And some thoughts on a path forward for the peace movement:
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-middle-east-today-and-spirit-of.html
Thursday, February 8, 2024
Monday, February 5, 2024
MALCOLM AND MANNING
Black History Month: Some Remembrances
Harry Targ
(A Rag Blog repost from July 18, 2011)
“And finally, I am deeply grateful to the
real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and
transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism.
Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive
yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership
should be measured.” Manning Marable, Malcolm X, A
Life of Reinvention, 2011, 493).
Manning Marable: Scholar/Activist
Professor Manning Marable was a member of the
Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the
1986-87 academic year. His scholarship, activism, and ground-breaking books and
articles inspired faculty and students even though his stay at our university
was brief. His classic theoretical work, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black
America, along with over 20 books and hundreds of articles, inspired social
science scholarship on class, race, and gender.
His weekly essays, "Along the Color Line," were published in over 250
community newspapers and magazines for years. He once told me that writing for
concerned citizens about public issues was the most rewarding work he ever did.
He was a role model for all young, concerned and committed scholar/activists.
I just finished reading the powerful biography of
Malcolm X authored by Manning Marable. My encounter with this book was as
fixating and transforming as I remember my reading of Malcolm’s autobiography
in the 1960s.
On Malcolm X in the Classroom
While I lack the deep sense of Malcolm X’s impact on
African American politics and cultural identity that others have, I feel
compelled to write something about this reading experience. (Bill Fletcher’s
review and analysis of the Marable biography provides much expertise on the
subject. “Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography
Controversy: A Response to Critics," from The
Black Commentator, July 7, 2011.)
During my first year at Purdue University in north central Indiana in 1968, I
requested to teach a course called “Contemporary Political Problems.” Since I
was on the cusp of becoming a political activist in belated response to the
civil rights and antiwar movements, I thought I could use this course to have
an extended conversation with students about where we needed to be going
intellectually and politically.
My plan was to assign a series of books that reflected different left currents,
politically and culturally, and get us all to reflect on their value for
understanding 1968 America and what to do about it. We read Abbie Hoffman, Ken
Kesey, Herbert Marcuse, the Port Huron and Weatherman statements, and The
Autobiography of Malcolm X.
While my students and I embraced, endorsed, or rejected various of these
authors, we were profoundly impacted by the power of Malcolm X’s personal
biography and his transformations from the streets to the international arena.
As the word got out about the course, and largely because of Malcolm X, sectors
of the Purdue campus got the word that there was a new “radical” in the Political
Science department. (Therefore, I owe my growing enrollments to Malcolm X).
More important, during the second semester in which I taught the course, I had
a very quiet and respectful African American student in the class. He was a
member of Purdue’s track team. One day, after he showed up at the local airport
sporting a very thin, almost invisible, mustache the track coach ordered him
off the plane. Why? Because he had unauthorized facial hair. His modest
symbolic act, growing the mustache, and the universities response to his words
and deed, set off extended protest activities by African American students in
support of him over several weeks.
Shortly before this incident, we had spent a couple of weeks in class
discussing Malcolm X’s autobiography. During one class period this very quiet
person announced to the rest of us that we should consider ourselves lucky that
he chose to participate in this class.
I saw him 40 years later for a fleeting moment. He remembered me and said that
he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time in my class. The
student’s emerging boldness and his articulated sense of pride must have had
something to do with his reading of Malcolm X.
Manning Marable’s Biography of Malcolm X
Reflecting on the Marable biography, I was struck by
the capacity of people to change their ways of thinking, their ideologies, and
their practice. Marable attributes some of Malcolm X’s development to his
conscious desire to reinvent himself and to do so as he told his life story to
Alex Haley, his autobiographical collaborator.
Despite the world of racism, repression, and theological rigidity Malcolm encountered,
Marable records how Malcolm X’s experience and practical political work were in
fact transforming.
Different people gleaned different things from reading Malcolm X’s
autobiography, and the same is true of a reading of Manning Marable’s stirring
and frank biography. While those of us on the left were most inspired by the
last two years of Malcolm X’s life, my student was probably impacted as much by
Malcolm’s developing sense of pride and self-worth in a society that demeaned
and ridiculed people of color
Reading Malcolm and Marable reminds us that, while we bring change through our
organizational affiliations, each individual can have a role to play in
achieving that change. Not all of us can be Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Dolores
Huerta, or Mother Jones. But we can make a difference.
In addition, Manning Marable makes a particularly strong case for Malcolm X as
an internationalist. The United Nations had adopted a Declaration on Human
Rights in 1948 but human rights discourse was not part of the language of
international relations until Malcolm X demanded the international community
address the issue.
For Malcolm X, United States racism, while violating the civil rights of its
Black and Brown citizens, was also violating the fundamental human rights of
peoples at home and abroad. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X
was working to build a coalition of largely former colonial states to demand
that each and every country, and particularly the United States, respect the
human rights of all peoples. Multiple problems including racism, poverty,
disease, hunger, political repression, and sexual abuse were problems at the
root of twentieth century human circumstance AND the United States was a major
violator of human rights.
Marable described in great detail Malcolm X’s frenetic travels through Africa
and the Middle East to build a coalition of Black and Brown peoples to demand
in the United Nations and every other political forum the establishment of
human rights. Bombing Vietnamese people and killing Black children in
Birmingham were part of the same problem.
And, this campaign was being launched at the very same time that the countries
of the Global South were struggling to construct a non-aligned movement to
retake the resources, wealth, and human dignity that had been stripped from
peoples by colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. This was the position
that Dr. Martin Luther King came to in 1967, as articulated in his famous
speech at Riverside Church in New York. Malcolm X was introducing this global
human rights project in 1964.
Marable’s Malcolm X therefore transformed himself from a minor street hustler
to a Black Muslim to a visible world leader advocating a global human rights
agenda. This is the Malcolm X that has meant so much to us over the years,
along with his insistence that Black and Brown people be accorded respect
everywhere and that they should honor and respect themselves.
But, Marable carefully documents Malcolm X’s flaws as well as his strengths. He,
at various times, was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, not unsympathetic to
violence, and a man engaged in intense, sometimes petty, political struggles
with his organizational colleagues.
Manning Marable humanizes Malcolm X. Humanizing our heroes makes our efforts to
pass the messages and symbols of the past to newer generations of activists
more convincing. Young people do not need to see progressive heroes as
untainted by their own humanity. And when we present those who make a
contribution to building a better world to new generations, the examples of
their flaws make it clear that no one is beyond personal and political redemption.
Finally, the biographer, Manning Marable, as my statement at the outset
suggests, was a profoundly important scholar/activist. Marable used his
historical knowledge, social scientific analytical skills, and political values
to craft a career of writing and activism that impacted his students, his
academic colleagues, and his fellow socialists in the struggle for a better
world.
Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental
social change in a deeply troubled world.
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Dr. King Speaks: Economic Consequences of the Capitalist/War System
Black History Month: Some Remembrances
Harry Targ
Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967, spoke of the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.
Every health and welfare provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures.
Over half the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current. And the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war system as it exists
“I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”
Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.
RACISM ON THE CAMPUS: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES (A revised repost from November 15, 2015)
Black History Month: Some Purdue Remembrances
Harry Targ
Journal and Courier photo
The problem of the twentieth century is
the problem of the color line. W.E.B. DuBois
What a proud contrast to the environments
that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Mitch
Daniels
All across the country students, black and white, hit
the streets and the campus malls to protest racism; structural and
interpersonal. One thousand students rallied at Purdue University on Friday,
November 13, 2014 to show solidarity with students at the University of
Missouri and to announce 13 demands they were making to address racism at
Purdue; a racism that the university president says no longer exists.
Of course nationally and locally the struggle for
social and economic justice is historic. Rev. William Barber, leader of the
Moral Mondays Movement, points to the “Three Reconstructions” in post-Civil War
American history. The First Reconstruction occurred in the 1860s and 1870s when
black and white farmers and workers came together to write constitutions and to
create a new democratic Southern politics. The hope this first reconstruction
raised for a truly democratic America was dashed by a shift to the right of the
federal government, the reemergence of the old Southern ruling class, and the
rise of a brutal violent terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Racist policies, coupled with terrorism, instilled formal
racial segregation in the South and subtle forms of institutionalized racism
throughout the rest of the country. (A later rendition of the KKK dominated
Indiana politics in the 1920s).
The Second Reconstruction, Barber asserts, was
inspired by the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which
declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. With militant sectors
of labor, a grassroots Southern civil rights movement revived all across the
country. In the 1960s, it culminated in civil rights legislation that outlawed
racial segregation and guaranteed voting rights. Also the “war on poverty” was
launched. Shortly after these victories, the Republican Party presidential candidate
Richard Nixon employed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to shift federal and
state politics to the right. The forerunners of today’s Tea Party (and Trump
supporting MAGA) rightwing reaction expanded their political power at the
federal and state levels.
Rev. Barber believes that, with the movement that
elected President Obama, there emerged a
Third Reconstruction. It featured the mobilization of masses of
people--blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, blue collar and
white collar workers, young and old, people of faith and those who choose no
faith--coming together to reconstitute the struggle for the achievement of a
truly democratic vision. This vision is of a society that is participatory,
egalitarian, and economically and psychologically fulfilling.
The resurgence of protests on college campuses over
the last decade, although narrowly focused, represents the contemporary form of
the kinds of struggles for social justice Frederick Douglass talked
about. For example, on the campus of Purdue University, the struggle
for racial justice has a long history. For the first 60 years of the twentieth
century the African American population was less than one percent of the
student body. The numbers of African American students grew to a few
hundred in the 1960s. And in the context of the Second Reconstruction and
activism around civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, some
students organized a “Negro History Study Group” (which later became the Black
Student Union). In 1968, to dramatize what they saw as institutional racism
coupled with an environment of racial hostility, more than 150 Black students
carrying brown bags marched to the Executive Building. At the building they
took bricks from the bags. The bricks were piled up and a sign “Or the Fire
Next Time,” was set next to the bricks. The students submitted a series of
demands including the development of an African American Studies Program and a
Black Cultural Center.
The demonstration was dramatic. The demands clear. The justice of their motivation was unassailable. Administrators and faculty set up committees to discuss the protests. And in the short run, only minor changes were implemented, such as Purdue’s 1968 hiring of the first African American professor in Liberal Arts.
One year later, after an African American member of
the track team was castigated for wearing a mustache and his verbal response
led to his arrest, Black students launched another protest march with more
demands. This time the Administration and the Board of Trustees authorized the
establishment of the Black Cultural Center, which today is an educational,
social, and architectural hub of the campus. In 1973, Antonio Zamora, educator,
accomplished musician, and experienced administrator was hired to lead the
campus effort to make the BCC the vital embodiment of the university that it
has become. One of the leaders of the 1969 protest, Eric McCaskill, told then
President Hovde by phone during the protest march and visit to the Executive
Building: “We are somebody. I am somebody.”
https://omeka.cla.purdue.edu/s/investigating-150-years/page/civil-rights-protests-in-1960s
History of protests at Purdue shows 'another world is
possible' | City & State | purdueexponent.org
Forty-six years later one thousand similarly motivated
students rallied together on Friday, November 13, 2014 on the Purdue campus.
They expressed outrage at the systematic violence against people of color
throughout the society and the perpetuation of racism in virtually every
institution. On the Purdue campus they protested the lack of full, fair
representation of African Americans on the faculty and in the student body, a
climate on and off campus that perpetuates racism, and the continuation of all
the old stereotypes of minority students that has prevailed for years. They
also shared their solidarity with the students of the University of Missouri
and they made it crystal clear their disagreement with the statement by the
Purdue University President that the Purdue campus was different.
The organizers provided thirteen demands including:
-an acknowledgement by the President of Purdue
University that a hostile and discriminatory environment still exists at Purdue
-the reinstatement of a Chief Diversity Officer with
student involvement in the hiring process
-the creation of a “required comprehensive awareness
curriculum”
-the establishment of a campus police advisory board
-a 30 percent increase of underrepresented minorities
in the student body and on the faculty by 2019-2020
-greater representatives of minority groups on student
government bodies
Frederick Douglass was correct. Progress
requires struggle. DuBois is still correct about the twenty-first century as he
was about the prior one: the problem of our day remains “the color line.” And
many of those who observed, participated in, and applauded the organizers of protests
in 1968, 2015 and today at Purdue recognize that the struggles are long, the victories
sometimes transitory, and each generation of activists is participating in a
process of fundamental change that will move society in a more humane
direction. The generations of Purdue students of the 1960s and the twenty-first
century are linked in a chain for justice.
WBAA Photo
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM ARE ESCALATING
Harry Targ
(“Meanwhile, Kenneth Griffin, a megadonor who gave Harvard
so much money that it named its largest graduate school after him last year,
said at a conference Tuesday that elite universities now produce “whiny
snowflakes” instead of “leaders and problem solvers” because of their excessive
focus on “microaggressions [and] a DEI agenda.” The Boston Globe,
January 31, 2024).
David
Horowitz launched an assault on higher
education in 2005, not too dissimilar to the McCarthyite attacks on higher
education in the 1950s. He and a variety of organizations such as the National
Association of Scholars (NAS) sought to purge higher education of critical
thought.
Another round of more sophisticated and highly
resourced attacks on higher education were expanded in the twenty-first century
by the Koch Foundation State Policy Networks (SPN). In this case, state
organizations were created, rightwing politicians were supported for key
administrative posts in universities, particularly university presidencies, and
Boards of Trustees representing huge corporations and banks acted more
assertively to destroy the rich diversity of educational experiences that had
been inspired by the 1960s.
With the rise of the far-rightwing forces around
former President Trump, combining corporate elites, religious fundamentalists,
extreme free market advocates, and military contractors, the attacks today on
education, K through university, have become fierce.
Now political puppets have launched attacks on
education in state houses and the halls of Congress. Critical Race Theory,
rather than being a short-hand description for a body of scholarship, has been
redefined as ideology. Politicians running for office talk about the Civil War
without mentioning slavery as a root cause.
Charges of antisemitism are being used to challenge
expressions of intellectual and political points of view on campuses.
Presidents at our most prestigious universities, women
and persons of color, are attacked for defending academic freedom.
The whole edifice of what John Stuart Mill described a
long time ago as “the marketplace of ideas” is under assault. To borrow from a
book title about the 1950s by Marty Jezer, we are returning to a new “Dark
Ages.”
It is time for those who oppose racism,
exploitation of workers, patriarchy, environmental spoilation, and other social
ills to stand up in defense of freedom of speech, education, and the
celebration of diversity and debate.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
21st century techniques of empire
Harry Targ
(a repost and update)
(COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) —"President Joe Biden said Sunday that the U.S. “shall respond” after three American troops were killed and dozens more were injured in an overnight drone strike in northeast Jordan near the Syrian border. Biden blamed Iran-backed militias for the first U.S. fatalities after months of strikes by such groups against American forces across the Middle East since the start of the Israel-Hamas war." ZEKE MILLER AND LOLITA C. BALDOR “Biden says US ‘shall respond’ after drone strike by Iran-backed group kills 3 US troops in Jordan,” January 29, 2024).("Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad…" David Vine, “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military? July/August 2015, Politico Magazine).
The world has come a long way from the days of Roman legions slogging across land pillaging and killing. The days of nineteenth century colonial rule -- clumsy and arrogant with foreign occupants of land lording over exploited local workers -- has changed. However, it is important to reflect on the new or more developed techniques of empire, while never forgetting that there are centuries long continuities of techniques of imperial rule.
For starters, Marc Pilisuk reports in Who Benefits From Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System that the character of war has changed over the years and centuries. Wars today are not usually between nations. Casualties of wars are overwhelmingly civilians rather than soldiers. The weapons used in wars today are more likely than in the past to temporarily or permanently damage the natural habitat as well as kill people.
Wars in recent years have been likely to be fought over natural resources. Nations and groups now are more likely to be supplied with weapons produced by a handful of corporations that specialize in the production of military supplies. These weapons are provided by a small number of nations. Finally, wars fought in modern times, the last 100 years, have caused more deaths than in any other comparable period of human history.
Pilisuk reports that since World War II 250 wars have occurred causing 50 million deaths and leaving millions homeless. (The United States participated significantly in 75 military interventions.)
Recently a number of journalistic and scholarly accounts have added to our understanding of newer techniques of empire, particularly U.S. empire.
The world has come a long way from the days of Roman legions slogging across land pillaging and killing. The days of nineteenth century colonial rule -- clumsy and arrogant with foreign occupants of land lording over exploited local workers -- has changed. However, it is important to reflect on the new or more developed techniques of empire, while never forgetting that there are centuries long continuities of techniques of imperial rule.
For starters, Marc Pilisuk reports in Who Benefits From Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System that the character of war has changed over the years and centuries. Wars today are not usually between nations. Casualties of wars are overwhelmingly civilians rather than soldiers. The weapons used in wars today are more likely than in the past to temporarily or permanently damage the natural habitat as well as kill people.
Wars in recent years have been likely to be fought over natural resources. Nations and groups now are more likely to be supplied with weapons produced by a handful of corporations that specialize in the production of military supplies. These weapons are provided by a small number of nations. Finally, wars fought in modern times, the last 100 years, have caused more deaths than in any other comparable period of human history.
Pilisuk reports that since World War II 250 wars have occurred causing 50 million deaths and leaving millions homeless. (The United States participated significantly in 75 military interventions.)
Recently a number of journalistic and scholarly accounts have added to our understanding of newer techniques of empire, particularly U.S. empire.
Global presence. Pilisuk,
Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire), David Vine (Base Nation:
How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World) and others have
estimated that the United States has over 700, perhaps 800 military
installations in more than 70 countries. Some years ago the Pentagon determined
that huge Cold War era military bases needed to be replaced with smaller,
strategically located bases for rapid mobilization to attend to “trouble-spots”
in the Global South, such as in Jordan today. While forward basing in South
Asia and in nations formerly part of the Soviet Union has received some
attention seven new U.S. bases being established in Colombia (within striking
distance of hostile Venezuela) and increased naval operations in the Caribbean
have not. In addition, there are some 6,000 domestic military bases, many that
anchor the economies of small towns.
Privatization of the U.S. military. David
Isenberg (“Private Military Contractors and U.S. Grand Strategy,” PRIO, Oslo,
2009) refers to “...the U.S. government’s huge and growing reliance on private
contractors” which “...constitutes an attempt to circumvent or evade public
skepticism about the United States’ self-appointed role as global policemen.”
While PMCs provide many services, such as combat, consulting, training armies,
and military support, their combat presence in the two major wars of the 21st
century, Afghanistan and Iraq, has generated the most, if limited, public
attention. Isenberg says that between 1950 and 1989 PMCs participated in 15
conflicts in other countries and from 1990 to 2000 another 80. PMCs were
employed in civil wars such as in Angola, Sierre Leone, and the Balkans and
PMCs are all over Africa today.
A recent Washington Post investigation compiled a data base, “Top
Secret America,” “that found 1,931 intelligence contracting firms” doing top
secret work “for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites.” TSA
indicates that 90 percent of the intelligence work is done by 110 contractors.
Defense department spokespersons and legislators claim that the United States
needs to continue allocating billions of dollars to private contractors to
maintain military performance levels that are minimally acceptable.
The X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle. Artist's
rendering from Defense Industry Daily.
Unmanned aerial vehicles. Nick Turse (The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives) describes the introduction of unmanned aerial weapons in the 1990s and their current weaponry of choice for the White House and others who prefer antiseptic and bloodless (on our side) technologies to eliminate enemies. New predator drones can be programmed to fly over distant lands and target enemies for unstoppable air strikes. Drones have been increasingly popular as weapons in fighting enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
Connecting drone strikes to assassination teams and other war-making
techniques, Shane, Mazzetti, and Worth, (“Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on
Two Continents,” The New York Times, August 16, 2010) refers to
shadow wars against terrorist targets. “In roughly a dozen countries -- from
the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet
republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife -- the United States has
significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the
enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and
training local operatives to chase terrorists.”
Assassinations. The United States has initiated campaigns to identify and assassinate presumed enemies. CIA operatives and private contractors join teams of army specialists under the Joint Special Operations Command (13,000 assassination commandos around the world) to kill foreigners alleged to be affiliated with terrorist groups. These targets can include U.S. citizens living abroad who have been deemed to be terrorist collaborators. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, through Latin American military personnel trained at the School of the Americas, has long supported assassination programs that now seem to be “globalized,” that is administered everywhere.
Fred Branfman (Alternet, August 24, 2010) starkly describes the
assassination policy: “The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that
mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart
of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and
never seriously debated by Congress or the American people.”
Missionary humanitarian interventions. While most techniques of empire involve the direct use of violence, public and private organizations expand the presence of empire through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” While the work of the missionary has often followed the flag, never has such activism impacted so heavily on global politics as today.
For example, The New York Times (July 6, 2010) reported that Christian evangelical groups have transferred substantial amounts of funds to Jewish settlements in occupied territories of the West Bank. Furthermore, fundraising for settlements that stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state receive tax exemptions. The newspaper reports on “...at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.”
The newspaper correctly points out that so-called “humanitarian” and tax deductible donations to entities in other countries tied to U.S. foreign policy are not new. But, the article suggests that donations to the settler movement are special “because of the centrality of the settlement issue in the current talks and the fact that Washington has consistently refused to allow Israel to spend American government aid in the settlements. Tax breaks for the donations remain largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government.”
Cognitive War.
A recent document prepared by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) suggested that “in cognitive warfare, the human mind
becomes the battlefield. The aim is to change not
only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged
successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and
behaviors to favor an aggressor's tactical or strategic objectives.”
This NATO document, of course, is addressing the world
of international relations but the concept of “cognitive warfare” seems to
parallel efforts “to change not only what people think, but how they think and
act.” This project animates the efforts of media conglomerates-print,
electronic, social media platforms. Changing how people think and act has its
historic roots in campaigns to convince citizens to support wars, consume
cigarettes, forget climate disasters, and to find flaws in populations because
of class, race, gender, sexual preference, and/or religion. Creating
images of enemies is central to launching wars. The processes of
“branding” are similar in all realms of human experience.
What is new about imperial policies
While the general character of imperial policies remains the same, whether the
empire is Rome, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, or the United States,
changes in technology, the state system, ideology, and tactical thinking have
had their effects.
First, imperial rule has become truly global. From bases in far-off places to
unmanned drones flying over literally millions of targets everywhere, empires
operate with no constraints based on geography.
Second, the military has become big business. Private corporations assume a
greater share of Department of Defense budgets. Private companies now clean up
and cook for the troops, train foreign soldiers, assassinate assumed terrorist
enemies, and fight small wars with almost no visibility to publics.
Third, the United States is moving toward fighting wars without soldiers on the
ground. Enemies can be identified by computer and military technologists can
then push the right buttons to kill the unfortunate targets. Killing has become
antiseptic. Killers can say goodbye to the kids in the morning, drive to work,
push some buttons, drive home and spend the evening with the family. Meanwhile
thousands of miles away there are mourners crying over those just assassinated.
Fourth, empires, at least the U.S. empire, can kill with impunity. Targets
labeled terrorist can be eliminated by unmanned space weapons, specially
trained assassination teams, or average foot soldiers.
Fifth, concentrated media control, artificial intelligence, the systematic
lying of governments, censorship in education institutions, and the reification
of war and violence in popular culture transform the consciousness and value
systems of people, both victimizers and victims about the legitimacy of war.
Finally, empires can expand and change the destiny of
peoples through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” Local goals, good or bad,
are furthered by the large financial resources that special interests can bring
to other countries.
Empires have had a long and ugly history. Because of technology, economics, and
ideology new techniques of empire have been added to the old. The struggle
against all empires must continue.
Monday, January 29, 2024
Targets of U.S. imperialism and the danger of war with Iran
Harry Targ
(Part of this essay was posted March 28, 2012 on The
Rag Blog)
An
artist's take on U.S. imperialism. Cartoon from Iran Review
Given the troubled history of U.S./Iranian
relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both
Israel and the United States are not surprising.
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