It has been just short of a month since I last posted on
this blog. During that time, the average number of visits per day to the blog,
as measured by Google, has roughly doubled – a rather humbling fact, I must
say. My time has been spent preparing my weekly lectures on Marx and dealing
with the depredations of Parkinson’s disease and the burdens of being the
primary caregiver to my wife, who is struggling bravely with the problems of
being 91 years old. Just in the past two days, I have learned of the deaths of
two old and good friends – Charles Parsons, my college classmate, graduate
apartment mate, colleague at Columbia, and lifelong friend, and William
Strickland, my colleague and friend from the Afro-American studies department
at the University of Massachusetts. Charles was 91 and Bill was 87. Since I am
now 90, their passing is a cautionary tale for me.
I decided to return today to make what might be considered a
terminological quibble, but one with some larger significance. A number of
people have described the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel as a form of
apartheid. This is a mistake. Let me
explain. “Apartheid” is an Afrikaner term to describe an elaborate and complex
system of racially-based oppression developed in South Africa by the whites.
The system, justified by some rather distressing phony philosophical arguments
derived from a misunderstanding of European philosophical doctrines of the
earlier 20th century, involved classifying the population of South
Africa into four major categories: Whites, Africans, Coulereds, and Asians. The aim of the system was simultaneously to
keep as much separation as was manageable of the four categories of people from
one another (hence apartheid, which is to say apartness or separation) while
also making it possible for the whites to exploit the labor of the nonwhites.
The Africans, descendent of the original inhabitants of the area, were needed
both for agricultural labor and for work in the mines. In addition, they were
used as domestic workers of all sorts. To keep them separate from the white
population, the Afrikaner government had several devices. The first was the
creation of 10 “homelands,” territories ostensibly represented as independent
states, one each for the 10 racial and linguistic groups that the Afrikaners
imagined the Africans to be divided into. The second was the creation of single-sex
hostels or residences where African mine workers lived for 11 months a year,
being permitted to make brief trips home to their families and the homelands. The
third was the townships, segregated communities outside major white cities
where people whose labor was needed in the cities would be forced to return
each evening. The best known of these, of course, was Soweto, a community whose
name is an acronym formed from the words “Southwest Township” and which is
located outside Johannesburg. In addition, there were so-called “informal
settlements,” which is to say collections of shacks scattered along roads and
elsewhere in the officially white parts of South Africa.
The goal of the system of apartheid was not to get rid of
the nonwhite population – that would have been an economic disaster for the
whites. Rather, the goal was to exploit their labor while keeping them
officially out of sight, as it were.
I may be wrong, but it is not my impression that the Israeli
policy toward the Palestinians is based on a desire to exploit their labor. I
think many Israelis would be quite happy if the Palestinians were simply to
disappear. In that way, their attitude toward the Palestinians is much closer
to the attitude of the European settlers toward Native Americans. By and large,
the European settlers sought to exterminate the Native Americans, and when they
could not quite accomplish that, to push them into reservations on land for
which the settlers did not have much use. Needing large amounts of labor to
develop the New World in ways that would make them money, the settlers first
brought a good many indentured servants from England, and then brought Africans
whom, over more than a century, they enslaved after revising the English Common
Law to permit such a status to exist.
I am not sure this makes a great deal of difference to the struggle now going on, but I do think there is something to be gained from being more accurate in the terms we use to describe the horror as we observe.
Carry on.
117 comments:
it is not my impression that the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is based on a desire to exploit their labor. I think many Israelis would be quite happy if the Palestinians were simply to disappear.
The one thing that might be worth adding to this is that while waiting for "the Palestinians [to] simply to disappear," Israelis are quite willing to exploit their labor. See Andrew Ross's "Migrant workers in their own land", online at
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/04/21/migrant-workers-in-their-own-land/
This has the effect of reducing the difference between the two regimes, especially since the Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens are restricted to specific parts of Israel + (Palestine not including Israel).
Also, good to see you back here.
[to] should have been not included in my comment above.
Bishop Tutu would not, it seems, have agreed with you respecting aprtheid in Israel:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/30/desmond-tutu-palestinians-israel
To add to marcel proust's comment see these two separate excerpts from Chomsky's Fateful Triangle:
1.
The Gaza strip is vastly overcrowded and the population is rising rapidly. No opportunities are provided for development. On the contrary, the only land reserves have been expropriated for potential Jewish use. Since the only means of survival are service in Israel’s cheap labor force, and since regular commuting is virtually impossible, workers find ways to sleep illegally in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. In Tel Aviv, each worker is picked up by the police several times a year on the average. Workers sleep in fruit stalls in the open markets or in rotting rooms or cellars in slums where they are lined up wall-to-wall, sleeping in their work clothes with no sanitary facilities or showers, waiting for the knock of the police. The rough estimate is that thousands of Arab workers live this way, though no one knows. While the police are empowered to prevent Arabs from sleeping in Tel Aviv, there are no laws establishing minimal conditions for their survival.
2.
The reaction here and in Israel to the grossly discriminatory treatment of Arabs and Jews by the courts stands alongside the prevailing double standard on terror and rights. Palestinian artist Fathi Ghaban receives a six-month prison sentence for using the colors of the Palestinian flag in a painting. An Arab worker caught sleeping illegally in Tel Aviv receives the same sentence, with two months’ additional imprisonment if he does not pay a heavy fine. Four young Arabs are sentenced to fines and three months at hard labor for having waved a Palestinian flag in a protest demonstration after the Sabra-Shatila massacres. In contrast, a sergeant who ordered two soldiers to bury four Palestinians alive with a bulldozer receives four months, and two soldiers, whose prolonged beating of captured Palestinians horrified Europe after a CBS filming, received three months probation. Another soldier received a month’s suspended sentence for killing an Arab by firing into a village. A settler found guilty of shooting directly into a crowd of demonstrators was sentenced to a rebuke; another received six months of “public service” outside prison for killing a 13-year-old boy after an incident on a road in which he was under no danger according to testimony of army observers. President Herzog reduced the sentences of Jewish terrorists who murdered three Palestinians and wounded 33 in a gun and grenade attack at Hebron Islamic College from life in prison to 15 years.
Wait is this a blog
Dear Professor, you certainly have brought terminological clarity to the matter without diminishing the awful genocidal realities of what's happening in Gaza to the Palestinian people by the Israeli State and its IDF (and which is also hypocritically supported by the US-led West). Noam Chomsky has pointed out too that strictly speaking the Gaza Strip is not an apartheid situation, even though no one seems to dispute the fact that it's an 'open-air prison'. So, that puts you in very good company.
Regarding the North American example of settler colonialism, a similar historical account can be given here of Australia, too.
The professor’s post suggests a philosophical point that has struck my many times in reading the blog and the comments: the issue of the point of giving definitions of general terms, and then treating those definitions as providing criteria for evaluating historical phenomena. I mean in particular the seeming interest in the definitions of terms like ‘fascism’, ‘genocide’, and ‘apartheid’. The heated arguments go like this: X, the current political phenomenon in question, is or isn’t relevantly similar to Y, which is the paradigmatic instance of malign political phenomenon A. For a while I thought that such interest in definitions was just one of the cognitive pathologies of the Mad Shyster, but it does seem more widespread. My immediate response to these attempts has from the first been to dismiss them with one or the other of the tools of my personal philosophical kit. (I just grabbed the books off my shelf, so I’ll give quotes). First, there’s what I would have thought was the knock-down remark of Nelson Goodman: “When, in general, are two things similar? The first response is likely to be: “When they have at least property in common.” But since every two things have some property in common this will make similarity a universal and hence useless relation.” (Problems and Projects, p. 443) Second, there’s the more general Nietzschean point that, as Raymond Geuss put it, “Human words and institutions are interlaced. Words arise and develop through actual human uses of them in contexts in which power is being exercised in one way or another. Through time human institutions are modified to serve new ends. Each re-use of a word like ‘democracy’ or ‘Christianity in a new context is potentially a reinterpretation of it. There are no ‘natural’ or unbreachable limits to the ways in which such reinterpretation can take place.” (History and Illusion in Politics, p. 7) And third, there’s the general Deweyian conception of inquiry (to which I subscribe) that treats inquiry as problem oriented, especially in what seems to me its elaboration by Foucault, Geuss, and Hans Sluga as diagnostic oriented, and which then searches out “the constituents of a given situation” (Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, p. 112), considers the ideas suggested by those constituents, tries to formulate solutions to the problems, reflects on the solutions, considers alternatives, etc., etc., and so on until something seems settled. The relevant point is that nothing, including the meaning and significance of general concepts, is treated as definitively fixed.—None of this implies that it is pointless to pursue the definitional question and the marks of the concept, and then test the applicability of suggested criteria, but it does suggest that definitions and correlated criteria have highly circumscribed roles to play in historical inquiry and reflection.
John Rapko,
Very thought-provoking and true.
The very people who do not accept my use of the word "apartheid" to describe Israeli treatment of Palestinians (and they come in two varieties, those who believe that "apartheid" is too bland to describe Israeli treatment of Palestinians and those who believe that "apartheid" is too condemnatory to describe said treament) have no problems using "fascist" to describe Trump.
And of course if I begin to point out the many differences between Trump and what we called
"fascism" back when I took political science courses in college, I'll be accused of being a Trump apologist or of not realizing "the threat to the American way of life" Trump poses.
So we or she who rules the definitions rules the world or at least rules the blogs.
The substance of the debate is empirical in nature. It is the evidence that matters. The Trump analogy falters because by and large educated people know the relevant facts there are to know about him and his acolytes. When it comes to American foreign policy and specially the policy regarding Israel, the vast majority of educated Americans are very unaware of the facts, and many apparently want to remain that way. The media with its pundits and so called-intellectuals don't deviate much from the same narrative. There is academic research about this manipulation. This differs from domestic policy and other aspects of politics. One can avoid researching and reading so as to keep the illusion that things are not as bad while a tiny minority will keep finding the facts as uncomfortable and depressing as they may be.
Many months ago (I don't recall exactly when) RPW posted something very similar, arguing that apartheid was an inaccurate label in this context. In response, several people then pointed out in the comments that many Palestinians from the West Bank (and, I think to a lesser but still non-trivial extent, Gaza) worked in Israel proper, sometimes or often under rather exploitative conditions. Marcel Proust's and MAD's comments above are to this effect, just as some of the comments on RPW's earlier post were.
In May 2022, the International Commission of Jurists issued a statement that began:
"The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) strongly condemns Israel’s laws, policies and practices of racial segregation, persecution and apartheid against the indigenous Palestinian population in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), comprising the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and against Palestinian refugees." (see link below)
Now maybe the International Commission of Jurists is wrong, and many would undoubtedly dispute its conclusion in whole or part. My non-expert view is that one would probably need to distinguish (as the Intl Comm. of Jurists perhaps goes on to do) between Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories (including those who migrate(d) back and forth to work in Israel proper) and Palestinian citizens of Israel (who also face discrimination but -- or such is my impression -- not in exactly the same way, although that may be changing under the current Israeli govt).
I don't think the terminological question is all that significant. Trumpism is similar to "classic" fascism in some respects, dissimilar in other respects. Use of the label "fascist" in that context is a kind of conceptual stretching that may be allowable. Perhaps something similar could be said about the use of "apartheid" in the I/P context, though I would perhaps be more inclined to describe specific practices and show how they violate int'l human rights norms, without getting too bogged down in labels. That approach seems roughly consistent with what John Rapko says at the end of his comment.
https://www.icj.org/un-icj-denounces-israels-system-of-apartheid-against-palestinians/
"...against the indigenous Palestinian population in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories...)"
If there ever was a population that would qualify as "indigenous" in that part of the planet it was displaced millennia ago. Of course, it would have been better to put a stop to the process awhile back.
Academic discussions on fascism are often like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18AzodTPG5U&t=6s
It's more politically useful to note the straws in the wind.
Professor Wolff raises an excellent point. “Apartheid” become a prestige word, subject to inflation, and therefore devaluation. This is probably a natural enough process, it seems, but it is nevertheless annoying to those of us who are too-heavily invested in the currency.
As a lawyer, I find myself grinding my teeth over this phenomenon more than most. For example, consider that perennial hack-journalistic chestnut, “complicity”. I am sure there are a number of hacks out there right now writing that “we are all complicit in the events unfolding in Gaza”, and thereafter congratulating him or herself for Having a Big Thought.
But “complicity” has a specific meaning in the law. And if everyone is complicit, then no one is. Members of the foreign policy establishment (for example) might be complicit, but ordinary schnooks like me? I don’t think so. This kind of employment of prestige words in the service of pseudo-profundity does the work of obfuscation of responsibility—which is, of course, what journalism is there for.
Some other terms, “Violence” (and "Indigenous" and "Colonial") among them have also been subject to this phenomenon. Given this, I find it hard to resist a chuckle when the linguistic central bankers, having so devalued the currency, are themselves caught out: Consider how the cult studies crowd have rather painted themselves into a corner with their redefinition of “violence”. If mere words—and even silence—count as “violence”, well then, an irredentist political slogan ("from the river to the sea!") must also so be counted, a fortiori.
@aaall
Bernard Lewis (a neocon partisan I dislike very much) said something that I agree with:
Above all, the historian should not prejudge issues and predetermine results by the arbitrary definition of topic and selection of evidence, and the use of emotionally charged or biased language. As a famous economist once remarked, “Complete asepsis is impossible, but one does not for that reason perform surgery in a sewer.”
I will let readers interpret the analogy on their own. What is the point of saying that Palestinians are not really native?. Hasn’t “From Time Immemorial” by Joan Peters been discredited enough to your satisfaction? Many of the founding figures of Israel certainly thought Palestinians were native. Here are some relevant things I’ve picked from my readings in the last months:
For example, the chief ideologue of the Zionists, Ber Borochov, claimed that Palestinian Arabs had no crystallized national consciousness of their own and were likely to be assimilated into the new Hebraic nationalism, precisely because, in his view, “the fellahin are considered in this context as the descendants of the ancient Hebrew and Canaanite residents ‘together with a small admixture of Arab blood’”
The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and his Circle by Salim Tamari quoting from The New Hebrew Nation by Yaacov Shavit.
Ahad Ha’am wrote that “the Moslems [of Palestine] are the ancient residents of the land … who became Christians on the rise of Christianity and became Moslems on the arrival of Islam.”
The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and his Circle by Salim Tamari quoting from The New Hebrew Nation by Yaacov Shavit.
In 1918, David Ben Gurion and Yitshak Ben Zvi, writing in Yiddish, tried to establish that Palestinian peasants and their mode of life constitute the living historical testimony to Israelite practices in the biblical period. But the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic, and these writings were soon withdrawn from circulation.
The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and his Circle by Salim Tamari
In any case, in Wikipedia we find: “A 2020 study on human remains from Middle Bronze Age Palestinian (2100–1550 BC) populations suggests a significant degree of genetic continuity in Arabic-speaking Levantine populations (such as Palestinians, Druze, Lebanese, Jordanians, Bedouins, and Syrians), as well as several Jewish groups (such as Ashkenazi, Iranian, and Moroccan Jews) “ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10212583/
A few weeks back, I was perusing through Saul Bellow’s letter collection when I stumbled upon one about his first meeting with Christopher Hitchens . I’m confident that many of the individuals commenting here will find it appealing
Let’s go on to our dinner guest, Martin’s companion. His name is Christopher Hitchens. During dinner he mentioned that he was a great friend of Edward Said. Leon Wieseltier and Noam Chomsky were also great buddies of his. At the mention of Said’s name, Janis grumbled. I doubt that this was unexpected, for Hitchens almost certainly thinks of me as a terrible reactionary—the Jewish Right. Brought up to respect and to reject politeness at the same time, the guest wrestled briefly and silently with the louche journalist and finally [the latter] spoke up. He said that Said was a great friend and that he must apologize for differing with Janis but loyalty to a friend demanded that he set the record straight. Everybody remained polite. For Amis’ sake I didn’t want a scene. Fortunately (or not) I had within reach several excerpts from Said’s Critical Inquiry piece, which I offered in evidence. Jews were (more or less) Nazis. But of course, said Hitchens, it was well known that [Yitzhak] Shamir had approached Hitler during the war to make deals. I objected that Shamir was Shamir, he wasn’t the Jews. Besides I didn’t trust the evidence. The argument seesawed. Amis took the Said selections to read for himself. He could find nothing to say at the moment but next morning he tried to bring the matter up, and to avoid further embarrassment I said it had all been much ado about nothing.
…Well, these Hitchenses are just Fourth-Estate playboys thriving on agitation, and Jews are so easy to agitate. Sometimes (if only I knew enough to do it right!) I think I’d like to write about the fate of the Jews in the decline of the West—or the long crisis of the West, if decline doesn’t suit you. The movement to assimilate coincided with the arrival of nihilism. This nihilism reached its climax with Hitler. The Jewish answer to the Holocaust was the creation of a state. After the camps came politics and these politics are nihilistic. Your Hitchenses, the political press in its silliest disheveled left-wing form, are (if nihilism has a hierarchy) the gnomes. Gnomes don’t have to know anything, they are imperious, they appear when your fairy-tale heroine is in big trouble, offer a deal and come to collect her baby later. If you can bear to get to know them you learn about these Nation-type gnomes that they drink, drug, lie, cheat, chase, seduce, gossip, libel, borrow money, never pay child support, etc. They’re the bohemians who made Marx foam with rage in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Well, that’s nihilism for you, one of its very minor branches, anyway. Yet to vast numbers of people they are very attractive somehow. That’s because those vast numbers are the rank and file of nihilism, and they want to hear from Hitchens and Said, etc., and consume falsehoods as they do fast-food. And it’s so easy to make trouble for the Jews. Nothing easier. The networks love it, the big papers let it be made, there’s a receptive university population for which Arafat is Good and Israel is Bad, even genocidal.
Let’s leave aside the fact that Hitchens has his own version of the event in his memoirs.
I want to highlight this part: “Besides I didn’t trust the evidence” and then his reflection on Hitchens (which to me seems more a reflection of himself), a person he had just met. The strategy is: avoid engaging with the material evidence and instead attack the credibility of the opponent with FLUFF. He was willing enough to believe everything in the stupid 1989 Commentary article “Professor of Terror” but then says he doesn't trust the evidence against his position.
I don’t know whether his box office numbers were “vast” or not, but Hitchens was fun to read. You didn’t have to take him seriously—he was just offering the left-hand version of the sort of clever, brisk comedy that you get with The Spectator: e.g., Boris Johnson joking about EU-mandated square bananas. (I laughed over that one… does that make me a nihilist?) But why would you take either of them seriously?
But Bellow is right, some people did, which must be part of the joke. I recently saw a book called “Why Hitchens Still Matters” (come again?!). The irony is that all Bellow had to do was wait and he could have watched in his rear view mirror Hitchens come up from behind and overtake him in the right-hand lane, going 85 mph and still accelerating.
Well, Bellow later took Hitchens seriously enough to thank him warmly for writing an introduction to his Augie March. I am glad you liked the letter.
I had a brief encounter with Hitchens years ago, at a political event in D.C. (no need to get more specific). It was in the days when I subscribed to The Nation, where he had a regular column, and he had recently published a slashing attack on someone that was indeed fun to read (I no longer remember for sure who the particular target was). I said to him that I'd enjoyed the piece, and he gave me a three-word reply, in a somewhat self-deprecating tone: "Mere vulgar abuse" (which I think is probably a distinctly British way of putting it).
Hitchens esp. in his prime (before his views on certain things -- though not all things, I think -- changed) was brilliant at invective. A couple of people might have equaled him in that department, but no one did it better. He also had a quite wide range of historical and literary reference. He was not always right, but he was almost always provocative, in the good sense of the word.
The Hitch ... even if he wasn't always right, and went over spawning for a brilliant punchline, he's missing.
Hitchens's support for the invasion of Iraq was a huge blot on his legacy.
Hitchens ended up as a complete neo-con. He even endorsed George Bush in 2004.
And Hitchens crawled WAY down the Anti-Muslim rabbit hole, along with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, his "New Atheist" mates.
Sheesh... it gives a bad name to atheists like me.
I tried to read Hitchens' book, "God is not great, why religion poisons everything" and it bored me.
Bertrand Russell did a better job demolishing the arguments for God's existence in Why I am not a Christian and Nietzsche did a better job demolishing the psychology of religious belief in the Anti-Christ and other works, not to mention Freud's the Future of an Illusion.
Anyway, religion doesn't poison everything. I point to Martin Luther King and to the heroic role of the Catholic church during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
@LFC (April 24, 2024 at 9:40 PM): I said to him that I'd enjoyed the piece, and he gave me a three-word reply, in a somewhat self-deprecating tone: "Mere vulgar abuse" (which I think is probably a distinctly British way of putting it).
Reminds me of this monty python sketch.
PS: In response to LFC (April 23, 2024 at 8:49 PM), my initial comments were merely to emphasize that whatever Israeli policy is called (and whatever its most important goal or function is), labor exploitation is a major component/consequence of the policy.
An atheist myself, I nevertheless have always found the "new atheists" little different in their evangelism from the extreme evangelism of some religionists.
Talking about atheism, one member of that gang of Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, i.e. Daniel Dennett, passed away on April, 19,2024. He was 82 years old.
Prodded by the discussion, I just watched the philosopher A. W. Moore's lecture on the New Atheism of Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Hitchens (he compares it unfavorably to Logical Positivism) on YouTube. I had the captions on, and at one point it rendered him as saying "With friends like these, who needs enemas?"
^Do you have a link to that video?
I'd also be curious to see people's essential reading lists on the philosophy of religion, skeptical or otherwise. Hume's [i]Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion[/i] would top mine. I recommend it to anyone getting into the subject, and particularly the question of God's existence. It's a far better representative of doubt and unbelief than anything by the New Atheists, and it's not so sure of itself; it depicts competing positions without scorn and caricature, and doesn't seem to favor any one overwhelmingly (though anyone already acquainted with Hume knows he's pretty much Philo). It's not as technically sophisticated as more recent works, but this makes it less of a labor to read. I still need to check out the professor's old blog entries on it.
Returning to the topic of the post I wanted to share the following excerpt from "State Expansion and Conflict" by Israeli historian Oren Barak:
In both Lebanon and Israel/Palestine the vision of the nation-state, which was promoted by the dominant group - the Maronites and the Jews, respectively - soon confronted a multi communal reality, but whereas in Lebanon this vision was ultimately - and painfully - adjusted to fit the reality, in Israel/Palestine persistent efforts were made to change the reality to fit the vision, with devastating consequences for all.
It supports Professor Wolff's point, which I agree with as well, but as my post from April 22, 2024 at 5:04 PM holds, this did not stop Israel from exploiting some Palestinians.
Thanks, John!
For my convenience and anyone else's, here are the links to the professor's posts on Hume's Dialogues: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Final
Ha ha ha! “Enemas” is about right. If religion (especially in the broad Durkheimian sense, that is, with or without belief in supernatural beings) is universal among humans, then what is going on? Are people just irredeemably silly?
Reflect on this and you may perhaps come to understand that religion is simply psychology turned inside out—that is, a picture of one’s inner landscape is not understood as such but instead projected outwards and understood to be a picture of the cosmos.
And, comparatively speaking, you may come to understand that monotheism as a religion represents a woefully incomplete psychology, destined to make one miserable. Here it helps to have some familiarity with other religious traditions. The abandonment of the study of Greek in school means that the much more complete psycho-religious attitudes of the ancient world are unknown.
aaall
I took a quick skim through the John Ganz piece you linked. He refers to the 1977 "upheaval" when Likud took power for the first time. Is that the "heel turn" you're referring to, or is it something else?
Not that it’s directly connected to the on-going dicussions here, but since I imagine many of those commenting or reading here have links to higher education in the US, I was wondering what their thinking was on the responses to the demonstrations on so many campuses.
I want to emphasise responses, not the pros/cons of the demonstrations themselves, which, I'll add, in my view have been quite restrained.
My own take on the responses is in part one of surprise that the universities and colleges have moved so quickly to crush them with overwhelming police force. Am I misremembering that in the 60s matters proceeded much more slowly? And if I’m not misremembering, does this quick resort to suppression signal anything of larger significance?
JW,
They waited about a week to call the cops at Columbia in 1968, although the cops were very brutal when they arrived. One cop pushed me out of a very low second story window (no great harm done), but a lot of kids ended up with more serious injuries.
My impression is that in 1968 the "gentleman and a scholar" ethos still prevailed at least in Ivy League schools and so the administration was less aggressive towards us than they are now.
Second, there are a lot of pro-Israel big money donnors who want to see the protests crushed.
By 1968 big money wasn't necessarily pro-Vietnam: like everyone, besides LBJ, they saw that it was a losing cause.
How long did Nathan Pusey wait before he called in the police to clear University Hall in 1969? Offhand I don't think it was that long but I am open to correction if someone wants to look it up.
Each case may be at least slightly different, e.g. what's going at Columbia now. Though precisely what is going on seems to have been the subject of varying accounts.
Further to jw’s question, can one of the profs explain to me the predilection for tents? I mean, why would your protest take the form of erecting a tent and crawling inside? If I were a cranky “old” with a tendency to suck on my pipe and psychoanalyze, I might say that it’s infantile, it’s just like a 6 year old child who “camps” in the back yard overnight.
I suppose it may go back to the mock “shantytowns” of the anti-Apartheid days. I was in school and an onlooker then. No such protests were possible on my campus, for the mundane reason of the non-existence of our endowment, and so righteous upper-class calls for disinvestment were unavailable to us poor relations.
But I did read all about it, and I got an earful about it, de haut en bas, from a friend of a friend who was at Brown. My feeling then was, were I a Soweto resident watching this unfold, I would find it offensive to see a bunch of rich kids playing at being poor and thereafter going back to their comfortable lives while I remained in place.
I also thought: if they want to protest black people living in insalubrious conditions, they could walk two blocks off campus, there’s no need to go halfway around the world. But those blacks in South Africa were somehow morally pristine, while the local ones were … not?
But: de gustibus, etc.
While I’m being perverse along these lines, shouldn’t the protesters now welcome a little police brutality? After all, isn’t this is just The Man (in the form of the Administration and the NYPD) entering into the LARPy spririt of the thing and adding just a little bit of IDF flavor to the proceedings?
I see that Leiter has a post that bears on this topic, though not on the specific question jw posed.
@ J. Pillette
Some of the anti-apartheid activity of those days was "ordinary" protest (not tent encampments). I recall participating in a couple of standard or "ordinary" protests (I was not involved in encampments). And it's not a question of which groups were more "morally pristine"; rather the universities were seen as having fairly direct ties, via some of their investments, to the S. African regime.
Pillette,
I don't any student wants to be suspended or expelled from the university, as is happening now.
As for police brutality, the cop pushed me and I landed on my feet, spraining my achilles tendon (no great harm done), but if I had hit my head, I could have spent the rest of my life in a wheel chair.
To clarify: there *were* encampments but I wasn't involved with them.
W/r/t what ties an Ivy League campus has, I would say that Yale’s tie to New Haven (where it is, if I’m not mistaken, the single largest taxpayer) are quite a bit closer than indirect investments in the Israeli economy--that is, investments in funds that are invested in companies that do (some) business in countries whose governments are understood to be morally wicked (the USA excepted, of course).
As for students wanting to show “solidarity” but in an entirely risk-free way, consider the outrage when the HLS students declared that Israel was “entirely responsible” (stupid, but leave that aside) and thereafter were upset that their white-shoe job offers were rescinded. Was this not emblematic? I want my cake and I also want to eat it. I want to be righteous ... but I also want to be a corporate lawyer! Whose interests did they think they would be representing at Cadwallader, Wickersham, and Taft—les damnees de la terre?
Sounds to me, J.P., as though you're the one being righteous.
Both comparisons, i.e. with apartheid and with european colonialism in the americas, seem distorting. Apartheid for the reasons already mentioned. The european colonial endeavor for the significant fact that the jews in the middle east are not colonizers simply taking over a region of the world without historical or cultural connection with them. This isnt trivial. Jews have as long as there has been recorded history always been in israel and the middle east. A closer, although still not perfect, comparison would probably be south asia if one or the other side never accepted the partition into two, and later three states.
@Leslie Glazer
I do think your point is trivial against the point Professor Wolff is making. It has been amply documented that the ideology behind Zionism was largely influenced by European nationalism and imperialism. It is not then surprising to find in "The Jewish State" (1895) by Herzl:
For Europe we could constitute part of the wall for defence against Asia: we could serve as an outpost against barbarism. As a neutral state we would remain in contact with all of Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence..
Many interesting comparisons have been made with the ideology of the Puritans and their idea of being the chosen ones in guiding humanity to a new type of civilization. And who could forget manifest destiny in the middle of the 19th century. Every invading group has some ideology justifying its invasion as some sort of God-mandated mission or for the sake of civilization. I think Michael Rice in "False inheritance" is largely right when he argues:
The foundation of the Israeli state was a response to the distress of European Jews who themselves had been nurtured in the ideas of nineteenth-century nationalism. Inevitably, it must have seemed reasonable to them to seek a solution to their suffering at the hands of their fellow Europeans by establishing the sort of supremacist rule in Palestine which they had seen set up, with every evidence of success, by the imperial European powers across the world. To the simple political concept of Colonialism - its simplicity demonstrated by the expression of the early Zionists’ belief that the Palestinians would welcome them into their land, as the bringers of civilisation - was added the prescriptive rights of habitation in Palestine conveyed to them by their assumption of the myths of the tribes of pre- and post-Exilic times in Palestine. This absorption of the myths of another people in another age had the effect of making the Jews of Europe partners with the very imperial powers whose nationalist and expansionist policies they envied so much and absorbed so readily. Because they shared many of the same myths which the imperial powers had taken to themselves they found a sympathetic audience for their proposals, an audience already predisposed to them by its own self-interest.
Many founding figures of Israel were deeply aware of this reality. For example Ben Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress:
If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti‐Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Israeli right said:
Colonization is self‐explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonization. For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.
Far more pleasant to our ears is this letter from Arthur Ruppin to Hans Kohn in May 1930:
In the foundations of Brith Shalom one of the determining factors was that the Zionist aim has no equal example in history. The aim is to bring the Jews as second nation into a country which already is settled as a nation - and fulfill this through peaceful means. History has seen such penetration by one nation into a strange land only by conquest, but it has never occurred that a nation will freely agree that another nation should come and demand full equality of rights and national autonomy at its side. The uniqueness of this case prevents its being, in my opinion, dealt with in conventional political-legal terms. It requires special contemplation and study. Brith Shalom should be the forum in which the problem is discussed and investigated.
@Leslie Glazer
I do think the point is almost trivial against the point Professor Wolff is making. It has been amply documented that the ideology behind Zionism was largely influenced by European nationalism and imperialism. It is not then surprising to find in "The Jewish State" (1895) by Herzl:
For Europe we could constitute part of the wall for defence against Asia: we could serve as an outpost against barbarism. As a neutral state we would remain in contact with all of Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence..
Many interesting comparisons have been made with the ideology of the Puritans and their idea of being the chosen ones in guiding humanity to a new type of civilization. And who could forget manifest destiny in the middle of the 19th century. Every invading group has some ideology justifying its invasion as some sort of God-mandated mission or for the sake of civilization. I think Michael Rice in "False inheritance" is largely right when he argues:
The foundation of the Israeli state was a response to the distress of European Jews who themselves had been nurtured in the ideas of nineteenth-century nationalism. Inevitably, it must have seemed reasonable to them to seek a solution to their suffering at the hands of their fellow Europeans by establishing the sort of supremacist rule in Palestine which they had seen set up, with every evidence of success, by the imperial European powers across the world. To the simple political concept of Colonialism - its simplicity demonstrated by the expression of the early Zionists’ belief that the Palestinians would welcome them into their land, as the bringers of civilisation - was added the prescriptive rights of habitation in Palestine conveyed to them by their assumption of the myths of the tribes of pre- and post-Exilic times in Palestine. This absorption of the myths of another people in another age had the effect of making the Jews of Europe partners with the very imperial powers whose nationalist and expansionist policies they envied so much and absorbed so readily. Because they shared many of the same myths which the imperial powers had taken to themselves they found a sympathetic audience for their proposals, an audience already predisposed to them by its own self-interest.
Many founding figures of Israel were deeply aware of this reality. For example Ben Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress:
If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti‐Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that
Expulsion of the Palestinians was essential to him writing in 1941 that:
it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Israeli right said:
Colonization is self‐explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonization. For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.
Far more pleasant to our ears is this letter from Arthur Ruppin to Hans Kohn in May 1930:
In the foundations of Brith Shalom one of the determining factors was that the Zionist aim has no equal example in history. The aim is to bring the Jews as second nation into a country which already is settled as a nation - and fulfill this through peaceful means. History has seen such penetration by one nation into a strange land only by conquest, but it has never occurred that a nation will freely agree that another nation should come and demand full equality of rights and national autonomy at its side. The uniqueness of this case prevents its being, in my opinion, dealt with in conventional political-legal terms. It requires special contemplation and study. Brith Shalom should be the forum in which the problem is discussed and investigated.
Your point, I think, has more weight in that the attachment of the Jews to Israel was in the hearts and minds of many British and American religious protestants which made it easier for both to support Israel without opposition.
My virtuous friend shared a link with me in which a small group of people wanted to show what happened when they took the U.S. flag to a pro-Palestinian rally in NYC. There are many Muslims in the USA who are people of God. But those protestors in the following video were nefarious rebels and un-American.
"https://twitter.com/Davidlederer6/status/1780143103048888493?t=4gr-L5PflT6VHD5kVEgQhw&s=19"
Michael LLenos,
Are you to going to resurrect the House Unamerikan Activities to harrass the un-Amerikan nefarious rebels?
Here's Billy Bragg Waiting for the Great Leap Forward: "if you have a blacklist, I want to be on it".
It would be a genuine honor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHd2O_KuCxA
@MAD
Judging from the opening part of the Michael Rice quotation (and btw, it wd be nice/helpful if you put quotation marks around passages you're quoting), he's not distinguishing betw 19th cent European nationalism and 19th cent European imperialism. I would suggest that the two, while connected in some respects, are not identical. This wd require elaboration, which I can't do rt now.
Also your second quote from Ben-Gurion about expulsion doesn't show what you say it shows. To say that evacuation wd require compulsion doesn't in itself show that he favored evacuation.
This is, I think, at least the third time you have quoted B-G's statement to Nahum Goldmann. Don't you think three times is enough, or are you just going to keep repeating the same quotes over and over and over and over until everyone here agrees w you that this statement to Goldmann ends the story? Assuming that B-G did see the Zionist "project" as theft of another people's land, how did he justify it? Since B-G criticized M. Begin as racist (based on another quote you've offered), wd it be reasonable to suppose that B-G had a non-racist, non-imperialist justification?
“Anonymous” (interesting name, is that Armenian? Ethiopian? Lithuanian? I’ve never heard it before) is right, I shouldn’t raise these kinds of questions. Considerations of class are wholly inappropriate here and now, and the class position of Ivy League students has NOTHING whatsoever to do with their ideology. Silly me, I forgot that students dwell in a platonic realm of pure ideas.
I will henceforth join in and celebrate the right-on tactics of protest. I’ll even take this huit-tarded approach (geddit?!?) all the way and follow Jacobin Magazine’s advice to boycott the upcoming election! My conscience will remain pure! It worked before in ‘68, when we got rid of that monster LBJ and cleared the way for those two groovy peaceniks, Nixon and Kissinger!
Just read a pretty good (though I don't agree w all of it) column by Anne-Marie Slaughter in WaPo. Will provide the link later on.
Pillette,
Class certainly is a factor in the formation of everyone's ideas, but not the only one and perhaps not the main one.
Theodor Adorno, whom you often refer to so favorably, came from a wealthy background, but somehow he was able to see through the bourgeois ideology of his upbringing.
Students of the activist persuasion tend to be drawn from comp lit, not poli sci, and so their understanding of the situation tends toward the puerile. America is in fact an empire (or “hegemon” if you like), with world-wide interests, client states, and so on, of which Israel is but one component.
It should be obvious to even the most casual reader of history that the American Empire is the immediate successor to the British Empire. To claim, as the comp-lit crowd is wont to do, that empires are per se wicked and ought not to exist, is to make a claim that is, strictly speaking (that is, in the logical positivist sense) meaningless.
Such a moral approach to politics is sentimental. It is deeply satisfying for the participants. Who not only regard themselves as moral, but as baby Einsteins into the bargain. After all, that is just what their parents and teachers have been telling them for the last 18 years. But are they really that smart? Marching and chanting “Genocide Joe” is undermining the Dems and can only help elect Trump and his band of ghouls, who will no doubt return the favor by kicking sand in their faces.
s.w.
I think you're perhaps misreading Pillette. He's focusing on what he sees as their hypocrisy, not mainly on the supposed class influences on their worldview, even though in his effort to be clever he may be giving the latter impression.
In one of his comments above, Pillette criticizes students who want to protest in an "entirely risk-free way." This is his real complaint -- that, in his words, they want to have their cake and eat it. And yet there is no reason to suppose that it is reasonable to expect students to give up their career aspirations, whatever they may be, in order to participate in protests.
Pillette's implicit position is that unless your career goal is to be, say, a union organizer or a community organizer or (like Pillette himself) a plaintiffs' class-action lawyer, you have no business protesting bc you're a hypocrite. Pillette is saying: How DARE someone who plans to be a corporate lawyer protest a university's policies or the war in Gaza. As if one of the prices for working for Cadwalader or McKinsey should be giving up your right of free expression when you're still a student. By that logic, anyone who plans to be a corporate lawyer should give up their right to free speech and to protest as soon as they make that "sell-out" career decision. Pillette's position is: capitalist sell-outs shouldn't have free speech. Only the truly righteous shd have, and exercise, the rights to free speech and to protest.
It’s an old topic, just how much ‘education’ in political science discourages many from taking a critical stance on political matters. I’ll add that, as a political scientist myself, I’ve been quite aware for a great many years that that has been much debated within the discipline itself. All too often it results, it often seems, in students going off into the great outdoors with a false sense that they are politically realistic unlike the general run of humanity.
But that aside, J.P., I hope you are aware that the rot within the Democratic Party extends far beyond the college campuses. That is surely what one should take away from this report from my favourite state:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/us/politics/mark-pocan-wisconsin-gaza.html
But perhaps the people being reported on are hypocrites too?
Mr Pillette, going out on a tenuous limb here, reading your post sounds like you are channeling Adorno. This is just my psychological hunch. And I am just wondering if my intuition has some reality or my I am terribly wrong? Stated with anxiety that I may have made a move that isn't part of what a blog ought to be. John reading your post is always a learning experience. Thank you.
LFC,
I have zero contact with the young protesters, but do they all want to become corporate lawyers?
My niece and nephew are a bit older, in their 30's. They went to good state universities,Michigan and Wisconsin. My niece, a French major, studied in France for a year, then did graduate work at Columbia and now teaches high school in New York. My nephew is a journalist working in alternative media.
Of the people of my generation whom I'm still in contact with, one is a lawyer who defends juvenile offenders, another was a teacher in an alternative school, another was a librarian, still another was a community activist. All participated heavily in 60's protest movements, without expecting to work in Wall St. in the future and no one I know laments their life options.
s.w.,
Respectfully, I think you have *completely* missed my point. I think I shd just give up on this part of the discussion.
"Are you to going to resurrect the House Unamerikan Activities to harrass the un-Amerikan nefarious rebels?"
Sorry to disappoint, s.w., but I don't have a fantasy list of 205 card bearing Communists (or terrorists) working for the U.S. Department of State. There is a big difference between someone who reports a story (hoping for positive social change or awareness) and someone who takes another twenty steps to use that story as a means to ruin someone (or something) politically and socially.
But to answer yr question anyway: no, I'm sure they don't all want to become corporate lawyers.
LFC,
Sorry to have missed your point completely.
But anyway my personal experience and a bit of sociological research I read somewhere say that during the college years (18-22) most people form values that will guide the rest of their lives.
So someone who opts for leftwing protest in college will rarely want to become a corporate lawyer. I don't deny that that occurs.
The one classmate I'm still in contact with who became a corporate lawyer never particpated in protest movement, but was always a mainstream Democrat.
Radicals often opt for public service jobs after college. Even Mark Rudd, at one time on the FBI's most wanted list, after serving a jail term, taught math in a junior college. By the way, I knew Mark in high school and he came from a middle class background.
I’m not claiming (implicitly or otherwise) that the students are being hypocritical, what I’m saying is that their career aspirations and their approach to politics are both part of the same worldview. Every white-shoe law firm brags about its pro bono work. Everyone understands that this is window dressing for its real work of servicing corporate clients (and yes, helping the American Empire run, and not so indirectly either).
Nor am I touting myself as a paragon of virtue (although I am much better looking than most corporate lawyers); nor am I calling for their speech to be supressed. What I am saying is that they are blind to their own motives, that their speech is mostly worthless, and that it has a very good chance of throwing the election to Trump.
aaall
I agree that Slaughter's reference to the poss of stationing American soldiers on Israel's borders, even if floated as part of a larger change in US policy, is silly and a bad idea.
I said I thought it was a pretty good column, not that I agreed w every statement in it.
sorry, my grammar got confused; i should have put quote marks around my invented quotation. I meant to say,
If people tell me, 'I’m demonstrating in the slender hope that my actions might help stop the slaughter in Gaza,' why shouldn’t I believe them?
Let me say a word or two in defense of “corporate lawyers,” a term that seems to be used with much opprobrium.
Apart from a couple of years at the Department of Justice, my entire career was as corporate lawyer, if that term encompasses both individual corporations and their trade associations (and a couple of governments). So was the career of the great majority of lawyers in this country. Representing individuals is very risky, and usually unprofitable business. True, personal injury lawyers can hit it big with one massive lawsuit on behalf of a severely injured client or a class action, but that’s a real roll of the dice—and it works for a very small percentage of those who give it a try.
One of the reasons you see so many former prosecutors, now defense attorneys, share their wisdom with CNN and MSNBC, as the Trump circus rolls on, is because they have a lot of time between clients who can afford their services. And that isn’t because their rates are unreasonably high. It’s because a rate designed simply to allow the lawyer to live a modest, middle class existence, and maintain an office and a small staff is far more than most people—including lawyers—can pay for very long.
In more than 40 years of practice, on behalf of corporations, trade associations, and a couple of foreign governments, my adversaries themselves were either corporations, trade associations, or other governments. That’s where the work is. Even in Washington, the home of lobbying, most “corporate” work does not involve lobbying. Most of it involves advising on existing Federal regulations—tax, environmental, labor, import and export, health and safety, food and drug, patents etc.—the list is long. I don’t see any of it as dishonorable. Many of us, indeed, a rather left wing.
Very truly yours,
A (retired) Corporate Lawyer
I'm glad you got that of your chest, J.P. Enjoy your sense of omniscience.
And w/r/t to corporate law practice, I’ve worked on this side of bar as well. It’s no more dishonorable than anything else, including the plaintiff’s bar. Well, come to think of it, maybe it’s more honorable than those guys … don’t get me started. I went into law to make some money, do something interesting (at least part of the time) and because what the hell else was I gonna do with a philosophy degree? I didn’t go into it to be any kind of a secular saint.
My point was rather that the Kids Today, when they’re not on my lawn, talk about the Big Subjects (like “Empire” “Colonies” “Capitalism” and so on) like they can be swapped in and out like a Nintendo game cartridge: “let’s ‘just replace’ Capitalism with Socialism”, that sort of thing. I think a certain notorious beardy German would find this to be annoyingly naïve.
aaall @3:18 p.m.
"Meanwhile the voting patterns [of] Mizrahi and then Russian Jews made possible the Likudnik heel turns in Israeli politics."
Ok, but what inferences/conclusions do you draw, or do you want me to draw, from this, esp. as it relates to the current conflict etc.?
Free link to A.-M. Slaughter op-ed:
https://wapo.st/4bhYul3
D. Palmeter @ 4:11 p.m.
I don't see "corporate" law as (necessarily) "dishonorable." I'm sure a fair amount of it, as you say, is advising corporations on how to comply with govt regulations, and there's nothing generally dishonorable about that (though one might draw a distinction between compliance and evasion). And there are a lot of arcane specialties that I know nothing about, and so won't even comment on. Then there are lawyers who defend corporations against govt antitrust suits, or suits brought by govt or others on environmental issues, or suits brought by class-action plaintiffs etc. Some of that does have or can have a political dimension and implications. Then there are firms that represent, say, cities or state govts or municipally-owned utility companies (I worked for one of these latter briefly as a paralegal before law school).
While my résumé is not of general enough interest to rehearse, suffice to say corporate law was not really an option for me because when I graduated from a second-tier-ish law school in the early 1980s, not being on law review or having otherwise compiled a markedly exceptional record, no big corporate law firm would have been (or was) interested in me. The summer after second year, I worked not as a "summer associate" but for a small public-interest law group (that no longer exists) whose focus was communications law and regulation. But though I haven't worked in that world myself, I've known at least a few big-firm lawyers (including a high-school classmate who recently retired from a career as one), and they are not dishonorable.
I certainly don't see being a corporate lawyer as dishonorable.
It's just a totally different mindset and set of values than mine and of my closest friends.
My path in life is not the only honorable one. My tribe is not the only honorable one.
I’d like to pause in my fulminating against the Yoof of today (even though I want them to GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN) and request that any poli sci professors in the audience (are there any?) let us know whether the bullhorn-and-encampment approach to politics has actually achieved anything substantive. I’ve warmed up the grill, I’ve prepared one of my hats (as a starter) and a dead crow (as a main course) and am prepared to eat it, if not with relish, then with chastened resignation.
In February the LRB walked up to and then around this question, dodging it this way: “the Occupy Wall Street *generation* has had a persistent influence on US politics”. But the OWS “generation” is a pure abstraction, as it includes everyone in a particular age cohort.
To Define My Terms (sorry!), by “substantive” I mean something on the order of the NLRA (1935), Title VII (1965), FR Civ Pro 23 (1966), or OSHA (1971) … because as far as I can see, this record of durable concrete achievement came to an abrupt halt just as the megaphone approach cemented itself into the lefty consciousness.
Maybe you’re loading the dice a bit, John, by defining “substantive” as you do, by referring to actual legislation and regulation. I think that definition rules out asking and trying to answer the question, what had happened that made that legislation/regulation seem not only feasible but desirable? Doubtless a lot of organizing. But also, I suspect, a lot of agitation, partly rational partly emotive, carried on by a great many mostly unknown people before groups small and large, sometimes with bullhorns. And all that sometimes created something culturally consequential and so substantive? Hence some laws and regulations.
The Right has learned how to parlay earnestness and stupidity on the part of some students with mendacity on the part of others along with Administrative cowardliness and venality into political advantage. It would be good if The Kids figured this out and adjusted.
LFC, so far we have a death spiral. As long as those voting patterns persist the likely result is something like Tel Aviv and Tehran disappearing in quite bright flashes of light.
We've been through this before.
Did marching against the war in Vietnam end it?
No, but it set in motion a process which led to Nixon ending the war.
Then there's the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, all of which began in the streets with bullhorns.
Does beginning a movement in the streets with bullhorns guarantee success?
No. And aaall is correct that the kids should pay attention to how their slogans may be willfully misinterpreted by the right and by mainstream pro-Israel liberals.
I don’t think I’m loading the dice but OK. What would count as “substantive” below the regulatory level? All I can think of are things that I find difficult to see as areas of “progress”—the employee policies of non-union employers, public mores, and things like that—but I’m open to considering arguments.
Regarding public mores, I recall somewhere (it may have been in Manufacturing Consent) a description of the contrast between systems of control of information. In “free democracies” the system is largely in the hands of an elite—the editors of the NYT, e.g.—while in authoritarian regimes the system is controlled directly by the state.
That book was written in (I think) 1989, and I’ll argue that today social media, with its unregulated “likes” and two-minute hates, functions not as a source of information but as an instrument of censorship, is more “democratic” than that book’s propaganda model. The problem is, with our demos, it’s worse. The intellectual landscape produced reminds me of nothing so much as a narrow-minded, bigoted, humorless, status conscious, but extremely “pious” small American midwestern town circa 1925. A Gopher Prairie of the Mind.
J.P.,
Are you arguing or suggesting that, for example, the Montgomery bus boycott (1955), the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins, and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery had nothing to do with the legislative civil rights landmarks, such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? I'm no expert on the history of the civil rights movement, but if that's your position, as your condemnation or denigration of "bullhorns" might suggest, it strikes me as implausible, to say the least.
Again, John, it seems to me you take a too narrow, prejudiced view of things. I certainly share your disgust with a whole lot that gets thrown around on ‘social media. But at the same time, as I think has even been seen on this blog—as you yourself may now be put in evidence—there is often pushback: it’s not so entirely one-sided, I think, as you make it out to be. (Still, I’ll confess I can’t wait for a gigantic solar flare to wipe out cyberspace, much though I would miss G…gle Scholar.)
I also think LFC, s.w., et al., have it more to right, that your focus on endpoints—laws, regulations—is disallowing you from considering how they got there. And these things were, I’d say, socially substantive.
I guess I’d say much the same about your depiction of today’s “intellectual landscape” in the US. If your portrait of it is accurate, and I think to some degree it is, an important question for me is how did it get to be that way. Misanthropes—and anti-democrats— might blame “the public,” “our demos.” But I don’t. I’d propose a more systemic sort of argument, one which would include how those who control how the social media function are willing to allow anything, indeed their algorithms are repeatedly said to encourage bad behavior, so long as the money keeps flowing in. Their gatekeepers are much worse than the gatekeepers of the NYT etc. were. It’s a no-contest between the patrician rich and the filthy rich, for the latter have clearly won, but only for the moment (I hope and believe). Besides, that’s surely only one of a great many things that are interacting to shape and reshape the culture we inhabit.
The movement for homosexual rights in the U.S. famously starts with the so-called Stonewall
Riots.
The NYPD raid a gay bar in Greenwich Village and gay patrons of that bar and of others in the neighbor riot in response, for several nights.
Younger people perhaps do not realize that gay sex was illegal in most states or maybe all in 1969 when the riots occur. Being gay was still considered a mental illness at that time too.
Things have changed and it started with a riot of enraged gay people, fed up with being mistreated by the cops and by society in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
I think even a casual reader (no expertise needed) of the actual history (not the potted just-so version for sale on television and the movies) of the substantive achievements in civil rights in that era will be struck by the amount of actual organizing—with paper and pen! of real people! with names and addresses! and not simply online avatars and pseudonyms—and the relative paucity of bull-horning.
The contrast with what came later is striking. Recall that this contrast was noted (hilariously) by Tom Wolfe. NYC’s Beau Monde, at “That Party at Lenny’s, was thrilling to the Black Panthers’s militancy … which was EXCITING! As he heard a guest say, “These aren’t your boring old civil rights guys like A. Philip Randolph … these are Real Men!”
Because, as David O. Selznick could tell you, militancy (i.e., EXCITEMENT) is what gives you boffo world-wide grosses. Sure, it may not actually accomplish that much, and it tends to telegraph your own political impotence, but it fills the theater! At least for a weekend, or maybe even two…
As for the struggle for homosexual rights, there is one fact that has been consistently overlooked. If it’s true that this cohort has (as I’ve read) been steady at around 10% of the population for ever, and that this 10% is evenly distributed among all classes, then there existed at the beginning of the gay rights era a cadre of well-placed elites—bankers, lawyer, lawmakers, and so on—ready to extend to others the rights that they themselves already discreetly enjoyed as a matter of class privilege.
J.P.,
What evidence is there that "well-placed elites" were "ready to extend to others the rights that they themselves already discreetly [with very heavy emphasis on "discreetly"] enjoyed...."?
J. Edgar Hoover, by most accounts, had a relationship with Clyde Tolson, but I don't think he was ready to extend any rights to homosexuals (other than himself); gay people were routinely dismissed/fired from government jobs as supposed security risks at least, I'd guess, through the 1950s and probably into the early 1960s (if not later). "Don't ask don't tell" in the military was not introduced until 1993-94, and even then it was controversial.
John, Surely it's always been NOT either or; surely it's always been both.
Why are you so down on people out on the streets or in encampments? Don't such actions generate support and, yes, even educate people respecting the issues, including bringing certain political and economic relationships to light?
Also, I'd bet there are always a lot of people behind the scenes organizing and debating both strategy and tactics as well as goals.
I just read a headline from the Washington Post that might bring some memories back to RPW (and to some others who read his blog):
“Columbia begins suspending students who refuse to leave encampment
“The university said the nearly two-week-long protest violated school policies.”
Also, this coming Saturday is the 54th anniversary of the mass shootings at Kent State. Mutatis mutandis.
I get the sense that many college administrators are close kin to the types of business 'leaders' who now provide planes that bits fall off in flight. What they're hired to do seems to have little to do with what we imagine they've been hired to do. Along those same lines, the PBS broadcast of "Mr Bates and the Post Office" strongly suggests that it's not just an American problem
Jesus Christ on the Cross, I’m NOT “down on people in the streets”, I’m down on these people in these streets right NOW. The kids are entitled to their fun, they’re going to do it anyway, I just want them to do it after Thanksgiving. What I thought I made clear was my annoyance at their simplistic approach to politics which takes the form of the dopey anti-strategy of urging a boycott of the election or voting for Jill Stein or Cornel West or whoever. AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES THE PROBLEM HERE?!?
When I said they are blind to their own motives, what I meant was that this is a narcissistic approach to politics, which is concerned first with maintaining your own moral purity, second with maintaining your status within your little group of enthusiasts, and not at all with the real world that the rest of us are stuck living in.
If they knew anything about history or politics or money or power or literally ANYTHING they would understand that they are confusing the foreign policy establishment with the Administration and that this Administration is miles better than the alternative Administration that they seem to want to help elect.
And thanks to the geniuses in charge of the Dems like Robby Mook, we’re stuck working with razor thin margins, such that we need every single vote, but that’s a different story.
W/r/t gay rights, my ”evidence” is simply the fact that gays and gayness are a universal human trait, such that gays are in all walks of life and all classes. Gays, unlike blacks, were (are) evenly distributed in all social strata (closeted or not) and for that reason never completely insulated from political power. They could, therefore, at the appropriate time (that is, when it didn’t require damaging one’s career), successfully lobby for the extension of full rights to others who were like them in this respect. The contrast with the 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act is striking, wouldn’t you agree?
I should say that I myself was an early supporter of gay marriage … because I found the gays to be a profound source of irritation, what with their happy-go-lucky lifestyles and all. I thought it only fair that they should all get married and be as miserable as the straights.
J.P.
I think the worry that these protests will hurt Biden in November is a legitimate concern but the causal connection seems somewhat weak. Certain polls at the moment show Trump ahead, but it's not at all clear that these protests have much of anything to do with that. A substantial protest at the Dem convention in Chicago might well be a different matter, inviting the inevitable comparisons to 1968. Perhaps students shd be thinking in more pragmatic terms about November, but given the situation in Gaza it's understandable that they are moved to act in these ways that you deem simplistic.
Biden had to sign the recent aid to Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan bill, long delayed and something he had been pushing for. About $13 billion of the $26 billion Mideast aid package will go to enable Israel to buy U.S. weapons (not purely defensive ones), with 9 billion earmarked for Gaza humanitarian aid and 4 billion to replenish Israel's missile defense systems. The 13 billion to enable Israel to buy weapons shd have been excised from the bill but that was politically a non-starter. One can understand though why there is upset/anger/opposition about both U.S. policy and universities' investment policies. That a Trump admin would be worse than Biden on I/P issues is true, but protesters are not in the mood to focus on that; perhaps they should, but denouncing them as politically naive will not help much.
In short, I see where you're coming from on this and it's a legitimate worry, but I would get really concerned about the connections only if there were to be a major disruption at the Dem convention, and that remains to be seen.
Oh, I see. It's a variant of the lesser evil argument. Which pretty much comes down to the forlorn hope/belief that everyone should think the way I do, have the same political concerns, have the same political goals, make the same political calculations as I do. Too bad life and politics are always going to be a bit more complicated than that.
For the information of everyone:
https://www.rawstory.com/to-remove-cloud-of-doubt-journalism-professors-urge-review-of-nyt-story-on-oct-7-sexua/
Further to our discussion of the Inflamed Righteous Youth of Today and their inherent political nous, I stand corrected. These kids do know how to play the game … of making the olds look foolish. No sooner did they successfully play rope-a-dope with the Columbia Administration by provoking a heavy-handed response and thereby gaining the support of the AAUP, they go and break some actual NY state laws, retrospectively justifying the heavy-handedness. It’s almost as if they read the bit in the AAUP open letter about “a peaceful outdoor protest” and thought, “We’ll show them! We'll make this protest un-peaceful and indoors! Take THAT, you fascists!”
I believe this is what’s known as “kicking in an open door”?
Well. I may be an amateur social anthropologist, but I’ll be God damned before anyone can call me an *armchair* amateur social anthropologist! I believe in fieldwork!
But it’s scary out there in the field … do I really want my ass in the grass, with all those bugs and dangerous lunatics? I do NOT. I much prefer the comfort of my Herman Miller Aeron Chair. And our Freedom does depend on our country’s frontline force of Keyboard Commandos, the Green Berets of Grammar, the Seal Team Six of Syntax … But I AM dedicated (amateur or not), and so into the field I went.
But I’m not crazy! I didn’t just stroll past no-man’s land and into enemy territory (a/k/a the Cal campus). In a situation like this, preparation is key. I did the Boy Scouts, I did Outward Bound, I know how to tie knots and shit, I can pump my own gas, and I know that the very first step in preparation is research. Know your enemy, whether he be man or beast or … “furries” or whatever. (See what I mean?)
So then: research. I’m a scholar, I know my reliable resources. For one thing, I’ve got that indefatigable source of wisdom “Anonymous” and for another I’ve got the Daily Mail. So I knew what to expect, and I had a plan in place to cope with it. See, I knew that, as soon as I set foot on campus, they’d be coming for me. They being Judith Butler’s personal bodyguard, her genderqueer Sturmabteilung (this is Berkeley we’re talking about here).
[TRIGGER WARNING: if you’ve been triggered, please direct your hate mail to Anonymous and the Daily Mail. I’m only repeating what they’ve told me.]
As soon as they spotted me, I knew they’d come after me: “There he is! There’s the white man! Get him! Down with the patriarchy! Down with Gender! Emasculate him! Make him one of us! … one of us! … one of us! (I had also consulted the pioneering American visual anthropologist Tod Browning.)
But I was prepared for this. As soon as I could see the whites (sorry) of their eyes, I would whip out my copy of The History of Sexuality and shout “I’m an ALLY!” and they would all be mollified. But little would they know that this was only a Foucauldian dust jacket, wrapped around my copy of God and Man at Yale! PATRIARCHY 1, JUDITH BUTLER 0!!!
As for what’s actually going on in the field, I was disappointed (relieved?) to discover that it’s a whole lot less exciting than I’d been led to believe …
Robert Paul Wolff told us something to the effect in teaching a class on Ethics he raised the question of Not knowing what to do.
Subsquently a young student asks him about this concern. Professor Wolff said to some effect that he professor Wolff wanted to know morally what to do in the world. The young student said to him, it comes down to knowing which side you are on. Now I may have the details inadequately stated, but the end line still holds, i.e. "Which side are you on?"
Also From Robert J Ackermann's book Heterogenities which is not just more scholarship which would mean that action would have to wait for theory to be verified. Ackermann tells us he's not prepared to wait for the full force of understanding to take place before laying out a plan of action given the necessity to act.
Also, Corneal West's name has been mentioned here by J.P. One can certainly be critical of West's run for president but one can not find fault with his acting on his beliefs to put his life on the line, something that I essentially lack.
I simply along with many others am horrified by the Planned slaughter of the Palestinians by Isreali, abetted by and complicit with the United States.
A footnote to JP's (effort at) humor at 1:55 p.m.
I own vol. 2 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality (trans. R. Hurley) and have actually read some of it. It has little or nothing to do with "gender" in (what I gather from second hand mostly) is the Butlerian sense. Rather it's about ancient Greek attitudes to sexuality and how "they [the Greeks] sought to define the form of moderation that it required." (I'm aware that not all scholars think highly of this volume but have not been interested enough to read the critiques.)
Anyway if your Foucauldian dust jacket fell off and revealed God and Man at Yale, how many current students at Berkeley or elsewhere would even know what that book is? Probably only on the Yale campus today would that book elicit many reactions, and even there some people prob don't know who Wm F. Buckley was.
"One can certainly be critical of West's run for president but one can not find fault with his acting on his beliefs to put his life on the line, something that I essentially lack."
When did CW do that?
LFC is right, it was insensitive of me to be so humor-normative. But I’m a little hurt because I’m your ally! I know and I tell everyone I meet that there’s NO difference between those who were assigned humorless at birth and people like you who’ve had humor-non-confirming surgery (HNCS)* later in life. The humorless are humorless … regardless!
But yes, I was WRONG to make a joke. I will henceforth do better and make every effort to be humorless myself. *(What’s HNCS? It’s where they lop off your funny bone, of course! … and your funny balls.)
...without anesthesia.
I had the surgery myself.
When I was in college, I would have found you, Pillette, funny, but I no longer do.
Some call it growing up, others call it undergoing surgery.
I suggest you, Pillette, seek a younger audience. For every ten or twenty earnest and sincere protesters, there's one heretical rebel soul like yourself. That's the market you should target with your humor. I'm sure you'll find fans there.
I wonder whether there's been a great shift in American humor, at least in some aspects. (Perhaps not for the first time in recent decades; consider how awful we find most American comedy routines (the sexless and/or nagging wife; Foster Brooks; Jose Jimenez; etc.) from the 50s and 60s.) In his little book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, the philosopher Ted Cohen tells a joke that he claims everyone to whom he's told it--Jews and Gentiles, Believers and Atheists, 'Whites' and 'Blacks', cops and criminals, etc.--has found funny. Maybe it's in the telling, but I've tried it on dozens of people, and only maybe half have found it funny. Here goes (from memory): 'Abraham and Isaac are walking down a street, and stop in front of a storefront fundamentalist church. They ponder a sign that reads '$500 for anyone who converts to Christianity'. Abraham says, "Never! Never would I renounce the faith of my fathers!" Isaac says, "Hmm, I'll check it out." He goes in, and Abraham waits--ten minutes, twenty minutes. After thirty minutes Isaac comes back out and Abraham asks, "Well, did you get the five hundred dollars?" Isaac says, "Money. That's all you people care about."'--Is that (still) funny?
Not funny.
Too obvious.
When Isaac goes into the store, it's obvious what he'll say when he comes out.
One vote for 'not funny' because too obvious.--But surely what counts as obvious shifts constantly and is highly audience- and context-relative?--Still, that's very interesting and thought-provoking (for me at any rate). I had thought that (some) people didn't find it funny because of the anxiety provoked by any evocation of ethnic stereotypes, even if (as in the joke) the tables are turned.
Woody Allen, who I generally find funny, always surprises me. I can never anticipate the punch line.
The joke about Isaac and Abraham is obvious because being Jewish, I've listened to similar jokes told by Jews about Jews all my life.
Typical from my uncle Julian.
Why is September 15 such a sacred day for the Jews?
The listener is wondering if he refers to Rosh Hashana or Yom kippur.
Punch line: because it's the day the new model Cadillac comes out.
Julian, yes, drove a Cadillac.
Part of the moral is that the humor depends upon not just the audience's relevant contextual knowledge, but how vivid or close to the surface that knowledge is. For more examples to reflect upon, here's some that seem to me wonderfully funny, even though most come out of the old school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI5euTaviCc
John Rapko,
I listened to the video until the joke about the wife falling out of the car, which I found annoyingly stupid and in bad taste.
None of the jokes made me laugh, but I don't laugh often.
Woody Allen and Groucho Marx make me laugh. The movie, the Big Lebowski also. Rafael Gumucio among the Chileans. Otherwise, I guess I'm too weird to find funny what most people find funny.
To make a belated interjection into the discussion about the campus protests, it seems to me that Pillette has a naive, simplistic view of how social change happens.
It doesn't make sense to think of changes in society or in the geopolitical posture of the US as happening because of any singular cause. So, it doesn't make sense to ask "what is this supposed to accomplish?" about the protests. These sorts of large scale changes are the result of innumerable, small forces all pushing in the same direction. So, what will the protests accomplish? Well, nothing. But then again, by that metric, nothing on its own accomplishes anything. But, the protests can make their small contribution to shifting the zeitgeist in an anti-war direction.
As for the stated aims of divestment, or what have you, this is far from the only point of the protests and university administrators are far from the only audience. The audience for the protests includes the protestors themselves (building solidarity in the anti-war movement by creating opportunities to express that we're all in this together), political leaders (causing trouble to give political leaders pause before they go all-in on military support for Israel), Palestinians in Gaza (people in Gaza have expressed solidarity with the university protests in the US and have thanked the protestors for their support), among others.
As for debating tactics, it seems to me that if you're in the street, then you get to voice an opinion on the tactics of street protests. If you're sitting behind your computer, your role is to get behind what the protestors decide are the best tactics. Otherwise, you're on the wrong side of the barricade, to borrow Prof. Wolff's metaphor. Moreover, once the Columbia protest was cleared by the police (the first time), encampment became not only a tactic for achieving the protestors' stated aims, but a means of signaling support for the Columbia protestors and condemnation of the heavy handed response of the Columbia administration. Nothing besides encampment could serve the same symbolic function, which seems like an important tactical consideration.
s. wallerstein--
I think that exploring shared and unshared taste in humor, like explorations of other kinds of taste, is one of the roads into and out of intimacy, so not something that lends itself to internet comments. For me the central comedians of our time are Stewart Lee and Frankie Boyle, but of course I wouldn't argue the point with anyone who disagreed.--I've found that my core tastes have hardly changed since my early-mid twenties, but that as the decades roll by my secondary tastes and appreciations have expanded. Among the greatest breakthroughs were learning to love Whitman in my 20s and Poussin in my 30s, neither of whom I could stand when I was 20.--Things in bad taste have never bothered me; just this morning I was singing the Sex Pistols' 'Friggin in the Riggin'.--That's it for me on the topic.
Ha ha ha! That’s hilarious. Isaac and Abraham, walking down the street. Together! They were able to patch things up. After much effort … all on Isaac’s part, of course.
His therapist’s idea, really: Take him out for Father’s Day, you’ll feel better.
It won’t work, it’ll be a disaster.
So what? Just try it, you’ll feel better, trust me.
I won’t feel better, I’ll feel worse, he drives me crazy.
I know, that’s why you’re in here.
OK, fine! I’ll do it … but it won’t work!
Was it a disaster? Of course.
What is this place?
It’s a restaurant, Dad.
Look at these prices …! “Crabcake Benedict”! Who eats shellfish for breakfast?
Lots of people, Dad.
Look at what these women are wearing! … I suppose you took your mother here.
Yes, she was able to enjoy it.
I’m sure she did. She was always a frivolous woman. I suppose her new husband tagged along.
He’s not “new” Dad, they’ve been married for 25 years, and no, it was just the two of us.
Hmph. I suppose he was playing “golf” at his “country club”.
(This again.) No, Dad, he was out sailing.
Sailing! In a boat! Ridiculous.
(Thank God I took that Klonopin before I picked him up …)
As for humor itself, let’s note that the inability to see and enjoy it is mostly a matter of repression—of the self by the self and also of the self by society. Hence the absence of laughter in the middle of the middle class. The upper and lower classes can both laugh, but not those imprisoned in the middle (don’t take my word for it, go check your Marx and your Freud!).
John Rapko,
I have no idea who Stewart Lee and Frankie Boyle are.
I left the U.S. in 1977 and I began to function or to try to function in another culture and another language. I have not kept up with Amerikan popular culture or even highbrow culture at all.
I'm not claiming that I successfully made the transition to another culture and mindset. I rather feel that I inhabit a no man's land between the two cultures.
So one thinker I've come to cherish is Nietzsche, who lived in a no man's land himself, not mine because no two no man lands are the same.
Furthermore, let’s note that the humorless are always focused on “tone” and not substance, and so the immediate reaction wasn’t “well, what DID you see when you went onto the Cal campus to actually investigate this thing that we all have such very important opinions about but haven’t bothered to really look at?” but rather, I don’t appreciate your tone, young man! You may think you’re funny, but you’re not!
You didn't choose to tell us what you saw, did you? (Instead you wrote a little screenplay with you waving Buckley disguised as Foucault.
Close parenthesis.
P.s. And then proceeded to label people humorless, leading to a thread detour on humor.
Aaall, West is a living embodiment of his beliefs, and as a public figure, in those senses, he puts his life on the line., That I assume is not strong enough for you. But as far as I know, he has never been in actual danger the way MLK Malcolm X, Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Rachel Corrie were. MLK and Malcolm X received death threats often. There are many others who put their life on the line that I didn't mention. Aaron Bushnell took his life because he didn't want to be a part of the genocide in Gaza, abetted by the USA. I would say at some point he put his life on the line and then with his final action followed through.
I made a rare trip to the Cal campus yesterday to grab some stuff from Doe library to help get ready for the forthcoming books by Charles Taylor and Markus Gabriel. I'm happy to report that there was no sign of Judith Butler, although I do occasionally see her preparing to perform coffee drinking at a North Berkeley cafe. Fifty or so tents were densely clustered in front of and on the sides of Sproul Hall. There was a banner demanding divestment, and a very few others, including one calling upon us to praise the 'martyrs'. A thin, tall speaker broadcast the sounds of what are (allegedly) Israeli drones continually hovering over Gaza. Sonst gab es nichts; über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh.--There was more action at the chess site at Telegraph and Haste in front of the old Cody's. Although in recent weeks sanitation folks directed by the police have hauled away the tables and chairs used by the players (Why can't we have nice things?), there were two games going on, both with the characteristic no-defense street style of mutual queen invasions and pawn storms.
@John Pillette
Just three quick questions. There is a simple way to stop the “Genocide Joe” chants, or the calls to vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West or for an election boycot or whatever: do what protesters ask.
Why is it the protesters who must concede defeat? Aren’t democracies supposed to be responsive to the people? Isn’t that what pragmatic, realist, responsible people would do?
To stop Trump is in Joe Biden’s hands: do the right thing.
They enslaved Africans!?
True, but apartheid is a legal term, defined in the Rome Statute. Israel probably meets the definition. Zionism may be eliminationist in the long term, but in the meantime the situation that it has created and enforces seems to meet the definition. Several international organizations have published reports in recent years detailing the systematic discrimination. In this, they have caught up with Israeli critics like Uri Davis and Palestinian organizations like Adalah, which have been documenting this for decades.
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