[News] The Students Will Not Tolerate Hypocrisy

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*The Students Will Not Tolerate Hypocrisy: The Eighteenth Newsletter 
(2024)*


Askhat Akhmedyarov (Kazakhstan), /Autumn Purge/, 2012.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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It was inevitable that the Global North governments’ full-throated 
support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians would result in 
furious retribution from their citizenry. That this retribution began in 
the United States is also not a surprise, given the ongoing cycle of 
protests that, since October 2023, have contested the US government’s 
blank cheque to the Israeli government. The US bankrolling of Israel’s 
extermination campaign against Palestinians includes 
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over one hundred weapons shipments to Israel since 7 October and 
billions of dollars of aid.

For a long time now, young people in the United States – as in other 
countries of the Global North – have felt the demise of promise from 
their society. Permanent precarious work awaits them, even those with 
higher degrees, and a more precious hold on morality has developed 
within them due to their own experiments to become better humans in the 
world. Cruelties of austerity and of patriarchal norms have forced them 
to turn against their ruling classes. They want something better. The 
assault against Palestinians has spurred a rupture. How much further 
these young people will go is yet to be seen.

Eng Hwee Chu (Malaysia), Lost in Mind, 2008.

Eng Hwee Chu (Malaysia), /Lost in Mind/, 2008.

Across the United States, students have built encampments 
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on over a hundred of university campuses, including the country’s most 
prestigious institutions such as Columbia, Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, Stanford, Emory, Washington University in St. Louis, 
Vanderbilt, and Yale. The students are part of a range of local campus 
groups as well as national organisations, among them Students for 
Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for 
Peace, CodePink, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Party for 
Socialism and Liberation. At these encampments, students sing and study, 
pray and discuss. These universities have invested their vast endowments 
in funds that are entangled with the weapons industry and Israeli 
companies, with the total endowments 
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at US institutions of higher education reaching roughly $840 billion. 
Seeing their ever-expanding tuition payments go towards institutions 
that are complicit in and profiting from this genocide is far too much 
for these students. Hence their determination to resist with their bodies.

Democracy is corroded when basic civil actions such as this are met with 
the full force of the state’s repressive apparatus. College 
administrators and local urban authorities have sent in heavily armed 
police forces to use any means necessary to remove the encampments, 
further reinforced by placing snipers on campus rooftops at multiple 
universities. Scenes of sensitive students and faculty members 
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being ripped away from their campuses, tased, brutalised, and arrested 
by police in riot gear are scattered across social media. But rather 
than demoralise the youth, these violent measures have simply sparked 
the creation of new encampments at colleges not only in the United 
States, but in countries as far afield as Australia, Canada, France, 
Italy, and the United Kingdom. Excuses such as the tents being a fire 
hazard might stiffen the resolve of the administrators, but they make no 
sense to the students, the faculty members who came out to defend them, 
or concerned people around the world. The images of this violence are 
reminiscent of the photographs of the massacres against US students 
protesting the Vietnam War and of police dogs being unleashed on young 
Black children during the US civil rights movement.

Liang Yulong (China), /May Fourth Movement/, 1976.

This is not the first time that young people, particularly college 
students, have tried to impose clarity upon a world encrusted by 
compromises. In the United States, earlier generations fought to get 
their colleges to divest from apartheid South Africa and from the ugly 
US-driven wars in Southeast Asia and Central America. In 1968, young 
people from France to India, from the United States to Japan, erupted in 
anger at the imperialist wars in Algeria, Palestine, and Vietnam, their 
eyes firmly set on Paris, Tel Aviv, and Washington for their murderous 
culture. Their attitude was captured by the Pakistani poet Habib Jalib, 
who sang at Lahore’s Mochi Gate /kyun darate ho zindan ki divar se/ (why 
do you scare me with the prison’s gate?), and then /zulm ki baat ko jahl 
ki raat ko, main nahin manta main nahin jaanta/ (oppression’s words, 
ignorance’s night, I refuse to acknowledge, I refuse to accept).

Since we are at the start of May, it might be valuable to recall the 
brave young people of China who took to the streets on 4 May 1919 to 
condemn the humiliations forced upon the Chinese people during the Paris 
Peace Conference (which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles). During 
the conference, the imperialist powers decided to give Japan a large 
part of the Shandong Province, which Germany had seized from China in 
1898. In this transfer of power, Chinese youth saw the weakness of 
China’s republic, which had been set up in 1911. Over four thousand 
students from thirteen universities in Beijing took to the streets under 
a banner that read ‘Strive for sovereignty externally, eliminate 
national traitors internally’. They were angry both at the imperialist 
powers and their own sixty-member delegation to the Paris conference, 
led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Lu Zhengxiang. Liang Qichao, a member 
of the delegation, was so frustrated with the treaty that he sent a 
bulletin back to China on 2 May, which was published and spurred on the 
Chinese students. The student protests pressured the Chinese government 
to dismiss pro-Japanese officials such as Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, 
and Lu Zongyu. On 28 June, the Chinese delegation in Paris refused to 
sign the treaty.

Nidhal Chamekh (Tunisia), Dessin 8, 2012.

Nidhal Chamekh (Tunisia), /Dessin 8/, 2012.

The actions of the Chinese students were powerful and far-reaching, with 
their May Fourth Movement not only protesting the Treaty of Versailles 
but unfolding a broader critique of the rot in China’s elite republican 
culture. The students wanted more, their patriotism finding shelter in 
currents of left-wing thought such as anarchism but more profoundly in 
Marxism. Just two years later, several of the important young male 
intellectuals that were shaped by this uprising, such as Li Dazhao, Chen 
Duxiu, and Mao Zedong, founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. 
Women leaders founded organisations that brought millions of women into 
political and intellectual life, later becoming core elements of the 
Communist Party. For instance, Cheng Junying founded the Beijing Women’s 
Academic Federation; Xu Zonghan established the Shanghai Women’s 
Federation; Guo Longzhen, Liu Qingyang, Deng Yingchao, and Zhang Ruoming 
created the Tianjin Women’s Patriotic Comrades Association; and Ding 
Ling became one of the leading storytellers of China’s countryside. 
Thirty years after the May Fourth Movement, many of these men and women 
displaced their rotten political system and established the People’s 
Republic of China.

Who knows where the refusals of students in the Global North today will 
go. The students’ refusal to acknowledge the excuses of their ruling 
class and accept its policies are dug deeper into their soil than their 
tents. The police can arrest them, brutalise them, and displace their 
encampments, but this will only make radicalisation harder to disrupt.

In the midst of the white heat of the May Fourth Movement, the poet Zhu 
Ziqing (1898–1948) wrote ‘Brightness’. His words rush from 1919 to our 
own time, from one generation of students to another:

    In the deep and stormy night,
    Ahead lies a barren wilderness.
    Once past the barren wilderness,
    There lies the path of the people.
    Ah! In the darkness, countless paths,
    How should I tread correctly?
    God! Quickly give me some light,
    Let me run forward!
    God quickly replies, Light?
    I have none to find for you.
    You want light?
    You must create it yourself!

That is what young people are doing: they are creating this light, and, 
even as many of their elders try to dim it, the brightness of their 
souls continues to illuminate the wretchedness of our system – at its 
heart the ugliness of Israel’s war – and the promise of humanity.

Warmly,

Vijay

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