Your Silence Will Be Studied By Your Grandkids

Genocide? What genocide?

I had just returned from a U.S. Out of Gaza protest near Bowdoin College when this winter’s alumni magazine in my mailbox slapped me upside of the head. The starving, freezing, and bombing of Palestinian children in tents has ramped up now that Israel unilaterally ended their ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Ten of us stood in piles of snow at a big intersection in Topsham yesterday as part of a monthly ongoing statewide protest. It was our third time in Topsham and we saw one middle finger and one thumbs down. The only angry shout I heard was a man yelling, “Fuck Israel!” and several of us noticed that we were the recipients of lots more honks and friendly waves than is the norm.

Looks like one of our signs was really working.

The sign I’m holding in our group photo is the source for my title today. I didn’t write it but a friend who had her daughter create it left it in the trunk of my car. Later over lunch I posed the questions, Do people who see this sign get the historical reference to the Holocaust? And do they see an analogy between their own silence and that of the “good Germans”? Opinions on this were mixed.

https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1906380449246531953

Bowdoin’s alumni mag cover is consistent with its innards. Genocide? What genocide? What Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum? What student encampment — an effort that was heavily supported by alumni, by the way? What cowardly declaration by the college that they not only (allegedly) don’t know what their endowment is invested in, they don’t want to know? What boycott by alums of Bowdoin’s One Day fundraiser this winter? The boycott was organized in response to the administration’s punishment of students exercising their 1st amendment right to object to their college’s complicity in genocide and land theft in Palestine. Can’t mention that!

The cover is connected to an article about two alums who make their living doing humor. The cartoony brown person hugging the smiley face is of indeterminate identity as are the figures continuing the theme on the magazine’s back cover, but we can be confident at this moment in history that they aren’t Palestinian. Because Palestinians aren’t laughing as bombs rain down on their heads, shattering their children to bits.

Just as I was processing all this, my friend Yussra published a powerful think piece on grappling with silence in the face of genocide, “Like Our Voices Could Free You.” She writes:

Anything I could say falls short and the last thing you need is our tears, yet I keep rewriting this line, like our voices could free you, if only our eloquence were profound enough to reach hearts or change minds or inform those who seriously still don’t know so the genocide might end one minute sooner.

Can you feel the desperation in my words? If it’s not reaching, how do I make it reach? And if I’m too upfront or intense, will I turn people off? Will the algorithm turn me off? What’s the might of the pen without readers?

Words are all I have to offer. And for that, I’m so sorry.

Much of the talk at lunch circled around the continually shocking ignorance of U.S. foreign policy expressed by our old friends, old classmates, and family members. Where do they get their very limited information? The New York Times and NPR came up more than once. As evil as it is, I have to admire the effectiveness of Zionist narrative control or, if you prefer, propaganda post-WWII. Keeping in mind that propaganda’s greatest power is not telling us what to think but in limiting what we think about to a very narrow window that excludes much of what’s really going on.

I guess my final questions for today are, Did the silence of the “good Germans” shield them from the consequences of the Final Solution their Nazi government imposed on European Jews? Will the silence of U.S. taxpayers shield them from the consequences of funding and arming genocide in Palestine?