What Glenda Gilmore Really Said

The following is the text of my remarks to the Yale Peace Coalition meeting on April 9, 2003. I invite you to compare it to the story written by two Yale freshmen and published in David Horowitz's on-line magazine. The "critical questioning" to which they refer occurred when Jamie Kircheck asked if I didn't think that Daniel Pipes and Andrew Sullivan were simply trying to get my opinions to a larger audience. I said that I had thought about that, but that Pipes's call for "adult supervision" and "outsiders" to "establish standards for media statements by faculty" made me think otherwise. That was the only question Mr. Kircheck asked.

April 9, 2003

In case you are wondering what we are doing here tonight, while film of jubilant Iraqis greeting U.S. troops in Baghdad runs on CNN, I offer this:

Around lunchtime today, I got this email from an old high school friend who acts as an armed escort for CNN news teams:

GG,
From the streets of Baghdad
Liberation and Freedom, nuff said.
Semper Fi,
Mac

I'm here tonight to tell Mac--and you--that 'nuff hasn't been said, that amid the fall of Baghdad, it is our duty as citizens to continue to question how we got there, what we will do there, and what lesson our policy makers will draw from our invasion of Iraq in the weeks and months to come.

I was in Memphis last weekend when I read the obituary of Edwin Starr. Starr is best
Remembered for his 1970 #1 hit, War. I'll quote a stanza here:

[Editor's Note: The stanza has been removed. We have been informed that permission is required to reprint it.]

I almost wept as I wondered what the reaction would be today to such a song. Number 1 hit? I doubt it. Starr, who served three years in the military, would be condemned on Fox News (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) as a traitor.

I know, because I have been branded a traitor. I wrote an op ed in the Yale Daily News and received death threats and rape wishes, was called a slut in the YDN comments section by a Princeton PhD (whom I don't know and who offered no evidence to back up that assertion), won blogger Andrew Sullivan's Susan Sontag award for fuzzy moral thinking, and was named by Daniel Pipes as one of five "professors who hate America."

It's tough to be an anti-war patriot in the vicious climate that Bush has encouraged and that Rumsfeld embodies. Tonight, I want to talk about the relationship between anti-war activism and patriotism, about who has the right to speak for our country, and about the organized plot funded by right-wing foundations to shut down dissent.

First, let me recap the position I took on October 11 in an opinion piece that the YDN solicited from me. I argued then that a preemptive strike on Iraq, which I defined as invading Iraq without immediate provocation, would be the most craven abdication of democratic principles in our country's history. It would transform our country into an aggressor nation if the U.S. followed the Bush Administration's foreign policy as articulated in his National Security Strategy: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build up in hopes of surpassing or equaling, the power of the United States." I argued that Bush was trying to do an end run around the UN, and that he seemed to want to undermine weapons inspections so that he could invade Iraq. Instead of standing up against tyranny, we were bringing it to our own doorstep, I predicted.

I pointed out that I, too, believed that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, and that we were the good guys, but that good guys don't invade other countries unless they have exhausted every other option. We had not. If our goal was to disarm Iraq, we had a workable plan that was proceeding to do so.

Did I argue as an expert on the Middle East? No. I argued first as an American citizen who thought the entire scheme fantastical and devoid of common sense and, second, as a professor of U.S. history who teaches about the quest to perfect democracy in the 20th century. You don't have to be an expert to say what you believe. It is every citizen's right to speak out.

Okay, perhaps, as my momma suggested, I was a bit rough on Bush when I said he wanted to become the "Emperor of the World," and "This unclothed emperor is, as they say in Texas, all hat and no brains," a riff on "all hat and no cattle" that brought me scorn from bellicose Texans.

But let me quote the much ridiculed and much beloved Imperialist Teddy Roosevelt on the subject of criticizing the President:

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is
exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1918, "Lincoln and Free Speech" )

What I did not know when I wrote that op ed is that I would walk straight into a preplanned campaign aimed at antiwar university professors in an attempt to cut them off from their students, to endanger their jobs, and to shut them up.

By the next morning, a YDN columnist had sent my piece to Andrew Sullivan, a hawkish blogger (I didn't even know what a blog was), and probably also to Daniel Pipes.

My inbox filled up with nasty, nasty little messages, and the comments section of the YDN (I didn't even know what a comments section was) filled up with the same.

The kind of criticism I received fell mainly into four categories, all four tropes intended to discredit me in different ways by composing for me fantastical past lives that had nothing to do with my real life. More importantly, 90 percent of these messages--and there were hundreds--had absolutely nothing to do with my argument to protect U.S. and Iraqi lives by letting the UN do its work.

First, there were the people who accused me of being a left-over 1960s liberal professor, reliving my anti-war days and imposing them on my students. In this scenario, I had acted treasonously as a young woman in opposing the war in Vietnam, corrupted the minds of Ivy leaguers for 30 years, and now I was baaack….I was disloyal then and had simply been waiting to commit other acts of disloyalty. The truth is that I was married to a Marine Corps Captain and spent the Vietnam War at Parris Island, where many of the Marines themselves had turned against the war by 1970.

Second, there were the misogynists, those who thought they could scare me by impugning my sexual reputation. Hence, the slut comments, along with those who wished I would be raped by Saddam's hired rape squads, and finally to a pathetic guy who said he bet I was fat, dubbed me elephant woman, and guessed that I hadn't had a date until I was 26. Sassy girl gets slapped down.

Then there were those who called me a communist, or the child of communists. This was baffling, since Saddam isn't a communist and my parents were virulent anti-communists. I grew up reading John Birch society publications.

Finally, there was the Ivory Tower/Ivy League nitwit criticism. In this fable, I knew nothing of the real world and was an effete snob to boot, trying to impose my eastern intellectual ideas on real Americans. Since I went to grad school after a career in business, and came to Yale with a degree from a public university, and with all of the effete snobbishness that one can pick up at a North Carolina barbeque joint, this was particularly funny.

Andrew Sullivan put a direct link from his blog to the YDN comments section, and it was clear that the vast majority of comments came from nuts with time on their hands who were outside of Yale. Why would they bother? They bothered because there was an organized campaign to shut up anyone from the academy who spoke out against the war.

Within a month, Daniel Pipes had reached millions of people around the world, starting with the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post and moving on to syndication, by profiling my op ed, with four others, in an article entitled "Professors who Hate America."

Here is Pipes:

Visit an American University,. . . and you'll often enter a topsy-turvey world in which professors consider the United States (not Iraq) the problem. . . .Yet, the relentless opposition to their own government raises some questions:
Why do American academics so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes?
Why have university specialists proven so inept at understanding the great contemporary issues of war and peace, starting with Vietnam, then the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, and now the war on terror?
Why do professors of linguistics, chemistry, American history, genetics, and business present themselves in public as authorities on the Middle East?
What is the long-term effect of an extremist, intolerant, and anti-American environment on university students?

And here are Pipes's recommendations to solve the problem he imagines above. I'll continue quoting him, with emphasis added to the original.

The time has come for adult supervision of the faculty and administrators on many American campuses. Especially as we are at war, the goal must be for universities to resume their civic responsibilities. This can be achieved if outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others) take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements by the faculty, and broaden the range of campus discourse.

In Pipes's imagination, professors give up their civil rights when they take the job.

Another professor mentioned in the article, Eric Foner, and I answered Pipes in the LA Times. We began to hear from people who had long been Pipes watchers. We discovered that his organization, the Middle East Forum, runs Campus Watch, an group designed to listen to and report to the right wing media what professors are saying on campus. I bet we have some members in this audience.

Dave Johnson of the Commonweal Institute, in a story on History News Network revealed how these organizations work. Pipes is funded by the Bradley Foundation, which funds the Heritage Foundation, as well as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The latter organization, set up to monitor speech on campus, was founded by Lynn Cheney, wife of the vice president. She is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, funded by the Bradley Foundation. Moreover, these organizations meet weekly and generate "talking points" for the media. The talking point that they generated in early October last year was apparently "professors who hate America." The National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy found that these organizations had formulated an assault on academia, "to attack the patriotism of liberals and to convince trustees of colleges and universities to remove them, replacing them with ideological conservatives." Surprise, surprise, they maintain a "Collegiate Network" with links to 70 college newspapers. The campaign I ran into was a preplanned, carefully orchestrated attempt to ask, "Why do they hate America?" and to imply that anti-war professors are like terrorists, who also hate America." Johnson informs us that if you google the phrase, "they hate America," you will get over a million hits. He summed up what happened this way, "Foner and Gilmore encountered a well-funded campaign to pursue an ideological agenda."

Why does this matter to you? Because you should know that there is a campaign out there to shut me up and to shut you up. There is a concerted attempt to question the patriotism of anyone who criticizes Bush and, now that we have invaded Iraq, anyone who criticizes what we do there. That campaign will not die; indeed, its planners have perfected it on rubes like me. Next, it will be directed against anyone who speaks out against our country's policies.

On Sunday, Richard Perle said, "There's got to be a change in Syria as well." James Woolsey, a friend of the administration, predicted last week that "the U.S. [will] have to spend years and maybe decades waging World War IV….in Iran, against the Hezbollah, in Syria. . . ."

If this is the case, what of our country will be left? If our children -- if you -- must temper your disgust at war and take up the responsibility of invading other countries to "solve" their problems, we won't have lives worth protecting anymore. They can't do these things if we speak; they must silence us.

This censorship campaign drives the cost of deposing Saddam Hussein even higher, because it signals the extinction of our civil liberties. And I believe that is exactly what the cabal who attacked me wants. They want to extinguish civil liberties so that they can move, unfettered by criticism, to world domination. Why? Because they believe that they alone know what is right.

What can you do? You can refuse to allow anyone to question your patriotism. As Paul Krugman wrote this week in the New York Times: "After all, democracy --including the right to criticize--was what we were fighting for" in World War II. Yet, today, he warns, "self-styled patriots are trying to impose constraints on political speech never contemplated during World War II, accusing anyone who criticizes the president of undermining the war effort." You can be strong, be loud, be patriotic, and be anti-war.

Do I still believe what I said on October 11? Yes. I regret risking and losing U.S. and Iraqi lives, and I believe -- if our aim was to disarm Iraq -- that the UN was accomplishing that. If our aim was to silence dissent in this country, position the U.S. as an imperial power, and breed terrorism in the Middle East, then Bush may have accomplished his goals. Yesterday, a wounded and bleeding Iraqi civilian told the New York Times:

"Is this Bush's promised 'liberation?' no, this is a red liberation, a liberation written in blood. Bush said he would disarm Saddam, and look how he's doing it now--killing us, one by one. Please ask him, how do you liberate people by killing them?"

And in case you think I exaggerate the enormity of the conspiracy against free speech, guess who President Bush nominated this week to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federal think tank established by Congress to promote "the prevention, management and resolution of international conflicts?" George Bush nominated Daniel Pipes.