Domestic Left #59: From the bosom of the devastated earth
On Friday I was talking with my predecessor UE NEWS editor about the student encampments protesting Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, a war that can only be described as genocide, an intentional attempt to destroy an entire people. A veteran of the student anti-war movement from the 60s, he was telling me how impressed he was with both the savvy and the courage of today’s student protesters.
One of those smart, courageous people is Christopher Iacovetti, a member of UE Local 1103 and a graduate student worker at the University of Chicago. If you’re on social media, you may have seen the interview he gave just hours after cops in riot gear busted up the encampment he was part of, at 4:30am on Tuesday morning.
He says, in a conscious or unconscious (I suspect the former) echo of Mario Savio’s famous “There is a time when the operation of the machine become so odious ... you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels” address to the student sit-on on the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley in 1964:
There are limits to when we continue following orders. And when you’re talking about a genocide, visited upon a colonized population that’s two million people trapped in a ghetto … when that ghetto is being systematically starved, slaughtered; every hospital bombed, every university bombed, seventy percent of homes destroyed; 40,000 people murdered, 15,000 children murdered; the entire population on the brink of starvation — we say, if our government and our academic institutions are complicit in this, there comes a point at which we say we’re not following orders and it doesn’t matter what you do to us.
Tomorrow is my deadline for getting the UE NEWS to the printer (hence the brevity of this week’s newsletter). In addition to a short report about Iacovetti and his compatriots, I had the pleasure of reviewing a new radio documentary about how a UE local in a “deeply conservative rural county” in Massachusetts not only survived but grew during the red-baiting attacks on UE in the early 1950s. As one of my mentors, David Cohen, says in the program, Local 274 members at GTD were “Yankee Republicans” and “they didn’t like anyone telling them what to do.”
It is Mother’s Day (hi Mom!). As we celebrate our mothers, and the other mothers in our lives, and perhaps take them out to brunch, we would also do well to read the original Mother’s Day Proclamation, a plea made by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe in 1870. An excerpt:
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
Peace, everyone.