The Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and Reading History

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Last month I argued in this space that we need to read history. It’s not something most Americans spend much time thinking about. A trait of the American psyche is that we favor looking to the future. Physically, historically, we moved West, away from the Old World, leaving the past behind, starting over. This American Dream, to reinvent ourselves in better and better conditions, has been a strength. We stress the new and the young. But reading history is looking back. What good would that do us?

Well, here’s the boring old cliché: The past informs the present. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly does rhyme. A case in point is the recent arrest and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil for his part in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University.

Khalil, a Green Card holder with the usual Constitutional right of free speech, was arrested, without a warrant, and spirited away from his home in New York to detention in Louisiana. He has not been charged with any crime. The federal government claims that his presence in the United States constitutes a danger to our foreign policy interests, and Mr. Trump crows that Khalil will the first of many pro-Palestinian protesters to be removed from the country. He is a preview of a coming attraction.

But we’ve already seen this movie. Anybody remember the Palmer Raids of 1919-20? They were part of the Red Scare around the First World War. U. S. Attorney General Palmer and an up-and-coming young lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover started rounding up political activists with whom they disagreed. These raids were the climax of a long campaign against the International Workers of the World (the Wobblies) and other socialist organizers.

This seems like a good time to pause and remind ourselves that it is not against the law to have an opinion, nor is it against the law to express that opinion. It is against the law to commit a crime. The thousands of people rounded up in the Palmer Raids had not committed a crime by speaking out for labor unions or against the First World War. American Midnight, Adam Hochschild’s history of the period, records that of the “1,182 people arrested” in the first wave of raids, most were rounded up without a warrant and that of those arrested in the much-demonized Union of Russian Workers taken in a later raid, no court ever convicted anyone of an act of violence.

Like Mr. Khalil, they had expressed unpopular views. The issue is not whether Khalil or any of those old-time lefties were right or wrong in what they said. The issue is due process (things like warrants) and that we have a First Amendment, which was written to protect unpopular speech. A functioning democracy needs a diversity of opinion.

But this is a test case. If Trump gets away with this one, he will use more arrests to further stir up hate and hysteria for his own political ends. The spectacle he creates will be another shinny object to distract us while he does his real work while we look elsewhere. Attorney General Palmer had his political motive, too. He wanted to run for president. The raids burnished his reputation for a while. It might have worked for him, but he was no Trump and couldn’t pull it off. Trump is a far more malevolent and media savvy creature. We can’t let him get started rounding up people he doesn’t like.

Reading serious historians and journalists, which is becoming about as popular as knitting, or at least paying close attention to their podcasts, is the best path toward a healthy perspective on how we have both succeeded and failed at being that Shining City on a Hill we keep hearing about. It can be a useful clarifier in confusing times like these. With a little knowledge, we will be able to see that the version of our story the right wing peddles is largely a lie serving their political and economic ends. We need to be able to see through the lie.

Repairing the damage done by the MAGA movement is sure to be a long struggle. In this time of attacks on the media and on informed debate itself, we will do well to remember the silencing of reasonable dissenting voices, the disinformation, and the forced group-think in the United States during and after the First World War and then the later McCarthy period of the 19 50s. We’ll see that private militias, like the ones patrolling the US/Mexican border or storming the U. S. Capitol, or proponents of the Great Replacement Theory are not new. They have been with us from the beginning and have had to be resisted.

But there were heroes, too, who stood up for freedom of thought and expression and who worked for a better society. Knowing their names and stories and their courage gives us heart in a time when it really does look some days that all is lost. Their stories can inform our activism.

As a people, we have made a grave mistake in allowing back into office a man deemed unfit by dozens of officials who worked closely with him during his first administration. It is truly only a cheap, morally vacant con-man who would stab an ally in the back in the middle of a war or vandalize the Congressionally-mandated institutions he was elected to lead. We should have known better the first time around.

The consolation of history is knowing how bad it can get with the wrong people in power, and so then going on with a little more wisdom than might otherwise have been available to us. It is also having faith that sometimes the right people step forward at the right time.

We need to look to—and ourselves be—the right people now.