pynchon-l-digest V2 #2249

[Doug Millison]

Paul,
Maybe Lynn Cheney could use your help in finding more people for their
blacklist.
-Doug


http://www.tompaine.com/features/2001/11/15/2.html
Q&A
LYNNE CHENEY'S FREE SPEECH BLACKLIST

Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and science and technology
studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Largely lost in the recent mountain of domestic and international news was
the release of a report by a conservative academic group founded by Lynne
Cheney, the vice-president's wife. Quoting professors and university
officials, the report calls them "the weak link in America's response to
the attack." This accusation arises in part, according to the report,
because some faculty "refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and
diversity as antidotes to evil." TomPaine.com's Sharon Basco interviewed
Hugh Gusterson, one of the professors quoted in the report.

TomPaine.com: Professor Hugh Gusterson, you're the first academic quoted in
the report entitled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are
Failing America and What Can Be Done About It."
One of the opening paragraphs of that report says "While America's elected
officials from both parties and media commentators from across the spectrum
condemned the attacks and followed the President in calling evil by its
rightful name, many faculty demurred. Some refused to make judgments. Many
invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil."
You're the first academic quoted in this report, which states this, "Hugh
Gusterson, professor of anthropology and science and technology studies,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 'Imagine the real suffering and
grief of people in other countries. The best way to begin a war on
terrorism might be to look in the mirror.'" That's the end of your quote.

Hugh Gusterson: One interesting thing I want to observe about that quote is
where they chose to begin it. It's a quote from a speech I made at a peace
rally at MIT, shortly after September 11th. And I took as my theme the
difficulty of imagining the real suffering of other people. And just before
that quote they select, I talked about how difficult it is for us to
imagine the suffering of the people at the World Trade Center as they were
dying.
And then I went on from there to invite the audience to try and imagine the
suffering of people in Afghanistan if we were to go and declare war on the
people in Afghanistan. Of course, the quote is carefully cut so it seems
that I only care about the suffering of people in other countries and not
about the suffering of Americans as well, which is the truth.
That's part of a process of distortion that I think marks the report more
generally.
But also more generally I'd like to make a point that universities are not
adjuncts of the American government. The role and the purpose of the
university in America is not to cheer-lead for whatever the chosen policy
of the American government is. The role and purpose of the university is to
pursue knowledge and to encourage people to think critically. And in my
speech at the peace rally I was encouraging students and anyone who was
listening to think critically about American foreign policy, about the fact
that Americans have not only been victims of violence, but that Americans
have often inflicted violence on people in other countries -- in El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Vietnam, for example -- and the people in
those other countries might see U.S. actions as being terrorist actions in
their own way.

TP.c: Have you spoken to anyone at the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni about the accusations in the report and about your words being taken
out of context?

HG: [...] Four of those quotes come from the peace rally where I spoke.
There's a fifth quote from Noam Chomsky, from a public lecture he gave. And
you would think from reading their report that these are the only public
statements that have been made about September 11th here at MIT. But it's
just not true. There was a whole series of panel discussions organized by
the university administration. So, for example, the Center for
International Studies did a panel within a few days of September 11th.
There were four panelists, only one of those panelists in any way
criticized American foreign policy. Two of the others called for
assassinating Osama bin Laden, or for declaring war on Afghanistan. When
that panel was repeated on two subsequent occasions, the person who had
criticized U.S. foreign policy was dropped from the panel. There was
another panel discussion called "Technology and Terror." There were six
panelists including myself. I was the only one of the panelists on that
panel who said anything critical about American foreign policy.
So actually if you look at MIT, there's a vibrant discussion about the
implications of September 11th, many people have called publicly for
military action, the people who've criticized military action are actually
a minority of the recorded statements. You can go to the MIT news service
and check this out.
What the authors of the report did is that they very carefully selected
only those comments that were critical of American foreign policy, and
tried to pretend that those comments represented the entire range of debate
at MIT. This is a complete distortion and fabrication.

TP.c: What do you think they're trying to do with this report? You're an
anthropologist, you study human beings and their culture, their
relationships. What's your professional viewpoint on this "Defending
Civilization" report?

HG: Lynne Cheney has been on a mission for over a decade now to try to
clamp down on dissent on campus, and to clamp down on multiculturalist
perspectives in education. And I think this fits with a long-term agenda
she has. We see at this moment, after September 11th, that many groups are
opportunistically using the current crisis to try and push an agenda that
they had long before September 11th. And I think that's part of what Lynne
Cheney and this group are up to.
But more than that I think that any student of American history can tell
you that whenever the country is at war, whenever there is a national
crisis, it's very clear that the government attempts to clamp down on
dissenters, on aliens and so on. This goes all the way back to the Sedition
Act shortly after the founding of the Republic, you see it in the mass
deportations around the time of World War I, the trial and execution of
Sacco and Vanzetti, you see it in the internment of Japanese Americans
during World War II, and in McCarthyism.
This fits within that pattern. It's an attempt to intimidate internal
critics within the United States, to keep them quiet, to say that in a time
of crisis there's only one correct opinion, and it's the official orthodox
government opinion. And I find it ironic, actually, that Lynne Cheney and
the American Council of Trustees and Alumni are calling in this report for
more American history on campus. For compulsory classes in American
history. Because I think if you study America history you see quite clearly
that they fit into this long-standing historical pattern of scapegoating
internal critics in times of crisis. It's a very ugly historical pattern.

[...]

This is not about debate. It's about blacklisting people. It's one thing to
do a detailed analysis of someone's written or spoken opinions, and suggest
why you think they're wrong. That's not what this report is about. This
report is about compiling a list of people who they think are deviants as
an attempt to intimidate those people.
The second thing I would say is that the report uses the classic technique
of propaganda. In propaganda you impute your own sins to the other side. We
saw this with Soviet propaganda, for example. Every time the Soviets
invaded a country, they would talk about the other country having committed
aggression against the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union acting out of
self-defense.
Cigarette ads do the same thing. They take the perceived weakness of their
product, and they turn it around in advertisements. They say that
cigarettes make people attractive. Cigarettes taste nice, and so on.
And this report uses the classic techniques of advertising and propaganda.
They are about intimidation. They are about curtailing the free expression
of dissent on campus. Instead they accuse internal dissenters -- who are in
a minority in American society -- of trying to curtail other people's free
speech.