#BeingRevolutionary
- By Jim Hicks
The UMass4Palestine press conference in front of the Eastern Hampshire County Courthouse in Massachusett, July 17, 2024. Photo: courtesy of UMass FJP.
On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a member of the US Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest the U.S. committing genocide in Gaza. A recent essay by Nan Levinson in TomDispatch examines the media reaction to this extreme act, with a focus on how quickly the press discussion swerved away from the political justification that Bushnell himself offered towards amateur psychoanalysis and a focus on the airman’s upbringing. (Masha Gessen, per usual, offered an important corrective to this particular media bandwagon.)
It should go without saying: Bushnell did have other choices. For any real change, Brecht’s “long anger” will be necessary—the long fight for peace, collective struggle, and ceasefire now. In an important analytic move, Levinson connects Bushnell’s protest to the less extreme actions on campuses across this country, where students “camped out last spring, erecting tents on university lawns, defying administrators, and dominating the news narrative for weeks.” As she notes, “Though no student protestors died, by demanding institutional responses to Israel’s war in Gaza, some were barred from graduating, denied job offers, summarily kicked out of their housing, physically attacked, and arrested.”
Levinson also points out that, although clampdowns of this sort often backfire and rarely make for calmer campuses, they do work in another sense: they manage to change the subject. “The repression, in fact, succeeded mainly in turning the conversation from core issues like war and human rights to an assessment of free speech and the very nature of academia — not to mention good old American anti-intellectualism.”
On July 17th, I attended a press conference given by UMass4Palestine in front of the Eastern Hampshire County Courthouse, one moment in the group’s ongoing effort “to organize for Palestinian liberation and self-determination, and to protect those who are facing persecution for their advocacy” on behalf of Palestinians. The specific goal of the press conference was to “address the ongoing legal proceedings for the ‘Mullins 134’ who were arrested on May 7th during a pro-Palestine action which took place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.”
The first speaker summarized those events: on May 7, 2024, to clear an encampment on the south lawn of the UMass campus, with authorization from UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes, “UMass Police, Amherst Police, and the Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) forcefully surrounded and later arrested rally participants and observers. Police tackled protestors as well as arrested them using violent methods, including aggressive use of zip-ties and restraint, causing injuries. Authorities then shuttled arrestees to the UMass Police Department as well as the Mullins Center at UMass and held them for hours before protestors were eventually released on bail.”
The speaker noted as well that July 17th was the two-hundred-and-eighty-fifth day since Israel began its genocidal campaign on the people of Gaza. The acknowledged death toll—counting only identified individuals—then stood at 38,664, with 89,097 wounded. The speaker also cited an article from The Lancet that estimates the actual toll (including deaths from starvation and disease) at 186,000, roughly 7-9% of Gaza’s entire population.
The second speaker at the press conference began with a straightforward question: “To UMass, we ask, in what universe does arresting your students, staff, and faculty for exercising their right to protest count as keeping your community safe?” During the Vietnam years, the most militant antiwar protestors chanted, “Bring the war home!” In Amherst, alas, our University’s administration took care of that for us. Yet here too, the diversion has been largely effective. Here too, the post-crackdown conversation has largely turned from core issues like genocide to the usual debates about free speech and stale critiques of academia.
Let’s not play that game. When I wrote to Levinson to thank her for her essay, I also sent her a short excerpt from a novel by J.M. Coetzee, in which the protagonist dives into such core issues, during the time of national (and international) shame lately visited upon us by the George W. Bush administration. Coetzee’s character notes that, “Their shamelessness is quite extraordinary. Their denials are less than half-hearted. The distinction their hired lawyers draw between torture and coercion is patently insincere, pro forma.”
At that point, the key question is asked: What is to be done? Coetzee’s character argues that, given this country’s crimes, “the issue for individual Americans becomes a moral one: how, in the face of this shame to which I am subjected, do I behave? How do I save my honour?” He goes on: “Suicide would save one's honour, and perhaps there have already been honour suicides among Americans that one does not hear of. But what of political action? Will political action […] suffice?” A few pages later, in a phrase that feels like autobiography, not fiction, Coetzee’s protagonist notes that, “The generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name.”
Like many of my faculty colleagues, I greatly admire the clarity and courage that so many of our students have shown and continue to show. After all, aiding and abetting genocide is also a crime against humanity, and thus every taxpaying citizen of the United States is directly and shamefully complicit in the war on Gaza. Anyone in this country who isn’t wondering what they can do to save their honor is thinking less than clearly. As they did back in the sixties, antiwar soldiers and students are again leading the way.
I should also note that one purpose of the July 17th press conference was pushback against the first of several more recent, absurdly punitive moves by the UMass administration. Two of our students—who weren’t even arrested on May 7—have been threatened with the felony charge of inciting a riot, because they have been singled out as “leaders” of the demonstration. In addition, over the past week, dozens of students and community members who were arrested on May 7 have received “no trespass” orders from the UMass police—informing them that they may be arrested simply for setting foot on campus. Such attempts at intimidation are outrageous. Before this, all charges have been misdemeanors; moreover, the local district attorney has stated that, “Our office sees no reason to be punitive to defendants who were peacefully protesting, engaging with democracy, and exercising their right to speak freely.” To call taxpayers—not to mention students who have paid tens of thousands of dollars in tuition—“trespassers” suggests that Orwell was not writing fiction.
The UMass administration must also be rethinking its recent brand campaign. Tipping its hat to the state’s colonial history, UMass has recently urged us all to “Be Revolutionary.” Last May in The Atlantic, Tyler Harper noted how these days, by celebrating and marketing their activist histories, “America’s Colleges Are Reaping What They Sowed.” Here on the home front, a student columnist has made a similar claim (though what for Harper had been a “morass,” Alexander Taylor calls “the whirlwind”). Both responses, it should be noted, again turn the discussion away from current history and towards a general discussion of higher ed and free speech rights.
I have a more radical idea. What if we consider the possibility that activism may actually be action—that it could potentially effect change? What if the campus crackdowns and congressional hearings and the right’s dance of death with Netanyahu are in fact evidence that the kids are onto something, that political action may suffice, that the military-industrial-congressional-educational complex might already be showing a crack or two, that light is beginning to shine through? What if, rather than aiding and abetting the war machine, the purpose of a state university was indeed to serve as a model for ethical action in the world, to teach its students to be citizens of that world, and how to make it better? What if, instead of threatening student leaders with felony charges, the University decided to award them a prize for meritorious student conduct, for honoring and exemplifying the best practices and higher values of our institution? What if "Be Revolutionary"™ wasn’t simply a marketing slogan and linguistic imperative, but instead a way of seeing and state of being, #BeingRevolutionary?
As the press conference was winding down, I posed a question to Eric Ross, a UMass graduate student in History and administrative coordinator for the University’s Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. “I’ve heard that the current administration and the Chancellor don’t believe that the long history of similar protests at UMass, where no similar punitive actions were taken, have any bearing on the present.” I asked, “As a historian, what do you think of that argument?”
Like any good historian, Eric’s answer was careful and measured. He did not suggest that the current administration and current Chancellor could, would, or even should be bound by the proud history and traditions of the institution they serve. Like anyone, they have choices to make and the freedom to make them.
Like any good historian, however, Ross did remind us that such choices are also a part of history—and will be judged by future historians.
JIM HICKS is Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review.
