Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.”
I did some easy googling and it’s likely that John Cage would have wanted students to listen that way: “The powers-that-be have become more and more repellent,” he said in 1966. "Look at us in Vietnam. It is indefensible.”
Back to McWhorter:
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
And what if John McWhorter were not a professor of linguistics, but actually a professor of cannibalism? That’d be pretty fucked up. What if, instead of writing books about language, he wrote books about how to cook and eat babies?
Favorite part:
The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.
can somebody smarter than me explain why i or anybody who doesn’t go to columbia should give a shit that they’re protesting? like obviously it’s bad the university is so pro-zionism and it’s cool the kids are pro-palestine but students have no leverage over capital and in fact pay a fortune to be at university. why would the capitalists not just let them continue their tempest in a teapot? is it just to prevent protests from spreading into the working populace?
Death to America
Perhaps because Zionists have successfully hijacked the meaning of anti-Semitism to mean any sympathy with Palestine, and the administrators are reactively still terrified of being called anti-Semites.
Either that, or they recognize that the radicalization of university students is potentially explosive and has historically lead or contributed significantly to many revolutions. Of course this would require the administration to have a level-headed understanding of revolution, which I don’t think any lib is capable of having.
I think it is to prevent solidarity fermenting between the future administrators of capital and empire and the oppressed; the administrators maintain and manage the operations of capital and empire.
In other words, If college students from an Ivy League - future leaders of industry and state -have solidarity with marginalized and oppressed groups beyond liberal handwringing sympathy, then their concerns echo with their contemporaries, middle aged elders, et cetera. Solidarity forms solidarity, and unrest threatens to create a mass movement. And unlike BLM or Occupy, this genocide in Palestine is impossible to coopt, diffuse, or deescalate from. It’s obvious to people what this genocide is, even those that sympathize with Israel.
Alternatively, the focus on these students comes from a desire to deflect from the discovery of mass graves under hospitals in the Gaza strip.
i mean it’s noteworthy that they’re not just letting them continue. they’ve already sent in the cops to arrest everyone once. student protests contributed to the divestment from apartheid south africa, and these universities are deeply embedded in the arms industry. getting them to divest would be a major hit to the war machine.
but yes, the disproportionate focus on universities and not the genocide that they’re actually protesting is a distraction.
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