The Mission of a Generation – Drive Out the Bush Regime

Speech given by Allen Lang, National Student and Youth Organizer, at World Can’t Wait’s National Conference on Jan. 12th, 2007.  The speech is a challenge for youth around the country to take up the mission to drive out the Bush regime, the importance of campuses in generating societal wide political upheaval and discusses the current project of holding 100 teach-ins in conjunction with World Can’t Wait’s “Mission for a Generation” Speaking Tour.

Mistakes. Mistakes. Mistakes.

This past week, President Bush announced an increase of up to 20,000 troops that will be deployed into Baghdad.  In his speech, he said that the U.S. has made some mistakes in Iraq and that he is responsible for those mistakes.

Lets look at some of these mistakes that characterize the war in Iraq:

*Bombing civilian hospitals
*The use of 510-pound napalm bombs
*The wanton killing of 700 people over the course of two days in Fallujah
*Twenty-four people murdered in cold blood by U.S. Marines in Haditha
*Standing in front of the entire world and lying about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction

No President Bush you are not responsible for mistakes in Iraq, you are responsible for war crimes.

But it is a world of difference between whether or not you see the war as unjust and perpetuating war crimes versus a failed policy, or military blunders or a diversion from the war on terror.  This war never “went  bad”, it was illegitimate from the beginning.  Look at Sunsara Taylor’s appearance on Bill O’Reilly and how different terms were set when he was forced to respond to the fact that this administration is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

What I want to talk about in this presentation is how the campuses and youth are central to the resistance necessary to drive out the Bush regime and how the campuses will be key in making the question of the Bush administration’s culpability in war crimes and crimes against humanity frame and fuel the debate on a societal wide level.

Living Legacies

To paraphrase a recent speech by World Can’t Wait: 

Every generation, each period of history, puts its stamp on the world.  But not every generation lives through pivotal epoch-shaping events.  The generation that rose up to stop the war in Vietnam [author’s edit] — the generation that lay down in the face of the Nazis.  These are among the generations that are celebrated or scorned.

Every generation has a mission.

In an article about the parallels of Nazi Germany and today Sunsara Taylor wrote:

During his rise, Hitler and his regime were filled with vulnerability. Large sections of people were turned off by his hateful rhetoric and aggressive tactics. Many thousands poured into the streets to protest and object. But, too many people either waited too long to resist or confined their objections to the effect of the Nazis only in one sphere of society.

It was reported that in the first concentration camp in Dachau, outside of Munich, people in the town could smell the burning flesh.  Now how much of a difference would it have made in history if the people revolted in protest to shut down that first concentration camp and if students at University of Munich, the most prestigious school in Germany, went on strike in protest of the existence of the Dachau concentration camp?

Fast forward four decades.

In the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s here in the U.S., the universities were in revolt, with millions and millions of students who had to confront the fact that their government was responsible for the mass murder of the people in Southeast Asia and they were moving society to not just oppose the war, but to challenge and change EVERYTHING!

Last year a member of Vets for Peace wrote an article reflecting on his experience at Princeton that exemplifies the positive legacy of his generation: 

Then, in the spring of 70, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger completely abandoned law and decency and invaded Cambodia. Kent State followed. And Jackson State (How many remember that?). The campus reacted as if it had been punched in the stomach. Seven thousand people came together at Jadwin Field House to consider how a responsible academic community should react to blatant, criminal immorality on the part of its government. We decided by acclimation: the university would be closed. We were on strike. It was surely Princeton’s finest hour and we knew it. There was a lump of pride in our throats, a sense of history in our hearts.

Shortly after, in one of the plush locker rooms in Jadwin, the Princeton lacrosse team met without coaches. We argued, discussed, agonized and in the end about half of us decided we could not in good conscience continue to play this game while Nixon rampaged, while so many innocent people died and while the university was on strike. It is difficult to explain to anyone who has not played varsity athletics the difficulty of this decision, but to a young jock, it meant a lot.

Last year, as Ayatollah Alito, the judge who was nominated by President Bush to the Supreme Court, a judge who is seeking to supplant constitutional law with biblical law and spent his years at Princeton during the Vietnam War pushing for the university to not allow women and Black people on campus reflected on his college years and said:

Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I couldn’t help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community. And I saw some very smart people behaving irresponsibly.

I urge every student here to behave VERY, VERY, irresponsibly in a surge of protests this Spring to protest this criminal war and demand this regime go, now.

Every generation has a mission, and over the past year, with every book I have read, with every documentary I have watched, with every soldier I have talked to and every town I’ve distributed the Call in, I can say with no doubt that the mission of our generation has to be driving out the Bush regime!

All the newspapers and pundits are asking with two years left, what legacy will Bush leave behind?  But the challenge has to be put to the youth today, what legacy will you leave behind?  Now is a time where a year of your life can make an impact in changing the course of history.  At a time when this administration has put the entire empire on the line, where it has lost credibility in the eyes of millions of people; are we just going to sit by and hope to weather the storm as they continue to burn down the planet?

When Bush announced a troop surge of 20,000 more troops to the world, he said Americans are going to have sacrifice a lot more over the next year.  Sacrifice what?

To sacrifice a generation to a bloody, unjust war.

To sacrifice our principles with silence.

Yes we need to sacrifice, but what for and what does that mean?  That means more than turning out to a protest every few months and then returning to one’s regular routine. It means a whole different ethos – a whole different set of priorities – a whole different tenor of our lives and of the times. It means refusing to rest or to compromise until those who are ruling over us – and attempting to lock down their rule over the entire planet – are driven from power.

Yes, this generation has the ability to communicate with each other through cell phones, email, file sharing, text messaging, You Tube, Myspace, Facebook – but what are we using this technology to communicate? Think of what could be possible if we brought forward a new culture of resistance with the overarching aim of driving out the Bush regime.

In brief, for those who are unaware of David Horowitz, Horowitz is an ex-60’s radical turned right-wing battering ram.  He is at the forefront of a right-wing assault on college campuses and has been at the centers of attacks on professors like Ward Churchill.  He champions a banner of “academic freedom” in the efforts to put a paralyzing chill on academia, that has larger implications for society at large.

One question I would like to pose for people to discuss at the conference is who has a better understanding of the strategic importance of campuses: World Can’t Wait and the larger progressive community or the right-wing movement spearheaded by David Horowitz?  Why have fascistic politicians and right-wing foundations poured millions of dollars into Horowitz’ campaign to silence dissent on college campuses?  If we do not transform the current dynamics on campus and allow this modern-day McCarthyism to put a chill over the universities, what are the implications going to be – not just for our ability to resist, but for the ability for academics to critically pursue questions in history, science, politics, sexuality, media and any other field of intellectual endeavor?

It doesn’t all fall into Horowitz, but it is a leading component.  For instance take stem cell research.  Bush has used his veto power to block stem-cell research on the basis of his intolerant brand of Christian fundamentalism.  Over the past period, there have been scientists and professionals working out of universities who have left the country, and gone to other countries where there are not restrictions on stem cell research.
 
From the restriction on stem cell research down to the attacks on teaching evolution in public schools, we will inherit a terrible future where the population looks at these subjects through the prism of Dark Ages biblical literalism if the Bush administration’s agenda is cemented into place.
 
Whether or not we can transform the situation on campuses in this country, especially campuses that are major centers of intellectual life like Columbia or Harvard, will be a decisive factor in whether or not the Bush regime can move forward in its fascistic remake of society.

Teach-Ins on Campus

But right there, people need to understand this, find someone in the science department who could talk about stem-cell research for a WCW Teach-In, why it’s important and what the restrictions by President Bush represent.
 
We really need to see the relationship of the Teach-Ins and the Mission of a Generation Speaking Tour with the kind of political resistance and upsurge that needs to be shaking up the campuses this Spring. 
 
This is a big question because many of us have grown up to have our political views shaped by missiles, terror alerts, and televangelists.  The same students in college now were the same students who were let out classes early five years ago when the World Trade Center buildings collapsed and haven’t known anything other than Bush.  A greater danger than being desensitized by the war is to not see any possibility of stopping it.

One student wrote after attending the “It’s Worse Than You Think” teach-in in NYC Oct. 30th:

We are a generation that has an unprecedented amount of information coming at us from all angles, but a severe deficit in actual understanding. People are given opinions without being told the perspectives they are born of, people are shown circumstances without being given pretext or context.

The more students understand the depth and scope of the crimes committed by the Bush administration, the more they will see how Democratic Party’s platform falls completely short of being able to stop the onslaught.  The more students understand that it is the people who make history, the more students will be able to imagine a different future.
 
We have to really challenge students this semester.  It is not acceptable for people to turn their heads and ignore the horrors and crimes being committed by their government because it is disturbing and might challenge the way they look at the world or what they would consider important in life.
 
There is a big difference if students look at the photos of Abu Ghraib and see them as emblematic of a systematic program of the U.S. government as opposed to some sort of aberration or the reckless actions of a ” few bad apples” in the army.

James Longley’s film Iraq in Fragments portrays the hellish life for Iraqis under U.S. occupation, where Americans patrol the streets in tanks, snipers shoot indiscriminately from rooftops, and barbershops are full of Iraqi men who watch President Bush speak on television as U.S. helicopters hover above their city.  Think of what it would mean if the people of Iraq saw the images of students shutting down their schools through political protest to demand the Bush regime be driven from office.

It’s up to the students to electrify the entire country, to break ranks with this terrible trajectory and to inspire new people to step forward.  We must have a utter contempt for the current convention and push things to unknown horizons. 

Student resistance that embodies the real-life urgency and moral certitude of the World Can’t Wait Call can blaze a new path that could open up new room for soldiers to resist, for Katrina survivors to organize in protest, for youth living under the gun of police terror to mobilize their neighborhoods to resist in the streets, and immigrants to step out from the shadows, like they did this past spring; to create a political situation throughout the country where Bush is forced to step down and millions of people refuse to accept to live in a society molded by the Bush doctrine.

We can draw lessons from the past, both positive and negative, but that isn’t enough.  We face an unprecedented situation that calls for unprecedented resistance.  Although we did not make the necessary impact on October 5th, 2006, and on the surface the campuses are not alive with protest, I feel the situation in this country, especially with the crucial juncture we have reached with Bush’s troop escalation, hold out an opening that can be seized if we choose to do so.  The opening and real potential cannot be seen through the narrow window of official politics and the mechanism of Congress, and that opening and real potential cannot be seized upon by the official political process.  We have to be able to see the volatility sweeping across the globe, the mood and major disconnect between the people and the government and that this opportunity can only be seized by breaking with the traditional political process and manifesting in the streets.

If the students aren’t on the forefront of that upheaval, who will be?