Universities And Hegemoney
I went to the student protests in Oxford (just visiting). The Vice-Chancellor had called the cops on 16 students who entered the admin building and protestors were trying to protect their fellow students (which should be the Vice-Chancellor's job). We were on one side road, to prevent the prisoners being taken out the back, but the cops just kettled the students out front and forced their way out. One student was taken out on a stretcher. Oxford certainly taught me a lesson that day. Universities are not centers of learning, but places where learning is institutionalized.
Later I sat outside the Pitt-Rivers Museum—where Oxford still keeps the stolen bodies of animals and human beings—and listened to a free lecture at the encampment. A man drove by and yelled ‘Rule Britannia!’ out the window. I thought it was a good comment on the unbroken nature of White Empire, how Rule Britannia became Rule Americana, especially in 'Israel'. My Oxford friend had simpler thoughts and made a 'small penis' sign to the man with his index and thumb.
Before I left, I went to a vigil outside the Radcliffe. Led by a Palestinian woman, people sang Palestinian songs and mourned Palestinian names in silence. Everyone tried (and failed) to not weep. I honestly can't do this anymore, and I definitely can't do it every day, but it keeps happening, with the support of all of these august institutions. The Al Aqsa Flood has washed away so many illusions since October 7th. Universities, parliaments, journalists, they're all corrupt, and they're all in on it. They'll even beat their own heirs for complaining about it. That's what I saw in Oxford. Old elites trying to beat the new elites into submission, trying desperately to prevent a new world from being born.
The Chancellor Of Vice
The Oxford Vice-Chancellor Irene Tracey is the banality of evil personified. She's a neuroscientist specializing in pain who somehow cannot feel anything when she sees thousands of dead children. While 'Israel' targets, abducts, and tortures doctors to death in Gaza, she mounts pious banalities and keeps funding them. In response to her own students protesting Oxford's involvement in the Gaza Genocide, she freaked out and called the police on them, the people in her care. However, when outsiders assaulted her own students, she didn't do anything at all.
What are the students protesting exactly? Well, they speak for themselves well enough. Oxford has an £8.1 billion endowment, which goes to 'Israeli' arms merchants like Elbit and their financiers like Barclays. Among God knows what else, Oxford's funds are quite opaque. Blood money has always been good money, and universities are increasingly just hedge funds with libraries. The moneylenders are well and truly in the temples of higher learning, and nobody's whipping them with appropriate severity. Oxford also collaborates with 'Israeli' universities directly, and deleteriously. As the Palestinian-British doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta (who barely survived Gaza) said (at Oxford):
[Quadcopters] are designed and the company that company that makes them is owned by Tel Aviv University, which is a partner of Oxford University. They are small drones that are agile and maneuverable enough to be allowed into the compounds of hospitals and they will have with them a sniper gun attached to them. And I remember that first night, being quite suprised that you could hear single fire. And then the following day, we received over 30 wounded. Of patients and their families that had been trying to get to the hospital the whole day, that had been taken out and shot by the quadcopters. They are symbolic of the fact that there is no scene when Israeli academia ends and the Israeli military begins.
Oxford is also transparently part of 'Israel's' propaganda system, copy-pasting the lie that these protests are antisemitic and even outsourcing their definition of antisemitism to shadowy third parties (which we'll get to, it's wild). This both endangers the many Jews at the protests and Jews in general, by associating them with the abomination that is 'Israel'.
It's all deeply cynical, and I was even more shocked to see actual neo-Nazis at Oxford myself. I saw Ukrainian Azov members in full uniform outside the encampment, because Reuben College invited them. The people protesting the Nazis of our time, however, get liberally beaten for their troubles. Hell, at Magdalene College they also include dead Nazis on their memorial wall. And, of course, the British Empire were worse than the Nazis, they just committed their crimes against colored people so it's forgotten. Britain has just been folded into the American Empire, it's all one continuous, and supporting 'Israel' is really a continuation of Oxford policy forever.
As Oxford Action For Palestine has said, “There is no university in the history of human civilisation that is more complicit in violence, dispossession, and the building of destructive colonial empires than the University of Oxford.” Perhaps because they have so much experience, Oxford never misses a chance to be on the wrong side of history, which is precisely where they are now.
The Excuses For Atrocity
The statements from the Wicked-Chancellor Tracey are telling, because it shows the deep hypocrisy of hegemoney. These people actually believe their own propaganda, in an age where people can see, know, and love the men, women, and children who die as a result. Yet they keep prattling on. As Tracey said:
As an academic institution, our mission is our teaching and research; within that context, we seek to create the conditions in which our members can pursue knowledge and exchange ideas within the law and with civility. Our priority has therefore been to ensure our community has remained tolerant and respectful of difference, and that our students and staff are free from Islamophobia, antisemitism or any form of discrimination. As a community, we are deeply committed to freedom of speech and academic freedom. We encourage our students and staff to express their views freely, including using their right to protest within the boundaries of the law.
This sounds anodyne, but I'll go through the bolded points because they're important.
The first thing Tracey gets wrong is the context. Students are not protesting the academics per se, they're protesting the finances. It is, in fact, the students who are trying to follow the academic mission, while the administrators want to follow the money straight to hell. Tracey appeals to being 'respectful of difference', as if committing genocide is an opinion and not an actual event that kills actual people. She also appeals to a definition of antisemitism that conflates Jewishness with 'Israel' and denies criticism of that state. They didn't even write this definition themselves, they outsourced it to a link. None of this even sounds like an academic institution, they just sound like another hedge fund making lame excuses.
When Tracey says they're ‘deeply committed to freedom of speech and academic freedom,’ it's completely meaningless. Just another marketing phrase from another hedge fund which really does not mean it. Then of course she closes with an appeal to the 'law', ignoring the fact that slavery and apartheid were once legal and, indeed, still are. None of this means anything any more than a bankers' commitment to ESG or DEI or whatever bullshit acronym they're flogging that month. These are all marketing slogans to sound clean while making filthy lucre as usual. That's all Tracey is doing here, while hiding behind the reputation of a 'university'. Tracey actually works for the donor (ie, rich) class and these students are just being annoying by actually believing the marketing. To understand how deep universities have been lobotomized by money, just look at Oxford's definition of antisemitism. They didn't even write it themselves despite being Oxford.
Antisemitism Is Not Supporting 'Israel'
Oxford, despite having no noticeable shortage of academics, has mysteriously outsourced the definition of antisemitism to the shadowy International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), headquartered in Germany of all places. Because committing a genocide makes you an expert now. The IHRA (and thus Oxford's) definition of antisemitism is a wild one. According to them, antisemitism includes “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor, applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, [and] drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
This definition is deranged because it both conflates Jews with the state of 'Israel' and denies that this state could do certain things on a categorical basis. It's like saying if you're abused you can never commit abuse, which just isn't true at all. By the outsourced-Oxford definition of antisemitism, 'Israel' categorically cannot be racist, they cannot do anything like the Nazis, and they should only be judged by the standards of the most racist and genocidal people on Earth, like the US and America. It's not that any of these things can be true or false, they're just not possible. Forget academia, this doesn't even hold up to basic logic.
Oxford—which presumably has academics available—has outsourced their entire antisemitism definition to a dubious and frankly dumbass link, and then used that non-definition to attack their own students. Jews and everyone else. Forget the theory and statements, look at what actually happened. Take May 11th, when the camp was attacked, as reported by the Oxford Student:
On Saturday 11 May, six men arrived at the encampment and disrupted a vigil, while directing abuse at several members. Police and protesters engaged in de-escalation, while the men shouted such statements as “Israel we love you”, “terrorist sympathisers”, and “You’re not Jewish, fake Jew… what the f*** is that on your head.”
By conflating antisemitism with a genocidal state and then weaponizing this definition against their own students, this is what Oxford University (and so many universities) have done. They have made everyone on their own campus quads less safe, so 'Israeli' quadcopters can keep killing Palestinians. University administrators and politicians lie about violence at the protests but all I saw was young people being incredibly gentle, and their own university both not protecting and actively attacking them through cops. It's like a bunch of Grinches complaining about the Whos of Whoville singing, and then punching them until they give up on Christmas ever coming.
Why Universities?
I often wonder why the ruling class allows this at all. Why do universities even exist, and why do they support so much criticism of the ruling class? But I think I get it now. Universities are there to absorb rebellion, to capture it as criticism and suppress it as action. That's why they react so violently against direct action. It messes with their misdirection. The point of universities is to slowly absorb and diffuse change—to categorize and complicate it—not to catalyze it into action. To keep people inside the tent pissing out, not outside the tent pissing in.
Universities are like the lymph nodes of power, all the 'bad' stuff is gathered there so the host body can learn about them, make antibodies, and suppress any sudden change to the system. Slowly—and always at the host body's own pace—ideas can be assimilated into the system, and even used to attack other people (like bombing people cause they don't support gay rights enough). Universities are a vital regulator for the powerful, both for inoculating themselves against dangerous ideas and for incorporating the ones they can use.
Universities like Oxford are global lymph nodes, they pull in young people and ideas (and our money) from all over the world. Thus the Empire can both understand what's happening without, and push its own agenda from within our own children. It really makes me think of the Game Of Thrones practice of sending young lords as hostages to conquering houses. The youth would be educated and generally be treated well... as long as they remained loyal.
Institutions like Oxford allow Empire to carefully control intellectual energy and keep it (and the money!) flowing in the right direction. Up and to the White. The Vice-Chancellor Tracey unconsciously expressed this purpose when she idiotically said, “we have begun mapping out existing connections to universities in Gaza to determine how we can build on those connections.” Firstly, connections to what? Every university in Gaza has been targeted and destroyed, with 'Israeli' soldiers taking selfies in front of the flames. What Tracey is trying to do—long after the historical moment has passed—is to absorb this rebellion into academia, through scholarships and books and stuff they should have been doing anyways, instead of funding and collaborating with known murderers. But it's too little too late.
The historical change is too big and too fast for these ancient universities to process. All they can do is mouth pious banalities and continue the beatings until morale improves. They remind my of my old dog Mercutio when we took him to the beach. The dude got angry at the waves and tried to bite them. I tried to explain to him that it doesn't work that way. Then he ran off and bit a random dog instead. You really can't teach an old dog new tricks, and Oxford is the oldest dog of all.
This historical moment is simply too much for the entire Western world to digest and process. The hypocrisy is too much, the contradictions too obvious, the carnage too constant. It's one of those decades when centuries happen, and universities simply aren't equipped for that at all. Universities are supposed to be regulators of change, but there's no regulating this and slowly digesting it over generations. The changes coming from the Al Aqsa Flood are quite literally a flood. They're washing away the illusions around all western institutions, and revealing them all as craven and corrupt.
All of the talk about Human Rights®️, Freedom©, and Democracy™ was just marketing bullshit, and if you talk about it too much they'll just hit you. They hit their own children to keep murdering other children. That's really how ugly it is, and this has become obvious to an entire generation now. There's no coming back from this. The Empire's own corruption has breached the lymph nodes of its universities and, sooner or later, the whole hegemonster is going to die of civilizational cancer. Inshallah.