Bowdoin Orient

Where Does Your Alma Mater Stand On Genocide?

/ went2thebridge / Leave a comment


There, I fixed it for you. 

An airplane towed the original distorted message through the skies all week, including over the Army-Navy football game in Boston and several campuses besides Harvard. Because narrative control that began with the NATO proxy war on Russia in Ukraine has grown exponentially with the need to whitewash genocide in Gaza by the U.S. and Israel.

In the topsy turvy world of status quo message management, those who oppose Zionism are now Nazis. So, Hasidic Jews, gen Z Jews, secular Jews who did not fall for Israelism — are all Nazis. Got it?

President Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania fell to the witch hunt and has resigned following charges in Congress that her fealty to free speech no matter how odious makes her a Jew-hater.

My own alma mater, tiny little Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, was working overtime on narrative management last Saturday as hundreds of students and supporters gathered demanding alumnus Sen. Angus King work for a permanent ceasefire now. Photographers and media were told by campus security that no photos and no reporting would be allowed.

But an open air rally on the steps of the art museum ought to at least be reported in the Orient, right? As the oldest student newspaper in the U.S., the Orient has lately become hampered in its ability to report the truth if that truth is deemed inconvenient by the wealthy who serve on its board of directors (think Jes Staley of Barclay’s who stepped down over allegations that he enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s child rape and blackmail scheme). I know because, while the Orient used to publish my occasional op eds or letters to the editor, that all came to a screeching halt over my dissent from the official Ukraine narrative i.e. Russia bad, Ukraine not infiltrated by literal Nazis.

The compare and contrast between Friday’s rally at General Dynamics and Saturday’s rally at Bowdoin reveals very similar messaging but a subdued tone at the college up until the march began. 

In a nutshell, Bowdoin speakers said things like, “according to the New York Times” as if they lack the understanding that the NYT and NPR (also cited) are part of the problem of genocide whitewashing. There was little if any crowd response except, interestingly, when a speaker mentioned the name of Gaza journalist MoTaz.

In Bath, the crowd responded continuously until hours in the cold and then gathering darkness quieted them down. The final speaker was well-informed but most of us oldsters thought it was TMI; I noted from my spot on the pavement that they actually got a cheer from the crowd for using the phrase “historical revision.” In other words, my kind of people.

At Bowdoin, the similar sized crowd of about 300 finally got loud as they marched with scrolls recording the names of the first several thousand people killed in Gaza. 

My friends who went on the mile and a half march reported the energy remained high throughout a reading of a letter to King signed by 1,500 members of the Bowdoin community (me among them). The marchers also left the scrolls with names of those slaughtered on King’s doorstep — in other words, right where they belong.

King has voted for funding genocide in Gaza before, and he probably will again. May he not know a moment’s peace when he’s at home a few blocks from campus in a house with a Ukraine flag out front in the small town of Brunswick.

Narrative Management On Ukraine At My Alma Mater

/ went2thebridge / Leave a comment

About a zillion years ago, I earned a history degree from Bowdoin College. I was a scholarship student and incurred some debt, but the price of a college education had not yet climbed into the stratosphere (currently $78,300 per annum). 

Today I live in another part of Maine but I often go to Brunswick to vigil for peace near my old campus. Yesterday, I attended the third in a series of talks on Ukraine.

Sponsored by the college’s Russian Department the lecture was, as advertised, an opportunity to bash the Russian Federation. Although I did not attend the first two lectures in the series, several friends did and reported back on delivery of a seamless CIA narrative on Ukraine (seamless except for my friends’ comments during Q & A that is). 

On November 18, I had a letter to the editor published in the student paper The Orient on the problem of one-sided information control at a liberal arts college:

I see the college is hosting a series of lectures on Russia-Ukraine, the first of which was already held (virtually) on October 27 when Ukrainian scholar Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed delivered “Russia’s War On Ukraine: Culture, Memory, Politics.”

I missed the lecture, so I can’t be sure how much the Orient’s coverage omitted, but I was troubled by Shpylova-Saeed’s neglect of historical context. She is quoted as saying, “There was very little understanding of what Ukraine was back in 2014,” but I doubt that she is unaware of the CIA’s involvement in a coup that year overthrowing Ukraine’s elected government. That event is well-documented, including the involvement of the U.S., and led directly to the civil war in which tens of thousands died prior to 2022. One may disagree with Russia’s entry into the conflict or argue about its motivations, but to ignore the context entirely while focusing on the “big man theory” that “bad Putin” is responsible for all of the death and suffering in Ukraine is silly.

Noting that two more lectures are planned in this series, dare I hope that more informed and balanced views will be shared on November 17 and December 1, perhaps by people who have read the RAND Corporation’s report from 2019, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options.”

Ironically, Senior Lecturer in Russian Reed Johnson was quoted as saying of the lecture series, “[we] feel very strongly about the importance of talking and teaching about these events so there’s a better understanding of that context, how we got here.”

May it be so.

Last night’s lecture was similarly disappointing. 

Leon Kogan, a Boston College lecturer, titled his talk “Blame it on Pushkin: Rethinking Russian Culture During the War in Ukraine.” The textual  focus was a recent poem by Andrey Orlov, “I’ve read to the middle the list of ships,” which Kogan read in Russian while projecting his own translated version in English. (I would love to give you a link to the poem, but I am unable to find one.)

The poet had employed a ships metaphor assigning various (all male) cultural heroes of Russia such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, et al. and some cultural icons like ballet, to indict Russian imperialism. Kogan deconstructed the poem for us and introduced a related concept from  Hannah Arendt about the responsibility of even passive people for the crimes of their empire.

I thought this was highly relevant to those of us sitting in the largest empire on the planet.

My comment to that effect was scoffed at by Kogan.

Two of my friends offered context on the notion of Russia’s alleged imperial designs i.e. the CIA-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014, and relentless NATO expansion since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Predictably, these truths were characterized as “conspiracy theories.”

One of my friends distributed a Ukraine issue of Peace & Planet News that we’d brought along. He was warned by a Bowdoin professor that he was “abusing the privilege” of attending the lecture series. “Aren’t they public meetings?” he asked the prof. “They are for now,” she replied. 

(This suggests that Bowdoin may go the direction of nearby Bath Iron Works which has steadily restricted access to their public events over the years in response to our truth telling there.)

As an alumna I could probably still wangle an invite. It’s worth the effort because my audience is not a visiting lecturer who’s busy kissing the NATO ring. 

Cherishing the hope that I had helped introduce a glimmer of doubt about the prevailing narrative in the minds of even one of the students who were present, I went home satisfied.