When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.

I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.

But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.

• READ MORE: US backing for Pacific disinformation media course casualty of Trump aid ‘freeze’
• Other Mandy Henk reports

There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.

I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.

But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.

Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.

In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.

Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.

They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of  relationship to money.

It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.

Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.

In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.

What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.

Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.

But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.

You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.

Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.

The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.

Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.

Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.

Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.

In England, the project was called “enclosure”.

Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.

As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.

As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.

I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.

AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.

Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.

Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.

However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.

In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.

This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.

By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.

That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.

Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.

Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.

Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.

The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.

When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.

There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.

Dehumanisaton always starts with words and  language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.

An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.

When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.

In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.

Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.

Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.

Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.

There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.

Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.

Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.

But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.

If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.

Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.

I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.

More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.

We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.

Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.

Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

A New Zealand-based community education provider, Dark Times Academy, has had a US Embassy grant to deliver a course teaching Pacific Islands journalists about disinformation terminated after the new Trump administration took office.

The new US administration requested a list of course participants and to review the programme material amid controversy over a “freeze” on federal aid policies.

The course presentation team refused and the contract was terminated by “mutual agreement” — but the eight-week Pacific workshop is going ahead anyway from next week.

• READ MORE: New course planned to help Pacific media professionals counter disinformation
• US sponsorship of Pacific disinformation workshop ends after dispute
• NZ education provider has US Embassy grant terminated
• Explainer: what will the withdrawal of USAid mean for the Pacific?

“As far as I can tell, the current foreign policy priorities of the US government seem to involve terrorising the people of Gaza, annexing Canada, invading Greenland, and bullying Panama,” said Dark Times Academy co-founder Mandy Henk.

“We felt confident that a review of our materials would not find them to be aligned with those priorities.”

The course, called “A Bit Sus”, is an evidence-based peer-reviewed series of classes that teach key professions the skills needed to identify and counter disinformation and misinformation in their particular field.

The classes focus on “prebunking”, lateral reading, and how technology, including generative AI, influences disinformation.

Awarded competitive funds
Dark Times Academy was originally awarded the funds to run the programme through a public competitive grant offered by the US Embassy in New Zealand in 2023 under the previous US administration.

The US Embassy grant was focused on strengthening the capacity of Pacific media to identify and counter disinformation. While funded by the US, the course was to be a completely independent programme overseen by Dark Times Academy and its academic consultants.

Co-founder Henk was preparing to deliver the education programme to a group of Pacific Island journalists and media professionals, but received a request from the US Embassy in New Zealand to review the course materials to “ensure they are in line with US foreign policy priorities”.

Henk said she and the other course presenters refused to allow US government officials to review the course material for this purpose.

She said the US Embassy had also requested a “list of registered participants for the online classes,” which Dark Times Academy also declined to provide as compliance would have violated the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

Henk said the refusal to provide the course materials for review led immediately to further discussions with the US Embassy in New Zealand that ultimately resulted in the termination of the grant “by mutual agreement”.

However, she said Dark Times Academy would still go ahead with running the course for the Pacific Island journalists who had signed up so far, starting on February 26.

Continuing the programme
“The Dark Times Academy team fully intends to continue to bring the ‘A Bit Sus’ programme and other classes to the Pacific region and New Zealand, even without the support of the US government,” Henk said.

“As noted when we first announced this course, the Pacific Islands have experienced accelerated growth in digital connectivity over the past few years thanks to new submarine cable networks and satellite technology.

“Alongside this, the region has also seen a surge in harmful rumours and disinformation that is increasingly disrupting the ability to share accurate and truthful information across Pacific communities.

“This course will help participants from the media recognise common tactics used by disinformation agents and support them to deploy proven educational and communications techniques.

“By taking a skills-based approach to countering disinformation, our programme can help to spread the techniques needed to mitigate the risks posed by digital technologies,” Henk said.

Especially valuable for journalists
Dark Times Academy co-founder Byron Clark said the course would be especially valuable for journalists in the Pacific region given the recent shifts in global politics and the current state of the planet.

“We saw the devastating impacts of disinformation in the Pacific region during the measles outbreak in Samoa, for example,” said Clark, author of the best-selling book Fear: New Zealand’s Underworld of Hostile Extremists.

“With Pacific Island states bearing the brunt of climate change, as well as being caught between a geopolitical stoush between China and the West, a course like this one is timely.”

Henk said the “A Bit Sus” programme used a “high-touch teaching model” that combined the current best evidence on how to counter disinformation with a “learner-focused pedagogy that combines discussion, activities, and a project”.

Past classes led to the creation of the New Zealand version of the “Euphorigen Investigation” escape room, a board game, and a card game.

These materials remain in use across New Zealand schools and community learning centres.

• More information on Dark Times Academy or to register for this course.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Chinese authorities have expelled over 1,000 Tibetan monks and nuns from the Larung Gar Buddhist Academy in the latest blow to the major center of Tibetan Buddhist learning, sources inside Tibet with knowledge of the situation said.

Citing a lack of proper residency documentation, officials said they need to reduce the number of Buddhist clergy residing at the academy from 6,000 to 5,000, the sources said.

The move is the latest in a long series of steps taken by China to destroy and shrink the academy, which by the early 2000’s was home to about 40,000 Buddhist monastics.

In 2016, Chinese authorities destroyed half the compound and sent away thousands of monks and nuns. At the time, county authorities issued an order that spelled out the plans for the 2016-2017 demolitions and forced expulsions.

In December 2024, about 400 officials and police were deployed to Larung Gar, which is in Serthar county (Seda in Chinese) within the Kardze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan province.

Officials have pressured hundreds of Buddhist clergy to leave voluntarily, the sources said.

“Those expelled have been ordered to leave under the pretext of lacking proper residency documents,” he said. “And to avoid drawing public attention, more than 1,000 monks and nuns have been gradually forced out over the past month.”

(China Stringer Network/Reuters)

The source said that government officials have been stationed at the academy, imposing strict controls on the movement of monks, nuns, pilgrims and tourists.

“They are strictly prohibited from taking photos freely and are only allowed to visit designated areas within the monastery.”

Many of the residences of expelled Buddhist clergy have been marked for demolition, although they have not been destroyed yet, he said.

Plans are in place to build a road through the monastery in April, leading to further demolitions, he said.

Part of broader strategy

The latest crackdown is seen as part of Beijing’s broader strategy to reduce the size and influence of religious institutions, particularly those ties to Tibetan Buddhism.

While Beijing says such policies are meant to ensure social stability, rights activists argue they they aim to suppress Tibetan culture and religious freedom.

Chinese authorities want to roll out a 15-year residency limit for Buddhist clergy at Larung Gar starting this year.

They also plan to shrink the academy’s population even more by making registration mandatory, which will force Chinese students to leave, according to a report by Phayul, a news website about Tibet.

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Destruction at Larung Gar greater than earlier reported

Larung Gar has long been a symbol of resistance to Chinese control over Tibetan Buddhism — but it has suffered for that.

When the Chinese government deployed around 400 troops from Drago county (Luhuo) and other areas to Larung Gar last December, with helicopters flown in to monitor the movement of monks and nuns, the source said.

Beginning in 2025, strict restrictions will be enforced, preventing monks and nuns from staying at Larung Gar for more than 15 years, he said.

Founded in 1980 by the late Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, Larung Gar, was established as a center for Tibetan Buddhist education and meditation.

Unlike traditional monasteries, it welcomed monks, nuns and lay practitioners from diverse backgrounds, fostering a unique blend of inclusivity and scholastic rigor that are now under threat.

Larung Gar at one time was home to 40,000 Buddhist nuns and monks, but in 2017, over 4,000 monastics were expelled, and 4,700 dwellings were destroyed.

“During that time, Chinese government officials stated that the Chinese Communist Party owned both the land and the sky, giving them the authority to do whatever they wanted with Larung Gar,” a second source said.

Translated by Tenzin Palmo and Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Tibetan.

An Aotearoa New Zealand-based community education provider is preparing a new course aimed to help media professionals in the Pacific region understand and respond to the complex issue of disinformation.

The eight-week course “A Bit Sus (Pacific)”, developed by the Dark Times Academy, will be offered free to journalists, editors, programme directors and others involved in running media organisations across the Pacific, beginning in February 2025.

“Our course will help participants recognise common tactics used by disinformation agents and support them to deploy proven educational and communications techniques including lateral reading and ‘pre-bunking’,” says Dark Times Academy co-founder Mandy Henk.

• READ MORE:  Welcome to Dark Times Academy and course information
• Ramping up counter-misinformation training

As well as teaching participants how to recognise and respond to disinformation, the course offers an understanding of how technology, including generative AI, influences the spread of disinformation.

The course is an expanded and regionalised adaption of the “A Bit Sus” education programme which was developed by Henk in her former role as CEO of Tohatoha Aotearoa Commons.

“As the Pacific Islands have experienced accelerated growth in digital connectivity over the past few years — thanks to new submarine cable networks and satellite technology — the region has also seen a surge in harmful rumours and disinformation that is increasingly disrupting the ability to share accurate and truthful information across Pacific communities,” Henk says.

“By taking a skills-based approach to countering disinformation, our programme can help to spread the techniques needed to mitigate the risks posed by digital technologies.”

Evidence-based counter disinformation
Henk says delivering evidence-based counter disinformation education to Pacific Island media professionals requires a depth of expertise in both counter-disinformation programming and the range of Pacific cultures and political contexts.

“We are delighted to have several renowned academics advising the programme, including Asia Pacific Media Network’s Dr David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, and Professor Chad Briggs from the Asian Institute of Management.

“Their expertise will help us to deliver a world class programme informed by the best evidence available.”

The programme will be co-taught by Henk, as well as American journalist and counter disinformation expert Brooke Binkowski, and New Zealand-based extremism expert Byron Clark, who is also a co-founder of the Dark Times Academy.

“Countering disinformation and preventing the harm it causes in the Pacific Islands is crucially important to communities who wish to maintain and strengthen existing democratic institutions and expand their reach,” says Clark.

Binkowski says: “With disinformation narratives on the rise globally, this course is a timely and eye-opening look at its existence, its purveyors and their goals, and how to effectively combat it.

“I look forward to sharing what I have learned in my years in the field during this course.”

The course is being offered by Dark Times Academy using funds awarded in a public competitive grant offered by the US Embassy in New Zealand.

While it is funded by the US, it is a completely independent programme overseen by Dark Times Academy and its academic consultants.

• More information on Dark Times Academy and register your interest in the course at: https://www.darktimesacademy.co.nz

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

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ProPublica and Documented obtained more than 14 hours of never-before-published videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, which are intended to train the next conservative administration’s political appointees “to be ready on day one.”

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation and its allies for a future conservative presidential administration, has lost its director. In recent weeks, it faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump, whose campaign has tried to distance itself from the effort.

But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy remains on track. Video trainings like these are one of the “four pillars” of that plan, says Spencer Chretien, the associate director of Project 2025, in “Political Appointees & The Federal Workforce.”

For transparency, we are publishing the videos as we obtained them.

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

In “Conserving America,” Matthew Spalding, a vice president at Hillsdale College, sets out the landscape for the Presidential Administration Academy by talking about common conservative principles.

Hillsdale College is a small, Christian liberal arts school in Michigan known both for its great books curriculum, which is centered on reading the classics of the Western canon, and for having been a feeder of staffers for the Trump administration.

In “The History of the Conservative Movement,” Christopher Malagisi, the executive director of outreach for Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus, gives a history that spans from the early-20th century Progressive Era to the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater and the “Reagan revolution.”

In “Why Your Service Matters: How Presidential Appointees at All Levels Impact Policy,” three Heritage Foundation experts discuss the role that political appointees play in making policy.

They talk about the importance of planning ahead to “hit the ground running” and call the first 100 days of an administration a “honeymoon period” for policy implementation.

In “Political Appointees & The Federal Workforce,” Chretien discusses the critical role that he says political appointees play in carrying out the vision of a conservative administration.

Chretien served in the Trump administration as special assistant to the president and associate director of presidential personnel.

In “Presidential Transitions & Appointee Hiring: What You Need To Know,” Ed Corrigan and Rick Dearborn outline how an aspiring political appointee can get a foot in the door during a presidential transition.

Dearborn is a former White House deputy chief of staff in the Trump administration, as well as executive director of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016.

Corrigan has had a long career as a Senate staffer. He was part of Trump’s transition team and is now the president and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a prominent think tank based in Washington.

In “Deep Dive on The Federal Background Investigation & Security Clearance Process,” Kirk gives an overview of the federal government’s background check process, including what disqualifies an individual, like substance abuse issues, and what does not.

Kirk, an associate director of Project 2025, served in the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration.

In “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Bethany Kozma, who was the deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, talks with six other former Trump administration staffers about what it’s like to serve as a political appointee in the federal government.

In “Time Management for Political Appointees,” Katie Sullivan explains how political appointees can maximize their time in government by vetting whom they meet with and not allowing career civil servants to fill their calendar with meetings.

Sullivan is the former acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Justice Programs, a grant-making agency inside the Justice Department.

In “The Art of Professionalism,” Chris Hayes and Leavitt discuss tenets of how to act with professionalism while serving in government.

Hayes worked for the Leadership Institute, a think tank that offers leadership and management resources for the conservative movement.

Leavitt worked in the Trump White House press office and is now a spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.

In “How to Staff Your Principal,” Jeff Small discusses the day-to-day work of serving closely with a senior government official like a cabinet secretary.

Small is a former senior adviser to the interior secretary and a chief of staff to Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.

In “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” Sullivan and Kozma discuss supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out.

In “How to Work With the Media,” Alexei Woltornist talks about how political appointees should navigate the modern media environment, including bypassing mainstream news sources and focusing on conservative outlets because those are the only ones conservative voters trust.

Woltornist is a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In “Oversight & Investigations,” Mike Howell, Tom Jones and Michael Ding explain what government oversight entails, the ins and outs of public-records laws and how political appointees should think about when and when not to put sensitive communications in writing.

Howell is the executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

Jones runs the American Accountability Foundation, a conservative investigations group.

Ding is a lawyer for America First Legal, which is aligned with Trump.

In “The Federal Budget Process,” Michael Duffey explains key budgetary policies, such as the difference between appropriations and authorization bills and discretionary versus mandatory spending.

Duffey served in the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration.

In “The Administrative State: What it is & How to Address the Problem,” Paul Ray explains what the so-called administrative state does and how a conservative administration could use its authority to rein in government regulation.

Ray is a former Trump administration lawyer who served as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Trump administration.

In “How to Promulgate a Rule,” David Burton discusses how the federal government’s regulatory process works and the role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Burton is a senior fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.

In “Taking the Reins: How Conservatives Can Win the Regulations Game,” Roger Severino talks about what lessons conservatives learned about passing new rules during the Trump presidency and how to be more effective in a future conservative administration.

Severino is a vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration.

In “Executive Order Drafting & Implementation,” Steven G. Bradbury explains the process of writing and carrying out executive orders, drawing on experience from the Trump presidency.

Bradbury is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former counsel in the Department of Transportation during the Trump administration.

In “Advancing the President’s Agenda as a Political Executive,” Donald J. Devine and James Bacon discuss different strategies for promoting the president’s policies as a high-ranking political appointee.

Devine is the former director of the Office of Personnel Management under President Ronald Reagan.

Bacon is a former special assistant to the Presidential Personnel Office, serving during the Trump administration.

In “How to Get Your Policy Through the Agency,” Dan Huff talks about how to navigate the policymaking process in the executive branch.

Huff is a former legal adviser in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, serving during the Trump administration.

In “Congressional Relations: How to work with Members,” Hugh Fike and James Braid talk about what executive branch political appointees should know and expect about working with congressional offices and elected officials.

Fike and Braid both formerly worked on legislative affairs in the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration.

In “Building Winning Coalitions to Advance Policy,” Paul Teller and Sarah Makin discuss what strategies political appointees can use to work with pro-life, gun-rights and other outside advocacy groups to pass policies.

Teller is a former special assistant to the president and a senior aide in the Office of the Vice President, serving during the Trump administration.

Makin is a former deputy assistant to the president and former director of outreach in the Office of the Vice President, serving during the Trump administration.

In “Best Practices in Social Media to Advance Policy,” Ben Friedmann explains how political appointees can most effectively use social media to promote conservative policies and messages.

Friedmann is a former deputy assistant secretary for digital strategy in the U.S. State Department.

Videos prepared by Lisa Riordan Seville and Chris Morran.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented.

The physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance…

— Macaulay (1841)

Chhayanaut, the premier cultural institution of the country, employs what one scholar of fascism, Roger Griffin, has termed palingenesis, “a framing device to emphasise cultural and national renewal” (Zac Gershbergh and Sean Illing. The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media and Perilous Persuasion, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2022), p 126).  Gershberg and Illing cite D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the modern medium of the cinema for a mass audience: the Lost Cause of a heroic South, reinvigorated by the Ku Klux Klan.

“Pakistan’s rulers, since its inception in 1947, tried to use religion to rupture the plural cultural identity of Muslim Bengalis; this was reflected in their onslaught on Bangla language and culture,” announces the Chhayanaut website. We will see below that this does not fact-check. “Chhayanaut created a landmark national tradition by launching the celebration of Bengali seasons. The musical welcome on the first dawn of Baisakh [the opening month of the Bengali year] under the banyan tree in Ramna, begun in 1967, brought back the Bengali new year into the consciousness of city dwellers. Thus, Chhayanaut has become a partner in the glory of the Bengali passage that began with a cultural renaissance and led to the war for independence. During the liberation war, Chhayanaut singers organised performances to inspire freedom fighters and refugees. After independence, Chhayanaut has been involved in seeking creative ways to broaden and intensify the practice of music and, more broadly, the celebration of Bangla culture…Chhayanaut believes the nation will find its path to development through this cultural renaissance (italics added).” In fact, the “Bengali calendar” issued from the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. “Celebrations of Pahela Baishakh started from Akbar’s reign (1556 – 1605).”

Needless to add, Bengali consciousness played no role in these celebrations. An imperial edict, for purposes of tax collection, constituted the new calendar: such top-down, supine payment of taxes prompted the expression for Asians as a whole: “born taxpayers”: “The nascent absolutist states of Europe had to struggle long and hard before they established fiscal absolutism; of the Asian populations it can fairly be said, in the light of their 2,000-year-old histories, that they were “born taxpayers” (S. E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p 1303)”.

According to a former student, Chhayanaut begins its Victory Day musical at precisely 3:45 pm – when the Pakistan army surrendered to the Indian army on December 16 1971. Apart from the singing and dancing, “Chhayanaut has a dress code for people who want to sit in the audience. The audience must wear something in green or red”, the colours of the flag — reminding one of the indoctrination scene in Stalag 17 (1953).

Whatever their goals, their one achievement stands out: subordinating the individual to the group. And this group, far from including all Bengalis actually excludes most: the illiterate, and their taste in music and dance. When the author questioned three exponents of Bengali culture, they were unanimous in condemning the movie item dances of Naila Nayem, a sex symbol in Bangladesh (pictured). “Indecency” must be ruled out, commented one of the trio. The puritanism of the Bengali middle class appears unclothed.

We are not surprised: the imperative of cohesion trumps all others. As history has shown, the boot-in-the-face is a Freudian need of the herd:

Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion from all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition…

And so Chhayanaut believes “that if people come together in singing songs of loving the motherland and its people, those divisions will dissolve. Chhayanaut believes that Bangalees can be united once again through culture…Chhayanaut hopes that their new initiative to bring people together in the spirit of patriotism will be successful (italics supplied).”

Patriotism: the last refuge?

The Soft Power

Chhayanaut promotes the arts on behalf of the ruling party. Its founders earned their nationalist spurs by singing songs – discouraged by the Pakistan government before and during the second Indo-Pak war over Kashmir –  by Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel laureate, on his hundredth birth anniversary, a lot like  the Boston Symphony Orchestra not playing Beethoven on the eve of the Great War. By cocking a snook at the authorities of a country founded on Islamic unity, Chhayanaut’s defiance earned merit for heroic anti-Islamism.

Which brings us to Rabindranath Tagore and his songs.

The songs of Nobel-Prize-winning Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) — one of which constitutes the national anthem of Bangladesh — betrays the elitism of our nationalism. Demotic Bengali is sharply different from hieratic Bengali — the latter only spoken by the uber-elite, the self-consciously nationalist. Education is the national cosmetic, concealing all wrinkles of the particular. Rabindranath belongs among the educated.

Rabindranath Tagore symbolised anti-Islamism, Bengalism and pan-Bengalism, all of which makes him a prophet-like personality in the salons of Dhaka, Bangladesh. None of this would have been possible but for the Nobel Prize in literature. Sanjida Khatun observes that his protean output “has made Tagore songs an essential part of life of the Bengalis who sing them in happiness, in distress, and at work”. The mythology around Rabindranath’s songs suggests a less innocent explanation.

Ian Jack, writing on the god-man’s hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary, observes: “Then again, love of literature can slide into fetishism, and from there, obscenity. When Tagore died in 1941, the huge crowd around his funeral cortege plucked hairs from his head. At the cremation pyre, mourners burst through the cordon before the body had been completely consumed by fire, searching for bones and keepsakes.” That’s not love of literature; that’s love of divinity. And godmen tend to proliferate in the “mystical” Orient: recall the Beatles’ guru, Maharishi Maheshi Yogi, father of Transcendental Meditation (TM), in whose dishonour a disillusioned John Lennon composed Sexy Sadie.  His genuflecting devotees must be reciting mantras to avert a similar fate for god-man Tagore (although a highly popular lampoon of one of the guru’s songs by Roddur Roy on YouTube manages to shock and amuse) .

Art has long been co-opted here for the purpose of propaganda. After the division of Bengal in 1905, the Hindu Bengali elite agitated for restored unity. One of these agitators was Rabindranath Tagore. He composed Banglar mati Banglar jal (“The soil of Bengal, the water of Bengal”). Dwijendralal wrote Banga amar janani amar (“Bengal is my land and my mother”); Atulprasad wrote Balo balo balo sabe (“Say, say, say everyone”). “Among others who contributed to the nationalistic movement was Mukundas, whose jatras [village plays], Desher Gan (patriotic song) and Matrpuja (Worship of the Mother), motivated the Bangalis to fight for their rights and against the despotic rule of the English.” These worked: As Percival Spear remarks, “It had been shown that the despised bourgeois might on occasion get a popular backing” (A History of India, Volume 2 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990), p 177).

“Bande Mataram” (“Hail to Thee Mother”) became the Congress’s national anthem, its words taken from Anandamath, a popular  – and “virulently anti-Muslim” – Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and its music composed by Rabindranath Tagore (the observation on the nature of the novel comes from Ian Stephens, Pakistan: Old Country/New Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p 86).

Chaterjee’s slogans – bande mataram, matribhumi (motherland), janmabhumi (birth land), swaraj (self rule), mantra, and so on – were used by militant Hindu nationalists, mostly from Bengal, and many of these words continue to resonate powerfully in Bangladesh today. Moderate leaders of the Indian National Congress did not take immediately to Chaterjee’s Hindu nationalist slogans, but were won over by their appeal to the youth during the swadeshi movement. Fuller, the Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal and Assam, forbade the chanting of bande mataram in public.  Congress’s continued emphasis on aspects of militant Hindu nationalism – such as the replacement of Urdu by Hindi, and the singing of bande mataram in schools and on public occasions –  was resented by Muslims (Hugh Tinker, South Asia: A Short History (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), pp 195, 220).

“Mother-goddess-worshipping Bengali Hindus believed that partition was nothing less than the vivisection of their ‘mother province’, and mass protest rallies before and after Bengal’s division on October 16, 1905, attracted millions of people theretofore untouched by politics of any variety,” according to the Britannica. The swadeshi movement, as it was known, inspired terrorists who believed it a sacred duty to offer human sacrifices to the goddess Kali (Spear, p 176). What in actuality had been a purely administrative measure served to catapult national consciousness among the Hindu Bengalis. However, British officials made it clear that one consequence of the partition would be to give Muslims of Bengal a province where they would be dominant: it was a forerunner of Pakistan (Tinker, p 195). According to the Banglapedia article on the swadeshi movement, “The Swadeshi movement indirectly alienated the general Muslim public from national politics. They followed a separate course that culminated in the formation of the Muslim League (1906) in Dacca.” During the first meeting of the Muslim League, convened in Dacca in December 1906, the Agha Khan’s deputation issued a call “to protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India.” Other resolutions moved at the meeting expressed Muslim “loyalty to the British government,” support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.

Thus, an all-too-frequently heard Bengali song here goes: “The queen of all countries is my birth land (janmabhumi)”. The land figures prominently in the superabundance of deshattobodhok — patriotic — songs. “O the land of my country, my head touches you/You have commingled with my body….” Again: “You [martyrs] will be the beacon for the new swadesh….” While bhumi unequivocally means land, desh is more ambiguous: it can mean village or country. Since the transition from the former to the latter is far from complete, the word attempts to transfer emotions from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, mirroring inadequately the (far more successful) transition from pays to patrie, from Gesselschaft to Gemeinschaft (Finer, pp 143-4). The pejorative chasha (literally, farmer, but connotes the gauche, the uncultivated) tars all rural inhabitants (and even more in its stronger version, chasha-bhusha), and thereby the entire country, with the same brush. Patriotic songs may be seen as an heroic effort at restoration of self-esteem through imagined restoration of the physical unity of the two Bengals.  The portability of song makes it a potent cultural artefact: emigres sing and hear these jingoistic songs in their new countries (typically America, Canada or Australia) where faux nationalism survives in the first generation, fortunately endowed with considerable human capital, the highly literate and numerate. The less fortunate are exhorted to love the motherland (matribhumi/janmabhumi) instead of voting with their feet. A single Youtube video, for instance, plays fifteen chauvinistic lays.

Mother, hail!…

Though seventy million voices through thy mouth sonorous shout,

Though twice seventy million hands hold trenchant sword-blades out,

Yet with all this power now,

Mother, wherefore powerless thou?

According to Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhury, “It was not the liberal political thought of the organisers of the Indian National Congress, but the Hindu revivalism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century — a movement which previously had been wholly confined to the field of religion — which was the driving force behind the anti-partition agitation of 1905 and subsequent years.” (Bande Mattaram lines, and Chaudhury, quoted, Tinker, pp 192-3). Rabindranath must be regarded as a pioneer of pan-Bengalism, and the successful reunion of Bengal as our Anschluss.

After Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League came to power in 1996, the state comfortably — and permanently — ensconced Chhayanaut headquarters in a tony part of town, “in recognition of it’s (sic) significant contributions for [the] last four decades to the Bangali cultural development”. “Virtually, the Chhayanaut operates unofficially as the apex body in the realm of music and dance.” The organisation, and others like it, provide psychic ammo for the government’s more muscular anti-Islamism – the soft power behind the hard power.

Death by a Thousand Mudras

The hard power went on display when, in 2021, Sheikh Hasina’s government invited Narendra Modi to the hundredth birth anniversary of her father Sheikh Mujib, the pater patriae and fifty years of national independence, announced by said pater on 26 March, 1971. The Islamist group, Hefazat–e-Islami, asked the government to cancel the invitation, thereby ‘showing respect to the sentiment of [the[ majority [of] people in Bangladesh”. In a written statement, they labeled Modi, not inaccurately, as ‘anti-Muslim and a butcher of Gujarat”. Members of the ruling party, and, predictably enough, its student wing, the Chatra League, attacked worshippers at the national mosque on 26 March after the Friday prayer to stymie the planned protest, leading to a nationwide fracas the next two days. At least fourteen Hefazat members were shot dead by police. “The Bangladeshi authorities must conduct prompt, thorough, impartial, and independent investigations into the death of at least 14 protesters across the country between 26 and 28 March,” insisted Amnesty International, “and respect the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, said 11 human rights organisations in a joint statement today. The organisations also called on the international community to urge Bangladeshi authorities to put an end to the practice of torturing and forcibly disappearing opposition activists.”

The Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha, “a welfare organisation of dance artistes” established in 1978, similarly serves up propaganda as dance. According to noted dance-teacher and impresario Laila Hassan: “It [Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha] believes that dance not only provides entertainment, it also speaks about the life, society, and culture of the country and its people, and that the liberation war and the country’s history and tradition can be presented through it”.

The Bulbul Lalitakala Academy serves a similar function: in addition to ministering to Terpsichore, the academy “plays a pivotal role in the cultural field through its regular observances of shaheed dibash [literally, “martyr’s day”, February 21, when young people were gunned down in a language protest in 1952] and independence day and celebrations of pahela baishakh and the spring festival….” On February 1 2024, a mega cultural event across the nation commemorated the shaheed dibash. The chief of the government-run cultural organisation, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy mused: ‘We need culture-friendly political parties in the country in order to further the nation”. “Over 300 troupes are staging street plays at 21 venues in eight divisions at the festival,” announced the newspaper. “Twenty eight Dhaka-based troupes will stage plays at the Central Shaheed Minar till February 7.”

Gershberg and Illing note how the proto-fascist D’Aunzia, Commandante of Fiume and the first Il Duce, “established music as the state’s central purpose” (p 134). The authors quote Robert A. Paxton: fascism is “full of exciting political festival and clever publicity techniques” as well as “the propagandist manipulation of public opinion [to] replace debate about complicated issues” (p 136).  Song-and-dance takes the place of tepid discussions of inflation and the current account deficit – although inflation eats away at the welfare of the poor. Hardly noticed, the Left Democratic Alliance, a group of left-leaning parties, held a protest rally on 20 March accusing the government of sponsoring “syndicates” that manipulate prices: “They said that the Awami League government had failed to control the price hike of essential commodities which increased sufferings of the common people of the country.”  Not surprisingly, the only party to use the F-word is the socialist Jatiya Samajtantrk Dal (JSD) who observe “anti-fascism democracy day” on March 18 when several members were killed by the private army of Sheikh Mujb in 1974.

In the article “Dance Groups” of the Banglapedia, the writer observes, “Dance as an art form was seldom practised by Muslims before Gauhar Jamil set up a dance institution called Shilpakala Bhaban in 1948. After partition in 1947, despite the conservative tradition of the Bavgali (sic) society, a number of performers…contributed to removing old ways of thinking and entertainment.” The article on Bulbul Lalitakala Academy mentions “conservative Bengali Muslims”; and Chayyanaut “encountered many obstacles from [the] government of the time, because music and dance, especially of secular genre, were not much in consistence with the ideology of the Pakistani regime”. (Never mind that Ayub Khan removed Islam from the constitution (Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p 58) and passed the Muslim Family Law Ordinance, that the government set up the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation in 1957, that the Iranian singer Googoosh appeared regularly on TV in West Pakistan in the ‘60s, that the dance program Nritter Tale Tale aired every week, as the author recalls….) However, the article on “Classical Dance” observes: “…it appears that, like other classical dances, Kathak developed in the courtyards of Hindu temples and got a fresh lease of life under the patronage of the Mughal rulers”. The Britannnica concurs: Kathak, born of the marriage of Hindu and Muslim cultures, flourished in North India under Mughal influence.

“Classical Dance” also states: “During British rule, Indian classical dancing was patronised by the ruling classes, such as, rajas, maharajas, nawabs and zamindars as well as by British high officials who held ‘nautches’ in their private chambers.” And Bulbul Chowdhury, according to the same encyclopaedia, succeeded with dance precisely “by showing that dance was part of the Muslim-Mughal tradition”.  Disinformation, or, not to put too fine a point on it, lying, conduces to incoherence. Another article in the Banglapedia observes that Khaleda Manzoor-e Khuda, a regular singer on Dacca Radio from 1951 to 1955, sang Tagore songs. “At that time as a Rabindra singer she was popularly known as Khaleda Fency Khanam.”

In an interview with the author, Benazir Salam, an expert in Indian classical dance with an MA from Rabindra Bharati, Kolkata and a teacher of dance at Dhaka University, observed of Kathak that it developed under Muslim rule, and, precisely for that reason, Chhayanaut allows its performance only at festivals, and relegates it to the tail-end.

The Men of Words, the Women of Song

We would do well to tarry a while and take note of Erich Hoffer on the subject, which will recur: “It is the deep-seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community (racial, lingual or religious) to which he belongs however loosely. It was Napoleon’s humiliation of the Germans, particularly the Prussians, which drove Fichte and the German intellectuals to call on the German masses to unite into a mighty nation which would dominate Europe (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), p 138)”. Hoffer uses the expression “the unwanted self” (p12). Macaulay’s attitude seems to have penetrated generations of this Delta, so much so that in Sheikh Mujb’s battle cry Joy Bangla  [Long live Bengal/Bengali language] they feel wanted again.

Hoffer explains the intelligentsia’s solid support for the despotic dynasty of Bangladesh: During the upheavals of 2018, when student thugs of the ruling party beat up harmless child protesters demanding safer roads, Mehdi Hasan went head to head with a former Harvard professor, Gawhar Rizvi, who shamelessly defended every criminality perpetrated by the government; this author has spoken with men (and women) of words, and found the same resistance to criticism. When a bridge opened recently, the men and women of words and song galvanised themselves to create musical paeans to the dynasty (click here for the album Bangladesh: Despotic Dynasty, pictures taken by the author of the images of the ruling family plastered throughout the capital, a superb example of persuasive advertising designed to perpetuate our founding myth of the Father of the Nation). Intellectuals, “ a herd of independent minds”, in Chomsky’s words, appease our collective self-loathing by glorifying and exonerating thuggery.

In all fairness, it must be conceded that Bangladeshis are not uniquely prone to assuaging collective self-loathing through megaprojects: According to development economists Hla Myint and Anne O. Krueger, less developed countries’ resentment of developed economies stem, not only from measurable differences in income, but from less rational factors such as a reaction against the colonial past and their complex drives to achieve parity. “Thus, it is not uncommon to find their governments using a considerable proportion of their resources in prestige projects, ranging from steel mills, hydroelectric dams, universities, and defence expenditure to international athletics. These symbols of modernization may contribute a nationally shared satisfaction and pride but may or may not contribute to an increase in the measurable national income.” A picture of the Aswan Dam accompanies their article.

Peace is War

In 1928, Arthur Ponsonby, a British Member of Parliament, published his tell-all book on British propaganda which he called Falsehood in War-time: Containing An Assortment Of Lies Circulated Throughout The Nations During The Great War. In time of war, he observes with acerbity, “the stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of ‘propaganda’.

“A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption….

“Perhaps nothing did more to impress the public mind – and this is true in all countries – than the assistance given in propaganda by intellectuals and literary notables.” In short, the men of words.

The items italicised by the present author could be supplemented with and at all times. In Bangladesh today, the intelligentsia provides the context for a mindset suitable to a wartime situation: Fifty-two years after the third Indo-Pak war, seventy-two after Ekushey February Pakistan is still the enemy, and Islamists are fair game. George Orwell appreciated well the need for a state of permanent hostility against a fictive enemy to keep the citizenry loyal to the Party – a world  dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. Emmanuel Goldstein, however, stars in the daily Two-Minute Hate – the equivalent of the propaganda by scribes, terpsichores and thespians in our country against the minuscule mullahs.

“He [Goldstein] was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.” How like the Islamsts of Bangladesh he sounds.

As Gershberg and Illing observe: “Fascism also promulgates the myth of sinister internal enemies that are simultaneously weak and devious (p 126)”.

“Nothing to report,” the lieutenant said with contempt. 

“The Governor was at me again today,” the chief complained.

“Liquor?”

“No, a priest.”

“The last was shot weeks ago.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

“In the world of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory,” muses a reviewer, “it’s a bad time to be a Catholic.” In the 2020s Bangladesh, it’s a bad time to be an Islamist, or even quasi-Islamist. (The quoted lines are from Vintage Books, London, 2002, p 32).

In 2017, Hafez (an Islamic scholar, not his real name) was, along with other religious students at Dhaka University dorms, beaten within an inch of their lives for being alleged Islamists. This routine torture of perceived “traitors” finally resulted two years later in the murder of Abrar Fahad, a straight-A student at the elite Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) by his classmates who beat him for hours for his Facebook post criticising the prime minister: automatically, this made him an enemy, an Islamist (the BBC report leaves something to be desired: the murderous students belonged to the student wing of the ruling Awami League, the Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL), not the youth wing as reported; this is significant.). The second event caused a firestorm, the first, that of Hafez, went ignored: it’s open season on Islamists.

A highly abridged interview of Hafez conducted by this author several weeks ago appears below (this sort of news, being par for the course, hardly travels; hence, the delay in interviewing Hafez. Indeed, had Abrar Fahad not been an engineering student of elite stock, his murder, like that of the tailor, Biswajit Das (pictured), though highly publicised on TV channels and newspapers in his blood-stained shirt, vainly warding blows from the ruling party student thugs,  might as well have been invisible. For the author’s observations on this selective attention, please click on What George Floyd’s Death Means – Or Should Mean – In Bangladesh ).

2017 August 13 11:30 pm 

Interrogations begin –  he’s forced to talk. It’s all pre-planned: the hall president and sidekicks are present

“Got him, Bhai [brother].”

Hafeez kneeled, salaamed.

The president is on the bed. The president’s room is on the 2nd floor; Hafez’s on the 5th floor

“Do you do Shibir [Islamist student wing of the main Islamist party]?”

Hafez is astounded. “No, Bhaiya [brother], I don’t.”

(Louder) “Do you do Shibir? Why do you do Shibir?”

“Bhaiya, I don’t.”

Slapping begins.

A friend who was an Islamic scholar, and similarly attired, is later brought in.

Heavier beating, kicking, ensue. A wooden stick is produced: they start hitting him on the back. Rods and water pipes are brought out from inside the president’s room. The hall secretary hits him on the thigh, right above the knee with pipes. The slaps are mostly on the eyes, ears and front face.

“Confess; we can burst your nose. Hey, who’s good at bursting noses?”

Bestiality of the above variety stems from nationalism, as documented by John Keane: “At the heart of nationalism – and among the most peculiar feature of its ‘grammar’ – is its simultaneous treatment of the Other as everything and nothing. The Other is seen as the knife at the throat of the nation. Nationalists are panicky and driven by friend-foe calculations; they suffer from a judgement disorder that convinces them that the Other nation lives at its own expense (Civil Society, (London: Polity Press, 1998), p. 96).” “…sinister internal enemies that are simultaneously weak and devious,” according to Gershberg and Illing.

A characteristic of collectivist organisations involves the use of children, such as the Chatra League of the ruling party. Interest in the child, and youth in general, arose in the early twentieth century, with such innocent bodies as the Boy Scouts.  But it was followed by the “much more sinister and deliberately exploitative youth organisations of the totalitarian states of the 1920s and 1930s”, according to J.M. Roberts (Twentieth Century: A History of the World, 1901 to the Present (London: Penguin, 1999, p 642). “Young Pioneers in the USSR, the Hitler Youth in Germany, the balilla, Picolli Italiani and Figli della Lupa in Italy.”  These countries vigorously excluded the Boy Scouts. The post-war youth market and culture never emerged in the east, where Mao’s Red Guards wreaked havoc in the 1960s. “Young Stalinists worshipped Stalin as an individual,” observes Richard Vinen. “Teenagers swelled the ranks of the party’s youth organisations….” They formed the most committed warriors against imperialism. “Astonishing as it seems in retrospect, the period when communist rule in Eastern Europe was at its most brutal was also the period during which many intelligent and well-meaning individuals thought it was a good thing” (A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Da Capo Press, 2001), p 339, 344). Astonishing, indeed, except to someone domiciled in Bangladesh today.  And Chhayanaut works its spell on children.

A Disappearing Act

When all eyes — those of the young and the old — are focussed on events several decades ago, thanks to Chhayanaut and the men of words, contemporary evils, as noted by Robert Paxton, such as the hounding of the Chief Justice, or the burning alive of innocent bystanders, enforced disappearances, state thuggery, extrajudicial killings, rapes by student politicians, appear remote and ephemeral. The stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred is assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of “propaganda” — by the government and its handmaidens, the intelligentsia, “the men of words”, “the women of song and dance”.

Dhaka University, the quondam Oxford of the East, where alleged Islamists, as we have seen, receive considerable corporal suffering,  earns the infamy of “concentration camp” , from the victims of its illustrious sons, mindful, no doubt, of the spirit of learning, albeit delivered, not in lectures, but in more tactile form. “It (Chhayanaut) believes that our celebration of fraternity and creativity under the broad rubric of an inclusive humanist culture will triumph, leaving behind religious bigotry, fundamentalism and xenophobia.” Read: getting rid of the Islamists, “simultaneously devious and weak”, by whatever means available to the state.

“Against this, there are other competing conceptions of art that are never fully suppressed, such as the archaic view that places art in the same general sphere of activity as ritual (a view with which I acknowledge considerable sympathy), and the conception of art as a vehicle of moral uplift or social progress, as is common in totalitarian societies where the creation of art becomes co-opted for the purpose of propaganda (for which, by contrast, I avow a proportional antipathy).” Most of us would go along with Justin E. H. Smith in his aptly-titled book Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp 22-23); we share his conceptions of art, and our sympathies lie with him. The Russian love story, “Boy meets tractor”, finds a creepy analogy: “Men and women meet bridge”.

The conception of Muslim civilisation as hopelessly philistine, if not proto-Khomeinist, persists in Bangladesh (as elsewhere). The following from Ronald Segal’s Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora would come as a shock to teenagers and adults alike: “Female slaves were required in considerable numbers, for a variety of purposes. Some were musicians, singers and dancers – neither the status nor the style of a great house could do without a sitara, or chamber-orchestra – reciters and even composers of poetry. There were celebrated schools in Baghdad, Cordoba, and Medina that supplied tuition and training in both musical and literary skills. Such slaves were highly prized and costly (London: Atlantic Books, 2002, p 38).”

Show Me the Money

The above description of our cultural hanky panky may not appear more than children on a playful rampage, or inmates running the asylum (not counting the dead and disappeared for now). But the twang of the sitar and the thump of the tabla conceal the tinkle of coins and the thud of dosh. Gunnar Myrdal observed of South Asia in The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Programme in Outline: “…changes of government, or even of form of government, occur high over the heads of the masses of  people and mainly imply merely a shift of the groups of persons in the upper strata who monopolise power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p 212).” The transition from East Pakistan to Bangladesh, from military rule to democracy, occasioned changes of personnel at the top.

Albert Reynolds’ figures tell a disquieting story: “For countries at the early stages of development, primary education has the lowest unit costs and highest rates of economic return….Most South Asian governments (backed by self-interested elites) invested disproportionately in higher education: India had one of the highest growth rates in Asia for university students and the lowest for primary enrollments. In the 1970s, Bangladesh and Pakistan were increasing spending on higher education at the expense of primary schools, whose share in Bangladesh fell from 60 percent in 1973 to 44 percent in 1981 (One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 2000), p 302, 307, emphases added).” We see these statistics clearly bearing out Myrdal’s observation regarding elite-churning.

For what prevails in the political economy of Bangladesh is an oligarchy in cahoots with the ruling party; the Center for Policy Dialogue, a think tank, went on record as saying: “The current practice of recruiting Board of Directors [to state-owned commercial banks, or SCBs] on political grounds has to be discontinued. Studies have shown that financial reporting fraud in banks is more likely if the Board of Directors is dominated by insiders”. The level of non-performing loans (NPLs) has increased steadily since 2008, when the current government returned to power: between 2008 and 2018, the level of dud loans soared 297%. Syed Yusuf Saadat, research associate of the think-tank, observed, “In 2017, a single business group gained control of more than seven private banks.” The IMF observed that “important and connected borrowers default because they can”.

The case study of Islami Bank provides a detailed picture, not only of the government’s anti-Islamism, but also the paw-in-the-public-till syndrome that promotes loyalty to the dynasty. “Established in 1983 as Bangladesh’s first bank run on Islamic principles, Islami thrived by handling a large share of remittances from emigrant workers and by lending to the booming garment industry. Its troubles stem from its links with Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, which allied with Pakistan during the war of succession of 1971.” One of the first acts by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, on coming to power in 2009 was to try “war criminals” in kangaroo courts. “Leading figures from the Jamaat were sentenced to imprisonment or hanging.” Then came the asset-seizure. In 2017, the prime minister sent government intelligence operatives to oust senior executives and put in place her cronies: a boardroom coup. The cronies swiftly turned a healthy bank sick.

While Chhayanaut greets the new Bengali year under a banyan, and grandmothers in the vernacular, its members and devotees don colour-coded sarees (white with a red border for Baisakh, yellow for Falgun, blue for Ashar, red and gold for Victory Day), hog watered rice rural-style, sing Tagore in soirees…the wonga wends its way….

As Don Fabrizio’s nephew observes in Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand (trans. Archibald Colquhoun, (New York:Random House, 1960), p 40)?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Iftekhar Sayeed.

Zionism has no place in the University – period. Other than as a historical subject and as a pathology for dissection.

Political Zionism drove the forging of the state of Israel via terrorism and its endemic expansionist thrust by ongoing ethnic cleansing. The history and innate character of Israel being heinous, Zionism requires commitment to misrepresentation, lies, silences and silencing. Zionism defends the indefensible.

Repressing Palestinian support on campus

Here we have a US Congressional extremist (Elise Stefanik, R-NY) forcing out the President of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, on claims of things that didn’t happen. With demands that the Presidents of Harvard and MIT follow Magill out the door. Magill should have taken it with to the ignorant and belligerent Stefanik, noting that it was appropriate that Stefanik should go back to school, preferably not UPenn!

But Magill had a quandary. If Magill had engaged Stefanik on the concept of the ‘intifada’, the context for Palestinian intifada would be in the offing. Dangerous territory. Magill was already in the sights of a wealthy Jewish UPenn donor for tolerating a Palestinian literary conference on campus in September. Outrageous! Marc Rowan, private equity CEO, claimed that ‘the administration had lost its moral compass and overlooked the concerns of the university’s Jewish community’. Since October 7, other wealthy Jewish donors have followed suit by pulling donations.

The media joined the assault. Philadelphia gadfly Jennifer Stefano opined in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 October, that ‘four Penn departments sponsored a shocking number of antisemitic speakers at the Palestinian Write[r]s festival on campus in late September’. Stefano continues, full bore hyperbole:

“The only surprising thing about these donors’ actions is that they seem genuinely shocked that antisemitism and anti-Western values have been normalized at America’s most elite institutions. … In this moment, when the basic tenets of Western civilization are at stake both domestically and abroad, we must put aside partisan bickering here in America to peacefully unite in confronting this moral rot within higher education.”

Magill had no hope. Goodbye Elizabeth Magill and goodbye to the University of Pennsylvania.

Yours truly as virulent antisemite

Over the years, I have had the odd letter in the Australian press criticizing Israel and Zionist propagandists. (Those were the good old days; no letter I now write stands a chance.) I also wrote a blog during 2004-06, created to rail against the reactionary Government under Prime Minister John Howard then facing an election. This blog coincided with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the Gaza onslaught in 2006, so I leveraged the blog for commentary on the latter. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the conventional condensed disgust/outrage, save that my University base seems to have aroused the concern of the gatekeepers.

A then apparatchik (‘Director of Policy Analysis’) of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Ted Lapkin, called me to push for a debate on my campus at Sydney University. No way was I going to have Lapkin pollute the atmosphere of the University. Lapkin took his revenge by smearing me as perennial antisemite. First with an article in the Australian Quadrant magazine (variously Conservative, reactionary and libertarian) titled ‘Anti-Zionism in Australian Academia’, July/August 2006. Quadrant probably would have had its smattering of genuine antisemites in its early days, but Zionists (and reactionaries) find bedfellows opportunistically. Lapkin writes:

“The ubiquity of left-wing politics in Australian academia means that the task of writing about campus Israel-phobia requires a solid sense of discrimination. The pool of stories is so large, and the horror stories so abundant, that considerable selectivity is required lest the end product be a tome the size of War and Peace.

I have thus employed the principles of journalistic triage, focusing solely on a handful of Australia’s most egregious university anti-Zionists. And while there might be many likely candidates who might be eligible for nomination, the Oscar for anti-Israel virulence undoubtedly goes to the University of Sydney’s Evan Jones.

… there’s nothing that moves him quite like the question of Israel. His anti-Israel animus runs so deep that he exemplifies the argument that hostility to the Jewish state is synonymous with hostility to Jews, per se. Yet the very fervency of Jones’ hostility towards Israel renders him tone deaf to the anti-Semitic overtones of his rhetoric.”

Lapkin’s harangue was reproduced in its essentials in a 2007 collection, Academics against Israel and the Jews, edited by the seemingly hysterical antisemitism hunter Manfred Gerstenfeld, who discovered antisemitism under every rock. Gerstenfeld, before his death in 2021, was feted with numerous awards for his obsession by self-referencing fellow travelers.

One should thank Lapkin for the free publicity accorded my scribblings, but his literary panache does not compensate for his sloppiness with the facts and with his reasoning. Left-wing politics in Australian academia was not then (nor now) ubiquitous; nor is criticism of Israel a left-wing affair. Lapkin’s claim as to my evident antisemitism is simply a calumny. The ‘egregiousness’ is all to his account.

Fear of academia is also central to an academic article, part-titled ‘The Israelization of Jew-hatred (sic) …’, published in 2023 in Israel Studies, a ‘peer-reviewed’ academic journal (emanating from Indiana University, a seeming enclave for Zionist sentiment). One author, a linguist, is an expert in finding antisemitism in innocuous language.

The abstract reads, in part:

“A new wave of antisemitism has lately emerged, mostly directed against the Jewish state of Israel. It justifies itself with a new formulation that obfuscates Jew-hatred and its main bearers are Western left-oriented academics. A worrying fact is the large number of Jewish intellectuals, among them Israelis, who support such positions.”

Here’s this spurious ‘left-orientation’ again (anyone labeled ‘leftist’ is automatically suspect), diverting from the subject. The main problem is that academia offers too much independence of thought, with myriad residents therein abusing the privilege by lacking the requisite allegiance to accepted ‘truths’ and falling into grievous error regarding the Zionist project.

Why is Israel sacrosanct?

Let’s spell out the implications of ‘the Israelization of Jew-hatred’. Any criticism of Israel is merely another manifestation of antisemitism. This is precisely the IHRA agenda, of which more below.

Can an individual of Jewish ethnicity be capable of unconscionable or criminal actions? Of course. Can a group of individuals, all of Jewish ethnicity, be capable of unconscionable or criminal actions. Of course. So what’s the problem?

There have existed Jewish organized crime gangs, their stories documented at least in the US – see Wikipedia’s entries on Jewish-American Organized Crime and List of Jewish-American Mobsters. Is being jaundiced about the character of Jewish mobsters an antisemitic sentiment? Is there hate speech involved? Surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League is not going for Wikipedia’s throat.

Jewish-American mobsters have been cast adrift, freely available for potential denigration or contempt. Isn’t this then an important precedent? Why not another collective of individuals of Jewish ethnicity – Israeli leaders, from 1948 on? Criminals all, if to varying degrees – terrorists, mass murderers, ethnic cleansers, petty thieves, abusers of public office.

Ah, but there is a sense in which successive Israeli leaders are acting beyond their individual initiative. They are creatures of the Israeli state. A nation-state exercises raison d’état – beyond legality or morality. Surely, Israel can be readily criticized. There is here a structured criminality in which successive leaders, whatever the specific personal initiatives, are vehicles. But no, Israel cannot be criticized. To criticise Israel, as a Jewish state, means that criticism is directed at Jews for being Jews. Criminality, collective criminality, has vanished off the stage.

Zionism, the ideology that conceived of Israel, that drove its creation and sustains its existence, demands that Israel cannot be condemned or criticized. More, it places itself beyond criticism. By anybody and everybody, including ‘Jewish intellectuals, among them Israelis’.

Universities, by their nature, are a threat to this mendacity. Tangibly, so also is the South African government’s December 2023 submission to the International Court of Justice alleging that Israel has and is violating the 1948 Geneva Convention on Genocide. The stakes are enormous.

The IHRA prohibition of criticism of Israel

The most egregious issue of relevance here is the phenomenon of the ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which institutionalizes the feint as above. IHRA has nothing to do with real antisemitism. Supposedly a ‘working’ definition, first appearing in 2005, it is omnipresent, being pushed on states and official institutions everywhere, including universities.

Thus did Melbourne University adopt the IHRA definition in January 2023.

This, as elsewhere, is an outrageous capitulation by an academic institution. One subject becomes out of bounds a priori for interrogation. And not just any subject but a state constructed out of terrorism, entrenched as an ethnocracy, an apartheid state, a pariah state, endlessly displacing a subject population contrary to international law, and currently engaged in genocide against incarcerated millions of that subject population.

Given that the actions of this essentially criminal enterprise have significant regional and global implications, how far does the attempted prohibition reach? Can one adequately teach current U.S. (or German) politics, for example, where crucial explanatory forces are replaced by gaps, white spaces or blackouts?

A Melbourne University spokesperson claimed that the University ‘would use it [the IHRA definition] as an “important educative tool”’. No doubt said with a straight face. On the contrary. The spokesperson also claimed that “We, like all universities, must continue to welcome and enable vigorous political debate and difference of view based on rigorous academic investigation”.

The Guardian link above also notes:

“The Australasian Union of Jewish Students said the IHRA was “created to remember what can happen if hate and discrimination are not called out. … In order to ensure that antisemitism and all forms of discrimination have no place on our campuses, we must be able to define it by amplifying the voices of those who experience it”.”

This is just so much palaver. Israel, the point of the censorship, is nowhere to be seen in this diktat. Do these particular students know what being a student entails? Well-educated people, not least those with a conscience, are supposed to take this shit seriously?

Melbourne University’s home page boasts “Research facilities Where our researchers are working on humanity’s most critical problems and complex questions facing the world.” One of humanity’s most critical problems is Israel and its destructive global impact. That subject has been pre-emptively ruled out of bounds.

When the rot is institutionalised by an institution’s executives, can it be bounded without spreading? Can prospective students take Melbourne University’s boasts on anything at face value?

Harvard President Claudine Gay has now fallen on her sword provided and sharpened by the Zionist lobby, the coup shoddily camouflaged by the plagiarism canard. Ardent Israel defender and longtime Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz was exposed as a plagiarist, powerful evidence in support, compiled by Norman Finkelstein and reported on by Alexander Cockburn. Dershowitz kept his Harvard job but Finkelstein, not least thanks to Dershowitz’s intervention, lost his. Go figure. Can Harvard’s stellar prestige be taken seriously, as it orders priorities according to the dictates of large-scale donors?

Sydney University

Sydney University plays its own small part in contributing to the Zionist cause. The University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS) has been closed down under the formal rubric of administrative clean lines. But CPACS, non-partisan but naturally having Israel in its sights, has been a victim of the Zionist lobby. Who needs a centre devoted to peace and conflict studies anyhow?

Sydney University also sacked my Political Economy colleague, Tim Anderson, after a concerted campaign by the Israel lobby in conjunction with an activist media. In November 2020, the Federal Court of Australia endorsed the sacking, essentially on the grounds of ‘managerial prerogatives’. In August 2021, an Appeal Court overturned the lower court judgment, sending it back to the lower court for a re-trial. In October 2022, the same lower court judge did a 180-degree turn and decided for Anderson on grounds of academic freedom of speech. Unrepentant, the University is currently appealing the judgment in Anderson’s favour.

On 26 October 2023, Sydney University’s Head, Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott, advised the University Community that:

“While many members of our community have strongly-held views on the Israel-Hamas conflict, and we uphold the right to free speech and academic freedom, in line with provisions of our Enterprise Agreement … during the current conflict and at all other times, we support the rights of students and staff to engage in political discourse, including by making pro-Israel and pro-Palestine statements or commentary, but we will not tolerate any pro-terrorist statements or commentary, including support for Hamas’s recent terrorist attacks.”

The political theorist and activist, John Keane, now Sydney University Politics Professor, penned an open letter in response on 6 November. Keane claimed that Scott’s approach to ‘tolerance’:

“… is founded on silence about such ugly matters as non-stop aerial bombardment, the illegal use of white phosphorus bombs on civilians, settler violence, bulldozers wrecking the homes of fearful innocents, death by suffocation under rubble, devilish propaganda dropped from the skies, the wilful destruction of mosques, churches, schools and universities, and crazed plans for the forcible removal of millions of people from their ancient homelands. If toleration depends upon silence about these grim matters then it’s an objectionable principle that has no place in the life of our University. …

in these circumstances of war, our university community must be free to say the unsayable, to speak more honestly about how it came to pass that a state born of the ashes of genocide is now hellbent on the ‘physical destruction in whole or in part’ (Genocide Convention Article II c) of a people known as Palestinians.”

An ensuing exchange was soon shut down by those seeking to reinforce their blissful isolation from and ignorance of real-world horrors in the fabled ivory tower. In the meantime, however, a joint email from 17 academics (Jewish) condemned Keane for his seeming blind prejudices.

“You accuse Israel of promoting indiscriminate warfare and genocide and the murder of innocents without compunction [an accurate portrayal], and your letter culminates in a repulsive reversal of victims and perpetrators in which you liken the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis [an entirely appropriate parallel]. … We believe that in the context of war, any loss of civilian life is tragic: Palestinian, Israeli, and any other nationality. To draw an equivalence, however, between the acts of terror witnessed and documented via bodycams from Hamas themselves, and the awful civilian deaths of Gazans (many of whom are deliberately placed in the line of fire as human shields) by Israeli army fire, is unconscionable.”

Another omnipresent canard – Gazans ‘deliberately placed in the line of fire as human shields’. Here are Hamas operatives presumably hiding behind 2.3 million Gazans in their own homes, in mosques, churches, schools, hospitals, universities, businesses, cemeteries, camps for people displaced for the nth time, etc. They are also presumably hiding behind all those journalists who keep getting murdered in record numbers. The entire Hamas operation was no doubt hiding behind Refaat Alareer who was thus inadvertently killed along with members of his extended family. Did these academics get their ‘facts’ from the back of a hasbara cornflakes box over breakfast?

Members of Sydney University’s Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies are amongst the 17 signatories, as is the previous Head of that Department, now emeritus. On the Department’s website, one notes:

“Our advanced exchange program provides life-changing experiences in Israel with our partner university, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, …”

Life-changing experiences in Israel indeed. No doubt the itinerary includes walled-in Bethlehem, Hebron and Jenin under siege, burnt-out Hawara, etc. And that’s just the West Bank. The 17 signatories ignored a previous post from Sydney University’s David Brophy:

“More serious, though, is the need to look at the university’s ties to Israeli institutions, which are deeply implicated in the violence being inflicted on Gaza. It is astonishing to me, for example, that we are seeking to run an OLE [Open Learning Environment] unit in partnership with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which itself partners with the Israeli military in myriad ways. Far from tolerating competing views on the current conflict in Gaza, the leaders of Hebrew University publicly berate dissenting faculty and call on them to leave the university.

To maintain such academic exchanges at a time like this represents a vote of confidence in Israel, a willingness to look past its violence and aid in its false self-promotion as a liberal society. To choose this path, I am sad to say, renders our own institution complicit in the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians.”

The aforementioned CPACS had been pressing Sydney University management for some time to sever the University’s links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, both institutions complicit in the Occupation, to no avail. Rather, shoot the messenger.

In September 2009, CPACS hosted a meeting for interested University staff and students as part of an ongoing process in responding to the Israeli massacre of Gazans at the turn of 2008-09 (‘Operation Cast Lead’). The then head of the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies (amongst the 17 above) turned up with a handful of her students. The latter proceeded to talk hasbara rubbish. The meeting going nowhere, I left prematurely in disgust.

Here, it appears, are academics formally employed in scholarship and teaching of Jewish history shitting in their own nest. It appears that tribalism (with the most errant of the tribe dictating the dominant culture and modus operandi) rules over intelligence, leave alone morality and humanity.

A Zionist university?

We are perennially enlightened that some Jewish students at tertiary institutions don’t feel ‘safe’ in an environment in which the state of Israel is exposed to critical scrutiny. Antisemitism is bubbling, potentially rampant, and no-one in authority is stamping on it!

Possibly such students attended Jewish ‘faith’ schools, some with an explicit Zionist orientation and a commitment to the installation of ‘a love of Israel’ in their ‘core values’ (we have them in Australia). At university, the cocoon is burst, with people brazenly expressing unsavoury opinions about this Promised Land.

My view is that Zionists should start their own universities, where they will naturally find themselves in a safe and secure environment with their values.

Outrageous? Not at all.

Hillel Foundation and Reform Judaism (using Hillel figures), for example, make much of estimating and highlighting the proportion of a university student population that is Jewish. Presumably, the implication is that one follows the crowd for a more sympatico environment. There is ‘security’ in numbers. (Does the learning environment matter?) It is only a small step to Zionists creating their own universities to ensure maximum belief reinforcement.

Sometime, in the early 1970s I think, Esquire magazine sent a questionnaire to various Conservative and/or right wing and/or reactionary and/or Bible Belt organizations, seeking to elicit the organizations’ preferences for tertiary enrolment so that budding young tertiary matriculants should be shielded from the depravity of the real world. The organizations took the questionnaire seriously and responded accordingly. Alas, I have not retained a copy of the affair. I do remember, however, that Oral Roberts University and Bob Jones University figured heavily in the responses.

There is a university out there catering to your (and your parents’) peculiar needs. Zionists take heart – there are precedents to follow!

The Zionist inquisition

However, Zionists don’t want their own universities. Rather, they want the power and privilege to control relevant discourses and scholarship across the entire tertiary sector.

Committed troublemakers have to be dispensed with. Hence the sacking of Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University in 2007 (with subsequent denial of employment elsewhere), the sacking of Joel Kovel at Bard College in 2009, the sacking of Tim Anderson at Sydney University in 2019, the sacking of David Miller at Bristol University in 2021.

On the Israeli home front, Ilan Pappé was forced out of his native Israel in 2007. Just prior to that in late 2006, Tanya Reinhart quit her prestigious appointment at Tel Aviv University and left her native Israel in disgust. Neve Gordon was forced out of his native Israel in 2012. Israel Shahak was the object of perennial abuse and threats for his outspokenness on human rights.

No doubt there is widespread self-censorship amongst academics with these instances in mind.

Simply, the Zionists are engaging in an inquisition globally against the University sector as a key vehicle for scholarship and education. The preposterous and scandalous IHRA definition of antisemitism, purely an obfuscatory defense of indefensible Israel, is an important recent weapon in the attack.

The IHRA trojan horse needs to be repelled and comprehensively neutered. It is appropriate that a scholarly (and moral) blowtorch be applied to the Zionist denial and de facto defense of the ethnic cleansing, now genocide, that is intrinsic to the apartheid state of Israel.

The post Zionism and the Academy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evan Jones.

Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

The October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the retaliatory genocide being waged by Israel in a total siege of Gaza have roiled academic communities in the United States and abroad. Charges of antisemitism and Islamophobia have divided colleagues, terrified students, destroyed friendships, and threatened the basic integrity of academic freedom that institutions of higher education hold dear. A brief look at two examples through the historical lens of international law illustrates the gravity confronting scholars who dare to challenge the Israeli narrative.

Two cases, one in the United States and the other in Israel, illustrate this point. In the United States, Dr. Lara Sheehi, an Arab woman professor of clinical psychology who teaches at George Washington University, was targeted by a pro-Israel lobby group, StandWithUs, that prompted some Jewish students to complain that she and a guest speaker from Palestine had made them feel “vulnerable and unsafe.” On behalf those students, StandWithUs filed a complaint against GW University with the U.S. Department of Education and released the complaint on rightwing social media even before filing it. Clearly, the intention was to manufacture controversy.

Dr. Sheehi’s guest was Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an internationally acclaimed scholar and advocate for children’s rights. She spoke on the topic, “Global Mental Health ‘Expertise’, ‘Therapeutic’ Military Occupation and Its Deadly Exchange.” According to the speaker, most of the students were engaged and posed good questions. However, a small number charged that the talk had been a “diatribe against Israel,” according to the StandWithUs complaint filed with the Department of Education.

The George Washington University administration took an unusual step and hired a law firm to pursue an external investigation. Was the pressure from a pro-Israel lobby group accompanied by a rightwing media smear campaign too much for the university to bear? Eventually, both investigations concluded that neither the university nor Dr. Sheehi were guilty of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has become the target of another smear campaign. Following Hamas’s brutal attack and Israel’s retaliatory mass bombing of Gaza, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed a letter protesting the genocide of men, women, and children in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces. In this case, it was the university that attempted to silence the professor, urging her to consider abandoning her post despite the fact that she had in no way justified Hamas’s horrific attack. Nor have the vast majority of civilians in Gaza, where IDF retaliations have now claimed the lives of some 11,000 people, 40 percent of whom are children. These people have been collectively punished for Hamas’s atrocities.

The argument about genocide made in the letter Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed is firmly rooted in the international legal framework that emerged after World War II. In 1948, the year that Israel became a nation, the international community joined survivors of the Holocaust by promising that never again may such horror be allowed to happen, and never again may the international community turn a blind eye while such atrocities are occurring.

That year, in a belated response to the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and five million others in the 1930s and ‘40s, the UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, which required member nations “to prevent and to punish” genocide wherever and whenever it is found. The Convention defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Such acts included “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The Genocide Convention also required member nations “to prevent and to punish” genocide wherever and whenever it is found.

In later years, further measures were added. In 1949, collective punishment was termed a war crime under Geneva Convention (IV), Article 33, “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” In 2005, the UN General Assembly, prompted by the international community’s failure to respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, passed a resolution commonly known as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), which allows the international community to intervene if governments do not protect their citizens from gross human rights violations. Deference to “state sovereignty” can no longer be used as an expedient to allow ethnic cleansing, genocide, or other crimes against humanity to proceed unhindered.

Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, therefore, is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. More than 800 international lawyers and scholars have termed the actions conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza a possible genocide. Just as nothing can justify Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, nothing can justify the Netanyahu government’s brutal response.

Like the attack on Dr. Sheehi, the request that Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian to “consider stepping down” from her position because she signed a public letter of protest that adheres to the norms of international humanitarian law violates the principles of democratic academic freedom. George Washington University ultimately cleared Dr. Sheehi of wrongdoing—although it could not give back the peace of mind that was stolen from her or extinguish the threats of violence that continue to plague her. Unless the Hebrew University of Jerusalem does likewise, its status as a site of genuine independent scholarship and intellectual achievement will be undermined. Other institutions should pay heed. Will they walk the walk of academic freedom or simply talk the talk?

The post Israel, Gaza, and International Law: A Humanitarian Crisis Roils the Academy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Christine Schmidt - Elizabeth Schmidt.

Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

The October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the retaliatory genocide being waged by Israel in a total siege of Gaza have roiled academic communities in the United States and abroad. Charges of antisemitism and Islamophobia have divided colleagues, terrified students, destroyed friendships, and threatened the basic integrity of academic freedom that institutions of higher education hold dear. A brief look at two examples through the historical lens of international law illustrates the gravity confronting scholars who dare to challenge the Israeli narrative.

Two cases, one in the United States and the other in Israel, illustrate this point. In the United States, Dr. Lara Sheehi, an Arab woman professor of clinical psychology who teaches at George Washington University, was targeted by a pro-Israel lobby group, StandWithUs, that prompted some Jewish students to complain that she and a guest speaker from Palestine had made them feel “vulnerable and unsafe.” On behalf those students, StandWithUs filed a complaint against GW University with the U.S. Department of Education and released the complaint on rightwing social media even before filing it. Clearly, the intention was to manufacture controversy.

Dr. Sheehi’s guest was Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an internationally acclaimed scholar and advocate for children’s rights. She spoke on the topic, “Global Mental Health ‘Expertise’, ‘Therapeutic’ Military Occupation and Its Deadly Exchange.” According to the speaker, most of the students were engaged and posed good questions. However, a small number charged that the talk had been a “diatribe against Israel,” according to the StandWithUs complaint filed with the Department of Education.

The George Washington University administration took an unusual step and hired a law firm to pursue an external investigation. Was the pressure from a pro-Israel lobby group accompanied by a rightwing media smear campaign too much for the university to bear? Eventually, both investigations concluded that neither the university nor Dr. Sheehi were guilty of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has become the target of another smear campaign. Following Hamas’s brutal attack and Israel’s retaliatory mass bombing of Gaza, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed a letter protesting the genocide of men, women, and children in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces. In this case, it was the university that attempted to silence the professor, urging her to consider abandoning her post despite the fact that she had in no way justified Hamas’s horrific attack. Nor have the vast majority of civilians in Gaza, where IDF retaliations have now claimed the lives of some 11,000 people, 40 percent of whom are children. These people have been collectively punished for Hamas’s atrocities.

The argument about genocide made in the letter Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian signed is firmly rooted in the international legal framework that emerged after World War II. In 1948, the year that Israel became a nation, the international community joined survivors of the Holocaust by promising that never again may such horror be allowed to happen, and never again may the international community turn a blind eye while such atrocities are occurring.

That year, in a belated response to the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and five million others in the 1930s and ‘40s, the UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, which required member nations “to prevent and to punish” genocide wherever and whenever it is found. The Convention defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Such acts included “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The Genocide Convention also required member nations “to prevent and to punish” genocide wherever and whenever it is found.

In later years, further measures were added. In 1949, collective punishment was termed a war crime under Geneva Convention (IV), Article 33, “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” In 2005, the UN General Assembly, prompted by the international community’s failure to respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, passed a resolution commonly known as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), which allows the international community to intervene if governments do not protect their citizens from gross human rights violations. Deference to “state sovereignty” can no longer be used as an expedient to allow ethnic cleansing, genocide, or other crimes against humanity to proceed unhindered.

Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, therefore, is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. More than 800 international lawyers and scholars have termed the actions conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza a possible genocide. Just as nothing can justify Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, nothing can justify the Netanyahu government’s brutal response.

Like the attack on Dr. Sheehi, the request that Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian to “consider stepping down” from her position because she signed a public letter of protest that adheres to the norms of international humanitarian law violates the principles of democratic academic freedom. George Washington University ultimately cleared Dr. Sheehi of wrongdoing—although it could not give back the peace of mind that was stolen from her or extinguish the threats of violence that continue to plague her. Unless the Hebrew University of Jerusalem does likewise, its status as a site of genuine independent scholarship and intellectual achievement will be undermined. Other institutions should pay heed. Will they walk the walk of academic freedom or simply talk the talk?

The post Israel, Gaza, and International Law: A Humanitarian Crisis Roils the Academy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Christine Schmidt - Elizabeth Schmidt.

The nature of the rot starts at the top – a conventional wisdom. And that rot features workloads of an unrealistic nature (too many classes; unrecognised grading efforts; questionable budgets), all padding for the bloated managerial class that guiltlessly loots. It helps, as well, that most Australian universities have Human Resources departments larger than most academic departments. They are the stormtroopers for the managerial gauleiters, ensuring that dissenters are kept quiet, and anyone wishing to challenge the status quo kept in straitjacket and check.

Much has already been made of the enormous casualisation of the academic workforce in Australia. (One figure suggests that 70% of university workers in the sector are on casual or fixed term contracts.) They are the precariat, the equivalent of altar children whose bottoms, bodies and minds are passed around from course to course to be used by the relevant coordinator, program manager and associate dean for a finite duration.

The nature of such sessionalisation has seen an interesting twist of late. The hand-to-mouth precariat are not wanted – at least in certain institutions. Universities suddenly claim to have no money in the kitty to pay modest sums to sessional workers they have sadistically abused for years. This is despite huge financial windfalls that arose even as the global pandemic was raging. In the post-COVID landscape, the assumption is that ongoing academics (tenure is not a concept of any worth down under) will take charge, seize the reins, and teach themselves into the ground.

But as departments, schools and university sections are racketeering enterprises, those wishing to cosy up to obese, overly remunerated managers may be rewarded for their flabby morals. (Arse-crawling really ought to be a degree, but why theorise it, when the praxis is sorted out?) The crawlers can avoid teaching. They can assume administrative posts and discuss administration with others in similar administrative posts. They can dream, fiddle and fondle spreadsheets, conjuring up miracles from the ether. Their minds devoid of cerebration, they are the perfect adjutants and servants for the managerial institution.

As for research, this only matters if it can be pegged to the industrial grant making complex, which is only useful in producing more grants. The cosmos of receiving such awards is only relevant, not from the actual material it produces in terms of what knowledge, but for the process of gaining the award. Money can then go back into undeserving pockets, with recipient academics, to use a popular and atrocious term “buying themselves out” of teaching duties. As one Dean of no stature or relevance insisted with dull conviction, “It does not matter how many papers you write, or how many books you author – your work allocation is the same as the next one.”

A half-wit sloth with one publication authored with several other dunces deserves the same academic praise as the single author of numerous pieces, with a profile that is somewhat larger than the standard 200 metre radius worshipped in insular towers. The die, it would seem, is cast, before you realise an awful reality: the Dean wants you to be on her level, that of the spreadsheeting numbed wonder who draws in a fortnightly salary with minimal cognition – except to justify the dictates of the satanic college she serves.

Amidst this messy state of affairs, Australian universities continue engaging in that practice most heinous: the underpayment of staff, notably those on temporary contracts. The payment rates for casual academics – and, in some cases, ongoing staff – is nothing short of scandalous. In March 2022, the Senate Standing Committee on Economics noted that 21 out of Australia’s 40 universities had been guilty of underpaying staff.

So why express horror or surprise at the latest revelation that gift cards are being used to pay academic staff? An investigation by the Australian publication Crikey, using Freedom of Information, found this to be particularly evident at the University of Technology Sydney.

According to the report, “one faculty debated the use of gift cards as payment for academics as recently as last year.” A Microsoft Teams message from a human resources official also stated in October last year, with some agitation, that the faculty of health wanted “to have another run at the gift card idea.”

The UTS public relations team was immediately stung into action. “Gift cards are used at UTS, as they are at any other organisations, as a token of appreciation for non-employees who volunteer their time at the university, for example, as research participants, or as members of events panels or as one-off guest speakers,” reasoned one spokesperson.

The Senate Standing Committee similarly found that various “casual academic staff have been paid in gift certificates, instead of the wages, loadings, leave and superannuation to which they are entitled.” Dr Hayley Singer, a member of the University of Melbourne Casuals’ Network, told the committee that she had “contested this at the time because I know I can’t pay rent, pay for transport or pay for medical bills with gift cards. This is how casual and insecurely employed academics are treated when we bring our professionalism and our expertise onto campus and into the classroom”.

If only Singer realised that the whole function of the modern managerial university is to eschew and excoriate professionalism of any sort, notably in the areas that give education its greatest worth. To be professional is to be subversive, thereby making that individual dispensable. Best join the spread sheeters.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Charter schools typically close for poor academic performance, corruption, or mismanagement, and it is common for all three to occur simultaneously.

The average person often wonders how such a thing is possible and allowed to happen in the first place. How can there be so many outsourced schools that open and close regularly? Why is such chaos and anarchy permitted? Who thinks this is positive and healthy?

The latest charter school to close abruptly and leave everyone stunned is Placer Academy Charter School in Rocklin, California. No one saw the closure coming. The disturbing announcement from the school came out of nowhere. “The abrupt closure plans leave the families of more than 200 students wondering where to turn on such short notice,” reports KCRA Channel 3. Echoing the sentiments of other parents who were stunned by the surprise announcement, one parent, Wendy Jenkins, said, “I could not believe it was real and I started to cry. We just kept reading it [the sudden closure notice] and reading it over – hoping we weren’t reading what we were seeing … the school was closing, and we were only going to have four days to find another fit.”

In the coming weeks and months, more charter schools will fail and close across the country, leaving even more parents, students, and teachers feeling violated. This pattern has not changed in over 30 years.

Nationally, a lengthy 2020 report from the Network for Public Education (NPE), “Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999 – 2017,” showed that a staggering number of charter schools closed just a few years after they opened, displacing more than a million students. The real numbers are higher. Indeed, 5,000 charter schools have closed since their inception 31 years ago. That is an astounding number given that there are only 7,500 charter schools in existence today. And according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 235 charter schools closed just in the 2019-20 academic year. On average that is more than four charter school closures per week. A textbook example of “free market carnage.”

Most of the students cast off by these segregated schools will return to their public schools, which accepts all students at all times and usually has more nurses, more experienced teachers, better employee retirement plans, stronger programs, and more resources than deregulated charter schools. Even in their chronically-underfunded condition, heavily-vilified public schools generally offer more than charter schools.

So far, the neoliberal narrative that “public-schools-are-failing-and-evil-and-you-need-to-get-your-kid-into-a-privately-run-charter-school-immediately” has resulted mainly in greater profits for charter school owners, while lowering the level of education and culture in society. By funneling public wealth into the hands of narrow private interests, charter schools have also harmed the economy and undermined a modern nation-building project.

People reject the idea that the only choices available to them are public schools methodically set up to fail by neoliberals, or privately-run deregulated charter schools created by the same neoliberals in order to get richer under the banner of high ideals. The public rejects this false dichotomy and condemns neoliberals for their destructive actions.

All should unite to oppose the commodification of education and to defend the right to education so that every child has free and easy access to world-class, publicly-governed public schools.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

The announcement came in a media release from the Central Inspection Commission issued on Monday.

Quang, along with other officials, is accused of having violated the principles of Party organization, activities and working regulations; lack of responsibility, loose leadership and direction; lack of inspection and supervision, causing violation in cadre and management work; and abuse of finance, property and public investment.

They are also accused of wrongdoings in scientific research management and training masters and PhD students as well as violations in resolving complaints; and failing to strictly implement the instructions and conclusions of superior Party organizations.

Other leaders of the Academy of Social Sciences to be recommended for discipline include:

Vice President Dang Xuan Thanh, Deputy Secretary cum the Head of the Organizational Committee of the Party Committee; Vice president: Nguyen Duc Minh, member of the Standing Committee Head of the Party Committee's Mass Mobilization Department; Director of the Institute of Ethnology Nguyen Van Minh; and Director of the Institute of Philosophy Nguyen Tai Dong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

The post Cutting Ties: The West, Ukraine, and the Russian Academy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Throughout history, academic cooperation between universities and academic institutions, despite the political differences of states, has taken place.  Even at the height of the Cold War, exchanges across several intellectual fields were regular occurrences.  The cynic could see these as culture wars in the service of propaganda, but work was still done, projects started and completed.

The times have tilted, and now universities, notably in Western states, find themselves rushing with virtuous glee to divesting and banning contacts and links with the Russian academy.  Russian President Vladimir Putin is deemed a monster of unsurpassed dimension; the Russian attack on Ukraine emptied of historical rationale or basis.  There is simply no room for academic debate, in of itself a risible irony.

In Freedom’s Land, some US institutions have snipped and severed cooperation.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ended its long-standing association with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Skoltech.  The reasoning strikes an odd note: we will exclude you and ostracise you out of respect for your achievements.  “We take it with deep regret,” MIT explained in a statement, “because of our great respect for the Russian people and our profound appreciation for the contributions of the many extraordinary Russian colleagues we have worked with.”

The university also makes it clear that the “step is a rejection of the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine.”  It’s all well and good to reject those actions, but how logical is it to then make those profoundly respected Russian colleagues suffer exclusion?

Behind every virtuous condemnation is the encumbrance of self-interest.  MIT may have severed ties with Skoltech, but that did not mean that MIT principal investigators, or students, would be affected.  “The Institute is in close communication with the PIs to offer guidance and to make sure that the students involved can complete their research and academic work without interruption.”

Russian students have also been singled out for special mistreatment, notably by Californian Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell.  “I think closing [the Russian] embassy in the United States, kicking every Russian student out of the United States, those should all be on the table, and Putin needs to know that every day that he is in Ukraine, there are more severe options that could come.”

To his credit, President Samuel Stanley, Michigan State University’s president, has sought to distinguish between individual and political decisions made by governments.  The distinction is trite, but the Ukraine War has made it exceptional.  “In times of crises and conflict,” he writes in a public letter, “it is important that we decouple individuals from adverse actions of their home countries and governments.”  Emphasis should instead be placed on unity in “supporting one another with dignity, empathy and mutual respect.”

In Australia, a country with few ties to Russian or Ukrainian institutions, universities have been issuing statements of condemnation against, not merely the Russian state but Russian institutions and figures.  The last thing on the minds of these academic bureaucrats is adopting something along Stanley’s lines.

The Australian National University has gone one step further, having officially announced the suspension of all ties and activities with Russian institutions on March 3.  “We identify with those brave Russian academics and students who oppose President Putin’s unprovoked aggression.”  Curiously enough, the decision was made as the Russian attack “threatens the peace, freedom and democracy on which freedom of inquiry and academic collaboration is based.”

Proceeding to show no inclination to follow those cherished principles of free inquiry, the authors of the statement explicitly note that only those Russian academics and students who opposed Putin’s “unprovoked aggression” would be taken seriously.  For Ukraine, the support was unqualified, whatever its actions.  “We stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people in their defence of sovereignty and freedom and offer our support for the universities of Ukraine.”

The ANU statement has little time for ethnic Russians, preferring to acknowledge “that this is a very difficult time for our Ukrainian staff and students and for those who have family members, friends and colleagues in Ukraine.”

The statement from La Trobe University is not much more nuanced either, though it openly promotes the work of one academic, Robert Horvath, given the task of demystifying Russian aggression and chewing over Putin’s numbered days.  (Horvath’s referenced opinion, it should be said, distinguishes between Putin the ruler and Russia itself, something his university is less inclined to do.)

Having been approached by “a number of staff” as to whether La Trobe had “any active connections with Russian institutions”, management expressed a deep sigh of relief.  “We can confirm that La Trobe does not have any formal education partnerships or partnerships with Russian research institutions.”

The university’s investment portfolio was also fairly liberated of Russian investment, a mere $20,000 in value.  “We are liaising with our Investment Fund about divestment options for this exposure.”

Singling out Russia has a note of self-indulgence to it.  In the case of Australian universities in particular, outrage expressed against Russia seems at odds with, say, the relationships with Chinese institutions.  The reasons, in the end, are financial rather than principled: excoriating the Russian Bear only harms intellectual merit, not the budget.  The same cannot be said about students and academics from the Middle Kingdom.

To that end Vice Chancellors and members of academic boards have been less forthright in their condemnation of Chinese foreign policy and the country’s human rights record.  Money often wins out in the moral dilemma, a point that activist Drew Pavlou found to his cost at the University of Queensland.  Suspended on disciplinary grounds, Pavlou was adamant about the reason.  “It’s a calculated move to silence me.  It’s because the University of Queensland wants to do everything possible to avoid offending its Chinese allies.”

In discriminating on the political and ideological standing of academics and students, a slippery slope presents itself.  Putting all your institution’s eggs into one basket and cause is never a good thing, however meretriciously popular and virtuous it might be at the time.  But the Academy, and the modern university, work in contradictory, self-defeating ways.  Wars do not merely make truth a casualty but kill off intellectual inquiry.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.