Racist Petraeus and Thugs, Beware: Anti-war Students, Profs on the Rise

NEW YORK CITY, September 4 — As President Barack Obama prepares to strike workers in Syria, former CIA director and war general David Petraeus has found a new stomping ground as an honors professor at the City University of New York (CUNY).  Meanwhile, students and faculty from many senior and community colleges have launched a campaign against further militarization of CUNY.
Amid perennial tuition increases and financial aid cuts, CUNY’s Board of Trustees appointed Petraeus to teach a one-year course to Macaulay Honors College, whose top-tier students are 60 percent children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.
Commanding U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions, Petraeus’s role was to solifidy U.S. control over the world’s largest energy reserves. Alongside Colonel James Steele, who commanded death squads that killed tens of thousands in El Salvador and Vietnam, Petraeus oversaw torture chambers and death squads in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It is likely that some of Petraeus’s honor students are from the very countries he brutalized.
During Petraeus’s tenure as head of the CIA, the agency expanded the use of drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen, killing thousands. According to the New York Times, drones killed an estimated 50 civilians for every “militant” slain.
The hiring of this war criminal is an attack on the mainly black and Latino students at CUNY. Even as the U.S. war machine murders and tortures workers in the Middle East, it spreads patriotic propaganda to the same class. Petraeus’s CUNY course is titled, “Are We On the Threshold of the New North American Decade?”
Of particular interest to this imperialist warmaker is U.S. energy policy. He will be advancing the interests of the Wall Street investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Robert, which hired him after a scandal over an extramarital affair ended his government career. His seminar includes readings that support fracking and the Keystone pipeline.  
It’s Not Just Petraeus, It’s Imperialism
Petraeus symbolizes the creeping of war fever onto our campuses. In addition to hiring this war criminal, CUNY restored the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) on several campuses last semester, including the College of Staten Island, Medgar Evers, York, and CCNY. ROTC was kicked out of CUNY in 1971 after mass protests against the war in Vietnam. Now the U.S. ruling class is preparing for larger wars. It needs working-class students’ ideological support — and working-class boots on the ground.
We must recognize that war and imperialism have always been a part of capitalist universities’ curricula, be it through research, propaganda, or recruitment. But students and professors have also played a historical role in fighting U.S. imperialism. We must revive the campus movement and help win the masses to communist revolution as the only solution against imperialism and war.
Fascism on the Rise
As the ruling class prepares for war, it also needs to train working-class students for fascist control. Students are harassed by cops on the streets, and the surveillance continues once they enter college. Our campuses have become centers for spying and patrols by the New York Police Department. Cameras, turnstiles, campus cops, and the presence of the NYPD is now normal at CUNY. The cops spy on Muslim students and disrupt any sign of protest. The FBI works with campus cops to investigate and intimidate students on campus.
Join college students and professors as we kick off our campaign against imperialist forces at 2:30 p.m. Monday, September 16, in front of the Macaulay Honors Building on 35 W. 67 St., between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. The U.S. can start its wars; the working class will finish them with communist revolution.