Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/urgent-need-en.html

Revolution #99, August 26, 2007

Katrina, Jena, and the Whole Damn System

The Need for Revolution and the Urgent Need for Resistance

Two years ago Katrina hit New Orleans. The whole world watched as hundreds of thousands of people—mostly Black and mostly poor—were trapped in New Orleans. Katrina shined a glaring light on the fact that masses of Black people are trapped in extreme poverty, with fewer and fewer jobs and worse and worse education and health care and housing, and a future of prison or early death for the youth. The lies and the failures of this system and its leaders were on display for everyone to see; they could not be denied or suppressed as they are in “normal times.”

America’s rulers and America’s media acted as if they were shocked. When his vacation was finally over, Bush flew to New Orleans and solemnly declared that the government would come in and help everyone rebuild their lives, and make things better than before. The Democrats made noises about all kinds of new aid for the people living in the ghettos. The 47th—or was it the 48th?—“national conversation on race” was said to have begun. And then, after about a month, the promises turned to dust and reality set in.

The reality, as this issue of Revolution shows, is that for the survivors of Katrina, their troubles were only just beginning. The system didn’t just fail them; it betrayed them.

Katrina concentrates and, in a deep sense, stands for the larger reality facing Black people in the U.S. In the two years following Katrina:

• New York police killed Sean Bell on his wedding day. This shocking murder and the protests that followed broke the silence about the widespread police murder since 9/11 and brought to light many similar cases;
• The Supreme Court effectively removed the government from any role in enforcing school desegregation. While court-ordered school integration had ended up to be yet another “dream deferred” and promise betrayed, for the Supreme Court to outlaw any further attempt to overcome the confinement of African-American children in segregated, inferior, prison-like schools amounts to a major attack;
• A report from the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed widespread police brutality within New York high schools, including routine police insults, assaults and unjustified arrests of students, and even attacks on teachers and even principals who dared to verbally defend their students;
• In Jena, Louisiana six Black youth face years in prison for a schoolyard fight that followed white students hanging nooses in a “white-only” shade tree on school property—an outrage that people have resisted and thereby drawn international attention to.

One common thread in all of the above is that the targets are African-American youth. In words, the system promises these youth one thing; in actual deeds, they make their message clear: Black youth have no future under this system.

To give a sense of where things have gone, in 1954—the year the Supreme Court back then decided there should be school integration—there were 98,000 Black people locked down in prisons. 50 years later, in 2004, the figure was...910,000! Nearly ten times as many. That is the “progress” given by this system. That is the future they promise. That is the “answer” this system has to the centuries-old oppression that it created and continually reinforces.

This Is a System—A Capitalist System

America is a capitalist-imperialist system. This basic and brutal fact has set the terms for Black people’s fate in this country.

It was capitalism’s expansion into America, and the growth of a world market 400 some years ago, that created the huge demand for cotton, sugar, and other agricultural products. To produce and sell these products, at massive profit, the early capitalists kidnapped millions of Africans, put them in chains and sold them into slavery. Millions died in hellish ocean voyages before even reaching America. Those who survived suffered in unimaginable ways and over the generations produced much of the foundation of the great wealth that this country’s rulers love to brag about.

It was capitalism’s need to “grow beyond” the bounds of the slave economy, along with the rebellions of the slaves themselves, that brought on the Civil War. (And, the ex-slaves themselves fought for their own freedom in the Union Army once they had the chance—and they took casualties way out of proportion to their numbers.) It was capitalism’s need to re-establish order—and profitable accumulation—afterward that led to the exploitation of the newly freed slaves as sharecroppers and the institution of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-mob justice in the south.

It was the battle for empire that was World War 2—and capitalism’s need for workers to build up the defense industries, as well as auto, steel, rubber and the rest and then, later, the mechanization of farming in the south—that led masses of Black people into the urban proletariat. This was the “great migration”—where the masses of Black people went from being sharecroppers to being workers, pushed off the land and into the cities.

But today capitalism has moved its heavy industries to the suburbs and to other countries. And, even though Black youth in the inner cities want jobs, the capitalists judge them to be too “defiant” to employ in the few jobs that remain. They have different plans now for these youth. So over the past decades they have let the schools rot and the dope trade flourish in the inner cities. They have set up a dynamic where millions of Black youth have no real alternative but prison or death. They have stepped up their vicious portrayals of these youth in the media as “savage” and “beyond redemption.” (It is true that during this time a few doors were also opened—but only part way—to allow a small section of Black people to “make it” into the middle class. But their position is very precarious, and they too still suffer discrimination and oppression at the system’s hands, in all kinds of ways—including risking their lives for “driving while Black.”)

For Black youth, this is not the time of rising expectation—these are the days of mass incarceration, ugly demonization, and full-out criminalization.

Revolution and Resistance

Time is up and past up for this system. We have seen how this system has betrayed the masses of Black people. What it has in store is not just “turning back the clock.” It is even worse—a program with truly genocidal implications. This is what it means when the number of Black people imprisoned grows by nearly ten times in 50 years, when people like Pat Robertson talk about the prison population being a “stain on the land,” when others talk about “cracking down further” and deem these youth to be “super predators, incapable of rehabilitation,” and when the few opportunities that did exist are systematically shut down.

There can be no real and lasting change for the better under this system.

This is one big reason why we need a communist revolution and a new system. Li Onesto’s article on Katrina in this issue contrasts graphically how a socialist system would have handled the needs of the people in such a disaster with how this system did. Of course, the communist revolution is the most radical and all-encompassing revolution: its goal is to get humanity to a stage where all class divisions, all relations of exploitation on which those divisions rest, all social relations and political institutions that reinforce those relations, and all the ideas that correspond to them are abolished, and where people interact with the world and each other as freely associating human beings. And from the very beginning stages of that revolution it would mean a fundamental change for the better in every sphere—with one very key component and task of the communist revolution being wiping out the oppression of peoples and nations, and overcoming the scars of the past.

To get to a situation where this can happen, many things would have to change. And one big change is this: the people must politically fight back, in their millions. There must be a new upsurge of political resistance to all this oppression, uniting many different kinds of people with all kinds of views. Without this, there can be no fundamental change; without this, the people will be ground down and suffer even greater horrors.

Some of this is beginning to happen. The protests against the police murder of Sean Bell, as well as the recent protests in Chicago against the police murder of 18-year-old Aaron Harrison; the struggle to free the Jena 6; and some of the different protests in many different forms against the continuing outrage of Katrina—all these are significant and positive. Many teachers, writers, artists and other folk in the Black middle strata are stepping out in different ways. There are stirrings among other people of color, and some whites are beginning to take a stand as well. But these are still only the seeds of what the people really need—a new upsurge declaring this is intolerable. All this must be strengthened and expanded, to whole other levels, and the links drawn between these fights and other key battles against the system, and the overall need for revolution.

This fall must witness much greater political resistance to these outrages and, yes, horrors. This newspaper must be a vital part of such resistance. This must be true on August 29, when the second anniversary of Katrina is marked. This must be true in the case of the Jena 6, both now and when the sentencing hearing of Mychal Bell happens on September 20—people must be very broadly united to Free the Jena 6. And this must be true as well on October 22, the National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation.

[To get deeper into what is covered in this article, check out the following: Cold Truth, Liberating Truth and the Black History Month series on-line at revcom.us. And check out the DVD of Bob Avakian’s speech, Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About.]

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/new-orleans-capitalism-en.html

Revolution #99, August 26, 2007

New Orleans: Capitalism in the Wake of Disaster… and the Disaster of Capitalism

Events to Mark 2 Years After Katrina As we go to press, these are some of the many events being planned in New Orleans to mark the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina 8/25 "Katrina Disaster Capitalism" featuring Naomi Klein at Loyola University College of Law. 8/25-29 Bike Katrina—500-mile bike ride from Tallahassee to New Orleans, retracing the path of Hurricane Katrina. 8/28 Day of Public Policy and Community Service. 9 a.m.—the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation will join with volunteers from around the country to assist environmental cleanup in New Orleans. 1 p.m.—Gulf Coast Collaborative Town Hall Meeting, Dillard University, Loveless Memorial Chapel 6 p.m.—Black Women's Roundtable, Celebrating Our Sisters of the Gulf Coast, with Susan Taylor and Iyanla Vanzant 8/29 9 a.m.–1:30 p.m.—memorial service and march. Beginning in the Lower 9th Ward at Jourdan and North Galvez Streets, near the Industrial Canal and proceeding to Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park. 2–5 p.m.—Day of Presence. New Orleans Convention Center 5–7 p.m.—People's Tribunal, featuring testimony by survivors of Katrina. Pan American Building, 601 Poydras St. 6:45 p.m.—Interfaith Prayer Service, St Paul's Episcopal Church 9/1 1–4 p.m.—Hands Around the Superdome, organized by the African American Leadership Project

by Li Onesto

August 29, 2007 is the second anniversary of the day that Hurricane Katrina slammed onto the Gulf Coast. From the moment the hurricane hit, to today, the massive death, suffering, homelessness, displacement of two hundred thousand people and the virtual abandonment of huge swaths of the city of New Orleans are an indictment of the worthlessness of this system and its inability to meet the basic needs of people.

When the authorities told people to evacuate New Orleans in advance of Katrina, over 100,000 people in that city had no access to cars. The government did nothing to guarantee their ability to leave before the hurricane struck—abandoning many of them to die. After the hurricane hit and large sections of the city were flooded, people trying to flee New Orleans had gunshots fired near or at them by racist police in neighboring towns who forced them back into the city.

Tens of thousands of people were trapped, without the basic necessities of life, in the stench of human waste in the Superdome simply because the system didn’t provide the resources to evacuate them. 1800 people in the region died unnecessarily because the system didn’t evacuate everybody who lived in the path of Katrina.

News helicopters showed people stuck for days on roofs in 100-degree heat with nothing to eat or drink. People around the world watched in horror, while the richest, most powerful country in the world, that could ship hundreds of thousands of troops to invade and occupy Iraq, couldn’t rescue people or provide for their most basic human needs. And who can forget Bush, in the midst of all the incredible suffering and government neglect, with his arm around the government official in charge saying “Good job Brownie.”

And it continues, today. Desperately needed housing for poor people is not being rebuilt, people are locked out of public housing. The resources people need to rebuild homes are not being provided. Even middle class people have been denied insurance payments and government assistance to rebuild. The public school system in New Orleans is being restructured in a way that the people on the bottom are going to have even worse education than before Katrina. Even the levees that allowed the flooding that caused so much of the property damage and loss of life have not been properly repaired or built to withstand a serious hurricane. And tens and tens of thousands of people have been exiled from their homes, living in toxic trailers or still in Houston and other cities.

All this is NOT because of government incompetence. These outrages occur because they fit the interests and the corresponding plans of the capitalists who rule this society.

The Needs of the People vs. the Needs of the System

The city of New Orleans was built on the sweat and blood of Black people. Slaves were bought and sold in the markets. The cotton picked by slaves shipped through its port. The wealth of the whole United States is built to a great degree on the foundation of slavery. Then, after the Civil War, Black people worked almost like slaves on plantations, under a sharecropping system enforced by lynch mobs and KKK terror, all backed up by the government.

In the great Mississippi flood of 1927, the authorities rounded up Black people at gunpoint and threw them into concentration camps. They were worked day and night to reinforce and rebuild the levees and were forcibly prevented from leaving the flood area. The wealthy white plantation owners were determined that their labor force would not escape to the north.

With changes in the economy after World War 2, the role of New Orleans in the accumulation of wealth by the capitalist system changed. Black people were driven off the land. In New Orleans, as in cities around the country, Black people labored at the most dangerous and dirty jobs—on the docks and in other industries. In the 1960s and ’70s, New Orleans had a large Black, relatively stable, working class population. Even in poor neighborhoods like the Lower 9th, people were able to buy their own homes.

But like other major cities in the U.S., in the last few decades, New Orleans has been profoundly affected by changes in the global and U.S. economy. The deindustrialization of the city has meant the loss of thousands of jobs and over the last few decades an unemployment rate among Black people that is even higher than other cities with large Black populations. Today, New Orleans needs something like 60,000 minimum wage workers for the tourist industry. So, to the system, there were, and still are, simply tens of thousands or more who the system considers “unnecessary” people.

Poor Black people don’t fit into the ways that capital could profitably invest in the tourist, oil, and shipping industries. To the system, the poor Black people of New Orleans were not only “in their way” but are a potentially explosive section of the population for whom this system has no future. Because of what they've seen and been through as a people, including the great struggles of the ’60s, there is an edge of defiance among Black people—which is a very positive quality to anybody who wants to change the world—but is considered dangerous to the ruling class. At the time Katrina hit, in places like the Lower 9th or Central City, half of all working-age people were not in the work force, surviving by whatever desperate means they could find. These are people who couldn’t be profitably exploited—except if they end up in prison where they can work on chain gangs or in prison factories.

William Oakland, a retired economist from Tulane University in New Orleans who has studied the city’s economy for decades, put it this way: “The city’s population was thus ‘out of equilibrium…’ It’s not normal to have that level of nonparticipation in the labor force.” And addressing the fact that the population of New Orleans is now only about half of what it was before Katrina, some economists have cynically pointed out that New Orleans had more people than the economy could support anyway. Oakland put it this way: “Maybe the diaspora is a blessing.”

The people who built the city, whose sweat and blood helped lay the foundation for this country as it is today, are now branded as parasites and criminals. A horrible disaster, that kills 1800 of them, and forces the dislocation of 200,000 people is a “blessing.” The continuing suffering and dislocation of tens of thousands of people whose lives have been ruined is seen as part of “clearing the ground” in order to rebuild the city.

This is why, speaking for the whole ruling class in this country, Republican Congressman Richard Baker said, right after Katrina: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” The ruling class in this country looked at the horrible destruction and suffering brought by Katrina, and their neglect of the people there, as a gift from god! It fit into their plans to get rid of the poor Black people.

And all the lunatic ravings of fundamentalist Christian fascists after Katrina about how god was punishing the people of New Orleans for Mardi Gras, tolerating gays and all served this whole agenda too, justifying the system’s response to New Orleans, with its genocidal implications, as “god’s will.”

This System is Worthless—We Need a Whole Other Kind of System

In the days after Katrina, there was incredible heroism among the people who had been abandoned to die. What the system called “looting” was in most cases people taking what they needed to survive. (And as Céline Dion said, if they were taking jeans, or a TV too, so what!) One woman said, “Those ‘looters’ are the only ones keeping us alive.”

But to the system, this was their worst nightmare. The people they saw as superfluous, who they hate and fear, were saving themselves and others. What kind of system hates and fears that kind of thing? To the capitalist system, the most important thing after Katrina was “social control,” i.e. repression, and the protection of private property and businesses. The sanctity of private property was more important than human lives. So when people, in desperate situations, attempted to save themselves and others by taking what they needed, they were slandered as “looters,” and Governor Blanco announced: “We are going to restore law and order… These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect that they will.”

And, later, when volunteers—many of them white and/or middle class—tried to come to New Orleans to help save people, to clean up, and to rebuild, they too were considered a problem by the system. The masses who were trying to survive had guns shoved in their face by the police. In many cases, volunteers who were trying to get into the city to help were turned around and ordered to stay out of the city. Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, in every real and fundamental way, the system got in the way of volunteers who came to help. When people wanted to fix up and reopen schools, the government did nothing to help—at best. When people wanted to fix up homes, government bureaucracy was in the way.

For the capitalist system, the people taking all kinds of great and heroic initiative in the face of a desperate and dangerous situation was something to be suppressed and repressed or kept under tight supervision. But for the revolutionary proletariat this is something to cherish, build on, and learn from.

What kind of a system abandoned, betrayed, and attacked the masses in New Orleans? It is a system that cannot and does not want to do anything that doesn’t fit the “bottom line.”

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we saw not only the need but also the possibility of revolution, and of a radically different society. The government left the masses to suffer and die, and then rounded up and subjected to horribly inhumane conditions. Yet the people kept their dignity and showed their humanity in many ways. And they put to lie the slanders that portrayed them as criminals and animals. When they took matters into their own hands in order to survive and help others, the great majority did so with right on their side. And in this they were supported and assisted by people all over the country.

Revolutionary state power, a socialist society, would welcome and back up the efforts of people to help each other. To drop everything and head for New Orleans to help. It would provide people with the materials needed to rebuild. It would not be trying to “rebuild” a lean, mean city based on tourism and minimum wage jobs. And, it would embrace, welcome, and promote the kind of chaotic mixing together of different kinds of people, the vibrant discussions and debates that would erupt on the spot, and throughout society, over how to rebuild in a way that served the interests of the people.

As a statement by the Revolutionary Communist Party put it shortly after Katrina: “In all this can be seen the potential for masses of people to be mobilized to bring into being a society in which relations among people are radically different than the daily dog-eat-dog that this capitalist system pushes people into. Yet what has also stood out very clearly is that the masses of people are not fully aware of and organized on the basis of an understanding of how the whole operation of this system is in direct and deep-going conflict with their real and fundamental interests.” (“On Hurricane Katrina: 3 Fundamental Lessons,” Revolution #14, September 18, 2005)

But it is these same masses who, on the basis of a revolution, can bring into being a new society and a new state which would put the interests of the great majority of the people at the foundation and at the center of everything it stands for and everything it does.

It Can’t Go Down Like This

The demands of the people still in, and those still exiled from, the city of New Orleans must be met! And that struggle must be part of, and contribute to, building a revolutionary movement.

Most of the people displaced from New Orleans want to return. The tens of thousands of people still displaced, neglected, abused and abandoned by the government must be allowed to return to their homes. Housing projects must be repaired and reopened. Homes must be rebuilt, now, and made available to people affordably. Basic social services must be restored and made available to people: health care, childcare, public schools, and other social services. And jobs must be provided to people in New Orleans and to those who want to return, including to rebuild the city.

This system doesn’t recognize the vitality and uniqueness of New Orleans, except as a Disneyland-type tourist attraction. But the people must demand that the rich Black history and culture of New Orleans must not be wiped out!

People are right to resist the ongoing crimes being committed by the government against the people of New Orleans—everything from fighting for basic needs, to artists and intellectuals doing work that exposes the situation to millions of people, to people all over the country finding different and creative ways to support the people in New Orleans. That resistance must be strengthened and spread. Already in the last two years, there has been a huge outpouring of musicians, artists, intellectuals, and others who have created songs, theater works, documentary films, and books that expose the crime of the system in New Orleans, give voice to the people of the city, and stand in solidarity with their struggle.

Many forces and organizations have called for protest events on August 28, the second anniversary of Katrina (see box). The theme of many of these events is that the people must have a right to return to their homes. People must take the second anniversary of Katrina as a time to join in solidarity, in different activities, to push this struggle forward.

In the aftermath of Katrina, the horrible and continuing crimes of the system against the masses of Black people of New Orleans cannot become just another outrage that goes down in history. The system’s plans that continue to cause misery and suffering for the masses of people in New Orleans must be DEFEATED.

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/katrina-two-years-en.html

Revolution #99, August 26, 2007

Katrina: Two Years Later

Two years after Katrina, much of New Orleans remains a wasteland.

In the Lower 9th Ward, a poor, Black section of the city, only 20% of the residents have returned to their homes and the area lies largely in ruins. The city plans to bulldoze much of the neighborhood even though a recent university-sponsored study shows that over 80% of the buildings are structurally sound.

In August 2005 New Orleans had over 450,000 people. Today only 250,000 people live there.

Tens of thousands of families throughout the Gulf Coast are living in 240-square-foot trailers, most of which house at least three adults. According to the Associated Press there are still 45,000 families living in trailers in Louisiana, 20,000 in Mississippi, 17,000 in Texas, and 400 in Alabama.

These trailers are often located in remote areas far from services that people need and any jobs that they could get to earn money to be able to return to New Orleans. For example, the Sugar Hill Trailer Park in the midst of cane fields near Convent, midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is 20 miles away from the nearest grocery store. There is one bus that leaves at 9 a.m. and returns at 4 p.m.

People living in these government trailer parks often face a hostility from the communities they are located in. Cities routinely pass zoning regulations that only allow the trailer parks to be located in very remote locations or ban the parks altogether. City officials may then decide to evict the residents with only a few hours notice. On top of this, there is general harassment to let the poor and Black residents of the parks know that they are not welcome. In one New Orleans suburb, a sheriff told reporters that he was going to protect his jurisdiction from "thugs" and "trash" migrating from closed public housing projects in the city. He said that every person who wore "dreadlocks or che-wee hairstyles" could expect to be stopped by law enforcement.

Toxic Trailers

Recent testimony before Congress revealed that many of the trailers provided by FEMA had very high levels of formaldehyde. People living in the trailers had complained that the chemical caused frequent nosebleeds, breathing difficulties, and mysterious mouth and nasal tumors. When FEMA first got complaints about the trailers, they did nothing about it. After many months, FEMA finally tested a trailer in March 2006 and found that the level of toxic chemical formaldehyde was 75 times higher than the government-recommended level for workplaces. Despite this, FEMA issued a statement saying, “We are confident that there is no ongoing risk.”

Mary C. DeVany, an occupational health and safety engineer advising the Sierra Club, testified that FEMA’s “misapplication and skewing of scientific results is at best unethical and grossly misrepresents and attempt to minimize the adverse health effects being experienced by thousands of travel trailer residents.” The Sierra Club reported finding unsafe levels of formaldehyde in 30 out of 32 trailers it tested along the Gulf Coast.

Destruction of Public Housing

At the time of Katrina, more than 5,000 families, nearly all of them African American, were living in New Orleans public housing. A couple of thousand more units were vacant or uninhabitable. The waiting list for housing had 8,250 names. Two years later, most of this housing remains closed, surrounded by razor wire. Only about 1,400 units are occupied, according to HUD figures. The plan is to tear down the old housing projects and replace them with “mixed-income developments.” This means that public housing for the poor will not be replaced or rebuilt in anywhere near the numbers that existed before Katrina.

The demographics of New Orleans are being systematically and forcibly changed. Before Katrina the city was about 67 percent Black and 28 percent white, according to Census Bureau figures. A more recent study conducted for the Louisiana Recovery Authority estimates that the city, still well under half its pre-storm population, is 47 percent Black and 43 percent white.

Flood System

According to an article in the New York Times, after two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, if a big “100-year flood” hit the Gentilly neighborhood in New Orleans, the water level is likely to be reduced by only 6 inches. By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly 5 and a half feet.

The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls, and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called “a system in name only” is still just that.

Inadequate Health Care

Only one of the city’s seven general hospitals is operating at its pre-hurricane level; two are partially open, and four remain closed. The number of hospital beds in New Orleans has dropped by two-thirds. Charity Hospital, which provided basically all the medical care—emergency, acute, and basic—for the city’s poor, is closed with no plans to reopen.

There are now 16,800 fewer medical jobs in New Orleans than before Katrina, down 27 percent. More than 4,486 doctors from three parishes in the New Orleans area have been displaced, creating a shortage that continues to be a problem at many hospitals.

Donald Smithburg, chief executive officer of the Louisiana State University Health Care Services Division, said, "If you are uninsured and have a broken bone, and it needs surgery, you could be waiting months and months, there are so few orthopedists and even fewer who will take the uninsured.”

Two-Tier Education System

Before Katrina, New Orleans had 128 public schools, 4,000 teachers, and 60,000 students. One year later, only four schools were controlled by the local school board. Today 70% of New Orleans schools are privately run charter schools.

Public schools with the best test scores and the least damage were given away to private companies to form charter schools, attended by students with better test scores whose parents have the ability to get them into those schools. Students with average test scores or learning disabilities, or from single-parent families, will have to attend deteriorating public schools.

At John McDonough—a public high school created to take the place of five pre-Katrina high schools—teachers, textbooks, and supplies remained in short order months after the school opened. The school has 39 security guards and 3 cops on staff but only 27 teachers.

Restoring the Tourist Industry

The government poured millions into restoring some property.

$116 million from FEMA was spent on restoring the New Orleans Superdome and $60 million on restoring the Morial Convention Center, and $37 million was spent on building a new parking garage for luxury cruise boats leaving the port of New Orleans.

Earlier this year J. Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, said, “It’s almost a tale of two cities. We have some outlying post-World War 2 neighborhoods that suffered damage that is incomprehensible. But the original city areas that the tourists come to—the French Quarter, the Garden District and the Arts District—are not only intact, but look better than they did before the storm.”

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/avakian/anotherway/anotherway16-en.html

Revolution #99, August 26, 2007

Part 16

Editors' Note: The following are excerpts from an edited version of a talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, to a group of Party supporters, in the fall of last year (2006). This is the 16th in a series of excerpts we will be running in Revolution. Subheads and footnotes have been added for publication here. The entire talk is available online at revcom.us/avakian/anotherway.

"Maintaining Our Strategic Nerve"

In the context of everything going on today, everything that has to be confronted and cries out to be radically transformed in a much better direction, I want to emphasize this basic point of orientation: In the face of the difficulties, in the face of even defeats along the way, in the face of falling on our face at times, it is very important, especially at crucial junctures, that—to use a certain phrase—we not lose our strategic nerve. It's very easy in the face of tremendous necessity and great difficulties, in the face of certain setbacks and of people flying in all directions, to lose your strategic nerve—to lose your grip on what actually is underlying and driving things and to be swept away in one form or another—either carried away with positive things or quite often carried away with disappointments—and to just openly go in the direction of throwing up your hands and capitulating, or to go off into an infantile direction, which is in fact the "mirror image" of capitulation and leads to the same ultimate result.

Now I want to say, just for the record, that at times I myself have been acutely disappointed by—and, yes, have cursed in graphic terms—the people in this society who are sitting by and doing nothing in the face of atrocities and horrors committed by their government and in their name—I would bet that I have done this at least as much as anyone else who has set out to mobilize people to do what needs to be done to change the present disastrous course of things and to radically transform society in a positive way. But what do we do then?

There is a tremendous gap between what is going on—and the rapid pace at which more and greater outrages and atrocities are being committed and being prepared by those in power in the U.S.—and, on the other hand, what people are doing, or not doing, in terms of political resistance to oppose this, in the massive and determined way that is required. This is a very acute contradiction. But what do we do in the face of that—what do we do, in order to transform that in a positive direction? Do we keep our fundamental and strategic orientation, and work and struggle through the contradictions—do we persevere, but with the necessary sense of urgency that the situation demands? Or are we going to search for gimmicks, or throw up our hands and give up? Are we going to, in one way or another, lose our strategic nerve? In speaking of "strategic nerve," I mean this in the sense of our basic and strategic orientation, not in some sense of "personal courage," in the absence of and divorced from that orientation. Another way to say this, another crucial expression of this, is that we can't lose our materialism and our dialectics.

The clock is ticking down. We are not operating in a vacuum here. U.S. society is in fact being remade in a fascist direction, with implications for decades to come; the world is increasingly being subjected to the attempts of those in power in the U.S. to further bludgeon things into correspondence with their needs, aims and objectives; and there are the very real, negative effects of the continuing dynamic where McWorld/McCrusade and Jihad mutually reinforce each other even while opposing each other—with already terrible and potentially far more disastrous consequences. But, at the same time and largely as a result of all this, a lot of people are running up against what someone has described as sort of a "cusp" or "trough." They're running up against the fact that the ways they thought they could affect the political direction of U.S. society, and the role of the U.S. in the world—those ways don't work. Those doors are being increasingly slammed in their faces. But they haven't yet made the determination—haven't yet been won—to the fact that they have to make some radical ruptures in terms of their political views and actions, even short of the full rupture of going for revolution. And if we were to lose our strategic nerve—in other words, our strategic orientation and methodology and approach—that would be especially criminal in this context.

Instead, we have to be combining, in the correct way, perseverance and urgency—persevering, but not in an aimless, timeless way, persevering with the appropriate and necessary sense of urgency—learning, as we struggle, to break through on these contradictions and carrying forward that dialectical process of unity-struggle-unity with a broad and diverse range of people and political forces, not only in such major efforts as World Can't Wait but in other key arenas, too, and in an overall way. At the same time, we have to be much more vigorously and boldly taking our full revolutionary, communist line in a truly big way out to the masses—to basic masses, but to other strata as well. And, in line with the very great and urgent needs, as well as in terms of our fundamental orientation and objectives, we must make further, and increasingly greater, advances in building the Party as the revolutionary, communist vanguard the masses need—building and strengthening the Party both quantitatively and qualitatively—continually increasing its numerical strength and not only its organizational but, even more essentially and fundamentally, its ideological and political solid core, and the corresponding elasticity, initiative, and creativity grounded in and flowing from that solid core.

Strategic Repolarization—for Revolution

Now, having stressed the tremendous importance of ideology, I also want to emphasize the need to grasp the importance of political line and policy and of providing practical means for masses of people to mobilize to change the world. There's a need to apply the two "mouthful formulations." The first one, from Strategic Questions,¹ has to do with how, in the development of political movements and the political struggle overall, to continuously forge (and reforge under new conditions) unity as broadly as possible so that it is objectively in line with and furthering the aims of the proletarian revolution and so that, at any given time in that process, as many people as possible are being won and influenced in their subjective consciousness toward the communist position, without however overstepping and undermining the correct unity for the given circumstances, which will be on a level different from, and short of, support for the communist position and proletarian revolution. And the second "mouthful formulation," which has been drawn from GO&GS ( Grand Objectives and Grand Strategy )² has to do with identifying and moving around—bringing forward political resistance and mobilization on a mass scale in relation to—concentrations of major contradictions in society and the world, and how that in turn contributes to moving everything toward revolution.

The overall work of our Party is, in significant measure, an application of these "two mouthfuls." This is an application of the united front under the leadership of the proletariat, in terms of policy and program. And it is very important to see every aspect of our Party's work not as a thing unto itself but as part of an overall strategic approach. An overall strategic approach and a means for what? For revolution—for repolarizing in a way more favorable for revolution and to prepare the ground, politically, for the emergence of a revolutionary situation and, relatedly, the emergence of a revolutionary people in the millions and millions.

And, if we look at things in terms of repolarization for revolution, the following formulation is very relevant and important—not speaking to any particular immediate situation so much as with strategic and overall considerations in mind:

What's being argued for is, if we do work correctly, we can take advantage of the paralysis of significant sections of the bourgeoisie; isolate to the maximum degree possible this really hard-core section of the bourgeoisie; and, with the necessary qualitative change in the objective situation, go after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie as a whole.

---

Footnotes

1. Strategic Questions was a talk by Bob Avakian in the mid-1990s, and selections from it were published in the Revolutionary Worker (now Revolution ) in issues 881 and 884-893 (November 1996 through February 1997) and in issues 1176-1178 (November 24 through December 8, 2002). These selections can also be found online at revcom.us/avakian/avakian-works.html. [back]

2. Great Objectives and Grand Strategy is a talk given by Bob Avakian at the end of the 1990s; excerpts from it have been published in the Revolutionary Worker #1127-1142 (November 18, 2001 through March 10, 2002) and are available online at revcom.us/avakian/avakian-works.html#gogs. [back]

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/professors-purged-en.html

Revolution: Fall 2007

Reverse the Firings

Purge of Professors Accelerates Suppression of Critical Thinking

by Reggie Dylan

On the (Trumped-up) Firing of Ward Churchill for (Supposedly) Fabricating Footnotes: THE EUROPEAN-AMERICAN GENOCIDE AGAINST NATIVE AMERICANS IS A CENTRAL FACT OF THE FOUNDATION OF THIS COUNTRY—NOT A “FOOTNOTE” IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

As the school year opens on campuses around the country, an ominous chill is in the air. For years right-wing political forces have been working, largely behind the scenes and “below the radar,” to suppress dissent and critical thinking on campus. These forces include Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney who started the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA); and David Horowitz, who founded the fascistic student group Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) and is an intimate of Karl Rove.

Their aim? Turn the university into a zone of uncontested indoctrination in the values and mind-set of empire.

The scope and scale of this dangerous and accelerating attack is not widely recognized, or understood. But just this summer two major universities purged controversial scholars highly regarded by their students, their departments, and in their fields—Native American Studies Professor Ward Churchill from the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Norman Finkelstein from DePaul University in Chicago. In addition, the trustees of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio—long known for its radical and open-minded approach to education—announced the school’s shutdown, despite fierce opposition from students, faculty and alumni groups around the country.

While the circumstances surrounding each of these decisions are different, together they mark a dangerous leap in this reactionary agenda; they must not be allowed to stand.

Why Were Churchill and Finkelstein Targeted?

What “crimes” did these two^* scholars commit? In short—contributing to research and scholarship that calls into question core assumptions about this country’s history; about its role in the world; and the role of Israel, a strategic ally.

Tenured Professor Ward Churchill was fired by CU’s Board of Regents on July 24, 2 1/2 years after a controversial essay he wrote after 9/11 became the object of a nationwide witch-hunt involving two Republican governors, the reactionary TV & talk radio megaphones, and Horowitz and ACTA. The university first tried to see if Churchill could be fired for the content of his writings. Then they switched the form of attack, and now claim he’s being fired for shoddy scholarship. Claims of research misconduct against Churchill have been shown by many scholars to be either completely bogus or grossly exaggerated.

As Anthony Romero, the national Executive Director of the ACLU, said, “The investigation of Professor Churchill’s scholarship cannot be separated from the indefensible lynch-mob furor that generated the initial calls for his termination. Firing Professor Churchill in these circumstances does not send a message about academic rigor and standards of professional integrity. On the contrary, it sends a warning to the academic community that politically unpopular dissenters speak out at their peril.” In reality Churchill was fired not because of errors in his scholarship, but because of inconvenient truths his scholarship raises—the genocide of the indigenous peoples and the FBI targeting of political opposition in the 1960’s—and his dissenting views on 9/11.

On June 8, DePaul University President Dennis Holtschneider notified Professor Norman Finkelstein that he was denied tenure—and essentially fired—by the country’s largest Catholic university. This followed a year-long campaign against Finkelstein led by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and torture advocate. Finkelstein, whose parents survived Nazi death camps, is a fierce critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, of U.S. complicity, and of Israel’s Zionist defenders in this country. Dershowitz is a zealous defender of everything Israel has done against the Palestinian people.

Holtschneider admitted Finkelstein is a “nationally known scholar and public intellectual, considered provocative, challenging and intellectually interesting.” But it accuses him of “unprofessional personal attacks” that “polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration.” His work supposedly “shifts toward advocacy and away from scholarship” and “fails to meet the most basic standards governing scholarly discourse within the academic community.” The President of the Illinois conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote to DePaul that these grounds for denying promotion violate the standards of the AAUP—and those of DePaul’s own faculty handbook.

Far-Reaching Impact

Nearly six years ago, Bush’s Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer, told people that they had to “watch what they say.” While Fleischer was later forced to back off his words, there are those who now do watch what they say, lest they lose their careers. And who are they? Professors…on the American campus.

The impact of these purges, if they aren’t reversed, will be far-reaching. Tom Mayer, CU—Boulder Professor of Sociology, wrote in the midst of the witch-hunt: “The permanent or temporary expulsion of Ward Churchill would be an immense loss for CU. In one fell swoop we would become a more tepid, more timid, and more servile institution. His expulsion would deprive students of contact with a potent challenger of accepted cognitive frameworks. The social sciences desperately need the kind of challenge presented by Ward Churchill.” Raul Hilberg, pre-eminent scholar of Jewish Holocaust studies, said of DePaul’s decision, “I have a sinking feeling about the damage this will do to academic freedom.”

Who’s next? These decisions send a clear message: Stay clear of scholarly inquiry that could challenge core myths and official “truths”—or your job, and maybe even your career, will be finished. Another DePaul professor, Matthew Abraham, drew on a colleague’s comparison of the Churchill and Finkelstein cases to public executions, and said: “You don’t need to do ten or twenty of them. You just need to do four or five just to keep people in line and to have them remember what can happen if you get carried away with your speech. Ward and Norman, these are top-flight scholars, and if they can take them out, believe me they wouldn’t hesitate to take out people of much lesser stature.”

The effect is clear. Those students who come to college to learn about and change the world will find a climate of fear, the exact opposite of the spirit of critical inquiry and daring to challenge the status quo they should expect. They will run into professors who’ll think twice before sponsoring speakers or activist groups, or who decide not to bring controversial speakers to their classrooms for fear of harassment, or worse. They’ll find administrators deciding to dis-invite prominent but controversial scholars, as the Graduate Center at the City University of New York just did to University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt, who dare in a recent book to criticize the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. Students will find fewer and fewer opportunities and avenues to explore refutations of the ‘official narrative’ on any number of controversial and vital questions—this country’s origins in slavery, genocide, and the theft of land; its current international aggression in the Middle East and around the world; the true history of revolution and socialism, etc. The stakes involved are tremendous.

Today’s campuses are a far cry from the “leftist dictatorships” claimed by those behind these attacks. But there is in academia still more space than there is in the rest of society for critical thinking to be encouraged and for dissent from the official narrative to still find air to be expressed. This is essential to the role of the university, and this academic ferment stimulates and influences the rest of society. For that very reason, these attacks aim to change not just the universities in a radically reactionary way, but to affect all of society.

The closing of Antioch College has to be seen in this context. Its Board of Trustees couched their closure decision in terms of lack of financial resources and low numbers of student admissions. But the newly appointed president of Antioch, Steve Lawry, told the New York Times that the college “became less about intellectual rigor, than a political and social experience…. The boot camp of the revolution became the model.” The trustees hired a consultant who talked of shutting down the campus to “cleanse the ghosts” of the ’60s/early ’70s spirit of questioning and rebellion. It was this, rather than financial problems, which drove the shutdown—and that inspired the right-wing columnist George Will to devote a nationally syndicated column to crowing about it. Coming on top of the firings, this is a further serious blow.

----------------------

As we wrote in our supplement to Issue #81—“Warning: The Nazification of the American University”—“If this reactionary program wins out, universities will be turning out students who will have had little, if any, opportunity to think critically, into a society qualitatively more severely repressive than anything seen in this country’s history.” Cores of faculty and students at both DePaul and the University of Colorado—Boulder are fighting to oppose these faculty dismissals, and Antioch alumni are organizing opposition to its closure. Every student and every scholar committed to the search for the truth and to the importance of ferment and the clash of ideas in arriving at it, should be alarmed and searching for ways to join their efforts to reverse these decisions, and the whole direction for the campus that they reinforce.

---

Footnotes

* DePaul Professor Mehrene Larudee, who had organized support for Finkelstein as he came under attack, has also been denied tenure. Her case is also being taken up by those fighting for Finkelstein to be tenured. [back]

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/generation-mark-en.html

Revolution: Fall 2007

As you start college…think about this:

Every Generation Leaves Its Mark on the World—What Will Yours Be?

by Sunsara Taylor

If You Want to Change the World… You Need to Know Bob Avakian

College should be a time and a place to learn about the world…to go from the galactic to the microscopic, to learn of different cultures and art forms, to get into philosophy and history and questions of meaning and of truth…to explore things that have been kept from you, to plunge into the exciting process of discovery…to meet people from different parts of the world and different perspectives…to stretch social and political boundaries and to get into different scenes.

It's supposed to be a time to stay up all night talking, making music, reading poetry…to be part of resisting and rebelling against everything that is wrong…to make a statement about who you want to be and what kind of world you want to live in…to look at the world as it really is, and to begin to forge your role in relation to it….

But you are doing this at a time when all this is being reined in, when powerful forces are trying to shut it down…precisely because discovering how the past has shaped the present, coming to grips with how your life will shape the future, and seeing how all of this is bound up with and will influence the lives of billions around the world has higher stakes now than probably ever before.

The World You Come To

You didn't carve up the earth with manmade borders, subjugate whole peoples, drive millions from their families and homelands in a desperate search for work in the leaner and meaner globalized economy—but you can't escape the fact that the clothes on your back, the food you eat, the roads you drive on, the computers you use were all made through this global system of capitalist exploitation and plunder, including of millions of children literally chained to machines working 12, 14, 16 hours a day.

You didn't rip up the earth’s beautiful landscapes and burn its fossil fuels, sending towers of filthy smoke billowing into the skies, to feed the cutthroat competition of capitalist corporations…you didn't decide that beef cattle for the cancerous spread of fast food chains around the world was worth massive deforestation and displacement of indigenous peoples…that concern about the extinction of species and the melting of the ice caps should be ridiculed by government and major media—but you are now inheriting a world teetering dangerously close to destruction.

It was not your hands that chained millions of Africans in slave ships across the murderous Middle Passage, that sold children out of their mothers’ arms on auction blocks, that saddled up with the night-riding KKK and dragged Black people from their homes, or shot them down in urban streets when they dared to rebel or even walked with a little bit of pride—but you live each day in a country whose wealth flows directly from the veins of those slaves and whose deep-rooted racism is alive and well in its murderous response to Hurricane Katrina and the racial cleansing of New Orleans since.

You weren't the ones cheering and waving the U.S. flag as nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands in slow and agonizing deaths as flesh hung from their bodies and their cities burned and burned and burned around them—but you live in the country that did this, the country that stockpiles more nukes than any other, the country that is threatening to use these weapons of mass death preemptively.

Get the Truth at Revolution Online

It wasn't you who first enshrined the idea that women's only value was as breeders of children, helpmeets of men, or objects of sexual plunder…you aren't the patriarchs who enshrined these ideas in the religious texts of every major religion—but you are living at a time when no woman in any corner of the globe grows up free of the fear or the reality of being raped, brutalized, mutilated, disrespected, or owned, and religious fundamentalist subjugation of women is on the rise everywhere.

And no, it wasn't you who sanctioned the Presidency of George Bush, who with his unjust and immoral wars waged for empire, his fascist remaking of U.S. society, and his Dark Ages religious fundamentalism has taken this imperialist society into even more extreme, repressive, and rapacious directions—but even as you read this, there are innocent people being chained to ceilings, stripped naked, and tortured in your name.

The Choice

Let’s face it—you, like everyone else, have had your circumstance largely determined by forces beyond your control. It would be easy to hide behind this. Without a doubt, there are options and rationales being held out there for you to “do for yourself” or maybe “just do your part.” But whether you chose it or not, all of these crimes have been laid at your doorstep and what you do—or don’t do—will shape the circumstances and lives of millions and millions of people around the planet for generations to come.

You have laid out before you the promise of the possibility of achievement, of personal acquisition, of a place at the table and comforts and safety and “protection” and all the rest. You can use your education, your talents, your creativity, your ambitions to run this hamster wheel, to scarf up as much as you can from high up on the global economic “food chain,” and to do as those who enforce this whole system of global plunder are hoping you will….

Or, you can refuse to be confined by narrow horizons. You can resist . You can challenge unjust authority, you can expose the government’s lies and its crimes, you can put your body into the political fight against the war grinding up hundreds of thousands in Iraq and the new wars currently being planned. You can be about ending racism and the hatred of immigrants being whipped up with deadly consequences. You can be about shattering the oppression of women and gay people. You can dare to take on and break people out of the death grip of the hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism that enshrines this subjugation as divine. You can defy the right-wing student brownshirts trying to cleanse the campuses of subversive ideas and critical thought.

You can throw your fist in the air and get way out there—the way young people have in every heroic struggle for justice and liberation in the past—bringing hope to people around the world and challenging and inspiring others to resist throughout society. You can act urgently and set in motion political resistance and upheaval powerful enough to drive the Bush regime from power and to open up the possibility of a whole different world.

And you can learn. You can find out about the human beings and their lives being shaped and destroyed by all this. You can look deeper at the structures that have caused all this, the ideas that have reinforced all this. You can investigate solutions that have been curtained off—behind the “caution tape” of the official keepers of ideas and “solutions,” written off even by many who hate the way things are but who have themselves been misled or havesettled in—to see what has truly been accomplished through the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed and exploited throughout the world.

Think you know the truth on socialism and communism? Think that there’s no alternative to the present setup?

You can even dig beneath the simplistic and cynical refrain of “power corrupts” that serves simply as an excuse to leave things the way they are. You can—and you should—explore the truly breathtaking things that have been accomplished when the masses have held revolutionary state power in places like the Soviet Union or China, when they were really revolutionary. You can stand on the shoulders of all of this—of those who have sacrificed and struggled, who have dared to dream and to live and to fight for the emancipation of all of humanity—and you can be a part of taking all of this so much further.

If you've read this far, you're someone who wants to change the world. Don't listen to the cynics and the worldly wise who tell you you can't, who try to lower your sights. History shows that the dreamers and fighters are right. Follow your principles, work to realize your deepest and highest aspirations, and follow THAT where it leads you.

DONATE | SUSTAIN | SUBSCRIBE | GET AN E-SUB AT REVCOM.US

And while you do that, check out and engage with this paper every week. Take it out to and talk about it with others. Get out the truth and a whole spirit of resistance and revolution. Get into the works of Bob Avakian: his re-envisioning of the communist project; his analysis of current world events and the challenges before people who want a different world; and the answers, approaches, and questions he is putting forward about what is involved in making a revolution that can remake the whole world in a truly liberating, viable, and lasting way.

Do all this as we work together to resist and reverse the mounting horrors—including the fight sharpening up now over whether the campuses will be centers of resistance or sites of imperialist indoctrination.

Your life is either going to count for something—or it is going to count for nothing. The world is intolerable. It is crying out for justice. Don't look away from it.

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/brownshirts-en.html

Revolution: Fall 2007

Brownshirts in the University

A generation of kids growing up in the 1950s was routinely taught to play the game of "cowboys and Indians" with their friends. Only later did they find out that what they had been playing at was genocide.

Today on campuses around the country, right-wing students are knowingly being organized, and trained, in a much more dangerous “sport.” Like the Nazi “brownshirt” youth of 1920s and 1930s Germany, groups like Campus Watch and the deliberately misnamed Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) are organizing students to spy on, gather “evidence” against, and report faculty who encourage discussion of controversial subjects in their classes, with the aim of having them silenced, or fired. From elite universities like NYU to community colleges, they organize “games” such as “find the ‘illegal’ immigrant” day. At one school they even held a game of “catch the runaway slave,” with students (and faculty) dressed in blackface! They mock the struggle against the oppression of African-Americans and others, holding “affirmative action bake sales” and Republican “coming-out parties.”

At Columbia University these students were turned on fellow students who protested the appearance of the leader of the anti-immigrant, paramilitary Minutemen. The College Republicans at Holyoke Community College waged a month-long campaign to follow around, physically intimidate, and sexually harass the Student Senate president for her efforts to pass a resolution calling on the administration to ban military recruiting on campus.

These right-wing student groups, richly funded and nationally directed by powerful right-wing political forces closely tied to those at the seat of power, are a growing force on campuses around the country that cannot be ignored. They are providing the foot-soldiers for a broad right-wing agenda aimed at destroying academic life, ruining faculty careers, and inciting official and unofficial persecution against targeted professors and students. Those directing this assault on critical thinking and dissent are out to fundamentally change the universities as we have known them, in their internal life and functioning, and in their effect on society, making them zones of uncontested indoctrination in service of empire.

These student bullies and fascists on the campuses create an atmosphere of intimidation among faculty, while cooking up “evidence” of the so-called campus “dictatorship of the left.” They provide the crucial undergirding for the argument by Horowitz, American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), and those in power that the campuses must be “taken back” and their direction fundamentally changed. State legislatures in Colorado and Pennsylvania have had these students testify about the terrible “left-wing bias” in their states’ college and university classrooms. Their evidence is consistently specious and laughable, but the public perception grows that conservative students are being systematically persecuted by their “leftist” professors.

These right-wing students go to seminars where they are trained to take advantage of the relativism which is widely promoted in academia. They are taught to argue that they are simply trying to promote an "alternative viewpoint" (or what some call a "competing narrative"), which deserves to be heard. And all the while, they histrionically complain about their own "persecution." Historically and down to the present day, this whole method of casting themselves as “victims” while representing the views and enjoying the backing of the most powerful forces in the country is the trademark of the reactionaries in power. They are even encouraged to co-opt the language associated with the left—equality, diversity, academic freedom, fairness, etc.

Despite their poses, these forces are not about encouraging a diversity of views to contend. On the contrary, using the stalking horse of “balance,” they have launched an assault on the search for the truth and its exposition. The fact is that there are indeed some things which we can judge to be true—that is, to accurately reflect objective reality. Some of these truths are not only quite established and definite—they are very “inconvenient” for those in power. And it is these inconvenient truths that are coming under attack in the name of balance. The truth about the roots of this country in slavery and genocide, for instance; the truth about the imperialist interests behind the wars that it has fought; or even truths about the evolution of the species. These truths conflict with the agenda of those in power, and so they demand that scholarship which challenges the “official narrative” of U.S. history be “balanced” with conservative professors. For David Horowitz, who actually claims that slavery was good for Black people because they are now “better off” than Africans, the content of such “balance” is obvious. As it is for those who argue that the teaching of the scientific fact of evolution be “balanced” with the dressed-up religious creationism of intelligent design. In both cases, the call for “balance” is a step on the way to suppression of the truth.

We’ve seen this method in operation before. Take the media, where Fox News claims to be “fair and balanced.” This kind of “balance” increasingly sets the terms where even ruling-class liberals like Dan Rather are either forced out or cowed into silence, and where truly radical voices are effectively banned. The right-wing demand for “balance” is not a call for contention of ideas over what is real and what most accurately characterizes reality, be it life on Earth or the history of this country. It is, for the time being, a call for the coexistence of truths, half-truths and lies, as a transitional step to silencing the truth. And in the hands of David Horowitz and Lynne Cheney, the Christian fascists, and Fox News, it is a cover to banish critical thinking from the university, and then from society itself.

These groups are well-funded and ruthless, and they have a certain momentum. But they also have an Achilles heel: they cannot stand up to critical thinking and a genuine search for the truth. They must and can be confronted and politically defeated, exposing the truth about their methods and their real agenda.

[For more on this movement’s ruling class backers, see “The Powers Behind the Brownshirt Movement”]

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/powers-en.html

Revolution: Fall 2007

The Powers Behind the Fascist Student Movement

The rise of the campus brownshirts is the result of a conscious campaign by ruling class organizations with literally billions of dollars at their disposal. As Time magazine noted, this "student movement" is actually “very old and powerful, run not by gangly kids but by seasoned generals of the Right.” (“The Right’s New Wing,” Time, August, 2004)

The president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), one of the largest funders of reactionary student groups, articulated this clearly, saying “We must…provide resources and guidance to…sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt [stronghold] the college campus…We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming.” His organization alone pumps in $10 million a year into right-wing campus groups.

In Turning the Tide: Challenging the Right on Campus, Anuradha Mittal writes that “the Right has built a nationwide campus network with a highly-organized infrastructure, an extensive network of campus affiliates, and over a dozen conservative student-focused think tanks that spend over $40 million annually.”

In 2004 alone, the three largest foundations supporting brownshirts—the ISI, the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), and the Leadership Institute—spent $25 million to build a reactionary campus presence. ISI funds 80 right-wing student publications, and by itself gives conservative groups at Yale University almost double the money that the college gives all student groups. The Leadership Institute trains, supports, and does public relations for 213 conservative student groups nationwide. They provide guest speakers, seed money, and support for newspapers and training in how to win campus elections. The YAF, according to Insight magazine, “organizes so many programs on so many campuses that it's difficult to find a conservative activist” who hasn't been associated with its activities. In 2004, YAF subsidized over 150 campus lectures by Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, and other fascists.

These same institutions finance many of the fraudulent “studies” used by Students for Academic Freedom (SAF) and others to make their claims of “liberal bias” at universities. One study from April 2005 was funded by the Randolph Foundation, big supporters of Horowitz.

Students for Academic Freedom

Students for Academic Freedom are at the forefront of the university brownshirt movement. It was founded by racist demagogue David Horowitz in 2003 to promote his “Academic Bill of Rights,” which aims to purge universities of radical and progressive thought in the name of “academic freedom.” SAF reportedly has chapters on 200 campuses. Horowitz regularly visits campuses and high schools, leaving in his wake well-funded, officially sanctioned right-wing student organizations.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center, which funds SAF, receives a million dollars a year from foundations like the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (the country’s largest right-wing foundation with $706 million in assets). In the 1990s, the Bradley Foundation funded the “scholars” who wrote The Bell Curve, which claimed that whites are intellectually superior to Blacks.

SAF has close ties to many reactionary ruling class forces, such as Senators Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, and Bill Frist, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former governors Jeb Bush and Bill Owens (of Colorado), and Senator Trent Lott, among many others. At the recent SAF Conference in March, the keynote speaker was none other than Rick Santorum, the standard-bearer for fascist intolerance and anti-gay bigotry.

There is also a K-12 SAF, which brings these same methods to schools down to the kindergarten level. One example is what was done to Jay Bennish, a high school teacher in Colorado. A snitch inspired by SAF made a recording of comments by Bennish. These were then taken out of context and fed into the Republican noise machine of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, et al. There were demands for his firing, including by Horowitz on Pat Robertson's 700 Club. While his students expressed strong support, Bennish was subjected to death threats. Bennish was not fired, but he was suspended. As a result of the tremendous intimidation, when he returned, it was on the basis of a commitment to teaching “both sides,” with less discussion and more textbook assignments. One of his students lamented that, as a result, “We're not going to be learning as much.”

Campus Watch

Campus Watch was formed by Daniel Pipes, a close ally of Horowitz and virulent supporter of Israel who has held positions at the Departments of State and Defense. Rashid Khalidi, of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University has called Campus Watch a “noxious campaign” which is “intended to silence¼true debate on campus.”

Like SAF, Campus Watch compiles “dossiers” on “unpatriotic” professors who dare to speak or write critically of Israel and U.S. policies in the Middle East. Their website has a “Keep Us Informed” section, which encourages students to inform on their professors. Nation magazine (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021125/mcneil—November 11, 2002) reported that professors targeted by Campus Watch “have been inundated with hostile spam, rendering their e-mail accounts almost useless, and most have been victims of ‘spoofing,’ in which their identities are stolen and thousands of offensive e-mail messages sent out in their names. More than one scholar has received telephone death threats.”

Horowitz’s book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left gave encouragement, direction, and political ammunition to Campus Watch and the pro-Israeli David Project, which launched attacks on Middle Eastern departments and scholars at Columbia University and elsewhere in late 2004.

Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt recently wrote in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy that Campus Watch was founded by “passionately pro-Israel neoconservative Jews” with the intention of “encourag[ing] students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel” and that it was a “transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars.” Within the last week, Mearsheimer and Walt have had a half dozen speaking engagements promoting their new book cancelled under pressure from Zionist organizations.

Send us your comments.

Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/099/martin-en.html

Revolution: Fall 2007

Urgent Need to Right Wrongs at DePaul University

by Bill Martin

The following article by Bill Martin, author and professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, was written in response to the outrageous refusal of the DePaul administration to grant tenure to Norman Finkelstein, a prominent scholar who has taken a very strong anti-Zionist stance. We thank Bill Martin for permission to post this article.

They did the wrong thing: the denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee at DePaul University must be reversed, and very quickly

Most questions having to do with ethics, politics, and university administration are both simple and complicated. Certainly there are many complex issues involved in the case of Norman Finkelstein. There are perhaps fewer complexities in the case of Mehrene Larudee, which seems to have been treated by DePaul administrators as simply an adjunct to the Finkelstein case. That would make the adjudication of her case an even greater wrong than what has been done to Prof. Finkelstein. But the complex issues should not be allowed to obscure certain simple facts. The administration at DePaul did the wrong thing in these cases. Both Finkelstein and Larudee should be granted tenure and promotion and given every encouragement to continue with their good work in the classroom and in research. These wrongs must be corrected very quickly, both for the sake of Professors Finkelstein and Larudee, and for the sake of the credibility and intellectual legitimacy of DePaul University, which is very much in question at this time. The eyes of the intellectual world are on DePaul, and the leadership of DePaul, which first of all means the president, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the senior faculty, only have a short time in which to make things right.

What I write here, as a senior faculty member at DePaul, I will write as if I am addressing the president of the university, Father Dennis Holtschneider. Fr. Holtschneider is a man whom I have very much liked and respected, and I hope to like and respect him again. What I say here I would say to Fr. Holtschneider directly, but it is clear that letters from faculty members to the president, while good and helpful, are not going to be enough to go against the larger political tide that the Larudee and Finkelstein decisions represent.

Indeed, I hope that Fr. Holtschneider and Dean Suchar (whom I have also liked and respected over the past seventeen years, the time I have been at DePaul) and others will recognize what I say here as part of an effort not only to help, but indeed even to save DePaul University, and therefore, to help them as well. The stakes of the Finkelstein and Larudee decisions are very high. DePaul has been, in my view, a politically progressive university. I have been very proud of DePaul in this respect, and have felt very happy and privileged to be a part of this university. DePaul has made an effort, far more than most universities, to stand for social justice and inclusiveness. Although there are some first-rate scholars and theorists and creative practitioners in the many departments and schools of the university (and I do not hesitate to say that I am especially proud of my own department in this regard, which also excels in diversity and inclusiveness among the philosophy departments in the United States), DePaul is also a generally plebeian sort of place. There is no overestimating the role that a certain Christian perspective, which at DePaul we associate with the vision of St. Vincent DePaul, and which we call “Vincentian values,” has played in making DePaul a beacon of justice and inclusion. I took the fact that the Political Science Department had hired Prof. Finkelstein in the first place to be exemplary of the kind of university that DePaul has been, and that, indeed, is a very good thing.

Now I feel that my politically progressive university has been destroyed in a single stroke, and this makes me sad, sick, dismayed, and angry.

Furthermore, because these wrong decisions have taken place at DePaul, the door is now opened wider for a general assault on politically progressive intellectuals at other universities. This assault is not just some amorphous thing, it is an organized effort. Indeed, this organized effort played an essential role in the decisions at DePaul.

Two things that are very simple to understand need to be said up front. First, you cannot deny tenure to a professor because she or he takes a political stand that you do not like, agree with, or that is going to incur the disapprobation and wrath of some group. Yes, frankly, I think a professor who is an outright racist or misogynist or anti-gay bigot ought to be removed from the university (though even here there have to be procedures, and judgments cannot be based on whims, innuendo, or the self-promoting agendas of powerful persons or groups), but that is not what is going on here. Second, you cannot deny tenure to a professor simply for a rhetorical style that you do not like. A person cannot be denied tenure simply because you find his or her rhetoric “inflammatory.”

Now, when I say these things cannot be done, I mean two things. First, it is morally wrong to deny tenure to a professor on such bases. Second, to deny tenure on these bases goes against anything that could be codified as a basic procedure, and it undermines the very idea of there being procedures, as opposed to the arbitrary whims of administrators or of senior faculty who are in positions of responsibility in the tenure process.

Of course, there is a level on which it does not mean anything to say that “this cannot be done,” since, at the moment, these things have been done. In the case of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Charles Suchar and of Fr. Dennis Holtschneider, the fallback position ultimately seems to be that they are the deciders. In response to questions and protest raised by one of my esteemed colleagues regarding the decisions, Fr. Holtschneider said that he was sorry for the disagreement but that he was not going to change his decision. This could either be called a complete non-response or the “response” that, in the end, there are only questions of power and no real questions of ethical or political justification. Procedures, which are meant to embody principles of such justification, are rendered meaningless. Surely it can be considered to be a part of Fr. Holtschneider’s job to be concerned about the fallout that would occur if Norman Finkelstein were to be tenured at DePaul — clearly, powerful interests were lined up against this. What is the proper way to address this concern, however? If the response is to undermine the system of principles and procedures, and therefore any basic trust that faculty — and students as well — might have for the university leadership, then it might be said that the university has destroyed itself in order (supposedly) to save itself.

The powerful outside interests that were lined up against Prof. Finkelstein either touched a nerve or found kindred spirits among certain administrators and a couple of key senior faculty; it is not outlandish to suppose that tremendous pressure was brought to bear on some of these, perhaps most of all the university president. The first two stages of the tenure procedure — namely the deliberations and decisions of the home department and the College committee — are supposed to be the most decisive stages. The votes were 9-3 and 5-0, respectively, in favor of Finkelstein’s tenure and promotion. However, the “minority report” (representing one-quarter of the voting members of the Political Science Department) and Dean Suchar’s decision (and attendant documents and conversations) have the character of an urgent intervention. Dean Suchar and the authors of the minority report (Professors Patrick Callahan, James Block, and Michael Mezey, the last being the former dean of the College and someone with a good deal of clout in the university) were within their rights to make their recommendations, from a purely procedural point of view, but only if their justifications were to be submitted to critical scrutiny at a later stage of the process. In fact, their justifications were flimsy, at best, but these justifications were accorded primary status in further deliberations, and the fact that these justifications had been carefully scrutinized and refuted in a lengthy document by two senior members of the Political Science Department, and that this document was then “ratified” by a three-quarters vote of the department, was accorded no status at all. Or, to leave the lawyer-language aside for the moment, anyone can see that a job was done on Prof. Finkelstein, there’s no mystery here or anything else that can be set aside because of other “complex” factors.

By and by, I have no doubt that all of these documents will be on the table (most of them already are), as well as the credentials and standing of the dean and the authors of the minority report, and this will further undermine the credibility of DePaul University. These decisions have created an opening to a kind of intellectual civil war. This isn’t anything I look forward to; in fact my urgent hope is that the decisions can be reversed quickly and we at DePaul can go back to being what we ought to be, on the basis of the Vincentian values of the university. However, if things drag out, then, as with the case of Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado, we will have to look very carefully at the credentials of the people who have questioned (or trashed, really) the credentials of Norman Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee. No doubt, given the timing of the decisions (at the very end of the school year), those who did this dirty job hope that anger and protest will dissipate into the summer. But the destruction of the university will not end with the departure of Norman Finkelstein (and whatever large payoffs are necessary to ensure that departure), if and when that departure occurs. This wound cuts much more deeply, to the very heart of the university.

DePaul has had a tradition of fairness in its tenure procedures, undoubtedly inspired by Vincentian values and a more general sense that we bring people to DePaul first of all in order to support them and give them every chance to excel in their work. We may not have lived up to this lofty ideal in every case, but it meant something that we worked with this ideal in mind. Often, DePaul has been fair to a fault, bending over backwards to avoid even the appearance of unfairness. In contrast, the teaching and research credentials of Norman Finkelstein stand out dramatically, and this again points to the impression that the process was proceeding as it should have, with Finkelstein headed toward tenure and promotion, when a number was done on him. We can talk about the role of various individuals, both inside and outside of the university, and what might be called a “rolling coup” or series of interventions that were made against Prof. Finkelstein, but then the point would be that it was up to certain key individuals, most of all and especially the president, acting as a protector of Vincentian values, to put a stop to this nonsense. That instead certain individuals in positions of leadership and responsibility actually pressed forward with the intervention, facilitating it and adding to it, is shameful.

The ideal of fairness with which we have worked at DePaul is not the norm at all universities, and at some universities it is taken for granted that senior colleagues will put junior colleagues in difficult positions to see how they fight their way out of the corner, so to speak. But then, DePaul, from its founding (in 1898), never had a “Jewish quota,” something that Harvard, from which Alan Dershowitz presumes to give us lessons in ethics, had well into the 1950s. It has been claimed that, in the end, outside influences did not play a role in the decisions. I would say that, at least from the moment in 2006 (June 16th), when then-chair of Political Science Patrick Callahan wrote to Alan Dershowitz essentially to ask for the “dirt” on Norman Finkelstein (”Could you point me to the clearest and most egregious instances of dishonesty on Finkelstein’s part”), the process was poisoned. And how is that for collegial behavior and Vincentian values? In this case it is completely upside-down that the futures of Norman Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee at DePaul are what we are discussing. If Fr. Holtschneider needed anything else to tell the president of the board of trustees of DePaul, John Simon (a supporter of both Alan Dershowitz and of the decision to fire Prof. Finkelstein), he could simply have said that the poisoning of the process by itself means that Prof. Finkelstein has to be awarded tenure, or otherwise the reputation of the university will be very seriously damaged — and so it has been. Unfortunately, the connection between Alan Dershowitz and John Simon, around fund-raising for the Jewish United Fund, is itself a part of this poisoned process.

A further element of the ideal of fairness with which we have attempted to work at DePaul is that we hire people to tenure-track positions in the hope that they will fulfill certain expectations and that we can then award them tenure. Nowhere has it previously been set out in these expectations that a professor cannot use “inflammatory language” in his or her writings or public discourse; nowhere previously has it been said that a professor has to uphold Vincentian values in order to be tenured at DePaul. Even apart from the fact that these requirements, as concocted by Dean Suchar without any discussion with faculty or procedural basis, are nothing but a smokescreen (and not even remotely an effective one) for covering the real issues, surely we would want to talk about the meaning of these new-found requirements; I know that many junior faculty at DePaul are wondering about this, or perhaps justifiably freaking out about it would be a more accurate description. It appears to me that Jesus, for instance, may have said some inflammatory things. Furthermore, to speak up for the existence and condition of the Palestinian people seems like the sort of thing St. Vincent would have done. Lastly, it cannot be a requirement for tenure at any intellectually respectable university that one cannot be a critic of the State of Israel.

But now of course I have veered toward the real issue, the issue that everyone who has followed this case knows is at the heart of the matter. Of course the administrators at DePaul, and the authors of the minority report, know this full well, hence the new-found requirements and the paper-thin justifications. Are these people living so deep inside their own heads that they actually think anyone else is buying this stuff? Seriously, if they really believe this, and I am not saying this in jest, and neither do I take any pleasure in saying this, then their basic mental competence has to be questioned. What is going on instead (for these are not stupid people) is that the crew who did this number on Professors Finkelstein and Larudee just hope that their obfuscations will deter people long enough that the cases will fade away, hopefully during the summer. (A recent response by Dean Suchar to the president of the Faculty Governance Council, Prof. Gil Gott, is a prime example; one great irony — or that’s what it would be called if it wasn’t instead just formalistic obfuscation — of Suchar’s response is that he raised procedural questions about the FGC sending its letter of protestation over his head, directly to the president, as if he himself had not shown contempt for the faculty of the College by overturning the overwhelming majority decisions of the home departments and the College tenure and promotion committee.) However, this issue will absolutely not fade away, and it is very disheartening to many, many people that such a cynical ploy would be attempted by our leaders.

That there is really only one issue in these cases is captured well by a comment that was made at the Norman Finkelstein Solidarity web site: “Keep the C. V., change the subject, and Norman Finkelstein has tenure.” If the “crew” is fooling anyone regarding this, it is only themselves; unfortunately, I can’t even believe that. What I can believe is the combination of enormous pressure that almost certainly was put on some of these people, perhaps most especially the president, combined with the ideological and personal animus that some of them may have against Prof. Finkelstein. One measure of how intense the pressure must have been, coming from powerful pro-Israel forces, is that, last year, DePaul University became the first Catholic university in the United States to have a gay studies program. I was very proud of the university for taking this step (and bravo to the faculty and administrators who organized it); it is the sort of thing for which I have been proud of DePaul for my entire time there, and there have been many such advances. Surely there were many in the Catholic community, academic and otherwise, who were not happy with the formation of DePaul’s gay studies program, but that didn’t stop us.

It would be silly to pretend to debate the question of Israel here, though perhaps not as silly as anyone thinking that Norman Finkelstein’s arguments and research are not a very important part of that debate. The crux of the problem is that there are some who don’t want a debate because, they think, on this issue there is no debate. Part of their position is that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people, though somehow the State of Israel has found it necessary to build an immense wall to contain and shut out these non-existent people. A big part of Norman Finkelstein’s research, and this goes back to his days as a graduate student at Princeton, has in essence been to challenge one of the founding myths of the State of Israel, the idea of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Just as no thinking person in the United States today can believe that North America was “empty,” a “virgin land,” when the explorers and pilgrims showed up, no one in Israel itself actually believes that Palestine was “a land without a people” when the original Zionist settlers came. Indeed, 1948 is called a “revolution,” and it is hard to see why a revolution was needed if there were only lizards and sand there before. Thus a wall now has to be built against Norman Finkelstein in academia — and if they get away with building this wall they will feel emboldened to build others — even though his position in the debate, and the debate itself, does not exist.

The pro-Israel forces in the United States do not hesitate to fight dirty, and in this case they are even willing to destroy what has been a good university. They were quite willing to attack DePaul for having hired Prof. Finkelstein in the first place, but now Alan Dershowitz praises this “excellent Catholic university” for having fired him. Dershowitz had said that DePaul would be a laughing stock if it tenured Prof. Finkelstein, but of course the reality is that DePaul will now be a laughing stock for submitting (or even simply appearing to submit) to the dictates of Harvard’s leading torture advocate, someone who would probably even be willing to admit that he would be willing to say absolutely anything if it furthered the cause of the State of Israel. Surely part of the pressure used on some DePaul administrators is the threat to unleash the language of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. It does not help that the Catholic church and its institutions does not have a good record on these questions. But let us face the issue squarely: to use these terms loosely, when in fact there are real and really vicious anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers in the world is to trivialize these issues — and why shouldn’t this trivialization instead be called anti-Semitism? To just throw these terms around, to engage in their trivialization in order to advance a political agenda, is disgusting. It is also traumatizing to be called these things, and undoubtedly difficult to find the intellectual and political (and financial?) will to stand up to it, but this has to be done. The cost for not standing up will be enormous: DePaul will be destroyed as a place deserving of respect in the intellectual and academic worlds, and, if this happens, academic freedom will be under attack everywhere.

Without saying anything at all about the State of Israel, or its chief supporter the United States for that matter, we can readily see that, if a particular state is understood to be sui generis, the only true sovereign, and the exception to every rule (including even the law of contradiction, which would say that there is no need for a “revolution” to overthrow people who do not exist), then there are no rules — and then there is no university worthy of the name, either. It attests to the power of the defenders of sovereign absolutism that this — criticism of the State of Israel, especially if done by someone who is not only Jewish but is the child of Holocaust survivors — is the one line that cannot be crossed; no similar line exists, apparently, for the advocacy of torture at elite institutions.

The administrators and faculty at DePaul who created this terrible mess, especially the president, need to come clean. I say this to you now directly: the rest of us ought to appreciate the kind of pressure you are under (and even that people get carried away with certain ideologies and