NEW YORK CITY, November 23 — On Tuesday, November 19, more than 120 students and faculty packed the courtroom or waited outside during the arraignment of two anti-fascist City College students. The two are leaders of a movement to oppose the teaching appointment of war criminal David Petraeus, the restoration of ROTC, and the police seizure of a student/community organizing space, the Morales/Shakur Center. They are being charged with disorderly conduct, riot, resisting arrest and obstruction of governmental administration.
The two students, previously suspended by the college bosses, have demonstrated tremendous courage and determination in the face of serious criminal charges. Our presence showed the court they do not stand alone.
Three days after the arraignment, nearly 50 students and faculty packed a hearing on the college’s disciplinary charges. Before it began, lawyers reached an agreement to reinstate the students for the spring semester but maintain their ban from the current semester’s classes. Their tuition will be refunded.
The pressure to criminally charge students who have done nothing wrong appears to come from the New York Police Department, which works closely with higher-ups at the City University of New York. Press reports indicate that people in high circles were furious with the militant demonstrations against Petraeus, who’s been mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate for 2020. (Before last year’s exposure of his long-running extramarital affair, he had been touted as a possible candidate in 2016.) The rulers consider him the model “warrior-scholar,” the type of leader needed to encourage military service among youth and to mobilize support for U.S. interventions abroad. Republican Senator John McCain called Petraeus one of “America’s greatest military heroes.” In 2010, Time Magazine ranked him among the top fifty “People Who Matter.’”
Petraeus and his powerful supporters never dreamed that CUNY students and faculty would expose the former general as a war criminal. They never imagined he’d be forced to go to and from class in a tinted-windowed SUV via an underground garage, and then escorted by security to the deserted 16th floor of an office building. They certainly didn’t foresee that angry students would pursue Petraeus on the street after his class.
Under pressure from several members of Congress, the NYPD and an embarrassed CUNY administration — two parts of the capitalist state apparatus — mounted a counterattack on radical students. First they closed the Morales/Shakur Center, used for decades to organize against higher tuition and the militarization of their university. After the closure sparked large demonstrations, CUNY suspended the two students while the cops arrested them.
The point of this repression was twofold: to intimidate students and to distract them. Instead of demonstrating against Petraeus and ROTC, we were now attending suspension hearings and criminal arraignments. But this heavy-handed attack is also a positive thing. It shows that ruling-class forces are worried. They need to restore ROTC to urban campuses to integrate their officer corps. Militant opposition to this strategy is a big problem for them.
Young people at CUNY are not rushing to enlist in the U.S. military. The failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not morale-builders. Thousands of soldiers died, hundreds of thousands returned home seriously impaired (including half a million with mental problems), and one of three female soldiers was sexually assaulted. The military is struggling to meet recruitment goals. Without enough soldiers, the bosses will be unable to project U.S. power abroad in the current period of global instability and inter-imperialist conflict.
U.S. wars of occupation — from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan — have killed millions and damaged tens of millions. While imperialism protects the profits of the very wealthy, it gravely harms the working class — both the workers forced to fight and those losing social services at home. With nearly a trillion dollars a year spent to maintain a thousand military bases and a global U.S. empire, there is little left over for health care, education, or adequate nutrition.
Members of Progressive Labor Party at CUNY are committed to use every class and gathering, every forum and film event, to win students to rebel against the agents of U.S. imperialism on campus: Petraeus, ROTC, recruiters, and military researchers. Join the communist PLP and end this murderous capitalist system!