We Believe Ourselves Citizens
From this vantage point—from Lisbon, finally released from a month-and-a-half of rain and storms—the United States, the country from which I come has looked more like Turkey and Hungary than itself for years now. The shooting and killing of unarmed protestors in Atlanta and the beating, tear-gassing and violent arrest of protestors across university campuses during a year-and-a-half of holocaust in Gaza—all harkening back to the militarised destruction of the Occupy Movement, and subsequently Standing Rock—have been predictors of the coming autocracy all along. Their careful arrangement, the dubious PR which told us Occupy had no message; the agitators at Standing Rock were all outsiders with hidden agendas (it was in this time that the government began using terror charges on environmental activists); now they say any and all standing up for the Human Rights of Palestinians are committing crimes and engaging in terrorism, and for this reason the First Amendment does not apply, and cannot be called on for protection.
Every capitulation to this insanity has been seamlessly handed on from one unhinged administration to another. Columbia has for years capitulated to pressure from pro-Israel groups, donors, sponsors and guests, while chilling voices speaking on behalf of Palestinians. Columbia University itself selecting Mahmoud Khalil as a negotiator because of his calm, because of his kindness, his commitment to his peers and his rational approach. He had the respect and trust of students and faculty, he was asked to act as negotiator, and then Columbia fed him to the wolves. This throwing of Mahmoud Khalil to the wolves and then offering further capitulations, bowing to further unprecedented federal interference in internal university affairs, this should trouble everyone, not just Columbia students. An Ivy League institution is working with an authoritarian executive to directly attack the First Amendment, and is allowing its students to be guinea pigs in the laboratories of tyranny.
Columbia University and Paul, Weiss law firm bowing down before the edicts of a would be king acting outside the law is a crack in the democratic foundations. For these two institutions in particular—institutions with the credibility and resources to fight this rogue administration—for them to cave, to kneel and kiss the ring not only emboldens the leaders in the administration, it emboldens and empowers the players in the wings and the shadows, the lobbyists and cronies, and it emboldens other tyrants, namely Netanyahu, who has resumed the holocaust in Gaza, Orban, who continues his erasure of LGBT people, and Erdogan, who has just jailed the leader of the opposition to head off an unwanted challenge.
From this vantage point, from a place of relative calm, I am watching history repeat itself, only this time it isn’t Berlin or Nuremberg, it isn’t Madrid or Barcelona—it is Manhattan and Washington, D.C. It is the capitulations that have, for years—more years than I can count—always worried me. The grey areas we worked into law and life following 9/11—the grey areas that linger on like our presence in Iraq or Afghanistan, Guantanamo or Syria or all of the places our arms shipments arrive—the newly undefined states of being, “terrorist” and “radical” among them. It is the capitulations on civil liberties over the last two decades and the normalising of exchanging liberty for “security” that has paved the road to this point, here, now, where legal, lawful residents are being disappeared and the executive branch seems intent on assuming supreme power. Once that phase of the project is complete, they will begin to come for the rest of us—the “citizens”, as we believe ourselves to be.
What happens when they begin arresting Americans for holding views that “jeopardise foreign policy”? And if Americans already believe anyone saying “stop the genocide” is an antisemite because that’s what cable news and both sides of the aisle have been telling them since October 2023? It would seem that in the contemporary rendering of a previous anti-fascist poem, the poem would have to start: First they came for the immigrant “pro-Palestinians”, and I said nothing because I was neither an immigrant, nor pro-Palestinian…
Who will speak for you when they have already come for me, when they have already come for your immigrant neighbors, or when they have already come for the students of your now quiet schools?
Obeying in advance is further destroying our democracy and no one in power seems to be rising up to defend its citizens. They are further disfranchising expats by require proof of citizenship when we vote…So many things, and you articulate them painfully well.