PATRICK LAWRENCE: American Freefall

The extent to which the U.S. has embarked on a departure from reality is only a question for empires in their waning decades.

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is time to do something — something very few of us have considered until now.

Rashid Khalidi, in a stinging opinion piece in The Guardian, asked, “Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?” Khalidi posed this question after the university where he taught for many years capitulated to the Trump regime’s demands that it compromise academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association while submitting its programs of study to political purview. All this in response to charges that anti–Semitism is rife among students demonstrating against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. 

Khalidi — some poetic justice here — is the emeritus Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. Among his books is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan, 2020). Here is part of what he published in The Guardian: 

“It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to…. 

This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17–month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland….

These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by The New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university….”

When Immigration and Customs goons arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s demonstrations at Columbia, Homeland Security initially said only that he “engaged in activities aligned with Hamas.” The State Department subsequently cited a provision in the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, asserting that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Sheer Charade

Last week the Trump regime added new allegations against Mahmoud Khalil, asserting that he withheld information on when he applied for permanent residency status last year. Even the Zionist-supervised New York Times sees through this ruse. “The Trump administration,” it reported, “appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil’s case.”

Amid these legal maneuvers President Donald Trump declared on social media, “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti–Semitic, anti–American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Since then ICE officials — masked ICE officials—have arrested a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, on the same grounds: A DHS spokesperson explained this week that “Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” Tufts officials have been told Ozturk’s visa has been revoked. 

I read now that a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama was arrested Tuesday and similarly charged. Alireza Doroudi is an Iranians in the U.S. on a student visa.    

Consider these events and what Trump regime officials say about them. 

The imperatives imposed by the Zionist lobbies in the U.S. long, long ago destroyed what integrity remained among U.S. mainstream media. Now they are destroying institutions of higher learning, the Justice and Homeland Security departments and altogether American law. 

And all of these institutions proceed, or pretend to proceed, as if nothing at all is amiss. The Justice Department pretends it is just, Homeland Security pretends it protects the homeland, the Trump regime pretends it acts lawfully, Columbia’s administrators — and here come numerous other capitulationists like them — pretend they are guardians of free intellectual inquiry and an uncensored discourse on their campuses.

To what extent has America embarked on a departure from reality that may be unprecedented in history but for empires in their waning decades? The fact that this is a serious question, and I consider it so, is suggestion enough that this perverse national journey has begun.

I think of an essay Arthur Miller published in the Dec. 30, 1974, edition of New York Magazine. “The Year It Came Apart” was a long, anguished look back to 1949, when, the noted playwright considered, postwar America began to lose its way. “Nothing any longer could be what it seemed,” Miller wrote. This is among the phrases that comes to mind now: Nothing in our public life can any longer be taken as being what it pretends to be — as authentically itself, this is to say. 

Here is the full passage in Miller’s piece to which I refer. The ellipses are mine:

“An inner fabric began to tear apart…. We would be entering a period of what the Puritan theology call Spectral Evidence…. 

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.”

I come to Simius Cognitius, who publishes a private blog from his farm in central Massachusetts (fortunate fellow). He wrote the other day:

“For all sane and rational people, what is now being officially and legally defined as ‘anti–Semitism’ in our once proud but now pitiably fallen nation, has now been elevated to a Moral Imperative.

The only way for any individual to maintain her or his sanity in our morally broken nation, which now officially declares that it is illegal to express any criticism, any at ALL, of a group of people who are wantonly murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, including tens of thousands of children and babies, right out in broad daylight, right before our very eyes… the only way to stay sane in such a morally depraved and insane nation, is to criticize that group more vigorously. 

Once more, for emphasis … If criticizing Jewish people [CN: Zionist leaders] for their utter moral depravity, for actual mass-murder of even children and babies, is anti–Semitic, then it becomes a Moral Imperative to openly express one’s anti–Semitism.” 

I am with Simius Cognitius on this point: While registering the strongest objection, I declared myself an anti–Semite by the offensively irrational definition imposed upon us at the time of the al–Aqsa incident in May 2021. The alternative would be coerced silence.  

But if the diabolic machinations of Zionists and their lobbies have precipitated the headlong descent of our polity, America lost all access to a beautifully moral world long before its sponsorship of the Israelis’ campaign of terror in Gaza and lately the West Bank. Arthur Miller was in mourning by the mid–1970s, let us not forget.  

Closer to our time, Chris Hedges published a book to this same effect not so many years ago. In Empire of Illusion (Nation Books, 2009), he looks not back but out his window — finding in the world as we have made it a morally collapsed culture wherein reality is incessantly confused with spectacle, self-deception, and illusion.

I offer readers this, my basket of apples and oranges. I do not know how else to capture in a few words the astonishing state of free-fall in which we find ourselves.

Over the past week or so three of the programs we watch on a regular basis featured guests that, to my great surprise, drew the same conclusions as to what means of response are available to paying-attention people in our blighted circumstance. 

John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago foreign affairs professor, and Chas Freeman, the estimable ambassador emeritus, spoke on back-to-back segments of Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom program. Chris Hedges interviewed Katherine Franke, recently forced out of her tenured position as a professor at Columbia University Law School for her advocacy in behalf of those who have demonstrated for the Palestinian cause. 

August figures all. And how curious that all three got asked the same question. We have an administration that is openly unresponsive to its citizens, indifferent to their constitutional rights, and abusive of the law; the judicial system appears on the way to failing: What do you think people should do?

I thought the question alone was an interesting reflection of our shared predicament. And I liked Ambassador Freeman’s reply best for his calm matter-of-fact delivery. He effectively paraphrased the others, in any event.     

“Well,” Freeman said, “there’s the street.”

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

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