War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young

18.05.24 – US, United States – Pressenza New York

In the Thrall of a Dominant Death Culture

Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.

By Norman Solomon

I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel — literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.

A familiar saying — “the more things change, the more they stay the same” — is both false and true. During the last several decades, the consolidation of corporate power and the rise of digital tech have brought about huge changes in politics and communications. Yet humans are still humans and certain crucial dynamics remain. Militarism demands conformity — and sometimes fails to get it.

When Columbia University and many other colleges erupted in antiwar protests during the late 1960s, the moral awakening was a human connection with people suffering horrifically in Vietnam. During recent weeks, the same has been true with people in Gaza. Both eras saw crackdowns by college administrators and the police — as well as much negativity toward protesters in the mainstream media — all reflecting key biases in this country’s power structure.

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1967. “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

Disrupting a Culture of Death

This spring, as students have risked arrest and jeopardized their college careers under banners like “Ceasefire Now,” “Free Palestine,” and “Divest from Israel,” they’ve rejected some key unwritten rules of a death culture. From Congress to the White House, war (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it) is crucial for the political business model. Meanwhile, college trustees and alumni megadonors often have investment ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where war is a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Along the way, weapons sales to Israel and many other countries bring in gigantic profits.

The new campus uprisings are a shock to the war system. Managers of that system, constantly oiling its machinery, have no column for moral revulsion on their balance sheets. And the refusal of appreciable numbers of students to go along to get along doesn’t compute. For the economic and political establishment, it’s a control issue, potentially writ large.

As the killing, maiming, devastation, and increasing starvation in Gaza have continued, month after month, the U.S. role has become incomprehensible — without, at least, attributing to the president and the vast majority of Congressional representatives a level of immorality that had previously seemed unimaginable to most college students. Like many others in the United States, protesting students are now struggling with the realization that the people in control of the executive and legislative branches are directly supporting mass murder and genocide.

In late April, when overwhelming bipartisan votes in Congress approved — and President Biden eagerly signed — a bill sending $17 billion in military aid to Israel, the only way to miss the utter depravity of those atop the government was to not really look, or to remain in the thrall of a dominant death culture.

During his final years in office, with the Vietnam War going full tilt, President Lyndon Johnson was greeted with the chant: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Such a chant could be directed at President Biden now. The number of Palestinian children killed so far by the U.S.-armed Israeli military is estimated to be almost 15,000, not counting the unknown number still buried in the rubble of Gaza. No wonder high-ranking Biden administration officials now risk being loudly denounced whenever they speak in venues open to the public.

Mirroring the Vietnam War era in another way, members of Congress continue to rubberstamp huge amounts of funding for mass killing. On April 20th, only 17% of House Democrats and only 9% of House Republicans voted against the new military aid package for Israel.

Higher learning is supposed to connect the theoretical with the actual, striving to understand our world as it truly is. However, a death culture — promoting college tranquility as well as mass murder in Gaza — thrives on disconnects. All the platitudes and pretenses of academia can divert attention from where U.S. weapons actually go and what they do.

Sadly, precepts readily cited as vital ideals prove all too easy to kick to the curb lest they squeeze big toes uncomfortably. So, when students take the humanities seriously enough to set up a protest encampment on campus and then billionaire donors demand that a college president put a stop to such disruption, a police raid is likely to follow.

A World of Doublethink and Tone Deafness

George Orwell’s explanation of “doublethink” in his famed novel 1984 is a good fit when it comes to the purported logic of so many commentators deploring the student protesters as they demand an end to complicity in the slaughter still underway in Gaza: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”

Laying claim to morality, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has, for instance, been busy firing media salvos at the student protesters. That organization’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, is on record flatly declaring that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” — no matter how many Jews declare themselves to be “anti-Zionist.” Four months ago, ADL issued a report categorizing pro-Palestinian rallies with “anti-Zionist chants and slogans” as antisemitic events. In late April, ADL used the “antisemitic” label to condemn protests by students at Columbia and elsewhere.

“We have a major, major, major generational problem,” Greenblatt warned in a leaked ADL strategy phone call last November. He added: “The issue in the United States’ support for Israel is not left and right; it is young and old… We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen-Z problem… The real game is the next generation.”

Along with thinly veiled condescension toward students, a frequent approach is to treat the mass killing of Palestinians as of minimal importance. And so, when New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote in late April about students protesting at Columbia, he merely described the Israeli government’s actions as “failings.” Perhaps if a government was bombing and killing Douthat’s loved ones, he would have used a different word.

A similar mentality, as I well remember, infused media coverage of the Vietnam War. For mainline news outlets, what was happening to Vietnamese people ranked far below so many other concerns, often to the point of invisibility. As media accounts gradually began bemoaning the “quagmire” of that war, the focus was on how the U.S. government’s leadership had gotten itself so stuck. Acknowledging that the American war effort amounted to a massive crime against humanity was rare. Then, as now, the moral bankruptcies of the political and media establishments fueled each other.

As a barometer of the prevailing political climate among elites, the editorial stances of daily newspapers indicate priorities in times of war. In early 1968, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S. newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of an American withdrawal from Vietnam. By then, tens of millions of Americans were in favor of such a pullout.

This spring, when the New York Times editorial board finally called for making U.S. arms shipments to Israel conditional — six months after the carnage began in Gaza — the editorial was tepid and displayed a deep ethnocentric bias. It declared that “the Hamas attack of October 7 was an atrocity,” but no word coming anywhere near “atrocity” was applied to the Israeli attacks occurring ever since.

The Times editorial lamented that “Mr. Netanyahu and the hard-liners in his government” had broken a “bond of trust” between the United States and Israel, adding that the Israeli prime minister “has been deaf to repeated demands from Mr. Biden and his national security team to do more to protect civilians in Gaza from being harmed by [American] armaments.” The Times editorial board was remarkably prone to understatement, as if someone overseeing the mass killing of civilians every day for six months was merely not doing enough “to protect civilians.”

Learning by Doing

The thousands of student protesters encountering the edicts of college administrations and the violence of the police have gotten a real education in the true priorities of American power structures. Of course, the authorities (on and off campuses) have wanted a return to the usual peaceful campus atmosphere………………………………………………… more https://www.pressenza.com/2024/05/war-culture-hates-the-ethical-passion-of-the-young/—