Student Special: "What a strange and troubling time to be launching into a new academic year"

What a strange and troubling time to be launching into a new academic year. It should be the beginning of a great adventure, a moment to feel full of optimism, energy and joy. Of course it should. Historically, most of the time it was.

But there’s a lot of people out there now, for whom that might seem like an extremely naive position to take, or feeling to have.

You don’t have to be a news junkie to look at what is happening in the world and feel a deep sense of foreboding. Not so long ago, the broad sense seemed to prevail that, in Martin Luther King’s memorable phrase, the arc of history bends towards justice. People had to fight for civil rights, but they won them. People had to fight for gay rights, but they won them too. Women had to fight for reproductive rights, and they were winning.

It took painstaking work. It took campaigns and protests and sometimes direct action. But, in certain parts of the world at least, equality gradually became a by-word. Hatred, prejudice and bigotry were challenged. Broadly speaking – whether in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand or parts of Asia – society became more inclusive and more openly democratic.

The old Soviet block collapsed. Democracies were established in what had been dictatorships. We were heading in the right direction. Hope and history seemed to rhyme. Until they didn’t.

MEANINGFUL SANCTIONS

Now, we can see it very clearly: the arc of history has been forcibly twisted in a different direction by power-hungry swine who have the money and the resources to do it.

The post-Second World War order has been collapsed. The restraints that were tentatively established back then have disappeared. And as a result, the agreement to build the United Nations as a platform for reducing conflict between nations is beginning to look like a busted flush.

Sure, the past forty or fifty years have not been free of appalling skulduggery, violence and brutality on the international geopolitical stage. The Iran-Iraq war, in which an estimated 500,000 people died. The Rwandan Civil War that resulted in the Tutsi genocide. The blood-soaked conflict in what had been known as Yugoslavia. The outrages of 9/11. The war on Iraq, unjustly launched in its wake by President George Bush of the United States of America.

There never has been a truly peaceful time. But the feeling was still that good people would gradually prevail, that autocracies and dictatorships would become the exceptions, that – as with the Good Friday agreement in Ireland – we could carefully negotiate our way to a better future for all. Who can really believe that faintly absurd idea any more, as 2025 unfolds?

Diplomacy is seen now as something that happens later, if at all.

And with that has come a shocking descent into barbarism, on a much wider scale. We have seen it in the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and even more tellingly, right now, in what is happening in broad daylight in Gaza. Over 63,000 people killed out of a population of just 2.1million citizens. Aid workers butchered in their hundreds. Journalists assassinated. All by the Israeli army, using weapons supplied by the USA, with parts that come from the UK.

We have long ago arrived at the point where complicity escalates into direct responsibility for crimes against humanity. And still politicians lack the courage to make a stand, because that might mean getting on the wrong side of the pathetically ego-centric snowflake that is Trump.

Every day, we waken up to a new horror.

How is it possible, any young student might validly ask, that the world can stand back and watch, while this brazen genocide is being carried out by Israel? Where starvation is used as a weapon of war? Where aid is deliberately denied entrance?

What ludicrous cowardice is there among leaders in Europe that they mouth meaningless platitudes when clearly what is needed now is the kind of hard-hitting sanctions necessary to bring the Israeli government – and if not them, the Israeli people – to their senses?

How many more innocent civilians must be butchered before really meaningful action is taken, in a way that will make the revulsion of billions of people across the world tangible?

At this stage, there is no hiding behind legalistic technicalities. The truth is that everyone really knows that this is genocide. And everyone knows they know. And still they prevaricate. It is both disgraceful and abject, pathetic...

GOVERNMENT BY SHAKEDOWN

The US will, of course, not acknowledge or admit it, because they too are guilty. They approve. They were unconscionably bad under Joe Biden. But with Trump as President, they actively want to see Gaza cleared of Palestinians. Just the thought of this, and what it says about the current administration in the US, is enough to make the blood run cold. Cynicism and opportunism have always been part of the political equation. But their plans for Gaza – seeing it first and foremost as a real estate opportunity – involve a new level of depravity.

I remember when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, smart arses saying that those who were shocked or appalled were being self-indilgent. “Get on with it,” they said. “Stop being alarmist. You’re just sore losers.”

Well, they were wrong. They didn’t foresee Trump’s attempt to over-turn the results of the 2020 election by force. Nor did they foresee the attack which he has launched on every aspect of American democracy since he was re-elected in 2024.

Using the power of the State to threaten political opponents. Acting as if the FBI is his own private army. Handing extraordinary powers of arrest and detention to the goons of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Disbanding USAID. Defunding universities. Attacking and suing independent media. Blatantly gerrymandering electoral boundaries to ensure that the Republican Party will retain its majority in the Mid-Term Elections in 2026. And using the White House for personal enrichment in a way that no President has ever even dreamed of doing before.

Fact: we’d be here all day if I tried to recite even a tenth of the abuses of power of which he has been guilty – so far. And it is likely to get worse. Much worse.

Everywhere you turn, he is acting like a dictator – and people are bending the knee. And he is taking that same presumption – that he can do anything he likes and be accountable to no one – into the international arena.

Unilaterally imposing tariffs, and using them as a negotiating tool to force countries to accept American domination.

Cosying up to dictators. Telling everyone what a great guy Vladimir Putin is. Attempting to negotiate with Russia separately from Ukraine and Europe. Effectively offering Russia Ukrainian territory and securing nothing in return, in the hope of doing another sordid moneymaking deal on the side.

It is mafia-style government by shakedown, a regime in which nothing or no one is safe – and in which the President will use any and every tactic to target individuals he dislikes, and political opponents, out of sheer spite.

Well, listen – as a student, I’d be giving the United States of America a wide birth for now. Because if something does go wrong, or you express an opinion too loudly, or you carry a Palestinian flag in a public place, you never know where you might end up: it could be Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras – and it certainly won’t be on holidays...

A LOT TO PONDER

I believe that to a huge extent the rise of the new wave of dictatorships – including in the USA – is down to social media and the way in which it facilitates the direct targeting of individuals, based on their neuroses, by hugely wealthy vested interests that are fundamentally racist, and determined to turn back the clock to the pre-Civil Rights era.

With social media, it requires only money to spread lies, disinformation, propaganda and hatred on a grand scale. And, with the help of surveillance capitalism, people’s psychological and emotional vulnerabilities can be exploited mercilessly. The advantage is always with those who are willing to lie, to exaggerate, to instil fear, to provoke hostility.

All of this social media bullshit is sold to people as being a town hall dedicated to free speech, when in truth it is really about the power of money to mould and shape men and women – and young men and women in particular – so that they point the finger in the wrong direction, punching down on even more vulnerable  people, rather than blaming those who are profiting most.

The core fact is that the Neo-liberal project has failed. It has produced ever-greater levels of inequality. It has caused the wealth in the hands of the top 1% to multiply, while poverty for the rest escalates.

It has seen rents soar and the thought of buying a house slip out of reach for the vast majority of younger people. It has created a time-bomb that governments are desperately failing to address, even in Ireland.

And all of this is before we even start to think about climate change. That escalating crisis is written about in the Hot Press Student Special issue by Gerry McGovern, in his column The End Is Nigh. It is, I believe, essential reading. Because among Donald Trump’s most appalling crimes is his decision to tear up the Paris Agreement, and to abandon the goal of limiting an increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees. We are on course, Gerry says, for disaster, maybe even extinction. And he could well be right.

So, dear student, as you embark on the new academic year, there is a lot to ponder. You can retreat into a bubble and play it safe. Or you can get engaged and decide that, working together, we have at least a chance of changing the world.

That, I’m afraid, is when the real hard work will start...