Category Archives: Neutrality and Complicity

They Have Some Planes

Posted on by under activism, Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

“We have some planes…”
–Muhammad Atta, 9/11 hijacker

The great horror of 9/11 was supposed to be that Al Qaeda hijacked a bunch of American planes and used the civilians on them as mere cannon fodder for their military ends. The great redemption was supposed to be United Flight 93, which flew out of Newark, bound for San Francisco, but crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers stormed the cockpit and brought it down.

The horror hasn’t really ended. It’s just been concealed. United Flight 90 is the standard United flight to Tel Aviv out of Newark that I’ve taken for a decade, starting from the same place as Flight 93, but flying in the reverse direction. It turns out that everyone on it is, and has for some time been, a human shield for Israel. Our lives–and the honest truth–mean so little to our ruling class that they’ll sacrifice both to Israel without a thought.

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Event: “On Direct Action”

Posted on by under activism, Activist Interviews, General announcements, Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I’ll be moderating this event, which takes place Saturday, September 19, 1-3 pm in Princeton. It’s a conversation with four of the ten activists who helped shut down Port Elizabeth, New Jersey this past May 22 to stop the shipment through the port of weapons to Israel.

Scan the QR code on the flyer to register. Confirmed attendees will receive the location of the venue, which by request of the venue is only to be divulged to confirmed attendees. You can also use this link.

Home Is Where the Bombs Are

Posted on by under activism, Human Shields, moralism, MTSP Discussion: Gerald Gaus's The Tyranny of the Ideal, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, pedagogy, Princeton University, War with Iran

For decades now, we’ve been force-fed the dogma that American higher-education is the epitome of “woke”–a fully-owned subsidiary of “the Left.” I spent three years working for the National Association of Scholars, an outfit dedicated to manufacturing and marketing propaganda of this kind. I spent twenty-six years in higher education, teaching at a dozen institutions on two continents. I happen to live in a college town, Princeton, have lived here for fifteen years, am walking distance from Princeton University, and spend time on campus just about every day. I happen to work near another college town, New Brunswick, home to Rutgers University, and spend time on campus there about once a week. And I have friends and colleagues in higher education across the United States and Canada. So I’m no stranger to higher education or to controversies about it.

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The Neo-Nazis and the Permit Raj

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Fatwas, migrant defense, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, princeton, War with Iran

Princeton Patch has now confirmed that a white supremacist rally did in fact take place in Princeton this past Saturday afternoon, August 29th. Don’t miss the neo-Nazi video embedded in the article, “Youth in Revolt.” Apparently, the spirit of Leni Riefenstahl never quite died.

Unfortunately, the rally is (like so many things) increasingly being seen as a law enforcement matter, and the police, fixated by definition on matters of law enforcement, are now pursuing the thought that the people participating in the rally lacked a permit to march down the street or through Monument Park, and should have had one. Law enforcement’s idea of a solution to the rise of neo-Nazism in Princeton is to set up a Permit Raj: demand that activists get permits to exercise the privilege of assembling, marching, chanting, or holding signs. And make sure to demote those activities to the status of privileges in the process.

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The Human Shields of West Palm Beach

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

The New York Times ran an article the other day that’s notable both for how ordinary and how extraordinary it is. The facts are extraordinary, the attitudes taken to it predictably complacent. It’s yet another addition to my running series here on the use of “Human Shields,” not in Gaza or Southern Lebanon, but right here at home. “The U.S. Start-Up Making Low-Cost Interceptors for the Iran War,” it’s called, describing a military start-up based in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida. Here’s the beginning:

For Florida-based Powerus, becoming a global supplier of counterdrone technology has meant involving the Trumps, a golf course and a new way of doing business. 

In a small warehouse in the United Arab Emirates, workers spend up to 12 hours a day snapping together 3-D printed components to make interceptors capable of knocking Iranian drones out of the sky at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour.

The facility, which came online last month, is being used by Powerus, a start-up in West Palm Beach, Fla., to make inexpensive interceptors.

The factory is the company’s first foray into the Middle East, and part of its plan to become a global supplier. Factories affiliated with Powerus make roughly 3,000 drone interceptors a month, a spokesman said, and the company is trying to establish a network of factories that will increase production to 15,000 a month worldwide by mid-2027. It would not publicly disclose the identities of its customers or contract manufacturer in the Emirates.

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Silicon Valley’s Human Shields

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

Consider this excerpt from a Guest Essay in today’s New York Times by Sharon Weinberger, editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and author of a forthcoming book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War.

People seem to forget that Silicon Valley was largely born on the back of Pentagon funding during the Cold War. Fairchild Semiconductor, a company that became the wellspring of the computer chip industry’s growth, was one of those beneficiaries. Conventional wisdom held that, by 2016, many firms, not to mention their employees, found the idea of working on defense projects distasteful, if not unthinkable. Mr. Trump’s election that year seemed to widen the divide. In 2018, Google, under pressure from employees, pulled out of Project Maven, a Pentagon-funded A.I. project to advance drone warfare.

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Masters of the Universe

Posted on by under Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

The Times “Covers” the Iran War
Here’s The New York Times describing recent developments in the US-Israeli war against Iran and Lebanon:

The June memorandum of understanding was widely seen as a boon for Iran, granting the regime badly needed sanctions relief even as talks over tough concessions like nuclear enrichment were postponed for later. But Iranian leaders opted to escalate again rather than consolidate their gains from the deal, according to Nate Swanson, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group.

Ships could move through the Strait of Hormuz freely before the war. Iran’s insistence that the deal’s vague language on the issue gave it control over the waterway led to the deal falling apart. Iran began firing on ships that transited in channels outside Iranian waters, and American forces retaliated by bombing southern Iran, prompting a cycle of attacks and counterattacks across the Middle East.

In other words, according to the Times, “expert” opinion tells us that the failure of the ceasefire is to be chalked up to Iranian belligerence and irrationality. In fact, what it actually tells us is that the “experts” are full of shit. Every claim made in this passage is factually challenged nonsense. 

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Aristotle vs. Institutional Neutrality

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Neutrality and Complicity, Princeton University

A bunch of us had a contentious discussion the other day about institutional neutrality, apropos of my then-upcoming talk about it at the Heterodox Academy conference. One topic that came up was how institutional neutrality relates to curricular decisions. Is there an institutionally neutral way of deciding, say, whether a given topic or discipline merits inclusion within the curriculum of a given institution of higher education? Or a neutral way of deciding whether a program, department, division, school, or university itself ought to set aside the resources to make something a formal subject of study? Since not everything can be studied, decisions have to be made about what gets included and what doesn’t. Can those decisions be made “neutrally”? Continue reading →

Getting in the Way

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Human Shields, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

“…Jesus did get in the way of empire…”
–Mary Anne Grady Flores, Ithaca Catholic Workers Movement

As I’ve mentioned here a few times (May 26, May 28, July 1), I support the direct-action activist effort to block weapons shipments from the United States to Israel. These shipments conscript our complicity in Israeli aggression, occupation, and war crimes, and also conscript (and are embedded in) civilian commercial networks that are exploited for military purposes. They turn all of us into accomplices of and human shields for wars of aggression and brutality, a status that I think we’re obligated to resist and refuse.

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“Iran’s Fractured Leadership”

Posted on by under moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Princeton University, War with Iran

I wrote the post below the line back in April, but got pulled into other things, and never posted it. But I feel pretty vindicated: since late March, the Times’s narrative has turned 180 degrees. In March, they were quoting officials quite sure that Iran’s leadership was too “fractured” to act in a unified way. By July 29, the narrative became: “Trump Encounters a More Determined Iran as War Widens.” By August 1, it was: “In Iran, the U.S. Appears Headed for Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear.”

Good call, NYT, but how the fuck did that happen? How did Iran go from being all fractured and confused to achieving victory over the supposedly unified and all-powerful United States in four months? One possibility is that though “fractured,” Iran had the capacity to heal its “fractures” pretty fast. The other is that Iran was never all that fractured in the first place. In the first case, we’ve gotten no account from the Times of the transition from the one thing to the other; in the other, we’ve gotten no acknowledgement of its false assessment of Iranian dysfunction. Either way, the question arises: how much do these journalistic “experts” really know, anyway? To the extent that they know anything, how much of their knowledge is ultimately neutralized by the desire to generate nationalist propaganda? Continue reading →