Blackcap Blog

Published at 14:26 on 3 May 2024

The anarchist site Crimethinc recently put out an analysis of what is going on with the campus demonstrations. Like most things from the anarchist subculture, it is a mix of spot-on analysis and inward-facing mindset.

After students began occupying Columbia in solidarity with Palestinians, student occupations and encampments spread like wildfire, occupying over one hundred universities around the world. Well over two thousand students have been arrested. Each day has seen new occupations and new tactics. Again and again, police repression has outraged students, professors, and community members, drawing larger numbers to more and more militant demonstrations. The movement for Palestinian liberation is growing by leaps and bounds in the United States as a consequence of the bravery of demonstrators and blockaders over the past six months—most recently, thanks to occupiers who have been willing to risk arrest, police brutality, defamation, doxxing, and expulsion.

This probably overplays the role of the demonstrations. The main thing that has instilled growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause in the USA is simply the facts on the ground in Gaza. Lots of news stories now paint Israel in a very bad light, and justifiably so. That sparked expressions of dissent with the US Empire’s policy, those expressions caused increased awareness of the issue, and the increased awareness caused more expressions. So yes, the demos did play a part, but initial spark was simply coverage in the media.

On the latter, one critical aspect is the growing relevance of social media. This has allowed the domestic gatekeepers of information, normally squarely behind the agenda of a US superpower empire, to get bypassed. Social media is a two-edged sword: it allows a lot of baseless garbage to get elevated to prominence, but it also allows valid information (that would have otherwise been suppressed to a significant degree) to get elevated.

Another is simply the level of badness here. Israel almost always retaliates disproportionately, but this time the proximate cause of the retaliation was abnormally bloodthirsty, which made for an abnormally bloodthirsty retaliation. This has at times tended to overwhelm even Israel-biased sources with its severity.

The demonstrations are now probably getting to the point where many are net counterproductive. Gratuitous vandalism, no matter how justified the rage that motivates it, turns Middle America off. A protest movement that does better policing of its own is needed. That is unlikely, however, given the inward-looking nature of much of the activist left, where espousing or defending the most extreme rhetoric and actions is a way of gaining in-group status.

Such it has long been. Struggles get waged using the activists that actually exist, not the activists that one might wish existed.

The basic demand to see Palestinians as human beings is incompatible with the agendas of the United States government and universities.

The US needs Israel as a strategic partner to maintain a foothold in the Middle East; universities rely on funding from and research relationships with the military, arms manufacturers, and Zionists. It is impossible to acknowledge that Palestinians are entitled to the universal human rights that form the basis of the US empire’s claim to moral legitimacy while continuing to supply the weaponry, funding, and diplomatic cover necessary for the Israeli military to continue killing civilians and destroying their homes. These protests reveal deep-seated contradictions between discourse and practice that the government, corporate media platforms, and universities are determined to conceal.

This is the crux of the matter.

There has been much rhetoric about an “existential crisis” by Israel’s supporters since the attacks of October 7th. This is false rhetoric. The attacks, awful though they were, did not constitute an existential crisis for Israel. The latter has a nuclear arsenal and the most powerful military in the region. The continued existence of Israel is not in doubt. Rather, it is Palestine that is experiencing the existential crisis (and has been for approximately 75 years and counting). But I digress.

There is another existential crisis here, one posed by the demands of those dissenting from US policy with respect to Israel: an existential crisis of the US empire. Not the US itself, but the US as the overseer of a global empire. In order to run an empire, one has to be brutal at times. An empire whose citizenry is strongly concerned about its subject peoples cannot long remain an empire.

A successful empire must either be an authoritarian dictatorship or have a citizenry that is uninterested in (or downright hostile to) the well-being of its subject peoples. A successful empire must value order and obedience, and find dissent threatening. A successful democratic empire must have a populace that values order and obedience, and finds dissent threatening.

The latter could end up being a truly complicating factor for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. If a majority of Americans simply don’t care very much about the Palestinians, and don’t want to ever care, then any movement to change this is doomed. The protestors will just be seen as the loony left, whose eccentricities place them outside the bounds of politically acceptable thought. It won’t matter how good a job the movement does in policing its rhetoric; there simply is not enough public support for the policy changes it advocates.

One of the many evils of empires is that they tend to morally corrode themselves from within. I have written recently of how the protest might damage Biden’s chances of winning a second term and therefore put Trump in office. If this happens, a transition to a significantly more authoritarian form of government is likely in the USA.

If that happens, expect the so-called “responsible” left to chide empire’s critics for destroying democracy via their intransigence. They will actually have a point from the standpoint of the proximate cause, but the root cause is that the USA’s status as an empire had by this stage so corroded its morals that it had reached the point where its liberal democracy status became fundamentally incompatible with its empire status. As such, a transition to a more compatible authoritarian order then occurred.

Things have, in fact, been trending this way for some time. It was one reason why George W. Bush’s war of choice, backed by lies, against Iraq, upset me so much, and the lack of any real accountability for it upset me even more: it indicated a very high level of moral decay that was incompatible with the USA’s status as a functioning political democracy with basic human rights.

Accusations of anti-Semitism are cynical lies coming from administrators and politicians who have already showed that they could not care less about protecting students from actual white nationalists.

The same university administrators who used “free speech” as an excuse to vilify and arrest students for protesting against white nationalists speaking on campus are now attacking and brutalizing anti-Zionist Jewish and Palestinian protestors in the name of protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Free speech and student safety are both false pretenses: the truth is that university administrations and police will seek to destroy any force that actively challenges their power. This explains the previously unthinkable alliance between Republicans who refuse to disavow white nationalists in their own party, Democrats who champion genocide in the name of resisting anti-Semitism, and university administrators.

I was going to come out with examples of antisemitism at pro-Palestine rallies… but I couldn’t find any good ones. Not of actual, overt, all-Jews-are-evil antisemitism. There’s plenty of anti-Israel rhetoric to be found, but that’s only to be expected at rallies against what the State of Israel is currently doing. I even went to pro-Zionist sources like the StopAntisemitism twitter account and the Times of Israel and couldn’t come up with any truly juicy examples. That strongly suggests there basically aren’t any. Propaganda can be true, and truthful propaganda is in fact typically the most effective propaganda. Yet even those with a personal motive in finding dirt on the protest movement can’t seem to find any truly nasty anti-Semitic dirt on it.

Yes, some protest rhetoric can be teased into anti-Semitism, such as implying that Israel ought not to exist while Palestine ought to (why? is one side less human and thus less deserving of national aspirations?).

I myself avoid such rhetoric. But I also find it not that impressive as a demonstration of anti-Semitism. If anti-Semitism is the actual motive behind the protests, wouldn’t actual overt anti-Jewish rhetoric be easier to find? A far better explanation for it is simply people repeating slogans without stopping to think of the implications behind them. That’s evidence for mindless sloganeering, not evidence for anti-Semitism (and mindless sloganeering exists in every political cause).

Politicians are terrified of the protests, but they are even more terrified by the prospect that the protests could continue past the end of the school year, spilling over the bounds of the campus and into a long, hot, summer.

It is the responsibility of anyone trying to stop this genocide to ensure that their nightmare becomes a reality. And it could: the the [sic] George Floyd Uprising is still alive in the memories of the millions of people who participated.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Support for Black Lives Matter declined as the protests wore on and continues to gradually decline over time.

I’d love for radical politics to become more popular in the USA (to the point where it becomes the norm), but I’ll believe it when I see it. And I’m reasonably sure that things like gratuitous vandalism do more to turn Middle America away from the cause than towards it (and if radical politics are to become the norm, we must recruit from the ranks of Middle America).