Meet George Washington University’s newest student group, the twenty student-strong Internationalist Students’ Front which seeks to “oppose nationalism across the world and contest popular narratives about U.S. foreign policy.”
According to The Hatchet, the ISF will host teach-ins about fascism and advocate “internationalism,” an ideology “similar to socialism that believes all people should unite to advance common interests.”
“Internationalism means that we stand in solidarity with every single struggle against oppression in the world,” ISF member Sheng Zhang said.
Zhang said the ISF will circulate a petition asking the Gelman Library to remove two books from its shelves — or at least “label them as propaganda” — one of which, he says, is a Japanese “far-right”-authored offering which denies the World War II-era Nanking Massacre ever happened.
A new student organization aims to promote anti-imperialist and anti-nationalist views on campus https://t.co/WR9PxVWyUt
— The GW Hatchet (@gwhatchet) December 7, 2017
Senior Alaina Taylor, a member of the organization, said the group’s main goal is to educate the public about new ideas and historical events they may have never heard about before, like U.S. interference in other countries’ elections. She said the organization will host teach-ins about events like former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s role in the starvation of Indians during World War II.
“A lot of people on our campus just don’t know about these things,” she said. “They’re not taught this in high school and they’re not taught in college either.”
Taylor said she hopes the organization can begin to change attitudes on campus away from the dominant U.S.-centric narrative on events like the Iraq War.
“A lot of people understand that people in their government will do bad things to them, but a lot of the time they don’t extend that to fully understand the scope and full scope of what the U.S. government is willing to do to people abroad,” she said.
On the group’s Facebook page, organization leaders posted blurbs celebrating internationalist figures, like members of the Black Panther Party – a black nationalist and socialist organization that fought against police brutality in the 1960s – and former Cuban President Fidel Castro, a communist dictator and long-time U.S. nemesis who controlled the island for more than half a century until his death last year.
Castro? So much for that “standing in solidarity with every single struggle against oppression in the world.” His victims don’t count, apparently.
The ISF’s Facebook page recently posted a statement from GWU’s Students forJustice in Palestine regarding President Trump’s declaration that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital:
“This imperialist act of violence is one of many continued, sweeping displays of settler-colonial arrogance by the U.S. and the Zionist entity [Israel].”
Read the full Hatchet article.
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IMAGE: Public Stock/Flickr
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