Students Take On Elites Over Gaza

Will they follow the 1960s and confront deeper issues?

Apr 28, 2024

Campus encampments draw on 1960s protests, spread internationally
Students awaken to manipulation by powerful forces
Will they follow the logic and confront the elites’ bigger crimes?
Soros is funding Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
He’s not doing it for the good of scholars or Gazans
Billionaire cash keeps students on a leash - to redirect them in future
Biden admin is driven by fears for Nov 2024 election
Torn between youth vote and pressure from the Israel lobby
Non-compliance is the only path to freedom

(2,400 words or about 11 moments of your company.)

Arrest of Emory University professor Caroline Fohlin while interceding for students

UPDATE: Soros funding Palestininan campaign organisations (Footnote) - May 2, 2024

Apr 28, 2024

It does not matter which powerful forces manipulate the world; students are waking up to the simple fact that they do.

Could the protests over Gaza lead to a broader challenge to the West's uniparty narrative?

The brutish foot of a policeman brings down a dancing teen who has discovered the Palestinian dabke as a form of defiance. They see their professors handcuffed. They hear pro-Israeli protesters outside the encampments giving voice to their own perception — all can open the doors.

Each one of these individuals, even those in uniform, is capable of awakening to the fact that events are manipulated for reasons that are not stated openly, and often lied about in the media.

This is a time for students in particular to discover that however urgent the cause, events happen within a grander scheme.

That’s the optimist

The more cautious gloss is that billionaires are once again manipulating protest.

With one hand they penalise university presidents for tolerating pro-Palestine gatherings; with the other they finance them.

George Soros’s Open Society Foundation is funding Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). [1]

It is just another layer in the kaleidoscope of divide and rule: to criticise Soros, even if he’s funding SJP, is anti-Semitic.

If you take cash or talking points from any billionaire donor, Republican, Democratic, Zionist, or those who position themselves as youth friendly, like Soros, you are playing into the same hands.

The tumult that confronts us is not about Left and Right. It is no longer sufficient to object: what would happen were the boot on the other foot. We must challenge orthodoxies and accommodate others with different loyalties. Old paradigms no longer fit.

Cute political analyses and critical theories don't help when politicians are fixated on grabbing resources, minerals, agricultural land and energy, while treating their own people as expendable.

It is not only in Gaza that Western politicians cheer on war.

The protests

The Columbia students, and those on a fast-growing list of colleges, have a specific objective: for universities to disclose their investments and divest from all Israeli companies.

Added to this, they want an amnesty for all students, especially those who have been arrested.

They have studied the student protests of the 1960s, inviting veterans of that era to speak. The universities also followed the script from 50 years ago: calling in the police to break up protests.

Emory university came close to being a flashpoint, as police evoked Kent State, using tear gas and rubber bullets to clear students, and at some colleges posting snipers on rooftops. Professors who tried to intervene to protect their students were shoved to the ground.

At the time of writing, The Independent published an article by Richard Hall which adds further insights.

Today’s students are as prepared as their forebears: they organised security at their encampments; set up communications; conducted de-estcalation training; schooled their fellows in giving interviews to media. [2]

The dialectic

Young people have been co-opted into activism by universities whose administrators who now are surprised at the direction their young "change agents" have taken on the issue of Palestine.

Is this a happy accident. Is it possible that students may next confront the repression they will face in the name of Climate Change?

Could repression on campuses open minds? Could it trigger students to reconsider all they’ve been told?

Have they learned to read between the lines and spot when the media is blatantly trying to manipulate their minds and behaviour?

The Guardian made the connection in January. It did not blame the war on Climate Change but it did point readers in that direction — “Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe.” [3]

Greenhouse gas emissions, according to The Guardian

You might consider the article fatuous until you spot the manipulation, like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, about the wall dividing the family of camp commandant Rudolf Höss from Auschwitz. The “zone of interest” is quite clearly Gaza and the wall one which divided it from a techno party. As Simon Elmer writes, don’t forget how propaganda manipulates your perspective. [4]

Given that Hollywood distracts us, billionaires play both sides in a war, and the media tells us the overarching issue is climate change, you have all the evidence you need to innoculate yourself against propaganda. The next issue is to ask where it leads.

Glory to War

Let’s take another example.

It's curious that The Guardian doubles down on praising Ukraine’s fascist Azov Battalion when the media has done its best for two years to look the other way.

The timing is likely no accident: “Elite force bucks trend of Ukrainian losses on eastern front.” It is a nudge to remind students who they should be supporting, though the epaulettes are stripped of offending symbols. [5]

Perhaps the propagandists seek to innoculate campus students with an antidote to Palestine — the objective being to derail young people, by telling them where their loyalties should lie.

This may work because we develop our "BS detector" only over time.

In our 20s we are angered by the injustices of the world and want to end them, "by any means necessary."

By our 30s we begin to recognise how these injustices do not go away but replicate. Some people stop caring at this point, turning away from harsh reality. Others decide that, however nasty reality, they will carry on trying to understand it.

The change is not only intellectual but social. The soul mates of our 20s may call us as traitors to the cause. We may see that we benefit from those injustices against which we railed, and be forced to confront the insitutions that we inhabit, from which we profit.

The simplistic view of progress we were taught at school, that every day, in every way, we get better and better, is nothing more than a nursery rhyme.

Wars are not a battle of good against evil but manipulations in which the good are thrown, by the evil among them, to the wolves.

Slowly we learn that governments do not uniformly care for our well being — shock, horror, they are not mummy and daddy writ large, but just as likely to be the deceiving relative that cheats and betrays.

If we learn something about how money works, it becomes so much simpler to see: how they use inflation to steal from the people; that even if you manage to buy a home, its magical rise in value is mostly the currency withering away. It just takes more pounds or dollars to buy the same thing.

Most of us gain such insights only with time. There are few shortcuts, and no easy pill, only the unavoidable bitter aftertaste for those who can stand it.

Who’s next

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken threatens China if it continues to supply Russia in order to "power its industrial base."

Are young people ready to go to war to back Blinken's bluster?

There are signs they will not. Apart from those in the bubble of the top universities, the majority of young face a life of hard work, perhaps two jobs.

Hard times make gritty, practical people, who have no time for "luxury beliefs." It is such people who will decide the direction the United States takes, and the rest of the West.

They face worsening internal conditions, from open borders to a government that abandons its duty to maintain order and functioning services at home, preferring to print money to fight wars abroad.

Then there's the agenda grouped under Net Zero, and carbon taxes and credits. Will that agenda be imposed before the majority wake up to it; or will the financial markets tank, bond markets leading all assets lower?

The question is who will suffer first: those just entering the work force, or those with assets to lose. Neither will act until the pain touches them personally.

If financial collapse takes out the middle class, how will they respond? The conditions exist for civil war, but those roused to arms may not rise up from the office cubicles (though they may yet!)

It will be people with grit. Like the union leader who greeted Trump in New York City this week and said his duty was to his construction workers, not the globalist higher ups.

Faced with the defection of such union workers to Trump, how will the establishment react? Does it continue to provoke civil war, in which the target will be not people against each other, but the people against the establishment?

Or will it impose a clampdown in the name of Climate Change, perhaps even before the Nov 2024 U.S. general election?

Or, does it provoke an external adversary, as we witness in the attempt to play Russia and China like cymbals?

And how will the students react?

Generational shift

We have mentioned young people just entering the work force, the middle class office dwellers, and the manual workers who continue to abandon the Democratic Party.

Each cohort may respond differently but they face the same fate. Why do you think another, imported cohort is flooding across the borders?

The Keynesian monetary system is a Ponzi: it needs to keep bringing more people into the scheme to keep paying the cost of welfare and medicine. When the population stops growing, Keynesian economics fails.

Too far in the future, perhaps, for students to care. Actually U.S. Social Security and Medicare are set to go bankrupt within a decade.

At the same time the mechanics of work are changing, and the geography. While Blinken rails against China, those who finance the uniparty are looking to foreign lands and new trade routes.

This does not mean the syndicates of oiler bankers are set on a single industrial location, nor that it will be managed by cat-stroking autocrats sitting around the table of a one-world government.

It does mean that in order to reshape those trade routes, shutter old industries and open new, they are prepared to transfer whole populations and reassign territories on a grand scale, as did the Soviet Union and China during their industrialisation - and arguably the USA during its Manifest Destiny.

That means we face a common fate, perhaps dispossessed, and no direction home. We were promised, weren't we, a new normal, no going back to the way things were.

Those entering the markets must consider this: if you have few skills to offer the economy today, you will have nothing to offer tomorrow.

Getting enhanced with Neuralink will not help, because the moment it works, everyone will want it.

AI will increase productivity, but also unemployment.

Don’t be a puppet

There is a certain poetry to the panic, of those who created that which they demonize.

Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has called to disperse “antisemitic, pro-terrorist mobs."

Universities have promoted activism as an end in itself — against what, was often left unsaid. Whose struggles they were fighting remained just as vague, though those who follow these things know where to look.

"Reimagining Democracy Through Student Activism" is the title of an Inside Higher Ed article, of Dec 2022.

Activism required a target and that was provided by using identity politics to pick at old wounds, for example reviving racial stereotypes and segretation in the cause of fighting racism.

History, literature and philosophy are not the only disciplines riddled with the rhetoric of oppressor-oppressed, intersectionality and reality squeezed into the mold of diversity, equity and inclusivity.

The universities created a golem — defined variously as an uncivilised person, or a representation of that which the potter fears, neither good nor evil but simply an inversion of themselves — and now it stares back.

They took a society that was coasting along, and then focused intensely on every fault, real or imagined, and gave it human form in the universities, from which the golem army would infiltrate corporations, media, entertainment and even the church.

The current protests are a much-needed counterweight to the uniform media, and the silence and complicity of corporations and politicians who do nothing but follow the money.

And yet take away the single issue of Palestine and the golem remains.

When the time comes the same protesters may be used to promote wedge issues, to divide, alienate or rally support to issues from gender to Climate Change.

Similarly a “right wing” wedge might may stoke tensions in a target population on the issues of race, immigration or security.

Members of the Patriotic Front, which some consider to be “glowies” — so clearly a creation of the three-letter agencies that they glow — were arrested after they posted “reclaim America” stickers on a masonic lodge in Idaho.

This technique of wedge politics saves the uniparty from cultivating demographics. They can simply use the media and education system to indoctrinate cohorts, by dividing and selling them an identity.

The Woke DEI propaganda is very good at selling a lie — and actually it is not hard if the schools have already trained the youth how to respond to particular trigger words — and it works with all cohorts.

The Great Firewall of Common Sense is being looped around the Internet, sending people back into their filter bubble. Will students have their moment of outrage, before they are roped back inside the pen, ensuring they make no connection between the war on Gaza and other wars to come — including the war on humanity in the name of saving the Earth?

Don’t embody other people’s neuroses, nor do their bidding. Above all, don’t be a puppet.

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