Since the launch of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, those few in the United States that have spoken out against seventy years of apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing have faced a violent backlash. The most visible groups to stand up against this unfolding holocaust, have been university   students . In the past few months they have been arrested , brutally assaulted   by police      officers , harassed by racist Zionist professors, doxed     by     well-funded     right-wing platforms ,      ostracized      by      their      community (especially since many of the movement leaders have been Jewish activists), shot     at , been suspended   from   school and expelled from their institutions of learning, vilified   by   the   national media , and more The students, in rising up against genocide and colonial occupation are proving themselves to be more competent readers of history, and more ethical subjects and actors than an American is designed to be since 9/11. Not in our names, the students   say . Their adherence to basic humanity appears as a threat to many of their elders who were programmed to impotently shrug and keep it moving despite daily barrages of dismembered Palestinian children, destroyed homes, and scenes of mass death appearing in their social media feeds from Gaza. It as an attitude and moral dereliction cultivated during the Global War on Terror. Self-Subtracting Humanity Since the inauguration of the War on Terror, the U.S. empire has unleashed death and destruction on a planetary scale. 3 This is a fact. 4 The empire has been enabled in its ability to murder with impunity by a population I identify as “self-subtracting humanity.” 5 Self-subtracting humanity disables its own ability to act as a subject of history precisely at the moment when it is called upon to signify its own ethical and intellectual subjecthood. 6 This self-subtracting subject thrives on the legacies and fruits of settler-colonial violence and imperial projects. 7 Yet, paradoxically, this populace simultaneously disavows that complicity by referencing its own being as unmoored from history. “I don’t know enough about this issue,” “It’s just horrible what’s happening,” “There’s good people on both sides,” “I am against all violence,” and other mantras are the shields behind which one hides to disavow material complicity in empire. Self-subtraction from the mass of humanity is the defining feature of the U.S. populace. Exemplary of this vacuity has been the silence of the U.S. scholarly community since October 7th. Lying within a highly prejudiced lay American populace whose consent for war-making, especially against black and brown bodies and Islamicate polities, has long been manufactured amidst narrow circles of corporate and state power, 8 scholars in some of the most prestigious and well-funded institutions of knowledge in the country give no account of having learned much if anything about ethical prerogatives to genocide. It should not escape analysis that many of these scholars were conditioned during the Global War on Terror to be this self- subtracting, suspending humanity in service of imperial projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. 9 The students, amidst a sea of apathy, appear anomalous by recognizing Palestinian humanity. The U.S. student is as miraculous in their humanity as their elders are typical in their apathy. The students practice forms of becoming human. Humanity Against Empire The student movement employs tactics such as encampments and building takeovers, demanding universities sever ties with colonial formations, and an end to genocide. They recognize universities and colleges as the principal loci of the imperial contradictions coursing through society. 10 The student protesters have made clear that U.S. institutions of higher-education masquerade as citadels of free speech and knowledge production since their operation as billion-dollar enterprises deny and countermand the ethical and intellectual imperatives that very knowledge demands in action. 11 The elders who had a duty to protect and guide these students, and use the protections afforded by tenure to express in words and actions what ethical, scientific, and, humanistic consensus demands of them – an unequivocal repudiation of colonialism and imperial violence – have been reticent in their response, uncertain in their will and march to signify their own humanity, expertise, and intellect with the ethical clarity of the students. There are exceptions of course. Maura Finkelstein , formerly of Muhlenberg College was fired for her principled stance as a scholar of Jewish origin. Similarly, Jairo Funes-Flores and Jodi    Dean , both prominent stalwarts of their field, were also suspended for raising their voice on the genocide. In May, DePaul   University   fired Dr. Anne d’Aquino, for simply addressing the health impacts of genocide in Gaza. The Brilliant Israeli American historian Raz Segal was appointed director of the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies on June 5, 2024 but had the    offer rescinded on June 10 after labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. Yet an organized and unanimous repudiation of the genocide has not been allowed to build steam in any quarter of the U.S. academy. This complacency of academics reflects a broader issue within the American empire: a culture of liberal aestheticism that masks the reality of its destructive impact. In lieu of an ethics and politics that gives evidence of their subjecthood, the U.S. academy settles for an aesthetics that privileges empty performances over true signification The Waste of Empire The United States today is a dying empire that stalks the planet like an aimless monster, trampling much of what it encounters, while leaving behind an unending series of wastescapes. 12 Nowhere is this wastefulness more evident today than in the continued U.S support for the ongoing genocide   in   Palestine . According to a harrowing study by the foremost British medical journal Lancet , as of July 2024, the past nine months of wanton murder may have yielded an estimated 186,000 dead, mostly civilians, in Gaza. Even as humanity bears witness to scholasticide in Gaza, the death of poets, the destruction of all universities, the bombing of schools, and the assassination of professors, the U.S. academy has extracted itself from that totality that holds the capacity to witness. In nine months, the United States has abetted a death toll in Gaza that rivals two decades of its occupation in Afghanistan. Even though the U.S. is not acting as a direct occupier this time around, its enthusiastic transfer of weaponry confirms that American empire since 9/11 offers little other than death and destruction.