In my writing about the reactionary attempt to transform higher education institutes in the Pig Empire into fascist indoctrination centers and functional arms of an authoritarian police state, my focus has been on the idea that this is largely necessary if you're actively steering nations in the imperial core into the kind of future where we openly conduct multiple genocides to preserve extractivist capitalism and the fossil fuels that are likely to kill billions of people on a boiling planet. And I still think this is by far the most important point to take from the organized erasure of history and the ongoing rise of what one salient observer called "the National Security Campus." Despite this however, I also think it's important to understand that the folks driving society and our higher education institutes towards right wing authoritarianism absolutely "use the whole cow" and there is another extremely important reason they're cracking down on student dissent and turning universities into militarized indoctrination camps; namely the fact that higher learning centers and student activism has historically functioned as a nexus of political and social opposition to fascist and other authoritarian political orders - and in some cases, quite successfully so.

To get a closer, and more global perspective on this situation, I'd like to turn to a piece in today's Guardian by an author I respect a lot; despite his bizarre insistence (contrary to all evidence) that "liberal" electoral politics is a viable solution for stopping fascism, and even if our last interaction was an argument about the foundational role of capitalist ideology in the rise of fascist movements and successful completion of fascist takeovers in Pig Empire society:

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Why fascists hate universities

"The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of widespread voter fraud to severely restrict minority voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United States; rigorous investigation estimated it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.

Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report by the special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report reveals an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real."

Although the quote I've selected here focuses on DeSantis's attempts to erase history, intimidate opponents in academia, and eviscerate higher education in neo-fascist Florida, in the actual article Jason Stanley touches on a variety of examples pitting students and universities against would-be fascist autocrats; including the successful student uprising in Bangladesh, student movements inspired by that uprising in India and Pakistan, and the curious (but altogether predictable) example of Tennessee choosing to honor a fascist think tank aligned with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. Stanley also touches briefly on the militarization and authoritarian repression of student-led anti-genocide protests at American universities across the country; although he fails to mention that many of the administrators orchestrating this fascist fuckery ostensibly claim to be "liberals," which I think speaks to Jason's blind spot in the war against fascism that I noted above.

Again, I want to be clear that preventing student-led uprisings are absolutely not the *only* reason fascists and other reactionaries are actively erasing history, and transforming our schools into militarized indoctrination centers for a coming world in which the only way to maintain capitalism on a boiling planet, is going to be the installation of fascism across the Pig Empire. Furthermore, I don't think waiting around for student movements to save us from the nazis is fair to the students, or a viable strategy for stopping fascism. But by that same measure, Stanley is absolutely correct that the crackdown on students and university professors is also about destroying environments that historically have produced the most *mainstream* opposition to the installation of a fascist order; and there's really only one reason the folks in charge would want to do that.

#Fascism #HigherEd #Capitalism #ClimateCrisis #JasonStanley #Genocide #PoliceState