There’s a quote by Martin Niemöller that people often misunderstand because they lack some important context.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
And the story people tell themselves is that he stood by and watched those things happen and merely remained silent. But that’s not what happened, and certainly not what he intended to get across when he used that quote in speeches he gave afterwards. Let me quote from the US National Holocaust Museum:
Niemöller was a fervent nationalist and anti-communist. He was devastated by Germany’s defeat in World War I and the collapse of the German Empire. He also strongly opposed the new postwar German government called the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). Unwilling to serve the new government, Niemöller resigned from the Navy in 1919.
In 1920, Niemöller began seminary training at the University of Münster. He was ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1924. During the 1920s and early 1930s, he participated in right-wing and antisemitic political parties and organizations.
In keeping with his right-wing, antisemitic outlook, Niemöller enthusiastically welcomed the Nazi regime in 1933. He voted for the Nazi Party in March of that year.
Do you know why he eventually objected to the Nazis? It’s because they started interfering in his church in 1934 and tried to rewrite things to make Jesus Aryan instead of Jewish, and other changes to make Christianity ‘less Jewish’. That’s it. He didn’t have a problem with anything else happening before 1934, it was entirely the meddling in the church. At that point, he became outspoken, got arrested, ended up in a concentration camp. The quote isn’t wrong, it was repeatedly used as part of a speech he gave where he talked about all this. But we’ve lost the context and just know the quote.
tl;dr – ‘First they came for’ is about Niemöller explaining how he voted and campaigned for the face-eating leopard party, didn’t notice warning signs, and then had his face eaten. He had a whole speech about it.
However, I want to talk about a different problem besides that common misunderstanding. The problem is that the quote starts 15 years too late with the Nazis coming for their main political enemies, the socialists or communists or whatever version of the quote you get.
That wasn’t the start. The situation, the ideology, started about 10-15 years earlier.
Rewind to 1918, the end of WWI. Before the Nazis, there were the Völkisch. That was a sort of reactionary rural nationalism that had all sorts of…weird ideas. It is essentially where the concept of ‘blood and soil’ comes from (which I don’t want to get into but feel free to Google), and has this mythological idea of rural folks fighting modernity.
Now, I want to be clear here: Völkisch was an extremely broad ideology. So when I say the Völkisch did something, I don’t mean everyone who called themselves Völkisch was doing that, or even agreed with it. There were parts of Völkisch that were just goofy back-to-nature things, or honest neopaganism, or even nudism, apparently. I’m generalizing.
But Völkisch ended up being part of what was eventually called the German neoconservative movement. A very important part, because it lead to the secretive Thule Society, who helped found the German Worker’s Party, which eventually became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. There’s other stuff that ended up in the Nazis also, like the Freikorps, but Völkisch beliefs formed a major core of the ideology, the ‘blood and soil’ that distinguished true German ‘volk’ from everyone else.
So what were the Völkisch doing, before the Nazis took over in 1933 and came for the socialists?
These proto-facsists were identifying Jews at the main problem of society, just like the Nazis did later. Everything was the fault of people who were not part of the German ‘volk’, and Jews were almost the definition of people who were not ‘volk’.
They also formed angry mobs. But those mobs didn’t attack Jews, as far as anyone can tell. Now I want to make it clear that this is distinct from the other political violence happening during some of this, the far-right violence and assassinations from the Freikorps that existed from the end of WWI to 1922, which did target a lot of Jews, and Marxists, for that matter. Mostly in the government. Those were the cold politically calculated murders of political opponents, and while those groups did eventually merge with the Völkisch into the Nazis, it was Völkisch thought that lead to actual Nazi ideology. And that ideology starts with the angry mobs. Without them, it’s just the far-right, not Nazis.
There were incidents of violence, by these Völkisch mobs, against two groups. These two groups that they literally first ‘come for’, Niemöller didn’t mention at all. Probably because society’s opinion of those groups hadn’t changed by the end of the war, so he didn’t consider it might have been a mistake. Indeed, people cared so little about these groups that these attacks are very poorly documented, which obviously wasn’t helped by the Nazis destruction of history once they came to power.
The first of two groups the Völkisch attacked were feminists. And generally women who didn’t conform to societal expectations of women.
Because in addition to hating non-‘volk’, the Völkisch hated independent women. They saw women’s suffrage, which had happened in the Weimar Republican at the very start, to be almost as bad as the Jews. Not quite as bad as Jews, but they couldn’t just attack Jews; they didn’t have the political cover that the far-right Freikorps had. But they could get away with, or at least thought they could get away with, attacking women who were not traditional German women.
The other group? Well, that group was much smaller, and honestly we only have records of one group member that the Völkisch went after, a scientist, Magnus Hirschfeld, although it’s understood they went after others. It was a man was beaten nearly to death in 1920 by the Völkisch, and threatened repeatedly, which ironically turned out good for him because he ended up fleeing the country in November 1930 before the Nazis, which meant the Nazis couldn’t kill him when they attacked his research institution and burn all his books in the first book burning in 1934. This man was Jewish, but just like Jewish feminists, that wasn’t the real reason he was attacked. It was because he was gay, and because his scientific research was about gay and trans people. He was caricatured by the media as a Jewish doctor threatening German youth, and that obviously resulted in violence against him.
But saying it like that misses the forest for the trees. Because those first two groups, the feminists and the gays?
They’re the same group.
The new theory for homosexuality, at the time, was something called inversion theory. It proposed that gay people were, in some sense, slightly accidentally made of the other sex, or even could be understood as some third middle/mixed sex. People were questioning some of the sexual binary for the for the first time. And trans people, whom only Hirschfeld really cared about, were definitely dismantling gender roles. Berlin was a hotbed of this sort of dismantling; Cabaret wasn’t an exaggeration, and it wasn’t just happening in Germany. The 1920s were a weird time for gender. The Völkisch, a very rural movement, saw that sort of ‘urban hedonism’ as the enemy.
Meanwhile, in the other direction: The suffrage/feminist movement, which also was a world-wide thing at this point, was astonishingly queer, despite that being mostly erased from the history books, and part of this erasure was due to the movement itself trying to hide exactly how many of the women involved were lesbians. I can’t even list the amount of very prominent suffragists that were ‘very good friends’ with another woman, who lived with them for decade, and were even in things described as Boston marriages which everyone is very good at pretending were platonic. Here’s a short list: Gail Laughlin, Dr. Mary Austin Sperry, Angelina Weld Grimké, Lucy Diggs Slowe, M. Carey Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Garret, Jane Addams, Mary Rozet Smith, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Marion Talbot, Edith Abbott…
I could just keep listing. I have a dozen names in front of me right me. I have one I could throw out that, if I said it, it would dominate the entire discussion, but that’s not the topic here.
Admittedly, that list is of British and American feminists, not German, because frankly I know very little about German feminism. But here’s the first sentence, trimmed from Wikipedia, talking about Feminists in Weimar Germany: Prominent feminists of this era included Helene Lange, her life partner Gertrud Bäumer, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin. The first two of those are a lesbian couple. The third one is also a lesbian.
Stepping back for a moment, it’s often noticed that a lot of the very early gay rights movement, pre-1940s, looks like it was mostly about gay men. There’s a variety of reasons for that, some of which are some not-very-great sexism, but part of the reason is that the politically-active lesbians were mostly all over in the suffrage/feminism movement. The gay men were trying to stop laws explicitly targeting homosexuality, and meanwhile lesbians were trying to dismantle laws that made most women, either presumptively or explicitly, under the control of some man, either her father or husband. For obvious reasons.
Both these groups were ripping apart the laws that defined the role of sexes. It’s not multiple movements; it’s one vast blob of people ripping apart gender roles from slightly different directions for slightly different reasons. There’s a whole article there I could write about how entangled feminism and queer rights have always been, because they are both challenging the same thing. But that isn’t the important thing here.
The important thing is that gender roles were so inbuilt into society that people, including Martin Niemöller, didn’t even think of about the fact that the fascists ‘came for’ people who had questioned gender roles and started dismantling them a decade before the fascists were even properly fascists. He sat down and tried to figure out his mistakes, and warn the world, and he totally overlooked this. I’m not really here to criticize him; he did try, but this warning failed, at least a little.
It’s the same way that when we liberated the concentration camps; we freed the socialists, and trade unionists, and the Jews, and the defiant Christians like Niemöller. We put the gay people back in proper jail, where they belonged. And didn’t particularly give more rights to women; we basically reset that to the Weimar Republic. Women could vote again (I’m not sure the Nazis ever bothered to remove that right legally anyway, considering they did not hold elections?) and were now back to being allowed, hypothetically, to attend college, which the Nazis had banned.
So why am I saying all this? It’s to warn people that the canary in the coal mine for fascism ideology isn’t in the quote.
The first step isn’t coming for current political enemies who could win at the ballot box or stop their actions in other legal ways (well, it is, but that’s not where fascist ideology come from, that’s just something that the far-right likes to do in general, so you can’t use that as a warning. It’s always true), it isn’t coming for groups and places where political enemies tend to cluster and form protests, it isn’t coming for whatever out-group is currently the Two Minute Hate target, and it isn’t coming for otherwise accepted people that disagree with the government on questions of religious doctrine. Those are all far too late.
What we need to watch for is a proto-fascist movement forming as a reactionary movement. And it will be probably be because state violence (aka, laws) is no longer being practiced against a group. That group has become legal in the last few decades, or gained some rights. The proto-fascists will turn around and use that fact that everyone used to be okay with, that state violence against those people to make them the first target of extra-judicial mob violence. And then later they’ll merge with a more formal far-right, and that will be fascism.
It seems unlikely that the next fascism will be targeting the exact same groups. They won’t go after queer people for muddying gender, or women for any sort of recent political gains. I can’t really imagine a reactionary movement doing that in the modern day, talking about how women have specific roles they have to fulfill and shouldn’t be in positions of authority, or building some elaborate thing about gender roles around LGBTQ people and how they threaten children. No, that would be a little obvious, right? A little on the nose? We’d have to be really inattentive to miss that one, people would be screaming out warnings.
But it will be someone. A group or groups that, until recently, were illegal or legally restricted in some way, have only been legal a couple of decades, and still aren’t well accepted and face a large amount of discrimination. That’s who they will ‘first come for’, because that’s who they can first target outside the law. That happens first; it’ll be a decade or so before they go after any one else.
That’s the point we need to be wary of what’s happening, and start looking for other indications of fascism. Just keep an eye out for it, it could happen at any time, and a decade later we’re shipping some outgroup off to gulags without a trial. Probably not Jews this time…not at first. The Amish? Who knows.
Anyway, thank you for reading my first post, an essay that is entirely about a well-intentioned but slightly wrong quote by Martin Niemöller about the start of fascism and how fascism would hypothetically reappear. And nothing else.
Aside from the content of this piece and the discussion that will come of it, I just wanted to say after six years of doing this for OT how it is always good to not only have a commentor take us up on “you can write a whole piece about this” – which too few do – but to deliver an essay like this is impressive, and I thank David for doing do.Report
Thanks, and I really do have an essay in my head about how entangled feminism and gay rights have been over a century and a half, and a lot of the recent assertation about trans people versus women’s right are absurdly ahistorical and seem to have an understanding of feminism that stopped in the 1920s, and they even managed to get _that_ wrong.
The problem is that I almost feel that’s going to require me stepping through the entire history of feminist thought, explaining each wave of it and possibly also all of queer history and everything with it, so it’s rather daunting.
I am desperately trying to figure out how to break those into pieces. Hopefully shorter than this, which was actually too long by like five paragraphs, but I really felt I needed to be overly sarcastic for a couple of paragraphs at the end just in case people missed the point somehow.Report
Yes it’s very well done! Good on you DavidTC!Report
Oh good! I was wondering about this!
Thanks for writing it!Report
Incidentally, and with the intent of hopefully restricting it to just this thread and not the entire discussion: The lesbian I didn’t mention, because it would dominate the discussion and also she was about a century earlier than when I was talking about, was Susan B Anthony.
Let’s go, people. Fight me. But Google it first.Report
Would you say that German far-right movements of the time were uniquely persecutive of queer people, relative to the rest of Western Europe and America?Report
The thing is, there was not one German far-right movements. There were multiple ones. Here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Revolution#Currents
I will try to summarized a very complicated thing I barely understand.
There were the Young Conservatives, which seemed to just be…anti-modernism in the sense they were anti-democratic and pro-authoritarianism. Often very corporatism, often harken back to Divine Right. Think Peter Thiel and all the other techbros that seem very sure the best system of government is one where someone Really Smart is eternally in charge.
There were National Revolutionaries, who embraced modernity and just wanted a revolution for some reason, after which they were sure we’d be happy people with modern technology but simple lives. These guys eventually argued _against_ the Na.zis. There’s not really an analog here. Honestly, these guys do not sound too far from modern ‘normal’ conservatives except they were slightly anti-capitalist.
And there was the group I focused on, the Völkisch, who came up with the base-level horrific part of Na.zi ideology, the idea that German blood belonged to German land, and vis versa, and everyone was not ‘volk’ was the problem. And part of volk was an understanding of gender roles.
But, anyway, to the question: The far-right didn’t really care about queer people in the 1920s. They were much more into ultra-nationalism and nativism.
No one actually cared about them. Yes, there were laws against them, laws that at various times and places were implemented or ignored, but no one actually _cared_. Berlin was incredibly gay. You want to be gay in some small German town…well, people would probably pretty strongly suggest you move to Berlin.
I can’t find any real information about how the rest of the German right felt about this, I suspect logically the Young Conservatives saw that as part of the modernity they despised, but I don’t think they really did anything.
And same with the rest of the world, who were increasingly seeing queer people as an oddity, not a threat. The acceptance of gay people isn’t a slope, it’s a cycle. Indeed, the entire cycle would cycle, during the Great Depression, going back to presenting queer people as dangerous.
The Völkisch were _out of cycle_. Like I said, they were a reactionary movement, at least partially in reaction to social rules about gender loosening, which had just sorta hit Germany at the end of WWI.
The exact same reactionary movement that, once integrated into Na.zism, resulted death camps.
Like, there’s a hypothetical Germany without the Völkisch, where the left falls to infighting and ultranationalism still takes over and they go to war again because of their war debts, but they _aren’t_ genocidal lunatics. The Völkisch are the thing that makes fascism _fascism_, and not just general totalitarianism.Report
“You want to be gay in some small German town…well, people would probably pretty strongly suggest you move to Berlin.”
I daresay you could substitute nearly any country for Germany and pick that country’s largest city for people to move to. Even now, 100 years after Weimar.Report
Really well written and well done. Good work DavidTC.Report
I think the next question is,
Is Columbia and Trump’s crackdown of the pro-Palestinians the ‘Canary in the coalmine’ (link at bottom, their answer is “yes”) or is it a lot more reasonable?
Some of the claims are concerning; Trump is forcing Columbia’s Middle East department to be seriously redone, ergo academic freedom is a problem. However (normally not mentioned) is a prof in this department, one day after 10-7, made posts referring to scenes from the attacks as “awesome” and “stunning” (same link).
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/29/columbia-middle-east-department-trump-edward-saidReport
Is there anyone in the Trump administration who is competent to say, or has any idea, whether there is anything academically wrong with the Department? Disagreements with faculty members’ politics don’t count.Report
“Disagreements” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there in the face of published department support for 10-7.
Presumably there is supposed to be a carful review process where we prove someone who openly supports Hamas is unfit to teach ME politics and history. Clearly that hasn’t happened.
But this is a process argument where we pretend we don’t know what we know. Same with those protests.
Calling for Jews to be killed is deep into antisemitism. That’s still true if it’s rephrased into “No Israel, No Jews” or any of it’s equivalents.
That’s in addition to whether protesters have the “right” to shut down various things to force people to respond to their arguments and do other things that are normally illegal.Report
I have little respect for “process” arguments because we wouldn’t apply them in other situations.
Example: A professor who was openly a white supremist who publicly made an argument for bringing back slavery as a “solution” to various race issues would instantly be fired without the Feds needing to threaten budgets.
We wouldn’t have University Presidents claim “it depends” on whether the code of conduct is being broken, nor argue for the first AM and so on. Protesters backing him and his issues would be handled by the police and they wouldn’t be allowed to shut down the university much less threaten black students.
All of this would, correctly, be handled by the U calling in the cops if need be to enforce things that are normally illegal.Report
The word that does the real work is “academically.” I don’t share what you describe, and I haven’t bothered to check, as the political views of members of the Department. Because that’s none of my f*****g business or the f*****g business of the federal government. I assume they have deplorable politics. Academic life is full of people who have deplorable politics, of all stripes. To take your own example, Columbia used to have eminent historians who held almost exactly the views you described. But their scholarship was first-rate and their status was never threatened. Probably because the government didn’t have a problem with that particular set of views back then. Things got a little dicier when the weird political views of certain scholars pissed the government off. I’m sure I don’t have to recite the history of the late 40’s through mid 60’s.
Whatever the political views of some of the Department members, I have seen nothing from anyone competent to speak — definitely not including anyone in the Trump administration, Chris Rufo, Barrie Weiss, or, to be blunt, you — even suggesting that the Department needs an academic overhaul.Report
If they don’t want politics to matter, then they shouldn’t be threatening Jews and insisting that everyone’s politics need to match theirs or they’ll shut down the University.Report
There are normal, well-understood ways of dealing with actual threats and forcible obstruction. None of them involve putting a department into academic receivership without a genuine academic reason.Report
CJColucci: There are normal, well-understood ways of dealing with actual threats and forcible obstruction.
Absolutely. However the problem on the table is the people who are responsible for doing those things have failed to do those things.
Both of the following can be true at the same time.
1) Trump is a blunt tool and bully.
2) The University is deliberately ignoring breathtaking levels of antisemitism which would never be tolerated against other groups.
This is similar to the U looking the other way when one of their employees is committing sex crimes (Michigan State). The institution doesn’t want to do it’s job so the institution needs to be punished as an institution.Report
I understand that you want to talk about something else and it’s your right to try to drum up a response. Maybe someone will oblige you. I plan to stick to my point and engage anyone who wants to talk about thatReport
It really boggles the mind how we are in a world where Canary Mission is getting students kicked out of school and deported for writing this op-ed:
https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj
and you are standing there pretending this is something that would normally get students kicked out of school if it was about anyone but Jews. At least, that is what I understand you are saying.
When in reality, it wouldn’t get anyone kicked out of school _except_ pro-Palestinian people. Who _are_, in the actual world, getting deported.Report
My expectation is this example, assuming that op-ed is the limit of her involvement, will be undone by the courts.Report
Because the administration has listened to all the other things courts have told them to undo?Report
You think being undone by the courts means the Trump Administration isn’t fascism?
Fascism currently slightly constrained by other parts of the government from doing individual actions is still a fascist administration.Report
DavidTC: You think being undone by the courts means the Trump Administration isn’t fascism?
We’re a few steps short. I think we have a lot of chaos, incompetence, & fringe people. I also think there is a general lack of respect for the law and/or ignorance of the law.
I doubt this will end well, but I also doubt it will end with the US giving up elections.Report
Among the things the administration doesn’t understand is that every department is different. Different research interests across all of topic, framework, etc, shape things. And that pushes into which classes are taught, reading material, and all that. It’s not like Calc I, where they’re teaching language as much as anything, consistent across the needs of math majors, physics majors, engineering majors, history majors, and so on.
My perception is that the administration wants there to be a single narrative about Middle Eastern history and current politics. No room for variance. Exactly the opposite of what universities are supposed to be.Report
There is a vast difference between “a single narrative” and “a crack down on the idea that ‘No Israel, No Jews’ is acceptable.” Advocating for genocide shouldn’t be funded by US tax dollars.Report
I know: Columbia should appeal to the importance of the academy being a place where difficult ideas need to be wrestled with, not smothered.Report
If they want that then they need to have police prevent the Protesters from shutting the U down and/or threatening Jews.
At least then when they have discussions on whether advocating for genocide is a good thing, the U will be able to say they’re only debating things.Report
Why are we asking about canaries when the Trump administration has asserted the right to detain people and ship them to foreign gulags without a trial of any sort?
If they can assert that someone, with no evidence or court proceeding, is not an American citizen and is a gang member, and ship them to an El Salvadorian gulag, then we are actually at fascism, we do not need to argue it is coming. In fact, even if they _aren’t_ allowed to do that, even if the court stops them, it is still fascism. It is just a fascist executive that is very slightly constrained by courts.
And I frankly could care less watching Columbia actively destroy itself and every single ounce of respect anyone ever held for it. Because, frankly, it never deserved any of that to start with.
You want to talk about academic freedom, let’s talk about it for the colleges that _don’t_ instantly and cowardly cave.Report
I think Ward Churchill is a good case to think about in this context. I assume everyone here is old enough to remember how in 2005, someone discovered his 2001 essay calling the victims of 9/11 “Little Eichmanns,” creating an outrage that ultimately resulted in Churchill losing his job as a tenured member of the faculty at UC Boulder 2 years later. But remember, he didn’t lose his job for the 2001 essay; he lost it because of research misconduct. Would he have been fired if he hadn’t written the 2001 essay, or if the article had never been brought to the general public’s attention? Who knows; his scholarship, such as it was, seems to have been largely ignored even within his field until then. But the main point is, Churchill was fired because of his academic work.Report
He was fired because he committed what even academics consider a sin: He embarrassed the institution.Report
That was part of it but I think it may have also been an early indicator of otherwise highly obscure academic silliness becoming widely disseminated to non academic audiences via the internet. People like him and numerous pro-Palestinian/Israel skeptical types were in many ways the OG victims of 21st century cancelation campaigns. It’s among the reasons that trying to treat everything from FedSoc judges or jurists to conservative provacateurs to just normal liberals who don’t toe the line on some issue or another as safety threats was so self evidently a mistake from the outset. Anyone with a memory longer than a nat could see where this was going. People at these places are reaping what they spent 15 or so years sowing.
The irony about the Niemoller quote that’s the subject of this piece is itself head spinning. When was the last time someone worked up about the current environment prominently stood up for the rights of someone they disagreed with, just on the principle of the thing? It just doesn’t really happen anymore.Report
People at college protesting speakers for the content of their speech is not, and never will be, even vaguely in the category of the US government revoking visas and detaining people for the content of their speech.
The fact ‘for the content of their speech’ is in both those doesn’t make them the same thing. Protesters at a university are the sort of the entities that have speech rights, like the right to protest others, under the constitution, whereas the US government is the entity that is restricted under the constitution.
So, to be clear: The thing that happened for the past 20 years is that people that the left disagreed with were ‘canceled’, in the sense that sometimes they were not given a specific large platform, or a platform at a college. This rarely actually happened, and generally what happened is protestors tried to stop it but failed. But some of them did, manage to heckler veto things, at which point those people were generally given much larger platforms talking about how they were canceled.
Meanwhile, we have Ward Churchhill, someone who did lose his job, because, fun fact, when the right attacks you, you do actually lose your job. We also have Canary Mission running around making sure that anyone with pro-Palestine positions, or that merely criticism the behavior of Israel, do not get jobs.
Somehow you’ve even managed to mention FedSoc judges in there. I feel this is extremely obvious, but judges are not canceled. They are, indeed, in position of authority in society. It’s the opposite of being canceled. The fact people are complaining about them is not harm.
This entire discussion is just willful inability to look the _actual results_ of the behavior of the sides, and notice that one side actually is able to get people ‘canceled’ in a meaningful sense, as in ruin their life, and the other is mostly able to get universities to hire slightly more security people and very rarely force people to change venues for their massive speaking engagements.
…There is an idea, among conservatives and a bunch of liberals too, that the only rights of people are being able to spew their ideas in whatever location they want, into the faces of people who are already there. Maybe that is a right, I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care.
But if it is a right, it’s a pretty unimportant one, as opposed to the all the people who think it is The Most Important one. Because conservatives seem to think that is where rights start and end. Mostly because literally no other rights of theirs have ever been threatened. The worst thing that ever happens to them is people get mad when they say things. And sometimes get mad enough that those people try to stop them! Oh noes!
Do you know what actual important rights are? Things like not having your healthcare forbidden by law, and the ability to get housing and jobs despite who you are, and not being shot by the police. Oh, and ability to vote, that’s also important. Those are all more much important than having the ability to make a speech in one specific place and not having people yelling over them, especially when they can literally just go somewhere else and give that speech. (Unlike the other side, which gets detained and eventually deported for op-eds.)
You may notice there’s no consideration of whether or not those people agree or disagree with me politically in there, because the thing under discussion is nothing to do with political beliefs. I don’t know their political beliefs!
In fact, in any sort of rational politics, what people want from the government is what we talk about, not the political beliefs of the people who want those things.Report
I think you give the game away when you ask if I know what ‘important rights’ are, so much so that everything in your comment before and after is best interpreted as a kind of nihilism, not a real attempt to grapple with the rights or principles in play, on the merits. Even if for the sake of argument we concede that at the end of the day nothing profoundly bad happened as a result of name your incident (and to be clear, I’m not doing that), all it would mean is that left wing or progressive illiberalism is the weaker prong of a pincer movement. Which is something I’d have agreed with well before we started putting the theory to the test.Report
No, actually, I was just being sarcastic, about the incredibly limited imaginations of privileged people who cannot conceive of actual right violations, so instead they glom on to ‘Someone said something and other people got angry’.
Being invited to speaking at a university is not a right at all. No one has a right to be platformed by the government. At all. Ever. It’s a privilege.
Now, the government is indeed also forbidden from discriminating based on viewpoints in how it hands out privileges (Something to remember when we’re talking about visa.), but if we are going to judge _this_ sort of viewpoint judgement on government platforms as a right violation, we need to understand that this happens near continuously, in literally every context that the government platforms a speaker.
In fact, ‘guest speaker at a college’ is one of the few circumstances where content of their speech is not the determining factor to their platform in the first place! Usually the government explicitly platforms someone because they knew exactly what that person would say.
There is something very suspicious this specific form of platforming is the violation of someone’s right. Surely the fact that a person _invited to give the commencement speech_ is going to talk only on topics the school wants and is picked because of of holding that position is even more discriminatory based on viewpoint!
Surely we should be complaining about that! I’m not sure how to make it fair, there are practical time limitations, but perhaps everyone who wants could enter their name and we randomly select half a dozen speakers to do five minutes. (You may notice that something like this is how it works in the very few places that the government does, without restriction, platform people, like city council meetings.)
See how dumb this is? There is no free speech access to a government platform.
You can make coherent arguments that colleges should platform people with various political positions as part of academic freedom and exposing students to ideas. But you cannot make that argument they have a _right_ to be platformed on any coherent first amendment grounds.Report
Churchill was fired because of his academic work.
True. And if he hadn’t been an American citizen, he would have been deported for supporting terrorism.
The university realized they had a terror supporting lunatic in their staff and they did a deep dive (well, just looked at) his work and bounced him. That they didn’t technically bounce him for his views is besides the point.
When you select for those views you’re also selecting for substandard work in fields affected by those views. Further the U was looking for a reason to fire him because of his views.
The current situation has had the University tolerate this set of terrorism supporters for years. Because Jews. Trump shouldn’t need to get involved because the University has had more than enough time to clean house themselves.
Instead we’ve had their administration testify to Congress that they don’t need to clean house and advocating genocide/terrorism is protected speech. So apparently supporting Hamas and arguing that Jews need to put up with terrorism doesn’t break any codes of conduct and behavior that would in other situations be illegal should be shielded from the authorities by the administration. Because the First Amendment, and Jews.Report
A related question: Should the university allow debate about who is a terrorism, and what acts are terrorism, or should the university require all faculty to adhere to the official U.S. list of designated terrorist groups?Report
Chris: Should the university allow debate about who is a terrorist…
You are pointing out that there are grey lines. You are correct, so the technical answer to your question is “yes”.
However killing hundreds of Jewish civilians because they’re Jews isn’t even slightly close to a grey line, nor is that disputed.Report
Interesting. How would we classify Israel’s killing of citizens in Gaza?Report
Chris: How would we classify Israel’s killing of citizens in Gaza?
I would call it a war. It’s expected that civilians are going to die in an urban war.
Do you think civilians are being targeted by Israel? If so, then why?Report
Let me also add that I think killing civilians is wrong regardless of who those civilians are, just so there’s no doubt in what follows. I’m trying to get at what discourse is OK among faculty at a public university, and what discourse should result in harsh penalties for university departments, like what’s happening at Columbia. That out of the way:
We know civilians are being targeted, and we know journalists are as well. It’s not really up for debate, and I point you to google for the copious evidence.
But even if you don’t agree that there is clear evidence Israel has targeted civilians, let’s stipulate it for the moment. So, considering that Hamas argues, and has points in international law in favor of their argument, that as an occupied and/or besieged populace, it is legal for them to strike out at the people occupying besieging them. Put differently, Hamas believes they are at war, under military siege, and therefore what they did was an act of war. Many throughout the world see their actions as part of the resistance movement, even if they condemn violence against civilians and taking civilians hostage (Israel, to be clear, also regularly takes civilians hostage; and, it should be noted, regularly uses human shields).
Is this discourse, which might end up with some people arguing in support of Hamas, allowable, or do we have to ban it from universities? Who, then, gets to decide which attacks on civilians are terrorism, and which aren’t? And therefore, which faculty can support, and which they can’t?Report
(Oh look, more evidence just today.)Report
“Targeting Civilians” would be “shooting Civilians because you know they’re civilians”.
Hamas routinely uses ambulances as troop carriers (see link). If you light one up because it’s getting close to you and might have solders, then that’s a different issue.
It might still be a war crime (Ianal) but it also showcases why urban warfare is so nasty and why it’s expected to have a lot more civilians than soldiers get killed.
https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/hamas-admits-using-ambulances-to-transport-weapons-terrorist-in-leaked-phone-call-palestine-israel-war-strike-fighting-gaza-strip-middle-east-humanitarian-crisis-israel-defense-forcesReport
Chris: We know civilians are being targeted…
We don’t even know how many civilians are dead. If Israel is targeting civilians then it’s weird that the death rate is lower than the birth rate.
Israel kills it’s own soldiers, that is not proof that it’s targeting it’s own soldiers.
Chris: …as an occupied and/or besieged populace, it is legal for them to strike out at the people occupying besieging them.
The purpose of 10-7 was to attack civilians. So no, it was not “legal”. Hamas killed every Jew they could get their hands on, so the word we should be using is “genocide”.
Trying to argue that the Jews are responsible for their own genocide is antisemitic.
Chris: Many throughout the world see their actions as part of the resistance movement…
And what are they resisting? Hamas’ charter explains that they’re resisting the idea of Jews in the Middle East. That this is popular doesn’t change that it’s antisemitic on the face of it.
Chris: Who, then, gets to decide which attacks on civilians are terrorism, and which aren’t?
This is an effort to claim everyone is morally equal.
If Hamas had Israel’s ethics, Hamas would have broken out of Gaza and only killed the Israel soldiers guarding the place. If Israel had Hamas’ ethics, then all of Gaza would be lifeless.
Hamas is an openly genocidal organization and they live up to their charter attacking all Jews they can.
Israel either doesn’t attack civilians at all (their claim) or it does so rarely it doesn’t show up in the numbers.
Big picture the Palestinians are dialed up to eleven by the existence of Jews and a Jewish state. They “resist” through terrorism. The conflict comes down to antisemitism.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s challenging to avoid antisemitism and/or supporting terrorism when supporting the Palestinian cause. The big way to do that is to claim that everyone is a terrorist and everyone is genocidal, but this is an abuse of language.
Given that we deport immigrants for supporting terrorism, we should expect that people supporting Hamas are F-ing around with their immigration status.
The Jewish equivalent of Hamas would be plans to kill everyone in Gaza. If we had faculty arguing for this I’d expect the administration would treat them like they’d treat someone arguing for a return of slavery, i.e. they’d find a way to fire them.
Where the challenge comes for College administrators is whether or not they’re going to put up with antisemitism.
One way for College administrators to deal with all this is to bite the bullet and admit their college isn’t going to be welcoming to Jews, that they do support anti-Jewish terrorism, and then deal with the consequences.
If that’s not what they’re going to do, then they should confront the problem that Hamas is both popular in certain groups but supporting it is massively antisemitic on the face of it.Report
Why do you think supporting terrorism via _speech_ is illegal and the government can punish people for that _speech_? Also, would you like to explain exactly how that is defined in such a way that the government cannot simply declare anything it wants as terrorism?
There are people in this country running around with flags indicating support of an unlawful government that illegally seized control of part of America in furtherance of an ideology that enslaved and terrorized a population for centuries, and then, for the next century, proceeded to commit acts of terror against that same population, and anyone who supported them.
Do you think we should deport those people? I know I’ve joked about having the National Guard called out to carefully detain those people and explain the Civil War is over and they need to lay down their muskets, but that was a joke.
Also, and just to be clear: Chuchill did not support terrorism, in any manner, although it’s unclear what you even would hypothetically think that means. He pointed out that 9/11 was basically a logical outcome of US foreign policy, have if we’re going to keep bombing them, they’re eventually going to start bombing us, a thing that quite a lot of people at the time pointed out.
He just did pointed that out without carefully rephrasing, in every sentence, how it was still some horrific tragedy that should not have happened and he is in no way saying it was justified. This was apparently the required standard at the time, and he didn’t do it.
But he did not, at point, say ‘You should give them money or material support or go join them’ or anything like that.Report
He pointed out that 9/11 was basically a logical outcome of US foreign policy, have if we’re going to keep bombing them, they’re eventually going to start bombing us, a thing that quite a lot of people at the time pointed out.
So things, bad things presumably, will inevitably lead to other bad things happening as an inevitable outcome?
Huh.
Is that phenomenon universal? Or was it limited to just that one thing, that one time?Report
…did you just compare firing this guy to 9/11?
Like, that’s the only logical way to read what you said, right?
American’s actions in the middle east is to 9/11 as this guy writing an column is to this guy getting fired
This is astonishingly trite, but also, wow. That’s really where you’re going with that, huh?
Yes, Jaybird, actions that people do can cause other people to do things to them. Weirdly, that doesn’t mean that all responses are justified by all actions, or that all actions are justified.Report
Nah, I’m comparing what’s happening to Academia in general to 9/11.
Academia is the United States, in the analogy. The professors would be the “Little Eichmanns”. The Trumpistas would be the hijackers.Report
I think you’re failing the sh*t test with this line of reasoning, same as they have been. We either live in a world where people can deal with these kinds of questions, including when they’re asked in ways many may deem offensive, or we can’t.Report
Back in the early Aughts, we definitely didn’t live in a world where people could deal with these kinds of questions. Hell, to even attempt to understand why we had been attacked was deemed support for terrorism. It was a bleak time in American history, though bleak times in American history might be most of the time in American history, so that may not be saying much.Report
I agree with your assessment, and that experience contributes to my politics today.Report
Failing one test but passing the one where I just like sputtering “how dare you”s in response to offensive comparisons in any given discussion of Ward Churchill.Report
I had a long reply that seems to have been eaten. Not sure if it can be salvaged.Report
Do you have the high notes?Report
Eh a more witty version of something like:
-The movement now MAGA conservatives have never been principled on any of this, as we are seeing now. It was all a kind of confidence or ‘sh*t’ test in the handful of places the left totally dominates like academia
-The left has failed the tests in epic fashion in large part by not appreciating that the audience isn’t just the person canceled, hecklers vetoed, etc., it’s the normies who see it happen, which now includes a multiracial working class
-Being a constructive force for a better tomorrow requires avoiding the same mistake, which probably includes some laying off of the piling on or recounting already thoroughly discussed hypocrisy. Ward Churchill may have been an ass and an incompetent academic but there was a difficult truth to what he said and punishing him for it was wrong.
-You’ve made the observation that the grey tribe is likely to get a reminder soon of all the things it hates about the red tribe.Report
Oh, yeah. For what it’s worth, the stuff they dug up about Ward Churchill *WAS* worth firing him over.
Plagiarism! I mean, now we know that it’s complicated but back in the day it was an actual sin! And he was so egregious that it embarrassed the institution which, I’ve already said, is the only unforgivable.
Which turns the discussion into “would they have brought out the fine-tooth combs if Churchill hasn’t embarrassed the institution?” and the answer to that is “of course not”.
But, at that point, you’ve got yourself a pickle anyway.
The Gibson’s Bakery thing is the one that gets me to say that academia has no idea how much good will they’ve lost and the sheer number of grads who are screaming for debt relief are making that relationship even worse.
The grey tribe is going to learn what it hates about the red tribe good and hard again, but when it comes to academia?
I’m not sure that the red tribe will do a whole lot of harm to the red/grey alliance based on the academia thing.
Academia is part of why the greys left.Report
InMD: We either live in a world where people can deal with these kinds of questions, including when they’re asked in ways many may deem offensive, or we can’t.
The human brain is a patter matching device. There is a temptation to draw a line between something we don’t like and something else we don’t like and claim they’re connected.
That kind of reasoning often says more about the person talking than the event. So when Jerry Falwell claimed 911 was the fault of the US because we tolerate gay rights, I don’t feel the need to respond in a logical way.
If we’re trying to draw a line between 911 and US foreign policy, then let’s link to what OBL claimed the motives were.
In no specific order, we have…
1) US support for Israel
2) OBL’s strategy to expand his group.
3) Sanctions against Iraq
4) US troops in Saudi Arabia
5) Global warming.
6) Tolerance for Homosexuality.
7) Tolerance of Alcohol
8) Charging Interest rates.
9) Tolerance of Gambling
10) Tolerance of Drugs
11) Tolerance of Sex
12) Conflict in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon and the Philippines
13-16) American cultural imperialism (Hollywood, Women’s rights, Media Companies, and having a larger GDP than Muslim nations).
His culture and worldview were very different. He didn’t have a rational outlook from our point of view. He was a Jihadist and wanted to make more Jihadists and was deeply offended by people who weren’t.
Should we be offended by a question that says we’re to blame for us being terrorized? Yes we should. It’s not like we will give up everything on that list to make OBL happy.
We’re not going to remake our culture so it’s not offensive to him. That’s not an excuse for him to murder thousands of civilians. Nor is it an excuse for some asshat to claim the dead weren’t civilians because he personally doesn’t like our foreign policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacksReport
DavidTC: Why do you think supporting terrorism via _speech_ is illegal…
It is not “illegal”. However as a condition to entering this country we make immigrants sign legal docs saying they don’t support terrorism.
DavidTC: would you like to explain exactly how that is defined in such a way that the government cannot simply declare anything it wants as terrorism?
This is also arguing for “there are grey lines” while ignoring that killing hundreds of civilians because they’re Jews isn’t even close.
DavidTC: He pointed out that 9/11 was basically a logical outcome of US foreign policy,
What he argued was the people who died in 9/11 shouldn’t be considered innocent civilians, so killing them is fair game. Arguing that the terrorists are correct for killing civilians is crossing lines.
If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.[5]Report
We do not. We make them sign documents that say they do not provide material support to terrorists, and that they are not member of terrorist groups. Material support, in case it is unclear, is providing money or other resources.
There is absolutely no legal prohibition on expressing support for terrorists on people entering the United States.
As we can tell by the fact these people have not been detained and their visas and green cards were not revoked by claiming this.
We know what part of the law they were removed under, one of the questioned (I mean, literally, courts have questioned it, just never have grounds to remove it) clauses where the US government can remove people because they cause political complications for the US government.
Not because they support terrorism.
They are not being removed for supporting terrorism, and it is absurd we are talking as if that is the question. The US government is claiming that in _press conferences_, and then claiming other things in actual legal documents, and we really, really, REALLY need to start understanding that when Trump makes legal claims in press conferences and then doesn’t make them in court, those legal claims were utterly baseless.
That should be the default behavior after over a decade of Trump: If he says something related to the law, but then goes to court and say something else, we need to stop pretending the legal thing he said before going to court has any meaning at all! That’s not a real thing! He made it up!
A decade of this, people!Report
Interesting.Report
I’m still waiting on our resident free speech absolutists to weigh in on this one. Popcorn is all done …Report
“Private companies can do whatever they want”.Report
Would you have it otherwise?Report
I’d love to change the rules to how I’d have it instantiated.
Is that on the table?
Because, lemme tell ya, if we go back to “we’ll use your rules for me and we’ll use my rules for you”, that’s worse than “we’ll use the same rules we used yesterday”.Report
Objection, non-responsive.Report
“Would you have it otherwise?”
“Yes, I would have it otherwise. Is changing it to how I would have it on the table?”
“ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTION!”Report
Neither of us owns the table. Neither of us can put it on whatever table you want to put it on. It’s just us folks talking.
If you don’t want to tell us what you think about something, the usual method is not to talk about it. It’s certainly the most efficient and least annoying.Report
Wait, do you want me to answer the question you asked or tell you what I think about something?
Because if those things are at odds and I start to explain why and I get the response that I’m being non-responsive, I find myself in a place where I have no idea what it is in the hell that you want.Report
“Would you have it otherwise?” is an open-ended question. You had multiple choices. You could have said “Yes” or “No” and stopped there. You didn’t do that; you expanded on your answer in a way suggesting that you have some ideas on the subject. You could have told us what they are or asked if we wanted to hear them. You did neither. You emitted some bafflegab about a mythical table. If you want to tell us what you think, you can do that. If you don’t, you don’t have to. It’s your choice.Report
I actually answered the question and then asked you a question.
Wait a second… is this one of those things where you get to ask me questions but I don’t get to ask you questions?
Like, our relationship is that of lawyer versus person on the stand?
Wow, that would explain a lot!
I don’t like that dynamic and I refuse to play by it, by the way.Report
You did ask, and I answered. Twice. Your turn.Report
I may need you to explain how:
1) “I’d love to change the rules to how I’d have it instantiated.”
2) “Yes, I would have it otherwise.”
Are not direct answers to your question.
Or, I suppose, an acknowledgment that, whoopies, you guess that they are direct answers to your question.Report
The first was incomprehensible. The second was a direct answer, but it was your second try. And if all the flummery you surrounded it with is now off the table, we can all go home. But that’s up to you.Report
So let’s now move to “and I answered” on your part.
My question was whether what I wanted was on the table.
You never answered whether what I wanted was on the table. Could you point out where you did?
If you didn’t, that’s cool. You can just say “I didn’t answer that question”.Report
Neither of us owns the table. Neither of us can put it on whatever table you want to put it on. It’s just us folks talking.
Looking back, I can see why you, in particular, might have trouble understanding that answer. Ill-formed questions invite such answers. But it is an answer.Report
I’m mostly unclear on the requirements that you have for my answers to you and the requirements that you hold for yourself when it comes to the answers you give me.
Which, quite honestly, reflects the fundamental problem.
Do we want a set of universal rules?
Or do we want to temporarily hold to a temporary standard that matches what others say the universal rules should be?
Because, lemme tell ya, if we go back to “we’ll use your rules for me and we’ll use my rules for you”, that’s worse than “we’ll use the same rules we used yesterday”.Report
I don’t have “requirements” or the authority or desire to set them. I just muddle through as best I can with what I’m given to work with.Report
Well, I think that one of the big problems plaguing the relationship everybody has right now is that there are isolated demands for rigor and one of the places we see it is, yes, the academy.
Like we can have years of one particular ruleset and then, when the Trump Administration shows up and threatens Universities for, for example, antisemitism on campus in violation of campus policy, the response is not “wow… these DEI rules came back to bite us in the butt, I guess” but “where are the free speech absolutists”.
You’ve noticed that, right?Report
We’ve gone from “student speech codes can prevent the n-word because we don’t tolerate racism” to “protesters can call for Jews’ extermination because free speech”.
If University Presidents had longer terms then we might be able have the same person say both of those things.
The problem is racism is supposed to be a political club only used against the Right. It’s not supposed to be a Left v Left issue.Report
Jews are the monkey in the middle as the Right and Left play a game of “No, you’re the anti-Semite ” between them. There have been many Jews listing our problems with anti-Semitism on the Right and the Left for years since 9/11 but nobody really listens to us on this issue.
“Hashem, please grant me the confidence of a non-Jew explaining to me what is and isn’t antisemitic” has become something of a thing among Jews recently.Report
Apparently, you have to keep an eye out for the guy who loftily explains that the time for argument is past.Report
The left always struggled with anti-Semitism because Jews don’t fit into any neat place in their cosmology and also because a lot of the left is anti-Semitic. “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools” became a saying for a reason. For a lot of the left, anti-Semitism can come across as resistance or even emancipatory because Jews are associated with capitalism and power. Others really don’t want to criticize groups they are sympathetic to when they engage in anti-Semitism or want to ignore it if something viewed more important is at stake.
The other big issue is that basically the Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian sides are basically occupying completely different factual universes. They can’t agree on anything. Most Jews until you get to the extremes edges are going to see the various aliyahs and Zionism as a response to the persecution Jews faced and an attempt at Jewish national liberation. The Prp-Palestinian movement is incapable of understanding why anybody would be sympathetic towards Jews or Israel at all.Report
“I’m mostly unclear on the requirements that you have for my answers to you and the requirements that you hold for yourself when it comes to the answers you give me.”
Clement doesn’t want answers. He wants you to play a role. He assumes that if you refuse to play the role then saying “lol UR A RETART” is a good fall-back position, and because there’s no judge here to spank his dick he keeps doing it.Report
It took you a week to come up with that? There may not be a judge, but there is, more or less, a jury, and I’m content with its verdict on who’s playing games instead of providing answers and who isn’t.Report
You don’t have much to do, huh?Report
For what it’s worth, most American Jews do not want Khalil and other people detained and deported because of their political opinions regarding Israel even if we retch and said political opinions and found the Pro-Palestinian protest movements on campus to be a lot less innocent and righteous than they presented themselves at being. Most of us voted for Harris though.Report
And yet Trump seems to be speaking for you quite regularly.Report
Not to our general liking. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place because much of the further left is demanding that we take loyalty oaths to things we cant support like the right is demanding loyalty to oaths to things we can’t support. It’s dealing with two idiot armies saying that “no, you’re the anti-Semite” among themselves while ignoring what actual Jews are saying.
“Hashem, please grant me the confidence of a non-Jew explaining to me what is and isn’t antisemitic”Report
BTW, in case people do not understand how much fascism is wrapped up in gender politics, I present this absurd article:
https://www.21cir.com/alexander-dugin-ukrainians-are-collective-transgenders/Report