Palestine protests is much worse. It's taking place in the context of the ascendancy of the right wing extremists in Israel and the steady march of the Trump administration towards dictatorship. I'm waiting for the inevitable backlash. The rallies held by Bernie Sanders over the weekend are a good sign of the awakening of thousands out west, not in the coastal cities which are sure to follow. I'm not going to end with platitudes or false optimism. Just thanks in advance for those who have the courage to risk it all.
These universities have been reduced to teaching that genocide is good now and it is doubly good as there is good money to be made from doing so. Genocide is now good according to these institutions. Imagine that for a bit. Genocide! I wish all the students en masse would boycott any university that is bowing down to authoritarianism and shut them down. Doing so would actually show that these students are actually learning something morally real and acting on it. But I suspect far too many are there to get a degree so they can simply join in the ongoing death machine of the USA and get their monetary rewards for doing so. Of course the irony for doing so is the enabling of their own destruction and future. We are clearly in the new GIG (Greed Is Great) economy though we always have been in some manner ever since artificial wealth was born in the sociopathic brain(s) of some human(s) wanting to hoard all they can. But now it has been elevated to some form of worship that will cause more and more suffering on this tiny blue dot spinning in space.
MLK famously said that "the arc of history bends toward justice."
With all due respect, this does not appear to be borne out by observable reality. Rather, the arc of history bends towards power.
Tolkein's hobbits were tasked with chucking The One Ring into Mount Doom. We don't have that option. Even if we refuse to use the power available, someone else will, and the humans who find power irresistable are precisely those humans who should not have it.
The reason that we are seeing less resistance to Trump 2.0 is that the decisionmakers in the United States, the people of influence and authority, have dropped any remaining pretense that the United States is anything other than an empire.
And even with the Hobbits, the only reason the ring was destroyed was because Gollum bit Frodo’s finger and fell into Mount Doom. Frodo was unable to complete the task as he fell more and more into the power of the ring. So much for that option even if we had it.
“The arc of the moral universe is long…” History is completely implied with that quote. I love the irony of you having no respect for Feral Finster and the irony of you missing the point of his post by calling him out with your strange words. The very fact that Feral Finster mentioned MLK is having complete respect for him. By the way I normally am a stickler for posting other people’s quotes correctly, but there are times when I give folks a pass if the essence of the original quote is conveyed. And just because Feral Finster didn’t go into all the detail of what MLK said and did in his life does not mean he MISSED THE POINT.
Thank you again and as always, Mr. Hedges, for the history (herstory?ourstory?) lesson.
"Liberal" institutions, like universities, did not get out into the streets and end our participation in the Vietnam war, nor our support for South Africa's apartheid regime: The students did that. I guess they got their education, not from those institutions run by craven cowards, but from folks like yourself who have the courage to speak the truth.
At least one person of influence has acknowledged the hypocrisy at elite universities where minds are supposed to be encouraged to be curious and open to matters, not threatened by looking. Good article, well done. Thank you for taking an objective viewpoint.
Seems we no longer have many real public intellectuals.
"East Coast Elites"--self-styled as such and smug--have never been a welcoming haven for actual public intellectuals, not in my long life time nor in the previous two centuries for that matter. Mark Twain, Jack London, the muckraker crowd of the Edwardian Excesses Era: Not from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Barnard. Not from the military academies certainly; not from MIT. Addicted to domination is as much a part of academia as are the politics and financial realms; let's not kid ourselves, OK?
Am I a public intellectual? I think I am. I tested high and was a National Merit scholar, but I refused (in 1959) to use my intellect in the service of hawkish imperialism (and learn to make atomic bomb triggers for GE, for example.) I was a scholar that ranged around the country, hands-on in anti-war, hands-on in counter culture, from the SF Bay area social base where it developed. I owned a coffee house on Tompkin Square and helped create the Fillmore East. I work in applications of fractals and set theory as these have been applied through Taoist metaphors to psychology and sociology--quite heady stuff but quite compatible with 'common sense' that indigenous people 'get' and use. Elitist schools of thought are cliques that resist--refuse to open-mindedly consider--what isn't already 'established.'
I've tried repeatedly to engage Chris (and Noam, and Rick Wolff, etc.) in actual discussion of the underlying conceits and blindnesses we have succumbed to in post WWII British-America. They can't relax and entertain the sorts of trains of thought that do, in fact, lead to the break-throughs necessary to revise the null trajectories we're on. Instead, they vie among themselves to hang on and cling to status in a social context that's become exactly what we see: Corruption, cynicism, intentional injury and spite. Smug lack of seeing 'our parts' in the mistakes we keep repeating, that's the fruit of trying to maintain that New York, Boston and Washington D.C. are the 'leadership centers' of America. It isn't true and I don't think it ever has been, for that matter.
Places like New Orleans, Marin and Santa Barbara, Seattle, Portland, Oregon and even smaller focal points--Big Sur, Wyoming lodges, the woods of Humboldt County--were places where the thoughtful people cooked good food and listened to each other, sat in saunas, fished and surfed and sailed in sunset silence with the respectful gratitude of trust within the fellowship they owned by virtue of their clarity.
Poor Chris has never been secure enough to just discuss these topics without matching up credentials and status-points before we pour the coffee and sit down around the table. The focus needs to be ripped out of the grip of just this bunch--the money, media, the not-very-public intellectuals who work for them and tuck their tails in enough to not be arbitrarily shut down. They're shut down enough to get by as the dark ages creep up and close off the memories of freedom and responsibility. Let's not kid ourselves, OK?
"Poor Chris has never been secure enough" ?? Well, I wish there were many Poor Chris's to improve this lousy world we live in. You might have many merits and achievements but nobody knows you. I hope you try to improve our world but not denigrating the heroes who are doing it.
Yes, it's a cynical use of antisemitism. I was a Jewish student at Barnard and Columbia. There were Jewish students everywhere and no antisemitism. Given Columbia's location in New York City, I am sure that's the case now. The establishment leadership of Columbia is surrendering to financial blackmail. They are giving the lie to academic freedom. In short, they have taken a side and revealed their true loyalty. Let's hope that the opposite side fights back.
If I recall correctly, Columbia has been a hotbed of activism throughout the years. I have lifelong friends who are Jews and I studied Judaism at Seminary. I am confident that ADL and AIPAC are delighted that Jewish students have been singled out for special "protection". But. Does that proclamation send the wrong message? How does the following play into this?
Decades Ago, Columbia Refused to Pay Trump $400 Million: A quarter-century ago, the university was looking to expand. It considered, and rejected, property owned by Donald Trump. He did not forget it.
Thanks for this sharp entertainment. Very drôle. But I can’t help wondering what purpose such clever Kosher humour serves at this moment in time as we slide towards authoritarianism across the slippery meaning of words such as ‘antisemitism’, ‘national security’ and even ‘Jewish’. (And not to mention the hundred lies and distortions of the Israelis since October 8). There’s a war on, you know and I feel that the two sides are differentiated as much by the way they treat the truth as anything else. And - call me a dullard if you wish - but I can’t help feeling that truth is currently better served plain than garnished liberally with irony, mockery, false outrage or other tasty linguistic spices.
What needs to be said is why there is not a letter signed by an equal number of faculty members to implement measures to "protect Palestinian students?" And why no outcry against Anti-Palistinianism or Islamaphobia? (they would be punished, expelled, fired) The Jews, not most Jews, but more accurately in this case, the Zionists and their supporters, seem to have a monopoly on supposed bigotry always being about THEM. Forever about them. Forever the Victim. But that needs to be called out as a lie that has long died in the harsh light of Gaza.
In truth, that convenient lie is purely a propaganda tool in service of increasing authoritarian political repression and the goals of Empire: Voracious Greed, Total Control, Divide and Conquer (at home and abroad), and obscene profits from selling billions in weapons of death and destruction and and seizing the Worlds Land, Oil and Resources.
To be critical of Jews is no more anti-Semitic than being critical of Christians is anti-Christian. As an ordained graduate Seminarian I am perfectly at ease criticising Christians (which I do often, especially of the miscreant errant evangelicals).
Liberalism is dead in universities as well. The hierarchy which itself resembles a Church, is now thoroughly privatized from food centers to parking.
But what will change is the curriculum as expressed here.
Lest we forget history:
“In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion.
The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none.
As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society.
Germany was preparing to cut its own head off.
By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.”
― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
We see this now from the same playbook. And the Weimar liberals have nothing to offer.
Who are they and why is there no press coverage of them? Why has no one raised the alarm over 23,000 U.S.A. citizens who have gone to Israel to fight in their genocidal war against the Palestinians?
Isn't it illegal to join the military of another country to possibly give your life for the political motives of another government? Anti-war protesters in the USA are losing jobs, being expelled and deported for being against the Israeli war. Why aren't the Americans volunteering for the Israeli genocide being tried for treason, or at least arrested upon returning from Israel or being stopped at the border and sent back to Israel and having their U.S. citizenship revoked? Over 23,000 Americans working for Israel - WHO ARE THEY? They need to be identified and held accountable for their role in the Genocide.
We, the working class majority, were abandoned by the neolib Ivy D elite more than 40 years ago. The admin and professional 20%ers of the D party faithful not only didn't consider us, but agreed with the elite judgement we were nothing but a "basket of deplorables." Yet they're bewildered by the last election. Adding insult to decades of injury, they explain away the results as entirely the product of idiots, bigots, and cultists. Yeah, a sure fire way to win us back to the party that was once ours.
The econ system is based on little more than libertarian fantasies and a legal framework established by the elected lapdogs of corporate interests. 20%ers can live with this; they don't worry constantly about job loss, stagnant wages, healthcare coverage. And as administrators, they know they are needed to keep any econ/pol system functioning. Including a fascist one.
It's a Pastor Niemoller thing. "First they came for____. I didn't protest because I wasn't ____. Then they came for______, then ___, etc. By the time they came for me, there was no one left to protest." Professors and MDs are rapidly becoming assembly line workers, subjects of the econ overlords and their bureaucratic enablers. Welcome to our world!
Turns out the first economic sacrificial lamb (the working class) was a bellwether.
It is hard to click Like on this article, even though it is a well-written exposition of the horrible truth. But like all the current news, so deplorable. Thank you for having the courage to publish this indictment against the inhumane and self-serving people of the so-called Free World.
Been reading Chris for years, it isn't easy reading. But then again, the times we've come to live in and the road here are what he's been writing about for years. One friend described reading Chris to drinking battery acid - I get it. But look where we are now after listening to PBS, NPR. NYT, etc. I'd rather drink battery acid than the swill the previously mentioned liars have told us.
Russian aphorism: “See the truth, lose an eye. Ignore the truth, lose both eyes”.
S u p e r b .
The disgusting and absolutely false premise that criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza is fueled by antisemitism is no different than the early 2000s lie that criticism of America’s aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq was fueled by support for Al-Qaeda. The establishment’s use of propaganda gets rebranded, but it never changes.
Institutions of higher learning – especially the ones regarded as the best in the country – should be at the forefront of challenging such narratives, not reinforcing them by bending to our authoritarian leaders.
I was a student at Barnard and Columbia during the Vietnam war. This crackdown on the pro Palestine protests is much worse. It's taking place in the context of the ascendancy of the right wing extremists in Israel and the steady march of the Trump administration towards dictatorship. I'm waiting for the inevitable backlash. The rallies held by Bernie Sanders over the weekend are a good sign of the awakening of thousands out west, not in the coastal cities which are sure to follow. I'm not going to end with platitudes or false optimism. Just thanks in advance for those who have the courage to risk it all.
These universities have been reduced to teaching that genocide is good now and it is doubly good as there is good money to be made from doing so. Genocide is now good according to these institutions. Imagine that for a bit. Genocide! I wish all the students en masse would boycott any university that is bowing down to authoritarianism and shut them down. Doing so would actually show that these students are actually learning something morally real and acting on it. But I suspect far too many are there to get a degree so they can simply join in the ongoing death machine of the USA and get their monetary rewards for doing so. Of course the irony for doing so is the enabling of their own destruction and future. We are clearly in the new GIG (Greed Is Great) economy though we always have been in some manner ever since artificial wealth was born in the sociopathic brain(s) of some human(s) wanting to hoard all they can. But now it has been elevated to some form of worship that will cause more and more suffering on this tiny blue dot spinning in space.
MLK famously said that "the arc of history bends toward justice."
With all due respect, this does not appear to be borne out by observable reality. Rather, the arc of history bends towards power.
Tolkein's hobbits were tasked with chucking The One Ring into Mount Doom. We don't have that option. Even if we refuse to use the power available, someone else will, and the humans who find power irresistable are precisely those humans who should not have it.
The reason that we are seeing less resistance to Trump 2.0 is that the decisionmakers in the United States, the people of influence and authority, have dropped any remaining pretense that the United States is anything other than an empire.
And even with the Hobbits, the only reason the ring was destroyed was because Gollum bit Frodo’s finger and fell into Mount Doom. Frodo was unable to complete the task as he fell more and more into the power of the ring. So much for that option even if we had it.
“The arc of the moral universe is long…” History is completely implied with that quote. I love the irony of you having no respect for Feral Finster and the irony of you missing the point of his post by calling him out with your strange words. The very fact that Feral Finster mentioned MLK is having complete respect for him. By the way I normally am a stickler for posting other people’s quotes correctly, but there are times when I give folks a pass if the essence of the original quote is conveyed. And just because Feral Finster didn’t go into all the detail of what MLK said and did in his life does not mean he MISSED THE POINT.
Way to miss the point.
Thank you again and as always, Mr. Hedges, for the history (herstory?ourstory?) lesson.
"Liberal" institutions, like universities, did not get out into the streets and end our participation in the Vietnam war, nor our support for South Africa's apartheid regime: The students did that. I guess they got their education, not from those institutions run by craven cowards, but from folks like yourself who have the courage to speak the truth.
Thank you, sir.
Yes. I agree! And I feel so lucky that
Chris is ALWAYS the most powerful voice in the room! My elderly brain
hasn’t the capacity to recall the HISTORY Chris brings to Conflicts
like the one at Columbia U!
Thank you Chris!
Linda
As I continue to comment on the news I find everywhere, I'm okay with being called an enemy of the state.
At least one person of influence has acknowledged the hypocrisy at elite universities where minds are supposed to be encouraged to be curious and open to matters, not threatened by looking. Good article, well done. Thank you for taking an objective viewpoint.
Seems we no longer have many real public intellectuals.
"East Coast Elites"--self-styled as such and smug--have never been a welcoming haven for actual public intellectuals, not in my long life time nor in the previous two centuries for that matter. Mark Twain, Jack London, the muckraker crowd of the Edwardian Excesses Era: Not from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Barnard. Not from the military academies certainly; not from MIT. Addicted to domination is as much a part of academia as are the politics and financial realms; let's not kid ourselves, OK?
Am I a public intellectual? I think I am. I tested high and was a National Merit scholar, but I refused (in 1959) to use my intellect in the service of hawkish imperialism (and learn to make atomic bomb triggers for GE, for example.) I was a scholar that ranged around the country, hands-on in anti-war, hands-on in counter culture, from the SF Bay area social base where it developed. I owned a coffee house on Tompkin Square and helped create the Fillmore East. I work in applications of fractals and set theory as these have been applied through Taoist metaphors to psychology and sociology--quite heady stuff but quite compatible with 'common sense' that indigenous people 'get' and use. Elitist schools of thought are cliques that resist--refuse to open-mindedly consider--what isn't already 'established.'
I've tried repeatedly to engage Chris (and Noam, and Rick Wolff, etc.) in actual discussion of the underlying conceits and blindnesses we have succumbed to in post WWII British-America. They can't relax and entertain the sorts of trains of thought that do, in fact, lead to the break-throughs necessary to revise the null trajectories we're on. Instead, they vie among themselves to hang on and cling to status in a social context that's become exactly what we see: Corruption, cynicism, intentional injury and spite. Smug lack of seeing 'our parts' in the mistakes we keep repeating, that's the fruit of trying to maintain that New York, Boston and Washington D.C. are the 'leadership centers' of America. It isn't true and I don't think it ever has been, for that matter.
Places like New Orleans, Marin and Santa Barbara, Seattle, Portland, Oregon and even smaller focal points--Big Sur, Wyoming lodges, the woods of Humboldt County--were places where the thoughtful people cooked good food and listened to each other, sat in saunas, fished and surfed and sailed in sunset silence with the respectful gratitude of trust within the fellowship they owned by virtue of their clarity.
Poor Chris has never been secure enough to just discuss these topics without matching up credentials and status-points before we pour the coffee and sit down around the table. The focus needs to be ripped out of the grip of just this bunch--the money, media, the not-very-public intellectuals who work for them and tuck their tails in enough to not be arbitrarily shut down. They're shut down enough to get by as the dark ages creep up and close off the memories of freedom and responsibility. Let's not kid ourselves, OK?
"Poor Chris has never been secure enough" ?? Well, I wish there were many Poor Chris's to improve this lousy world we live in. You might have many merits and achievements but nobody knows you. I hope you try to improve our world but not denigrating the heroes who are doing it.
Right on…wealth and power go together to make mighty aphrodisiacs for controlling even the cleverest mind.
How is the abject groveling of our congress and president to a foreign government that is hostile to the interests of American citizens not treason?
The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.”
There it is, in a nutshell. Little more need be said.
Yes, it's a cynical use of antisemitism. I was a Jewish student at Barnard and Columbia. There were Jewish students everywhere and no antisemitism. Given Columbia's location in New York City, I am sure that's the case now. The establishment leadership of Columbia is surrendering to financial blackmail. They are giving the lie to academic freedom. In short, they have taken a side and revealed their true loyalty. Let's hope that the opposite side fights back.
If I recall correctly, Columbia has been a hotbed of activism throughout the years. I have lifelong friends who are Jews and I studied Judaism at Seminary. I am confident that ADL and AIPAC are delighted that Jewish students have been singled out for special "protection". But. Does that proclamation send the wrong message? How does the following play into this?
Decades Ago, Columbia Refused to Pay Trump $400 Million: A quarter-century ago, the university was looking to expand. It considered, and rejected, property owned by Donald Trump. He did not forget it.
Oh, very well, then....
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/as-an-american-jew-i-feel-completely-reassured-for-my-safety-now-that-trump-has-targeted-the-epicenter-of-american-antisemitism-columbia-university
Thank you for this article. Seriously.
The Finster aims to please.
I sense the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm in the article. 😊
Just hilarious!
Thanks for this sharp entertainment. Very drôle. But I can’t help wondering what purpose such clever Kosher humour serves at this moment in time as we slide towards authoritarianism across the slippery meaning of words such as ‘antisemitism’, ‘national security’ and even ‘Jewish’. (And not to mention the hundred lies and distortions of the Israelis since October 8). There’s a war on, you know and I feel that the two sides are differentiated as much by the way they treat the truth as anything else. And - call me a dullard if you wish - but I can’t help feeling that truth is currently better served plain than garnished liberally with irony, mockery, false outrage or other tasty linguistic spices.
What needs to be said is why there is not a letter signed by an equal number of faculty members to implement measures to "protect Palestinian students?" And why no outcry against Anti-Palistinianism or Islamaphobia? (they would be punished, expelled, fired) The Jews, not most Jews, but more accurately in this case, the Zionists and their supporters, seem to have a monopoly on supposed bigotry always being about THEM. Forever about them. Forever the Victim. But that needs to be called out as a lie that has long died in the harsh light of Gaza.
In truth, that convenient lie is purely a propaganda tool in service of increasing authoritarian political repression and the goals of Empire: Voracious Greed, Total Control, Divide and Conquer (at home and abroad), and obscene profits from selling billions in weapons of death and destruction and and seizing the Worlds Land, Oil and Resources.
Thank you Chris and Mr. Fish.
To be critical of Jews is no more anti-Semitic than being critical of Christians is anti-Christian. As an ordained graduate Seminarian I am perfectly at ease criticising Christians (which I do often, especially of the miscreant errant evangelicals).
Liberalism is dead in universities as well. The hierarchy which itself resembles a Church, is now thoroughly privatized from food centers to parking.
But what will change is the curriculum as expressed here.
Lest we forget history:
“In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion.
The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none.
As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society.
Germany was preparing to cut its own head off.
By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.”
― Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
We see this now from the same playbook. And the Weimar liberals have nothing to offer.
Who are they and why is there no press coverage of them? Why has no one raised the alarm over 23,000 U.S.A. citizens who have gone to Israel to fight in their genocidal war against the Palestinians?
Isn't it illegal to join the military of another country to possibly give your life for the political motives of another government? Anti-war protesters in the USA are losing jobs, being expelled and deported for being against the Israeli war. Why aren't the Americans volunteering for the Israeli genocide being tried for treason, or at least arrested upon returning from Israel or being stopped at the border and sent back to Israel and having their U.S. citizenship revoked? Over 23,000 Americans working for Israel - WHO ARE THEY? They need to be identified and held accountable for their role in the Genocide.
We, the working class majority, were abandoned by the neolib Ivy D elite more than 40 years ago. The admin and professional 20%ers of the D party faithful not only didn't consider us, but agreed with the elite judgement we were nothing but a "basket of deplorables." Yet they're bewildered by the last election. Adding insult to decades of injury, they explain away the results as entirely the product of idiots, bigots, and cultists. Yeah, a sure fire way to win us back to the party that was once ours.
The econ system is based on little more than libertarian fantasies and a legal framework established by the elected lapdogs of corporate interests. 20%ers can live with this; they don't worry constantly about job loss, stagnant wages, healthcare coverage. And as administrators, they know they are needed to keep any econ/pol system functioning. Including a fascist one.
It's a Pastor Niemoller thing. "First they came for____. I didn't protest because I wasn't ____. Then they came for______, then ___, etc. By the time they came for me, there was no one left to protest." Professors and MDs are rapidly becoming assembly line workers, subjects of the econ overlords and their bureaucratic enablers. Welcome to our world!
Turns out the first economic sacrificial lamb (the working class) was a bellwether.
So ironic to ban face masks when 5 years ago they banned people not wearing them.
All too true, every bit of it. Is this country destined to endure a lifespan of dictatorship like
the many preceding it? And then what? I shudder to think of the shambles we will be left
with.
"Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent. Mao Zedong