Free speech ends where hate and violence begin; and dehumanization is criminal incitement to violence.

     Yes, but what is hate speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who decides what is permitted, and how shall we enforce limits on each other’s freedoms?

     Such questions about our fundamental rules of how to be human together are now being fought out on university campuses throughout our nation and the world, which pit student mass protests against the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza against repression of dissent by authority both within education systems and between institutions of education and those of the state, and often shaped by the special interest money which has been allowed to define the terms of the debate.

     In large part the world has accepted the state of Israel’s claim that criticism of its use of force inclusive of vast war crimes in Gaza is anti-semitism. There are two problems with this; first, Palestinians and Israelis are both semites, one people divided by history as faith, ethnicity, and national identity weaponized in service to power. Second, this falsification is deployed globally by the state of Israel to both defend and subjugate the Jewish diaspora by enforcing identification of being Jewish with the state of Israel, which also deflects questioning of its brutal colonial-Apartheid settler regime.

     We must beware those who claim to speak and act in our name, and most especially commit unforgiveable acts to make us complicit in their crimes, for this is a strategy of fascist tyranny.

     Netanyahu’s settler regime, founded on conquest and theft of indigenous people’s lands as manifest destiny authorized by God in imitation of our own  Conquest of the Native Americans, the state of Israel institutionalized as a military society designed as a refuge for and avenger of Jews, and the whole Zionist ideology of identitarian politics and a nation of one faith and one blood, remains today the world’s most extreme and dangerous fascist successor state to the Nazis.

      But this need not remain so. Israel would very much like to convince her own citizens and all of us that to be a Jew is to be a member and figure of the state of Israel, and that to call out and oppose the state of Israel for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza is to be guilty of hate crime against Jewish people, but this is a lie, and one of many.

     Sowe come to this final question; how do we oppose state tyranny and terror without confusing and conflating a state with the people it claims to speak and act for? How answer division with solidarity?

     Netanyahu has incited anti Jewish hate as well as anti Israeli horror at his atrocities and war crimes. When a state demonizes itself before the world, it is the diasporic population of those it claims to act in service of as legitimation of power who suffer first. The crimes of Israel have reawakened a slumbering monster and put every Jewish person and community at risk. We must now bring regime change, peace, and democracy to Israel or witness the return of the global Fourth Reich. Save the Jews, bring down the Israeli state.

      Herein we may find guidance in Jean Genet’s restatement of Nietzsche’s principle of how those who hunt monsters become monsters themselves in the use of violence to enforce authorized identities and ideas of virtue; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”

      As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled What’s behind the antisemitism furor over college presidents’ testimony? Backlash against presidents of Harvard, UPenn and MIT has led to one resignation and implications for free speech on campus; “The controversy over the comments of three elite US university presidents made at a congressional hearing on antisemitism could reverberate far beyond their campuses.

     On Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation, the school’s highest governing body, announced that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, would remain in her post after calls for her removal following the testimony. The news came days after another president, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, quit following backlash to her responses to combative questioning at the hearing from the New York Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

     At issue is how campuses are handling accusations of antisemitism on college campuses following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s air and ground offensive in Gaza that has triggered a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests.

     But the controversy has widened since last week’s hearing, with implications for free expression on campus. Supporters of Palestinian rights see an effort to muzzle criticism of Israel, which faces condemnation for the soaring civilian death toll in its military offensive against Gaza.

     Why are college presidents facing calls to step down?

     For giving what were widely regarded as feeble and legally parsed responses to Stefanik’s pointed questions at a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill on 5 December on whether their universities’ codes of conduct allowed students to call for the murder or genocide of Jews.

     Magill became a particular target for calling it “a context-dependent decision” when asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated her university’s rules.

     Gay, Harvard’s first African American president, and Kornbluth, who is Jewish, offered similarly legalistic answers citing context, which were defended as technically correct by free speech advocates even while fuelling a political firestorm.

     Magill, before her resignation, and Gay both later apologised for their responses. Kornbluth has received MIT’s backing, and with Tuesday’s decision from the Harvard Corporation, so has Gay.

     What role did Elise Stefanik play in the hearing?

     Stefanik – a Harvard graduate and former Republican mainstream conservative who has rebranded herself as a pro-Trump Maga Republican – ambushed the university chiefs towards the end of five hours of testimony.

     Demanding “yes or no” answers, she succeeded in making them appear ambivalent or equivocal on the issue of genocide by posing general, broad-brush questions whose terms were open to competing definitions.

     In one particular line of questioning seen as tendentious by some, she linked the Arabic word “intifada” – a term generally translated into English as “uprising” – with genocide, a word originally coined to describe crimes of deliberate group-based mass destruction.

     “You understand that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews,” Stefanik asked Gay.

     The question was asked against the backdrop of chants – including at student demonstrations – to “globalize the intifada” in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.

     Yet using intifada as a synonym for genocide looks highly dubious. The first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s consisted largely of non-violent forms of civil disobedience. The second intifada of the 1990s and early 2000s saw a wave of suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis and maimed many others. While segments of Israeli society were left traumatised, it appeared to fall short of the legal definition of genocide.

    Gay did not contest or engage with Stefanik’s definitions but said “that type of hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent”.

     More damaging still was Stefanik’s exchange with Magill, who eschewed straight answers to get bogged down in legalisms.

     Asked by the congresswoman if “specifically calling for the genocide of Jews … constitute[d] bullying or harassment?”, Magill – already under fire by university donors for permitting a Palestinian literature festival on the Pennsylvania campus in September – replied: “If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.”

     What role are politicians and university donors playing?

     The row is being driven by politics. Stefanik’s critics argued that her crusade against antisemitism reeks of hypocrisy, with the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin asking on MSNBC: “Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time? She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner,” referring to an event with the two avowed antisemites at the former US president’s Mar-a-Lago property last November.

     Stefanik herself has been previously accused of echoing the antisemitic “great replacement” theory. White nationalist proponents of the theory charge that white people in the US are being usurped by people of color in a process at least partly engineered by Jews.

     Her attack on the university presidents has already won vocal praise from Donald Trump. Yet it is being given added credence by support from some Democrats.

     The three college presidents were condemned by a spokesman for the White House while Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, joined the clamour for Magill’s resignation. Magill’s ouster followed a letter authored by Stefanik and the Democratic representative Jared Moskowitz – and signed in total by 71 Republicans and three Democrats – that called for all three university chiefs to go.

     Many millions of dollars are at stake, with donors at UPenn playing a vocal role in Magill’s departure, and many others demanding that Gay and Kornbluth step down. Ross Stevens, owner and founder of New York-based Stone Ridge Asset Management, announced the withdrawal of a $100m gift to the University of Pennsylvania, citing a “permissive approach to hate speech”.

     Why are free expression advocates concerned?

     Fire (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have both argued that slogans such as those cited by Stefanik are protected speech, as defined in the first amendment of the US constitution.

     “Phrases like ‘from the river to the sea’, ‘no ceasefire’, ‘make America great again’ and ‘no justice, no peace’ are protected,” the ACLU’s senior policy counsel, Jenna Leventoff , said last week.

     Elaborating on the faltering responses of the university heads in Congress, and warning against efforts by colleagues to take a more restrictive approach, she added:

     “Speech that contains a serious and imminent threat of violence, incitement to violence, or that pervasively harasses someone based on their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin or other protected characteristics is not protected by the first amendment or academic freedom principles … but Congress cannot expect university administrators to be in the business of deciding which deeply held beliefs may be censored and which views may be expressed,” she wrote.

     Stefanik’s invocation of “intifada” may be a case in point: a word seen by Israel’s advocates as synonymous with violence against Israelis is hailed by champions of the Palestinian cause as a legitimate expression of national conviction. University heads now face being asked to referee this difference of perception.

     What are students and faculty members saying?

     At Harvard, Gay gained considerable support from colleagues, with hundreds of professors signing a petition opposing calls for her to stand down before the Harvard Corporation affirmed its own support. MIT has backed Kornbluth, praising her “excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate”.

     Students have given a mixed response. At UPenn, the campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, quoted some students as fearing the impact Magill’s forced resignation would have on free speech.

     “I am alarmed at the implications for free speech and academic freedom as the far right uses this resignation as license to start policing calls for peace, ceasefire, and Palestinian rights,” one student said.

     But the paper also quoted a senior student, Albena Ruseva, as hailing the president’s resignation as “a ‘small win’ for people who value free speech while at the same time opposing hate speech”.

      As written by Moustafa Bayoumi in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Harvard and UPenn presidents walked into a trap in Congress; “Last week in Congress, Representative Elise Stefanik proved how well she can throw a dead cat.

     Let me explain. During an hours-long hearing on 5 December, members of Congress grilled university presidents from Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, some of the country’s most elite institutions of higher learning, about antisemitism on their campuses. But it was Stefanik’s questioning that grabbed the spotlight. She repeatedly asked the presidents essentially the same question: does calling for the genocide of Jews on your campus constitute harassment, yes or no?

     The question is a trap, of course, and for several reasons. The first and most important reason is that there’s no evidence anyone since 7 October, or even in recent history, has called for the genocide of Jews on any American campus, public or private. Stefanik’s question implies that such calls are commonplace, but she offered no proof.

     The second reason this is a trap is that the question can’t be answered with just “yes” or “no”. Public universities, as state actors, are bound by the first amendment, as are private universities which receive federal funding. And the vast majority of private universities guarantee freedom of speech and academic freedom as part of their core mission. The American university is, by tradition and design, precisely where abhorrent ideas can be uttered. So, if someone had called for the genocide of Jews, which they haven’t, that would be extremely disturbing but still protected speech.

     The utterance alone does not constitute harassment. In fact, the utterance should be an opportunity to debate and debunk – and not silence – the worst ideas of our day. To rise to harassment, such conduct must be targeted at an individual and, as a 2019 supreme court case decided, be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit”. Context makes the difference, or as this 2011 article, published by the American Bar Association, says: “It is the context that matters, and the context helps to make the determination about whether conduct is actionable under school policy or protected by the First Amendment.”

     The third reason the question is trap is that the situation is complicated by the overarching codes of conduct many universities have adopted, codes that I believe do often (wrongly) cross over into limiting speech. But here, too, Stefanik seems confused. Writing in the Wall Street Journal after the hearing, Stefanik ridiculed Harvard for requiring incoming undergraduates to take an online training session to help them identify language and behavior that could be considered hateful to others. But, while mocking Harvard’s approach, Stefanik – a rising Maga Republican – is at the same time demanding to be included in it. So, which is it?

     To recap: all three presidents were asked how they would hypothetically punish hypothetical students for uttering hypothetical thoughts. They answered, albeit with lawyerly detachment. Yet their responses were deemed by many, from the White House on down, as callous and insufficiently protective of Jewish students. Following the hearing, all the presidents attempted damage control, but the University of Pennsylvania president has since resigned.

     Meanwhile, not a word was spoken about the threats that Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim students and faculty (and their supporters) are facing. Billboard trucks drive around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City and Washington, broadcasting the names and faces of Palestinian supporters and libelously labeling them “antisemites”. University leaders suspend campus groups such Students for Justice in Palestine in moves the ACLU has said “harken back to America’s mistakes during the McCarthy era, and in the months and years after 9/11”. Three Palestinian college students, speaking a mixture of Arabic and English, were shot in Vermont over Thanksgiving break in what was “absolutely was a hateful act”, the Burlington police chief told CNN. On 29 November, dozens of students and some faculty members at Trinity College, where one of the students is enrolled, walked out of a vigil for the injured student because they say the campus administration is downplaying their insecurity on campus.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

     But there is something even more ominous in Stefanik’s questions. “You understand that the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for … the genocide of Jews,” she asked the Harvard president, Claudine Gay. I’m not aware if Stefanik is an Arabic speaker, but I suspect she’s not since she’s wrong again. The term “intifada” literally means “shaking off”. It’s often translated as “uprising”, and there have been non-violent and violent periods of Palestinian uprisings against a brutal Israeli occupation. At no point, however, has the word ever stood as a call for the genocide of Jews. What a gross misrepresentation.

     But Stefanik’s questions are aimed at backhandedly discrediting words like “intifada” and patrolling the language we use to describe the Palestinian struggle. (We see the same thing with the phrase “from the river to the sea”, a version of which incidentally forms part of the founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.) Needless to say, demonizing the Arabic language works to demonize Palestinians, Arabs and the world’s Muslims. And handing over the definitions of our political terms to partisan politicians would spell the death of free inquiry in this country.

     Which brings us back to Stefanik’s dead cat. In politics, a “dead cat strategy” is used to divert attention away from one issue and on to another by metaphorically throwing a dead cat onto a dining room table in the middle of a dinner party. “People will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted,” is how Boris Johnson once described the strategy. “That is true, but irrelevant,” he continued. “The key point … is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

     What Congress is not talking about is that the Israeli assault on Gaza has killed at least 17,000 people, over 7,000 of them children, and injured over 49,000. Israel has cut off regular supplies of food, water, fuel, electricity and medical supplies. Around 1.8 million Palestinians of Gaza’s 2.2 million have been displaced. More than 60% of the housing has been destroyed. Half the population is officially starving. Hospitals, historic mosques, essential libraries and the entire foundation of a society have been bombed into rubble. Meanwhile, the US was again the sole UN security council veto for a ceasefire, and the state department invoked an emergency measure to expedite weaponry to Israel that will almost certainly kill civilians. On 9 December, a group of esteemed scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies warned in a public letter “of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza”.

     Elise Stefanik would have us believe that that we should be more worried about non-existent calls for genocide on American college campuses than with what many experts are warning is an actual genocide in Gaza, funded and supported by US bombs and political cover. So, all credit where credit is due. She really knows how to throw a dead cat.”

     Amy Goodman’s interview of Peter Beinart and Omer Bartov in Democracy Now is illuminating; “AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at allegations that universities have failed to address threats of violence against Jewish students following a contentious congressional hearing on antisemitism and a broader effort to restrict pro-Palestinian speech on campus.

On Saturday, the University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill resigned her position over fallout from last Tuesday’s House Education Committee hearing. UPenn board chair Scott Bok, who announced her resignation, he also resigned soon after.

Magill was questioned along with Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth by the right-wing Republican New York congressmember and Trump ally Elise Stefanik. This is Stefanik questioning Harvard President Gay first, then UPenn President Magill.

CLAUDINE GAY: … free speech extends —

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes-or-no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term “intifada,” correct?

CLAUDINE GAY: I have heard that term, yes.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term “intifada” in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?

CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me. …

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Well, let me ask you this: Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say “from the river to the sea” or “intifada,” advocating for the murder of Jews.

CLAUDINE GAY: As I have said, that type of hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me. …

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: Ms. Magill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

LIZ MAGILL: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?

LIZ MAGILL: If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.

REP. ELISE STEFANIK: So the answer is yes.

LIZ MAGILL: It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill. She announced her resignation Saturday and will remain a tenured law professor at UPenn. Major donors to the University of Pennsylvania had demanded Magill’s resignation since September, after she refused to cancel the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on campus.

New York Republican Congressmember Elise Stefanik herself faced scrutiny for a campaign ad she ran last year that echoed Donald Trump and appeared to promote the white supremacist “great replacement” theory that Jews want to replace and disempower white Americans. She made similar comments after the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that was inspired by the “great replacement” theory. After news of Magill’s resignation, Stefanik called for the ouster of the Harvard and MIT presidents, writing on social media, “One down. Two to go.” She was echoed by Trump.

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you, Elise. What a job she’s done. You know, I watched the way — she’s very smart. I watched the way she was asking the questions, and they were asked in a very complex way. And these women, who I guess are smart, but, boy, that was — they were really dumb answers, weren’t they? But they were asked in a very complex way, and these people had no idea what the hell they were doing. I said, “You know, I think she’s got to lose her job.” I guess they’re all going to be losing their job within the next day or two, but one down, two to go.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as Harvard President Claudine Gay has growing support. Some 600 professors signed a petition against calls for her to step down this weekend. The school’s board of directors met Sunday.

Congressmember Stefanik is a Harvard alumna and was removed from a Harvard advisory board in 2021 over her comments about voter fraud in the 2020 election that had, quote, “no basis in evidence.”

For more, we’re joined by Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and, as well, an MSNBC contributor, and Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, the Israeli American author of numerous books. His books include, recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. He has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide.

Peter Beinart, let’s begin with you. Your response to the congressional hearing and the grilling of the three women presidents of MIT, Harvard and UPenn, and the resignation then of UPenn President Magill, as well as the chair of the board of trustees, Scott Bok, who announced her resignation, then resigned himself?

PETER BEINART: This really isn’t about those individual presidents. It’s about the fact that given the extraordinary slaughter that’s happening in Gaza, there is a movement on college campuses and across America for a ceasefire and to end American complicity in that slaughter. And in response to that, the effort is now to try to limit the ability of people who want to protest U.S. policy and support Palestinian rights from being able to organize on college campuses. So the reason that you’re going after these presidents is to try to set a precedent and bring in people who will be much tougher on restricting the ability of students and faculty and others who want to organize politically against this war in Gaza. This is what this is about.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about exactly what happened, for people who missed it this past week? We just played an excerpt of the questioning by Stefanik. I mean, it went on for hours, the overall congressional testimony, but it came down to these points. And this is the critical point. She said, “It’s a yes-or-no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term ‘intifada,’ correct?” And President Gay says, “I’ve heard that term.” Congressmember Stefanik says, “You understand the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.” This was the question they were asked. Elaborate on that, Peter Beinart, and talk about their responses.

PETER BEINART: Right. The premise of the question was just nonsense, right? The premise of the question is that “intifada,” which essentially means “uprising,” is the equivalent of an attempt at genocide at Jews. “Intifada” is actually a term that has been used even in uprising against Arab governments. Intifada can take nonviolent forms. The First Intifada had a lot of nonviolence. The Second Intifada, tragically, involved suicide bombings, which were horrifying and totally immoral. But these were uprisings in the context of oppression. It’s like saying a Ukrainian uprising against Russians that also killed Russian civilians would be an attempt at Russian genocide. It makes no sense.

But the problem was that these presidents, because they were not willing to contest the premise, because they were so lawyered up and defensive in their answers, that they basically accepted the premise and then were put in this ridiculous position where they didn’t — when they didn’t say it would be unacceptable for people to call for the genocide of Jews. Of course it would be unacceptable for people to call in mass protest for the genocide of Jews, but that’s not what was happening.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Omer Bartov into this discussion — you’re considered by the Holocaust Museum one of the leading scholars on genocide — and go to this second point. Congressmember Stefanik was asking the college presidents, she said, “Well, let me ask you this: Will admission offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say ‘from the river to the sea’ or ‘intifada,’ advocating the murder of Jews?” equating “from the river to the sea” and “intifada” with the murder of Jews. Can you respond to this? And also explain that term and how it’s been used by both Hamas but also protesters and the Likud party in Israel.

OMER BARTOV: Well, hi, and thank you for having me.

First of all, I want to agree with what Peter was saying. I think that this whole debate is so off-kilter, that the terms that are being used are being misused and are not being challenged by these three presidents, who should have been better prepared, not by their lawyers, but actually to have studied the issue itself and to have spoken about how they think about it. Using the term “intifada” is, of course, wrong, as Peter was saying. It means “uprising.” And uprising against oppression, one should support it.

Using the term “from the river to the sea” can mean all kinds of things. There are 7 million Jews living between the river and the sea, and 7 million Palestinians. Historically, speaking about “from the river to the sea,” or, in fact, both banks of the river in the traditional Zionist revisionist ideology, meant that the Jews should be in control of Eretz Yisrael, of the — sorry, of the land of Israel. I apologize.

AMY GOODMAN: Repeat —

OMER BARTOV: Sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Repeat that point.

OMER BARTOV: Yeah, sorry. So, the term “from the river to the sea,” or Greater Israel, which means Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, that land stretches between the Jordan —

AMY GOODMAN: We’re hearing you fine.

OMER BARTOV: Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m getting interruption here. Means the land between the Jordan and the sea, and, in fact, for some of the traditional revisionist movement, the right wing of the Zionist party, meant also across the river, even east of the river, into what is now known as Jordan, Transjordan at the time. So, to say that that is an antisemitic term or that it calls for the genocide of the Jews is nonsense. It can mean, if you look at it from the point of view of the Israeli right, that Jews have the right to rule over all the land of Israel. And many of the people who are now in Netanyahu’s government, the settler right-wing Jewish supremacists, such as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, they would like to rule over all the land, and they would like the Palestinians to go away or to agree to be ruled over by the Jews. Now, it can also mean the opposite. If you look at what Hamas has been saying, it can mean exactly the opposite. Hamas indeed wants to create an Islamic Palestinian state where Jews would either have no room or would have to be living there in much smaller numbers and be tolerated.

And so, it does not mean what people say, unless you ask them what do they mean. And in that sense, putting these three presidents to answer these questions, to my mind, A, they should have said, “Look, if you speak about genocide, no one should condone genocide, not of Jews and not of anyone else. If you’re speaking about intifada or about political slogans, you have to explain what they are, how we understand them.”

But beyond that, I have to say that this whole discussion seems to me to be the least important issue. What is most important is that Israel now is — has been conducting a war for weeks and weeks in which it has killed thousands and thousands of Palestinians. It has moved them to a very small part of the Gaza Strip. It has destroyed their property and has not even made a commitment to allow them to return. And it’s been doing that with enormous amounts of American-supplied munitions, not only rockets, but also tank shells, artillery shells and anti-rocket rockets. And that has to stop, and there has to be a political plan as to how to move to the next day, which is what Netanyahu is refusing to do. This is the main issue, not how we talk about politics on American campuses. That’s useful to talk about it, but it’s not the main emergency issue right now to my mind.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you two questions. You’re in Paris, France, now, but you’re generally in Cambridge, and you’re a professor at Brown University in Providence. What should Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, do you feel, at this point, should she do? Hundreds of Harvard professors have rallied around her. And I also wanted to ask about Hisham Awartani, who is the Brown University student, a student at your school, who was shot with two other Palestinian students in Burlington, could well be paralyzed, a horrifying situation. I mean, I think there’s no question that antisemitism is increasing around the country, and that is very serious, and also Islamophobia.

OMER BARTOV: Yes. I mean, both are, of course, increasing, and we should do everything we can against them. And what happened with Hisham and the other two Palestinian students is horrible. In some ways, I would say, it reflects both the heated discussion that we have about Israel-Palestine and also the kind of gun culture and violence that we have in America, quite separately from what is happening in the Middle East.

As for resignations of presidents, I think this is — this would be terrible. I totally support those — I’m not a Harvard faculty. My wife is. But I totally support those people who have come out against her resignation. I think it would give completely the wrong signal, because the pressure is coming in large part from donors. That will create an impression that there is pressure from moneyed people, that there’s pressure from often people identified with Jewish interests, with right-wing Israelis, with the Israeli government, to control speech. And just as there has been, I must say — and that was reflected in the responses by these presidents — great sort of timidity in saying anything that is not correct speech, to correct it the other way, to try and control it in a way that does not allow criticism of Israel, presents criticism of Israel as antisemitism. And to do it by firing, for instance, at Harvard, the first African American president of Harvard would be an absolute disaster, and I would totally oppose it.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking Peter Beinart about Republican Congressmember Stefanik and her history. This is Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland speaking on MSNBC.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: With lax Republican gun laws across the country, we’ve got to take very seriously anybody who’s making any kind of violent threats, especially genocidal threats. Having said that, where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism, when she is the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time? She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner — Nick Fuentes, who doubts whether October 7th even took place, because he thinks it was some kind of suspicious propaganda move by the Israelis. And the Republican Party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that, and yet somehow she gets on her high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT.

AMY GOODMAN: So, last year, Republican Congressmember Elise Stefanik of New York was criticized for seeming to endorse the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the white supremacist theory maintaining white people are being replaced by people of color and that Democrats are deliberately trying to deluge the U.S. with immigrants in order to gain an electoral advantage. We all know what happened in Charlottesville, the mass protest where the Trump-supporting white supremacists kept repeating “Jews will not replace us.” Peter Beinart, can you respond to the woman who’s taking these women presidents, at least attempting to, and succeeded in the case of UPenn President Magill, down?

PETER BEINART: First of all, there’s a tremendous irony in the fact that Elise Stefanik is supposedly so upset about people saying Palestine will be free from the river to the sea, because Elise Stefanik supports the existence of one country which denies Palestinians basic rights between the river and the sea. And as for the idea that she has some great concern for Jews, as you said, she’s actually trafficked in the same “great replacement” theory that is what motivated the Pittsburgh shooter because of this insane idea that Jews are bringing in Black and Brown immigrants into the United States to replace white people. Elise Stefanik doesn’t actually care about Jews. What she believes in is ethnonationalism. She believes in a white Christian state in the United States. And she’s sympathetic to forces in Israel that believe in a Jewish supremacist state, because fundamentally she’s hostile to the basic principle that people should be treated equally under the law irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity. She’s hostile to it in Israel-Palestine. She’s hostile to it in the United States. That’s what motivates her.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. We’ll continue, of course, to cover this issue. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, author of a number of books, including, most recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.

      Interdependent with the issue of propaganda in service to power is the co-optation of universities as success filters by private money.

     As written by Robert Reich in his newsletter, in an article entitled When wealthy donors oust university presidents over how they answer congressional questions: A frighteningly dangerous precedent; “Friends,

     America’s prestigious universities play a big role in determining who gets into America’s wealthy elite.

     A degree from Harvard, Penn, or M.I.T., to take three examples, is a meal ticket to a lucrative job on Wall Street or a corporate law firm and to the richest and most influential people in the land.

     But as America becomes increasingly stratified by wealth, those tickets are easily abused.

     Universities that give preference in admissions to the children or grandchildren of major donors serve to widen inequality even further.

     Universities that allow major donors to influence what is taught or expressed on campus could be seen to suppress ideas that threaten the wealthy — which could chill freedom of expression and fuel social resentment.

     Which brings us to the latest imbroglio.

      Tuesday, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and M.I.T. tried to give precise answers to questions from members of Congress about whether their university cultures had encouraged hostility toward Jews — hostility that has surged since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s attack on Gaza in response.

     In their opening remarks, all three denied it and repeatedly condemned antisemitism.

     Then Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York (and herself a Harvard graduate) asked a yes-or-no question: Would calls for genocide of Jews on campus violate their codes of conduct or harassment policies?

     The presidents hedged. “If the speech turns into conduct, yes, it can be harassment,” Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, a former dean of Stanford Law School, replied in lawyer-like fashion.

     “I’m asking if specifically calling for the genocide of Jews — does that constitute bullying or harassment?” Stefanik pressed her point.

     “If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment,” said Magill.

    “So the answer is yes?”

     “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman,” Magill said.

     Faced with the same question, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, also temporized. “It can be,” she said, “depending on the context.”

     The university presidents should have answered unambiguously and unequivocally that calls for genocide of any group are intolerable.

     Their failure to do so has fueled a firestorm.

     Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager, said he would withdraw a $100 million gift to Penn. Other wealthy Penn donors called for Magill to resign.

     Even prior to the hearing, a campaign had been launched by some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures to oust all three university presidents for failing to adequately condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

     The influential board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton School, chaired by Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, called on alumni to withhold donations to Penn.

     The billionaire investor Bill Ackman, Harvard alumnus and head of New York hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, called for the three university presidents to be fired.

     The day after their testimony, Magill and Gay issued statements in efforts to contain the damage.

     But on Saturday evening, after an emergency meeting of Penn’s board of trustees, Magill resigned under pressure.

     Over the weekend, calls from donors for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to resign grew louder, as prominent donors demanded her ouster, too.

     I can well understand the anger and frustration of these donors. In their congressional testimony, the university presidents should have been clearer that their institutions do not tolerate calls for genocide. Period.

     But to use their power as major donors to force or seek the ouster of these presidents is almost as repugnant as the failures of these presidents to unambiguously condemn calls for genocide. It endangers the autonomy of America’s universities.

     Who’s kidding whom? Those of us who have spent our lifetimes teaching in prestigious universities are well aware of the influence of big donors. The major job of today’s university presidents is to solicit money, and their largest targets are typically denizens of Wall Street.

     For the same reason, boards of trustees are packed with wealthy alumni, often from the Street, who routinely veto candidates for university presidencies who harbor views they find offensive.

     But not until now have major donors so brazenly used their financial influence to hound presidents out of office for failing to come out as clearly as the donors would like on an issue of campus speech or expression.

     As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose — based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world.”

      As written in the World Socialist Web Site, in an article entitled Oppose the state-organized witch hunt of opponents of genocide on US campuses; “The International Youth and Students for Social Equality denounces the forced resignation of University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) President Liz Magill on December 9. This witch hunt is aimed at suppressing the mass opposition of student youth and faculty to the genocidal war being waged by the Israeli fascist regime against the Palestinians in Gaza.

     Magill’s resignation was forced through by means of an alliance between right-wing billionaire donors, fascist Republicans, the Biden White House, the Democratic Party and the military-intelligence apparatus. Along with Harvard University President Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Sally Kornbluth, Magill was subjected to a McCarthyite hearing in the House of Representatives. The presidents of three of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world were subjected to demagogic questioning spearheaded by the antisemitic, far-right Republican Elise Stefanik over their alleged failure to address the supposed wave of antisemitism sweeping across college campuses.

      Magill’s ouster, the attack on democratic rights by the American ruling class has reached a qualitatively new stage. Over the past two months, universities and colleges around the country have moved to ban student groups such as the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace. In addition, students have been suspended and have had job offers revoked.

     When students opposed to the genocide in Gaza have been doxxed, threatened and attacked, university administrations have demonstratively refrained from defending them. Screenings of the documentary Israelism, which exposes the systematic indoctrination of American Jewish youth with far-right Zionist ideology, and their growing opposition to it, have been banned at the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter College in New York and other campuses.

     New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has threatened to withdraw state funding if university presidents fail to “denounce antisemitism and calls for genocide” on college campuses. While the campaign has so far centered on the campuses, it increasingly extends to high schools. High school students in New York City and San Diego who have organized protests against the genocide in Gaza and voiced opposition to it in student newspapers have been denounced as “antisemites” by the media, and pro-Palestinian teachers have been victimized.

     The message is clear: Anyone who dares voice opposition to or even question the policies of the Israeli state is to be silenced, driven from the campuses, blacklisted and attacked and hounded by far-right mobs on social media and at campuses and workplaces. The central aims of this witch hunt are twofold: First, the destruction of free speech on the campuses and beyond, and, second, the complete subordination of schools and universities to the interests of the state, the military and the aims of US foreign policy.

     Like every major pro-war and anti-democratic campaign in history, this witch hunt is built on a pack of lies. The first lie is that there exists a broad-based antisemitic movement on US campuses calling for a “genocide of Jews.” The only people subjected to genocidal policies today are the Palestinians, whose deliberate ethnic cleansing in Gaza meets the textbook definition of genocide. And the only students who have been violently attacked on US university campuses in the past two months are Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students, three Palestinian undergraduates who were shot in Vermont, and many others who were physically assaulted, doxxed and threatened for speaking out against genocide.

     The second and related lie is that opposition to the state of Israel constitutes “antisemitism.” This claim, which implies that the Zionist state of Israel is synonymous with the Jewish people and Judaism, is itself based on a racist assumption: that all Jews, by blood or some other mystical connection, have an inherent loyalty to the Israeli state.

     The truth is that Zionism historically emerged as a nationalist reaction by sections of the Jewish bourgeoisie and middle class against the Marxist and socialist movement in the European and Jewish working class. Although it was granted false legitimacy by the fascist horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, the Zionist state never represented the social interests of the Jewish masses, but rather those of a capitalist ruling class and imperialism. In fact, Jewish people and organizations, especially Jewish youth, have played a leading role in protests against the genocide in Gaza.

     The equation of opposition to Zionism and genocide with antisemitism is not only false and slanderous. It also serves to strengthen and rehabilitate the actual fascist and antisemitic right, while criminalizing left-wing opposition to capitalism, fascism and imperialism.

     It is no coincidence that this campaign is spearheaded by the fascistic New York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, a supporter of Donald Trump and the fascist coup attempt of January 6. Stefanik invokes the racist and antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” which alleges a conspiracy by international Jewry to flood “white” countries with masses of non-white immigrants. She is the personification of the transformation of the Republican Party into a fascist party dominated by outright neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists.

     The Democratic Party is fully complicit in this far-right assault on democratic rights. For years, the Democratic Party and outlets like the New York Times have systematically worked to undermine democratic consciousness through racialist falsifications of the history of the American democratic revolutions such as the 1619 Project and anti-democratic witch-hunting campaigns like #MeToo.

     Now, over the genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Party and Biden administration are consolidating their de facto alliance with fascist forces. While figures like Stefanik are now legitimized as “opponents of antisemitism,” Ukrainian neo-Nazis are praised as fighters for “democracy” and armed to the teeth by NATO to fight an imperialist war against Russia, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascist cabal is raining US-manufactured bombs, shells and missiles on the people of Gaza.

     There is an insoluble connection between the imperialist rampage of the US and its proxies abroad and the state-led attack on democratic rights and strengthening of fascist forces at home. The US veto in the UN Security Council of a resolution calling for a ceasefire makes abundantly clear that the Gaza genocide is state policy of the American ruling class. Bernie Sanders, the chief representative of the nominally “left” faction of the Democratic Party, continues to publicly oppose a ceasefire.

     This open embrace of fascist mass murder in Gaza is part of a new imperialist redivision of the world, which began with the imperialist-provoked war against Russia in Ukraine, now well into its second year, with hundreds of thousands of dead. The conflict in the Middle East signifies a new front in the war between US-NATO and Russia. War preparations against China are also far advanced. With the staggering violence inflicted upon the Palestinians, the imperialist powers are sending a message as to how they intend to deal with opposition to their rule, both abroad and at home.

     But this policy is meeting with growing popular opposition. The naked crackdown on free speech is an admission by the US political establishment that it has already “lost the youth,” that there is no popular support for its policies, and that it is no longer able to stampede public opinion as it has in the past. Despite relentless pro-Israeli war propaganda and attempts at censorship and intimidation, millions of people have turned out in mass protests and students who have been victimized have remained steadfast in their opposition to the genocide.

    In  November 2022, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, the youth and student organization of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), issued a call for the building of a global mass anti-war movement among workers and young people. With the mass demonstrations of millions across the globe against the genocide in Gaza, this movement has begun to emerge, and it is coinciding with a resurgence of the class struggle internationally.

     The critical question now is that of class orientation and political leadership. The bitter experience of the past two months has demonstrated that the genocide in Gaza cannot be stopped through appeals to the perpetrators of genocide in Washington, London, Berlin and Paris, as well as in Jerusalem. If anything, the violence has escalated. The only force capable of stopping the slaughter by stopping weapons production and arms shipments is the working class.

     As we stressed in our November 2022 statement:

     The IYSSE does not only seek the support of workers in the struggle against war. We recognize that the defeat of imperialism depends upon the emergence of the working class, armed with a socialist program, as the leading and decisive revolutionary force in the fight against the world capitalist system. Just as it was the Russian Revolution, the greatest intervention of the working class in world history, that brought an end to the first global carnage of World War I, it will be the intervention of the international working class that will today stop the escalation toward World War III.

     The IYSSE therefore calls upon students and youth in the US and internationally: Go to the factories and workplaces! Turn to the working class as the chief force to defend democratic rights! Fight against imperialist war, fascism and the capitalist system as a whole! Raise the following demands:

     Defend free speech and all democratic rights! Stop the witch hunt of opponents of genocide!

     For the right to free, high quality education for all! Throw the CIA, military and corporate billionaires off the campuses!

     For a unified movement of workers and students in the US, Europe, Israel and Palestine against imperialist war and capitalism!

     Those who agree with this program should fight to establish IYSSE chapters at your schools and college campuses.”

        Because the devil is in the details, here follows a select retrospective of my writing on free speech versus hate speech.

       As I wrote in my post of August 8 2019, Free Speech vs Safety from Fascist Terror: Hate, Violence, and the Dark Side of Social Media; As written in the Essential California newsletter of Tuesday morning: “In his much-cited 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow — an internet pioneer and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — wrote that “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

     But the utopian ideals of the early internet are increasingly at odds with the view of it as a place for free speech at all costs, as the darker corners of the web have proved a fertile breeding ground for violent extremism.”

    Barlow’s Declaration is a gloriously anarchic and libertarian manifesto; pretty words, indeed, which I endorse without reservation but for this; the right of free speech ends where others are harmed, dehumanized, identified as targets for violence, or restricted in their own freedoms.

     The very first and most important example of what is meant by our founding principle of America as “only that government which is necessary to obtain those rights which we cannot obtain for ourselves” is our right to freedom from hate speech which authorizes murder, as no one’s rights may infringe upon another’s. Further, the right to life takes precedence over the right to freedom of information and communication, as we may have one without the other, but not the reverse. Before all else, we must be alive to possess other rights.

     Whenever I consider our freedoms of speech and of the press, I imagine myself in the great film V for Vendetta, and secondarily in the classic film Brazil, whose dictum “We’re all in this together” has been the guiding principle of so many of my adventures. Harry Tuttle, played by Robert de Niro, V, played by Hugo Weaving, and the hero of Inglourious Basterds, the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt, are together my heroes and role models of political action. I have asked myself in many contexts over a lifetime of complex choices, what would our heroes do in this situation?

      What would Aldo Raine do if confronted by a global Fourth Reich which has seized control of the American Presidency and has built concentration camps on our border?

     What would Harry Tuttle do when a totalitarian regime has enacted pervasive state terror and surveillance, secret prisons, and attacks on truth and justice, equality and freedom?

    What would V do when tyranny and plutocracy have stolen our humanity from us, and lost our values in a sea of illusions and lies?                    

     As I wrote in my post of August 16 2020, Democracy, the Right of Free Speech Versus the Crime of Hate Speech, and the Principle of Open Debate; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.

     Much talk of late has employed the term cancel culture to deflect and obscure the true issues involved with the disambiguation of free speech from hate speech and the role of open debate in a democracy; cancel culture is a figment used without sincerity to obfuscate loathsome acts of incitement to violence and dehumanization, for platform denial and forms of peer ostracism are part of the free market of ideas and have no relation to silencing and erasure used by authoritarian tyrannies of force and control to subjugate a population and repress dissent, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party’s recent arrest of newspaperman Jimmy Lai in their campaign against democracy and truth in Hong Kong. But the values issues which the phenomenon raises are interesting, as they signpost the heart of what democracy means and our responsibility to others as well as our freedom from the ideas of others.  

     Democracy is reducible to a simple idea; the abandonment of social force in  shaping others to our own image, in the authorization of identity, in our freedom of conscience and from the establishment and policing of boundaries of the Forbidden.

     In a democracy, the principle of the autonomy of individuals takes precedence over the state, which exists only to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves.

     Any society or culture requires shared values and principles, agreements about things such as freedoms of and freedoms from, whether in systems of law and justice or as standards of courtesy. Democracy is unique in that it requires  rights of free access to information and the sharing of it, and freedoms from surveillance, censorship, and lies disguised as truths, but also requires for its functioning the tradition of open debate founded with our civilization in the Forum of Athens.

     Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of citizenship and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals.

     To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.

     As I wrote in my post of March 15 2021, Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Use of Social Force: the Case of Dr. Seuss;   Much like his wonderful anarchist hero The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss has been judged as rather naughty of late, taken to running amok and being ungovernable, transgressing the boundaries of the Forbidden, an agent of Chaos and mocker of authority. Reversals of order and authority, the violation of norms, and the destabilization of ossified forms and structures as a liberation from the shadows of our past and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, whose books modeled the limitless possibilities of becoming human as free-roaming Autonomous Zones like the delightful child criminals Thing One and Thing Two; Dr Seuss offers us much by way of the reimagination of ourselves, and for this I cherish him.

     His works can be read as celebrations of childhood as an ideal state of being; uncontrolled, wild, beings of nature, and free of conscience, inhibition, submission to authority or what Freud called polymorphosly perverse, but free of the Freudian injunction to control and sublimate our desires, in which anything goes.

    The works of Dr Seuss are a sustained advocacy of the idea of the natural human as conceptualized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his brilliant manifesto of 1762 The Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right. Here are some of my favorite quotes; “Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent.” “MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.” “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”

     Dr Seuss also used his platform to legitimize regressive ideologies in which he was deeply embedded; but he did not end where he began, and through his writing he transformed himself and our culture. In this respect his works are a parade of taboos and his art one of Swiftian satire which mocked and deflated authorized identities by extending them to the Absurd.

     As I once said to Jean Genet of a sniper who had joined us in resistance after having tried to kill me for several days, no one is beyond redemption.

     I’d like to keep the anarchy and transgression and struggle free from the legacies of our historical injustices and inequalities, among them racism and patriarchy which Janus-like act as dual faces of a coin of power, as did Dr Suess.

     Mistake nothing in this; there can be no excuse for racism nor for any advocacy or representations of racism or fascism. We must have zero tolerance for hate, and give no quarter to its perpetrators.

    Cancel culture is a fascist term and its use is a warning sign. It is used both as  in-group recognition signaling among fascists and white supremacists, and as a tactic of deflection. None who are innocent of intent to harm use this expression, and it is one of many identifiers we can use to tell friend from foe. The apologetics of hate and white supremacist terror recast resistance and deplatforming as cancel culture to shift blame. When someone invokes cancel culture to avoid responsibility for their actions or to delegitimize you, know that you are speaking with an enemy who is committed to your destruction.

      As to the themes of Dr. Seuss, it is useful to compare him to Robert Coover, the author who appropriated his character of the Cat in the Hat in a 1968 satire of Nixon entitled A Political Fable, a story whose lessons apply equally to the presidency of Donald Trump.

      As reviewed in The Guardian by Hari Kunzru; “Coover’s greatest battle with complexity is The Public Burning, a massive novel about the McCarthy era and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which appeared, after much struggle, in 1977. Coover, whose work belies the idea that postmodernism is necessarily disengaged and apolitical, had been active in campaigning against the Vietnam war, and made a short film about a 1967 campus protest against Dow Chemical, On a Confrontation in Iowa City. The authoritarian drift of US politics led him first to write a satirical novella imagining a presidential campaign by Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (A Political Fable, 1968) and then to take a panoptical look at the anti-communist panic of the 50s. Conceived before Watergate and then completely rewritten in the wake of the scandal, The Public Burning is narrated by Richard Nixon, who struts and frets his way across a political stage dominated by a foul-mouthed, xenophobic Uncle Sam, who is locked in mortal combat with the Phantom, a shadowy and seemingly omnipresent enemy”

    And from Kirkus Review; “The Cat in the Hat for President”: that was the title of this satire when first published in 1968 (in the literary magazine New American Review)–and that’s the single, inspired, ferocious joke (dated not one whit) that keeps most of these 88 miniature pages roaring along. Coover’s narrator is old party pro “Soothsayer” Brown, who goes to the Convention hoping to hand-pick the V-P candidate for this no-win election year (the Opponent will be virtually undefeatable). . . and then watches as the Convention turns into a circus: first a catchy slogan starts appearing everywhere (“Let’s make the White House a Cat House”); next, an irresistible campaign song fills the air (“So go to bat for the Cat in the Hat!/He’s the Cat who knows where it’s at!/With Tricks and Voom and Things like that!”); then funny hats, gorgeous cheerleaders, cute gags–and finally the arrival of the Cat himself, who pulls Seuss-like stunts, wreaks cartoon havoc, wows the crowd, and wins the nomination on the first ballot. Brown is the party’s last hold-out, but even he grudgingly goes along. After all, he can’t deny “the Cat’s essential ambiguity. . . thus his electoral power.” And he’s only half-revolted by the philosophy of the man behind the Cat–a creep named Clark who believes that “extremity is a great catalyst,” that the Cat’s outrageous campaign will free America of its illusions. But the Cat’s antics–gross practical jokes, driving the Opponent bonkers with those hat-tricks, fomenting racial riots in Mississippi (“the Cat’s ambivalent blackness, heretofore a political asset, now turned on him”)–eventually get out of hand; there’s talk of a military coup; “all the Good Folk of the Valley” now hate the Cat; and he’s skinned alive by an angry mob” “the sheer awful exuberance of the central absurdity here–which somehow, paradoxically, tempers Coover’s naked loathing with Seuss’ more good-natured mania–works to perfection: a devastating, across-the-board swipe at presidential imagery and campaign hype, perhaps even righter for Election ’80 than it was for the more issue-centered nightmares of ’68.”

     As I wrote in my post of July 21 2022, Our Stories, Ourselves: On the Right of Free Speech in a Social Media Forum; Of late our Forum of Athens here on FaceBook has tried to seize control of our dialog and the narratives of identity which we construct here as memoir and as shared history, an alarming and tyrannical turn of events which manifests in the banning of any posts which are not unique, any which contain links to media we do not ourselves own as citations to references in the text we have written, and some which seem politically motivated censorship and repression of dissent.

     This has occurred broadly throughout our communities and threatens to take down our cherished groups; the equivalent of purges, witch hunts, show trials, horribly reminiscent of the assassination of Khashoggi and the police raids on Hong Kong publishers to silence journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.

     Who owns our ideas and our conversations? If I stand on the master’s truck to address his laborers, does he have the right to censor unauthorized speech?

    FaceBook offers a free publishing platform which is superb at making connections between people and helping us find an audience with like interests; but this is not how it makes its money. We are the products of this system; this is a great power which can be leveraged to seize control of what we may say and to whom.

     Here in this virtual Forum we struggle for control of our authorial voices, independence, and authenticity against commodification, theft of intellectual property, falsification, and dehumanization. 

      Why is this important?

     Censorship, book burnings, and the enforcement of authorized identities, versions of truth, and control of the mimetic function of history is always important, for identity is a primary ground of struggle. In the silencing and erasure of our voices and witness of history, FaceBook attempts to shape our becoming human as theft of the soul.

     And this we must resist.

      As I wrote in my post of June 26 2022, Caught in the Gears of the Machine We Serve: FaceBook Censors My Posts on the Pretext of Being Spam; The mystery of the missing posts is solved; FB blocked 42 of them as spam.

           Two of these censored posts were intended as allyship for Pride Month and interrogated identities of sex and gender, one was about the Supreme Court’s Abortion Ban, and the one that took several days to write, difficult days and nights of working through trauma and grief by writing, and made me late in subsequent posts, was about the anniversary of a friends death who happened to be Palestinian, and of great value to me because we must bring meaning to each other’s lives and deaths by sharing our stories. Our stories and witness of history are a ground of struggle against silence and erasure, falsification and dehumanization

     No fascist agenda in censorship of dissent, FaceBook?

      I call out the truths authority would keep out of the public domain, the issues they would shape the discourse of, and the hidden purposes of elite hegemonic power which are served by social media in the commodification of our forum of discourse and connectedness.

     We serve a vast machine of wealth and power, like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory, through which we ourselves become the primary product of the system, our votes and our purchases, but also our ideas of self and others.

     In the words of Lenin; “What is to be done?”

      As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021 Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memoirs: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.

     As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?

    This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?

     As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.

     Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.

     Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.  

       As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?

     I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.

     We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.

     The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.

     As I wrote in my post of June 19 2022 Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?

     Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.

     Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?

     We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. Our stories live within us, and we also live within them. Who owns these stories also owns ourselves.

      Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?

     America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.

     Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.

     We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.

     Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves and for ownership of ourselves.

     Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?

     As I wrote in my post of February 2 2022, James Joyce, on his birthday; We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.

      Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?

     Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?

      Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.

     As written by Eloghosa Osunde in The Paris Review, in her column Mellting Clocks; “If you really think about it, we were all raised inside a giant dictionary. Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions. Who is normal? What is beauty? Who is a criminal? What is a woman? What is a man? What is good love? What is sex? What is fair? Who is holy? What is evil? The more you agree with the definitions you’ve been given, the more you belong. The more you belong, the farther away you are from punishment. And you want to be safe in this scary place, don’t you? So you do what you’re supposed to do, and you avoid what leads to suffering. You don’t want to be lonely either, do you, so you believe the rule: there’s nothing but nothing for you outside the defined lines. You’re told this from when you’re little, that your questions will put you in trouble, that you are and will always be too small to challenge a meaning. You’re just one person and this is how it works: society decides, you obey. But is that true? Seeing as many of us are alive on the outskirts of definitions, seeing as that’s the address that saved some of our lives, the place where we watch our safeties spring out of the ground, it’s clear that whatever was defined can be redefined. Whatever was written by a person for a people, can be edited by a person or a people. We’re proof. What is society, anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We have always made it up.

     Art making is my strongest argument for redefinition, because nothing shows you the lie of impossibility and the multiplicity of worlds better than a body of work standing where once there was nothing. You don’t know how to turn Something into Something Else? Listen to what a remix does to a song: how in African Lady, an ADM remix, TMXO lays Masego’s music over a Lagbaja sample, rubbing two worlds against each other until they spark a three-minute-fifty-seconds long fire. Listen to the Red Hot + Riot album made in honor of Fela’s music and enter the rooms that appear when Meshell Ndegeocello, Manu Dibango, Sade Adu, Kelis, Common, Tony Allen, and D’Angelo are invited to the same house party. Or watch Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and notice the world you hold too tight become subsumed in an alternate reality, another now. Watch the Greek film Dogtooth and remember how you were taught to see; see how every manipulation has its genesis in language, how language reshapes the cornea and whatever stands before it. Read The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and register what feels familiar about the premise; where have you seen that before? It’s strange, isn’t it, to know that what we remember is also a collaboration. Find all five remixes to Rema’s “Dumebi” [Vandalized, Major Lazer, Henry Fong, Becky G, Matoma]. All these unalike branches, growing out of the same tree. You think language is set in stone? Listen to a Nigerian talk a person to the fringes of their own English using pidgin—a genius composition. Strict binaries and genre are real until you watch DJ Moma play a New York club or DJ Aye play a Lagos night. Technically a thing like that should be impossible—continents ejecting you onto the same dance floor, that voice meeting this synth, the low wail of a bass guitar free-falling through the deep grunt of an ancient drum: jazz meets Afrobeats meets house meets alternative meets grime meets highlife meets soukous—but there you are, all of a sudden, thinking, Wait, who said these things can’t belong together?

     Two months ago, when a fraction of my chosen family and I gathered to talk about the things we’re often discouraged from saying in public, one of us named that space—my living room couch—The Womb. I didn’t ask why because I didn’t need to; I know Whose it was. It fit. We all belonged inside it in a way that everything outside my door claims is impossible. It makes sense to me to miss being carried in safewater, it makes sense to me to feel yourself being (re)made, (re)gaining realness—later and now and before, all at once. Womb is a word that made me wince for a long time. That time includes now, and the reasons are still just mine. But a word means one thing until it gets a chance to mean another. The promise of being born again appealed to me for a reason, after all. That February in twenty-fourteen, the church didn’t even have to try hard. Said once as a promise, and I was already on my knees saying Yes Please, Yes. So, in the dark of The Womb, there were stories shared over palm wine and smoke that are still behind my ribs. Everyone was truth telling and the room shimmered with an earned sweetness. In response to one of those stories, we shuffled truth about our shadows, about the darker parts of ourselves we’d folded away for at least two and a half decades because it was that urgent to be A Good Person. We admitted the reasons we all fight so hard for the word Good, the reason we answer when it is called and try to claim it like a name, how frightened we are of Bad. I’m trying something new: asking myself if the choice I want to make is matched with a consequence I can live with, instead of if it’s good or bad. We talked more about how much we tuck in, how even in grief, there is a correct way to feel the weight, there are feelings we’re still not allowed to admit having. But not-allowed means hiding, even from yourself; and hiding is exactly why Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom insisted on disassembling me recently. A humbling feeling, being turned inside out like that. Also a kind of kindness. “You know when a story sees the things you’ve been hiding from yourself?” Yeah, that. This time, nothing was off the table, not even when it started shaking; not even when one leg fell off. So in response to “Wait, are we allowed to say these things out loud?” I said, “Well, here we are.” I can’t vouch for anywhere else in the world, but where I live, the only commandment is that there are no commandments. Be true, is the only rule. Put the lie on that rack, take off the uniform they insist you wear when you’re outside—and just be true. This is not always a beautiful or weightless thing. When you ask for truth, sometimes heavy things get said. Heavy things got said. So two weeks after The Womb had closed and we’d all been born again, in response to: “Do you ever get lonely?” (living differently, living outside, fashioning a life), I played Obongjayar’s “Carry Come Carry Go” to the person who asked this in my car. Even now, recalling it, I can see the road get stretched insanely by the hook. The answer is that feverish bridge; the answer is the way he moves on the track; it isn’t just what is said, it’s in how it’s shivered onto the beat, almost wept. The answer to what helps and holds me, what restores me to myself is also inside sound: “Good” by Sutra, “Get Free” by Mereba, “Bordeaux” by SuperJazzClub, “Ngeke Balunge” by Mafikizolo, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, “Unspoken Word” by the Soil. More, more.                                

     There are multiple exits out of what is often referred to as Real Life on a daily basis, if you’re really paying attention. You probably fall in and out of your life regularly: between deep belly laughs at the dining table, or in clubs, bass beating against the small of your back. You do it when you’re watching a film that sucks you in or reading a book that pulls you deep into the corridor on the inside of your body, because imagination is a place. Distraction is a place. But you come back to, crawl right into the present so quickly, so casually that it’s hard to know what you’ve just done. Some of us have been there longer than others. I would know, having dissociated for years at a stretch, consistently moving at at least zero point zero two seconds ahead of myself, always catching up. I come to when I catch it, because I need me. Plus, you’re meant to snap out of stories and realms that are too fleshed out, too fantasy seeming, because people who believe stories and alternate realities too much and for too long see things that are not there, see things others can’t see, are called insane. Well, I used to fear that word until I was that. Until people I love were that and my love still met them there. Now I can’t care. There are a thousand reals vibrating in formation at any given moment and I’m open to many. We choose what we plug in to. The rest is the rest.

     Words have synonyms and antonyms, for depth of meaning, yes—the meaning of a word thickens next to its partner or companion, its opposite or opponent, because just like you, language needs company. But my favorite thing about language is that it responds to how it’s used. It can be anything, really: from a cave or an obstacle to the bridge between lives, the road between worlds. Redefinition is relocation. It’s why the easiest way to get Somewhere Else is to name it like something real. I was raised to worry about right or wrong. I cared until I was labeled wrong and did not die. So I tell myself: don’t worry about being good; just be as intentional about destruction as you are about creation. Do not create anyone, do not destroy anyone. Understand this and no need to run: nothing on the inside of you can swallow you from there if you keep an eye on it. Keep an eye on it. Anyone can change. Forgive your fumbling. People who don’t change don’t change because they trust the dark label like they would a name. Only your name is your name. When people tell you a word can only mean one thing, they are telling you—subtly, too—that change is impossible. It’s not true. Destroy that idea. Create another truth. A word can mean something new because language is still and always being made. It’s why you can take a word like Vagabond—weaponized by the law of your land in real time— name your work after it and still be here. It’s a kind of rhythm making, this; the synthesis of your internal soundtrack. Another word that might fit here is: chaos. And another: freeing. You are free.

     Forgive yourself for acting like you’ve never met yourself. Forgive yourself for sweating in the pursuit of importance, of acceptance. Forgive yourself for growing spikes when ashamed. Forgive your stubbornness. Forgive yourself for being more willing to die than fight, then forgive the defeats you stacked up inside. Forgive you for how tired you are. Forgive you for not knowing better. Then for knowing better and not yet being able to do better. For your hiding and running, for the suffocating disguises. For the secrets you still keep from you. For the times you unbecame yourself for someone else—a partner, a parent—because you were trying to become real, desirable, a shame to lose. Forgive you for the size of your love (you needn’t repent). Forgive you for the hands (they weren’t even yours). Forgive you for believing in anything that called you forbidden, for kneeling before whatever tagged you a sin. Forgive you for deceiving your head, for thinking the lie made you matter, more solid, more indestructible. Forgive you for breaking your heart, for lashing out, for falling apart, for losing your mind. You are here now. Let this matter more. A different now is close enough to exhale on you.

     What does fiction do for me? It allows me to see what has been made, just as it is. It reminds me that if there are seven billion of us, there are seven billion ways to experience the world, seven billion valid iterations. The systems do what the systems do, and the kindest thing I can think to do for anyone I love is to follow them to the end of their desire, is to go with them to the beginning of their imagination—that place where I wish turns into I want. I listen to my loved ones when they say: I wish this was a world in which I could decide not to have kids. I wish I could decide not to get married. I wish this world was kinder to queer people. I wish we’d all take friendships more seriously. I wish this world was fair to neurodivergent people. I wish. I wish. There’s so much I still wish for, too, but also so much I have now only because someone stayed with me past a question mark. What would you be like if you had room? I try to ask that often. When they start describing it—I’d live with my friends; I’d treat my partner more kindly because I’ll at least be allowed to love them; I’d just not get married; I’d just be an aunty or uncle instead of trying to be a parent; I’d share resources with people around me; I’d put way less emphasis on money and more on community building—I watch what dawns on all of us. Maybe it’s not possible for us to have everything right here right now, the world being what it is, but it’s not true that we can’t get closer to what we want. It’s not true that none of it is accessible. Your hope is the perfect size, so no point waiting, sometimes. Because what is society anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We make it up.

     It’s hard to remember this, because some feelings are so particular, so precise that you think no one will ever know what it feels like under your skin; but there’s a song for every feeling and a story for every situation for a reason. It’s how we get through. Maybe your life tells you that you’re right about being unseeable at the moment. Maybe that’s what you found to be true with people. Good thing stories can go everywhere then. Wasn’t it a book that reminded me recently that I have the spine it takes to stand up to my life? This life is massive, and of course. Massive and on course. It was a song that reminded me, too, some nights ago what a privilege it is that what I call family without flinching is a fiction I made; that there is a group of people who bear the truest witness of my life; that I get to live out the impossible. It’s only because of stories and music and art and love that I’m able to remind me how free I am to act in favor of myself and how free I am to not. I’m free to reach for more and I’m free to not. When I put it that way, I know what I choose.

     One of the first definitions I remember learning is from primary school. “Culture,” the teacher said, “is a way of life.” We repeated it after her; a simple sentence. As long as we’re alive, there’ll be other ways of life being made as we breathe. Some of them can be ours. It’ll just require us to take what we see and want and wish for seriously. If I say that I am free to dream and I’ve dreamed a world with decentralized power, a much slower pace, more kindness, a timeline in which people can fall apart and hibernate, where rest isn’t a luxury, where gender is an abundant harvest instead of two darkly rigid lanes, where sanity is not the measure of worth, where no one is an outcast and we’re all responsible for each other, where friendships can survive mistakes and tension, where thick love is commonplace, where I can hold my love close no matter the skin they’re in, then I’m free to test run that way of life on myself and my relationships. I’m free to do it now, because now’s when I’m alive. That won’t always be true, but I’m here now and that hereness is sometimes a vehicle, sometimes a tool.

     We were all raised in a giant dictionary, yes, and we’re more able to move out if we can find somewhere else to go: a where, a how, and a who to be with there. We find somewhere elses by making up and living out freeing fictions—even in small clusters. When we ground our faiths in the right not-yet-reals, when we look at the nonlinearity of time, we see how right here the future has been since yesterday, how we’re always practicing it in fractions now. Aliveness has always been a staring contest between us and time. We know that. No one blinks with you when you do. We know that. It’s costly, this, always—a life has to be—but what I know for sure is this: there are always other words and other definitions, always other worlds and other locations. To know this is to see this, too: we can grow the spines we need to stand up for our lives.”

     As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.

     When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.

     You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.

     What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:

     This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

     What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.

     A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.

     The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.

     Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.

     That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.

     To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.

     But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.

     Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”

Chaplin’s The Factory

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