Editorial

On "Who Is the Enemy?"

Henri enlists in Napoleon's army, and before going to war his baby sister asks him whether he will kill people:

"Not people, Louise, just the enemy."
"What is enemy?"
"Someone who's not on your side."

(Jeanette Winterson, The Passion)

This comes, in part, from a piece of fiction. And yet wars are still waged for reasons much like those of Napoleon's time. Even as words such as "enemy" recede from public speech, replaced by "those who are different" or "those in disagreement", the Napoleonic figure still rules, and changing the attitudes that spread confrontation, and finally hatred, can seem an impossible task. Still, there are moments when enough individuals agree on one thing and manage to oppose and expose the powerful, the modern-day Napoleon, and force some change, even if he loses only a battle and not the war.

Last month, students graduated from college. As is the tradition in the United States, the ceremony included a commencement speaker, who by custom also receives an honorary degree conferred by the faculty as a sign of the institution's endorsement. At my institution the speaker was to be Michael Smerconish, whose public statements about Arabs the student newspaper, and a number of faculty and students, found incompatible with the institution's values. One of our Arab students, a first-year writer, published an article opposing the choice, on the grounds of those statements. She engaged someone with whom she disagreed, and in response the invited speaker publicly ridiculed and shamed her.

Most students and faculty respect differences of opinion; it is a basic principle, the foundation of free expression, and many of us actively encourage it in the classroom through dialogue. The same should be expected of an invited speaker. Smerconish is of course entitled to his opinions, and many of us, myself included, would welcome a dialogue with him. But his public attack on the student was an act of intimidation, and it was followed by death threats against Arab students and faculty at my institution, among them a dear friend and colleague of Arab origin.

The students' response was strong and yet exemplary in its peacefulness. A small group of faculty, organized by one colleague, wrote to the college president asking that the institution support the students' protest and their petition to replace the speaker. I was the first to sign; a few colleagues did the same. I signed not because I disagreed with Smerconish, nor because I was "not on his side", but because he had placed the student, and me, and those who differed with him, in the category of the enemy rather than of the people. That was an action, not an opinion. To me, to me, racism, or any ism that drives unethical decisions, is not a difference of opinion. It is a move to suppress a group, whether or not its members belong to a minority. The episode also kept other faculty from going on record, for fear of consequences, and I suspect many who did not sign shared the view of those who did.

The president withdrew the invitation, not, I think, because Smerconish thinks differently, but because of what he did. The disinvited speaker answered with another public attack, on his radio program and in a video seen by millions.

Because difference is richness, the faculty had originally voted to confer the honorary degree despite the speaker's openly voiced sentiments. Yet at our last faculty meeting of the year, a minority of those who chose to participate voted to rescind it, on the principle that intimidation cannot be endorsed.

This is one of many such incidents the world now sees often, and the principle applies to all parties, whatever their affiliation. One may play it safe before the powerful, who can intimidate and will. Some choose not to, openly or through art, literature, music, and film. The road to the present has been corrected, again and again, by thinkers who subvert harmful views, and this issue of The Pasticheur is dedicated to them: artists such as Curtis Talwst Santiago, whose work denounces migration's injustices and colonialism; Jordan Seaberry, whose art and activism helped pass several criminal-justice reform measures; and the writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who challenged the establishment through literature and the philosophy of language, along with Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and the other members of Gruppe 47.

I hope that publications like ours can help resist intimidation and racism. Our readers need not agree with what we publish, and opposing views are always welcome when they respect difference. As I have said, difference is richness. We will all be the same only when we are six feet underground.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editor