THE THREAT OF A GOOD EXAMPLE: THE CUBAN REVOLUTION STILL FACES UNITED STATES IMPERIALISM

 Harry Targ

     

Before Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement seized power in Cuba in January, 1959, the United States had long controlled the island nation ninety miles from its shores. The country was ruled by dictator, Fulgencio Batista, a close ally of the United States, who, through repression and corruption, generated large-scale opposition in the countryside and the cities. In 1958 the State Department urged Batista to turn control over to a caretaker government, to forestall the victory of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camillo Cienfuegos, Vilma Espin, and their growing guerrilla armies, who were on the verge of overthrowing the dictator. Batista rejected the pressure to flee. His U.S. backed armies and police were defeated. The revolutionaries were victorious.

Before the revolution, United States investors controlled 80 percent of Cuba’s utilities, 90 percent of its mines, 90 percent of its cattle ranches, its three oil refineries, half its railroads, and 40 percent of its sugar. In a land rich with human and natural resources and a modern infrastructure and a tourist sector second to none in the Hemisphere, 600,000 Cubans were unemployed, more than half the population lived in slums, and one-half the population had no access to electricity. Forty percent of the Cuban population was illiterate; most Cubans spent much of their income on rent, and among wealthy Cubans, 1.5 percent of landowners owned 46 percent of the land.

When the Castro-led revolutionaries assumed office, they began to develop a series of policies to alleviate the worst features of Cuban poverty. The revolutionary government invested in housing, schools, and public works. Salaries were raised, electrical rates were cut, and rents were reduced by half. On a visit to the United States in April, 1959, Castro, who had proposed a large-scale assistance program for the Western Hemisphere to the Eisenhower Administration, was ignored by the President.

(The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the people’s health: these are the six problems we would take immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and political democracy (Fidel Castro, “ History Will Absolve Me,” Castro Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953)

Returning from a hostile visit to Washington, Castro announced a redistributive program of agrarian reform that generated opposition from conservative Cuban and American landowners. These policies involved transfers of land to the Cuban people from the huge estates owned by the wealthy. The Eisenhower administration responded by reducing the quantity of United States purchases of Cuban sugar. Cuba then nationalized the industry.

In February, 1960 Cuba signed trade agreements with the former Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed to exchange their oil for sugar no longer purchased by the U.S. When the U.S. owned oil refineries refused to refine the Soviet oil, the Cuban government nationalized them. An aide to President Eisenhower recommended that the US launch an economic blockade of the island to starve the Cuban people. Then, the argument went, they would rise up against their new government.

In July, 1960, the U.S. cut all sugar purchases. Over the next several months the Cuban government nationalized U.S. owned corporations and banks on the island. Therefore, between the spring of 1960 and January 1961 U.S. and Cuban economic ties came to a halt and the island nation had established formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Shortly before Eisenhower left office, the break was made symbolically complete with the U.S. termination of formal diplomatic relations with Cuba.

As U.S./Cuban economic and diplomatic tensions were escalating, President Eisenhower made a decision that in the future would lead the world to the brink of nuclear war. In March,1960, he ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to create a Cuban exile force that would invade the island and depose Fidel Castro. Even the State Department knew at that time that Castro was enormously popular.

In April, 1961, the newly elected President Kennedy was presented with an invasion plan by the CIA. The agency claimed that the right-wing Cubans would be greeted as heroes when they landed at the Bay of Pigs. After the Castro regime was overthrown, all private assets would be returned, and a Batista-like government would be reestablished.

The Bay of Pigs invasion, April 17-19, 1961, was launched by fifteen hundred Cuban exiles. It was an immediate failure:  close to 300 invaders were killed and the rest captured. No uprising against the revolutionary government occurred. Kennedy was criticized in the United States for not providing sufficient air support to protect the invading army. The critics ignored the fact that the revolutionary government had the support of workers and peasants who would fight to defend it.

After the invasion attempt failed, President Kennedy warned of the danger of the “menace of external Communist intervention and domination in Cuba.” He saw a need to respond to Communism, whether in Cuba or South Vietnam. In the face of perceived Communist danger to the Western Hemisphere, he reserved the right to intervene as needed. The lesson he drew from the Bay of Pigs was the need for escalated adventurism, not caution Every administration, with the exception of the opening of US/Cuban relations during the Obama presidency, has maintained the economic blockade and in other ways sought to undermine and/or overthrow the Cuban Revolution. And today the Trump Administration is continuing this tradition-placing Cuba on the list of terrorist nations, demanding that other countries withdraw their commercial ties with Cuba, and blocking Cuban access to oil, And now, the Trump Administration has indicted former Cuban President Raul Castro because the Cuban government shot down an anti-Cuban spy plane in 1996.

The Issue is U.S. Imperialism and Cuba as an Alternative for the Global South

As described by Stephen Kinzer in Overthrow (Times Books, 2006) the United States had been engaging in efforts to undermine and overthrow independent governments around the world, and particularly in the Western Hemisphere, ever since it took Hawaii in the 1890s. In fact, the Cuban revolution of 1898 against Spanish colonialism was usurped by U.S. forces followed by a full-scale occupation of the country, the institutionalization of a protectorate until 1934 and then indirect economic and political domination, lasting until 1959.

Further, as so many accounts of U.S./Cuban relations suggest, the interests of the Cuban people never figured in U.S. policy toward the island. The economic blockade and diplomatic embargo of the island amounted to a 66-year effort to strangle, not only the regime, but the Cuban people. A truism of US policy is and has been that others must be forced to sacrifice for the U.S. imperial agenda.

Also, the Bay of Pigs fiasco suggests that U.S. foreign policy decision-makers almost always misjudged the will of the people who would be subjected to military action. Ruling classes, by their very nature, are unable to understand the interests, passions, and visions of the great masses of people. The Director of the CIA in 1961 and other members of the President’s inner circle were incapable of understanding that the Cuban people supported their revolution, so they ignored State Department polling data.

Finally, as recent policies toward Venezuela; interventions in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Ukraine; and the so-called Asian pivot all suggest is that the United States since the dawn of the twentieth century has pursued global hegemony. Any challenge to that hegemony, such as the Cuban Revolution, is defined as a security issue. It fact, nations and peoples who seek their independence as reflected in the idea of revolution constitute a threat that must be undermined.

The Vision of the Cuban Revolution Remains

...the Cuban revolution (even until this day) has constituted a living experiment that most progressive forces around the world identify with. Even though each society has its own history, class structure, level of development, and revolutionary potential, Cuba’s desire to create a government to serve its people and at the same time to transform them from a traditional consciousness to a revolutionary consciousness is shared by progressives everywhere. For progressives, Cuba is a laboratory, a grand social experiment that will provide knowledge for others as they seek fundamental change in their own societies... Cuba’s successes in the years ahead are successes of all progressive forces and, similarly Cuba’s defeats are defeats for all who wish to create egalitarian and humane societies.

(Cuba and the USA: A New World Order? International Publishers, 1992, 6):

THE INCREASED ROLE OF RELIGION IN US POLITICAL LIFE (a repost)

Harry Targ

The Christian National Agenda and Neofascism Continue on May 17, 2026:

 democracynow.org/2026/5/18/white_house_prayer

https://godandcountrythemovie.com/

I live in North Central Indiana, a state that has moved to the right over the last twenty years, largely because of the efforts of leading Republicans to crush the prominence of the labor movement and the shift of the Indiana Democratic party to neoliberalism in the Clinton era.

However, in Tippecanoe County there have emerged a variety of organizations which are concerned about the twenty-first century attack on women, the rise of racism, rightwing legislative attacks on education, and the erosion of the environment, and, undergirding all of this, democratic institutions. In addition, peace and justice groups have blossomed on the campus of Purdue University, so much so that the Purdue Administration has reversed a tradition initiated in 2007 to have polling booths on the university campus.

To their credit a number of churches and civic organizations have been showing periodically a powerful new documentary co-produced by Rob Reiner called God and Country. This is a powerful documentary that demonstrates how the radical right has appropriated Christianity to serve political purposes. The film shows that beginning in the 1970s many well-funded groups and leading political operatives associated with the presidential campaign  of Ronald Reagan, such as Paul Weyrich, began to challenge the 200-year constitutional commitment to the separation of Church and State.

The documentary points out, as Nancy MacLean did  in Democracy in Chains, that the resuscitation of the radical right was stimulated by the historic decision ending racial segregation in public schools, Brown v. Board of Education. And while the key stimulus for the right-wing resurgence was racism, the film suggests, the issue that ignited the political and religious right as a mass movement was abortion. It is the latter issue that generated the movement of sectors of Christian evangelicalism to the rightwing, thus connecting Brown with Roe v. Wade.

In sum, politics becomes central to sectors of Christian evangelicalism when  some religious leaders realize  that challenging the separation of church and state can be financially profitable and can lead to enhanced political power. And to connect the dots between religion and politics, the film suggests, selected politicians gained critical support, particularly Ronald Reagan, and in our own day, Donald Trump. The Christian right and the unconstitutional claims about the connections between religion and the state have been promoted by multi-million-dollar support for corrosive media: radio, television, the internet, music, films, and organized efforts to restructure political institutions.

From the film’s point of view, and most of us, there was never in the US constitution any envisioned connections between religion and politics. God and Country, the ‘founding fathers’ declared must remain separate. And most voters learned from their childhood that the separation of church and state was the very essence of US democracy. And this, religious ideologues of the right challenge today.

The film presents a variety of experts who have studied the religious right, including current and former Christian evangelical ministers, who clearly document the “counter revolution” that has occurred in the religious community. The film shows charismatic ministers, beginning with Jerry Falwell, who cross the line between religion and politics for their own gain, financial and political power. The documentary brings the narrative to January 6, 2021 and beyond to show that rightwing evangelicals are willing to “pick up the gun” to insure that God and Country are merged. This the film suggests represents a fundamental threat to democracy and the Trump/Vance campaign is its current instrumentality.

This is a powerful film that deserves to be shown regularly before the election (and beyond) as it is being shown in my Indiana community.

Having said that I want to note two caveats in reference to the film. First, while it powerfully addresses racism and patriarchy, it does not address adequately the class character of the radical right, both its membership and why its devotees have drifted to the right. The only references to economic issues are two powerful, but undeveloped, comments by Reverend William Barber, who through his New Poor People’s Campaign, and his new book, points out that one third of eligible American voters are poor. (One participant in the film showing I attended correctly pointed out the important role of the politics of fear and resentment drawing voters to the far right).

In addition, the film speaks to Christians, albeit in a powerful way, but does not address those who have moved to the radical right who are not Christians. Communities committed to uncovering the roots of the radical right and its constituencies might show a documentary about Jewish fundamentalism as well, such as the new film Israelism.

Again, despite its shortcomings, I applaud those in my community who have organized the showings of God and Country and I regard multiple showings of films like it as a kind of political movement bringing concerned citizens together for education, discussion, and organizing to defend democracy

COMEDIANS: The New Revolutionaries

 Harry Targ

(As Stephen Colbert nears the end of his run as a host on late night television, it is becoming clearer than ever that the forces of repression seek to crush what Michael Denning called "the Cultural Front," including the comedians. That is in popular culture today the most penetrating critiques of the drift toward American fascism are found among the comedians. And reflecting on our past, the era of the Spanish American War, Jim Crow, McCarthyism and now Trumpism, it is the comedians who have popularized and legitimized critiques of  the rich and powerful. As with other sectors of progressivism, our comedians need to be defended.)

https://youtu.be/nzkAKrXLZoI?si=L8jb9y_6ZLp5ex6N

Reddit

"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!". ^{Karl Marx}

“Comedians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your jokes.” Harry Targ

 The twenty-first century is strange. Most of the modest social benefits provided by many governments are being reversed. Contrary to expectations in a “post-Cold War” world, violence has increased and competition between Cold War adversaries continues. And to quote from Vijay Prashad, we are living in an “age of cruelty.” We are helpless observers as a holocaust is being perpetrated on the people in Gaza. And while a police state is rounding up “illegals,” convicted felons are being pardoned, (and some elected or appointed to office), masses of people are hitting the streets to protest virtually all these egregious immoralities perpetrated by ruling classes and political elites. And it has gotten to the point with these horrific developments that we must look to comedians to save us.

And before we look askance at a defense of comedians, we should recognize that they historically have stimulated us to think about the human condition. Paradoxically profit and criticism have over the years conflicted. In the post World War Two period a panoply of comedians have surfaced who generated popularity and profit, and at the same time challenged the evils of capitalism, war-making, class antagonisms, racism, and patriarchy.

For those of us growing up in the fifties Tom Lehrer was cheerfully accessible while communicating ideas about atomic war, hate, and militarism. And while Lenny Bruce was too acerbic for some he spawned subsequent generations of very radical comedic talents including George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Lily Tomlin. And then radical/political humor became mainstreamed on television including Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show and the John Oliver program. Television series such as MASH critiqued war, Other programs, some funny and some serious, analyzed commercialism, greed, ruling classes, and racism.

So now in a period where democratic discourse is more threatened than ever, even more than the McCarthy era of the 1950s, fascist sectors of the ruling class, after attacking the universities, the media, protesters, and “foreigners,” are targeting the comedians, the last refuge of deep criticism of the US political economy. 

As we rise to defend academic freedom in the universities, vibrant curricula in K- twelve educational institutions, the right to protest (and vote) and independent media, we cannot forget the comedians. Historically, they have communicated radical ideas to larger sections of the population than many others who have resisted monopoly capitalism and war.

The Historic Role of Women in Peace and Justice Movements

Harry Targ 

As women and men organized politically during the two Trump administrations, it is critical to reflect on the centrality of women in the struggle for a peaceful world. Campaigns for social and economic justice and women’s movements, and particularly women’s peace movements, are inextricably connected.

In 1915, 1,200 women from diverse backgrounds met in the Hague to create what became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They opposed World War I and would continue to oppose war in the over 100 years of their existence. They also demanded that women play a role in decision-making about all matters of foreign policy, including decisions concerning war and peace.

WILPF, the oldest peace group in the United States was led for many years by Jane Addams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

In 1961 another women’s peace group, Women Strike for Peace, organized a day-long national strike of 50,000 women in 60 cities demanding nuclear disarmament. They opposed nuclear testing, increased radiation in the atmosphere and marched to the slogan, “End the Arms Race: Not the Human Race.” Women Strike for Peace became early opponents of the escalating Vietnam war. Among its prominent spokespersons was soon-to-be Congresswoman Bella Abzug.

Code Pink is a grassroots women-led organization opposing war and militarism. It was organized in 2002 and includes militant activists such as Medea Benjamin and Colonel Ann Wright. Code Pink advocates peace, a human rights agenda, and demands conversion from military spending to spending for health care, green jobs, and the general welfare. They have been active in campaigns for justice for the Palestinian people and in opposition to United States support for violence perpetuated by Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, the US/Israeli wars on Iran, and the continued economic blockade that is starving the Cuban people.

 

(Marlene Targ Brill (Author) Discusses the peace activism of women through 

the stories of antislavery advocates, suffrage movement leaders, social reformers, 

Nobel Peace Prize winners, and antinuclear advocates.)

The writing and activism of Jane Addams has been an important inspiration that runs throughout the educational, advocacy, and militant peace activity of women for the last 100 years. Addams’ classic essay, “Newer Ideals of Peace” was originally published in 1907 and reissued with an introduction by Berenice Carroll and Clint Fink in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press.

In this essay, Carroll and Fink indicate that Addams postulated that the tasks of peace activists must go beyond just stopping war. According to Addams, achieving what peace researchers later called “negative peace,” ending wars, must be coupled with “positive peace.” Positive peace includes transformations of the societies that engaged in warfare. These transformations must include the end of hierarchies of all kinds including patriarchy, paternalism, the criminal justice system, and systems of domination and subordination at the workplace. Addams wrote that there needed to be a theoretical and practical shift from individualism and property rights to community. The spirit of nationalism must be replaced by internationalism. In sum, advocating for social and economic justice was needed along with demanding an end to shooting wars.

We move ahead in these troubled times inspired by the great fighters for racial justice including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis. We are also inspired by those who struggled for workers’ rights: Joe Hill, Mother Jones, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, John L. Lewis, and Sidney Hillman.

And, as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock ticks toward midnight, we desperately need to reacquaint ourselves with our foremothers whose ideas and activism have been central to movements for peace and justice throughout the world.

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2026-statement/

STOP THE WARS; AT HOME AND AROUND THE WORLD

 

FOREIGN POLICY: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM (A timely update from a 2017 post which appeared in The Rag Blog)

 Harry Targ

 

An Empire in Relative Decline

United States global hegemony continues to be challenged. As the beneficiary of war-driven industrial growth and the development of a military-industrial complex unparalleled in world history, the United States was in a position in 1945 to construct a post-war international political and economic order based on huge banks and corporations. The United States created the international financial and trading system, imposed the dollar as the global currency, built military alliances to challenge the Socialist Bloc, and used its massive military might and capacity for economic penetration to infiltrate, subvert, and dominate most of the economic and political regimes across the globe.

The United States always faced resistance and was by virtue of its economic system and ideology drawn into perpetual wars, leading to trillions of dollars in military spending, the loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives, and the deaths of literally millions of people, mostly people of color, to maintain its empire.

As was the case of prior empires, the United States empire is weakening. There is now the possibility of a multipolar world emerging with challenges to traditional hegemony coming from China, India, Russia, and the larger less developed countries such as Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, South Korea, and Thailand. By the 1970s, even traditional allies in Europe and Japan had become economic competitors of the United States.

The United States throughout this period of change has remained the overwhelming military power, however, spending more on defense than the next seven countries combined. It remains the world’s economic giant even though growth in domestic product between 1980 and 2000 has been a third of its GDP growth from 1960 to 1980. Confronted with economic stagnation and declining profit rates the United States economy began in the 1970s to transition from a vibrant industrial base to financial speculation and the globalization of production.

The latest phase of capitalism, the era of neoliberal globalization, required massive shifts of surplus value from workers to bankers and the top 200 hundred corporations which by the 1980s controlled about one-third of all production. The instruments of consciousness, a handful of media conglomerates, have consolidated their control of most of what people read, see, hear, and learn about the world.

A policy centerpiece of the new era, roughly spanning the rise to power of Ronald Reagan to today, including the eight years of the Obama Administration, has been a massive shift of wealth from the many to the few. A series of graphs published by the Economic Policy Institute in December, 2016 showed that productivity, profits, and economic concentration had risen while real wages have declined, inequality increased, gaps between the earnings of people of color and women and white men grew, and persistent poverty remained for twenty percent of the US population (https://www.epi.org/publication/inequality-2021-ssa-data/ for 2021 data on economic inequality). The austerity policies, the centerpiece of neoliberalism, spread all across the globe. That is what globalization has been about.

Contrary to the shifts toward a transnational capitalist system and the concentration of wealth and power on a global level, the decline of U.S power, relative to other nation-states in the twenty-first century, has increased.  China’s economy and scientific/technological base have expanded dramatically. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the spreading violence throughout the Middle East have overwhelmed US efforts to control events. Russia, Iran, China, and even weaker nations in the United Nations Security Council have begun to challenge US power and authority. Mass movements increasingly mobilize against regimes supported by the United States virtually everywhere (including mass mobilizations within the U.S. as well).

However, most U.S. politicians still articulate the mantra of “the United States as the indispensable nation.” The articulation of American Exceptionalism represents an effort to maintain a global hegemony that no longer exists and a rationale to justify the massive military-industrial complex which fuels much of the United States economy.

(For more data on military bases see https://www.davidvine.net/bases.html)

Imperial Decline and Domestic Politics

The narrative above is of necessity brief and oversimplified but provides a backdrop for reflecting on the substantial shifts in American politics. The argument here is that foreign policy and international political economy are “the elephants in the room” as we reflect on the outcomes of recent elections. It does not replace other explanations or “causes” of election results but supplements them.

First, the pursuit of austerity policies, particularly in other countries (the cornerstone of neoliberal globalization) has been a central feature of international economics since the late 1970s. From the establishment of the debt system in the Global South, to “shock therapy” in countries as varied as Bolivia and the former Socialist Bloc, to European bank demands on Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, to Reaganomics and the promotion of Clinton’s “market democracies,” and the Obama era Trans-Pacific Partnership, the wealth of the world has been shifting from the poor and working classes to the rich.

Second, to promote neoliberal globalization, the United States has constructed by far the world’s largest war machine. With growing opposition to U.S. militarism around the world, policy has shifted in recent years from “boots on the ground,” (although there still are many), to special ops, private contractors, drones, cyberwar, spying, and “quiet coups,” such as in Brazil and Venezuela, to achieve neoliberal advances.

One group of foreign policy insiders, the humanitarian interventionists, has lobbied for varied forms of intervention to promote “human rights, democratization, and markets.” 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton and a host of “deep state” insiders advocated for support of the military coup in Honduras, a NATO coalition effort to topple the regime in Libya, the expansion of troops in Afghanistan, even stronger support of Israel, funding and training anti-government rebels in Syria and the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was a major advocate for humanitarian interventionist policies in the Obama administration.

Humanitarian interventionists have joined forces with “neoconservatives” in the new century to advocate policies that, they believe, would reverse the declining relative power of the United States. This coalition of foreign policy influentials has promoted a New Cold War against China and Russia and an Asian pivot to challenge an emerging multipolar world. The growing turmoil in the Middle East and the new rising powers in Eurasia also provide rationale for qualitative increases in military spending, enormous increases in research and development of new military technologies, and the reintroduction of ideologies that were current during the last century about mortal enemies and the inevitability of war.

In sum, the “elephant in the room” for the peace movement pertaining to US politics must include building opposition to an activist United States economic/political/military role in the world and the long history of United States imperialism.

Finally, it must be articulated that to the extent that economics affects domestic politics the neoliberal global agenda that has been enshrined in United States international economic policy since the 1970s, coupled with humanitarian interventionism, has had much to do with rising austerity, growing disparities of wealth and power, wage and income stagnation, and declining social safety nets at home. As millions of Americans struggle to survive poverty, inadequate access to healthcare, homelessness, a variety of environmental disasters it is time to reinsert visions of a non-interventionist, anti-militaristic foreign policy into our progressive political agenda.

How Should the Peace Movement Respond to the Elephant in the Room?

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

 

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

--2023 Doomsday Clock Announcement, January 24, 2023

The Peace Movement has been engaged in a variety of separate but interconnected tasks. It may be useful to identify them, see how they are interrelated, and think about ways in which it and other social justice campaigns can more effectively work together in the coming period.

Peace Movement tasks should include the following:

1.Oppose war. In 2022 the war in Ukraine has captured the attention of activists everywhere. Attention also has been paid on other wars, such as in Yemen and Palestine. Peace researchers have often referred to the historic need to end “direct violence”; that is killing. That task remains preeminent.

 

2.Reconceptualize “war” as a problem not only of killing and dying in war but also as a problem of hunger, inequality, environmental spoilation, and powerlessness in a world of power, control, and oppression. Peace researchers have called this “structural violence.” Theorists/activists like Vijay Prashad have argued that the problem of “war,” both direct and structural is more about the divide in resources and power between the countries of the Global North (the traditional imperial powers in Europe and North America) and the vast majority of humankind living in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. For Prashad, the war problem is about hundreds of years of exploitation, occupation, military assault, sanctions, and the threat and destruction of the resources and environment of the Global South. From this point of view, the peace movement task is to engage in solidarity with those struggling for their liberation from domination and control.

3.Oppose militarism. Historically peace movements have identified an inextricable connection between growing militarism and war and further a connection between military spending and concentrated wealth in selected military corporations. From this point of view as the old slogan suggests: “war is a racket.” And that "racket” can be seen as directly reallocating societal resources from fulfilling human needs to the construction of more and more weapons. Some theorists referred to the history of United States foreign policy, at least since World War II, as one of creating a “permanent war economy.”

4.Oppose the use of war to achieve pernicious goals domestically. This perspective sees war preparation as tied to efforts to create solidarity at home, to the detriment of domestic social groups seeking significant social change. For example, as World War II  ended, the labor movement sought significant policy changes to improve the rights and conditions of American workers. During the late 1940s, workers were demanding more rights to form unions, national health care, pension systems, and in some unions and communities an end to racism. The emergence of “the Soviet threat” served to stimulate nationalism, a rekindling of the vision of American exceptionalism, and increased repression against those pursuing worker rights and racial justice. In short, the war system, has served to reallocate societal resources and create a virulent nationalism which supports the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The war system, in this sense, is a status quo system. And to justify the war system an increasingly concentrated media institutionalizes narratives justifying war and imperialism.

 

5.Educate, agitate, and organize around these four major tasks. The questions that peace movements need to address include:

a.How to theorize about the interconnections between these four points? How do we develop a compelling narrative that targeted audiences find compelling for them? Young people, people of color, men, women, gays and lesbians?

b.How to network with other peace and social justice organizations?

c.And for now what kind of programs-education, street heat, networking, organizing-  should the peace movement engage in to address the four key elements raised above.

The Threats to the Integrity of Higher Education in Indiana

 Harry Targ

For over two years now we have seen a brutal assault on the diversity of scholarship and education at Indiana University by a MAGA governor and state legislature. Although less visible the same efforts to destroy higher education are occurring at the other major Hoosier university, Purdue.

The state legislature passed laws that require annual reviews of professors to see that they include all perspectives in their teaching. Even tenured faculty, tenure a long-honored commitment to protect faculty from capricious attacks on their teaching and research, may be fired if they do not meet the criteria of “fairness and balance,” (which presumably would require faculty to present the pluses and minuses of Hitler’s Germany or the Spanish Inquisition). Legislation also requires these institutions to take complaints from students concerning their professors , often without providing proof or identifying themselves by name.

Indiana University

In addition, Indiana University which has been known for its multiplicity of language programs will shut them down if they do not have a sufficient number of majors. About 40 such language programs have been eliminated. Both universities have been encouraged to eliminate humanities programs, interdisciplinary programs, and programs that address diversity, equity, and identities.

https://www.ipm.org/news/2025-09-12/funding-cut-for-iu-programs-that-do-not-advance-american-interests-or-values

Universities have shifted their resources to artificial intelligence and collaboration with the military and large pharmaceutical companies. And generally, both universities are prioritizing so-called STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Legislators and university administrators claim that the only salient measure of university success is whether college graduates get jobs. (Ironically some data suggests that many STEM college graduates are not finding jobs and employers in the corporate sector are mostly interested in hiring graduates who write well, have analytical skills, and have a sensibility about the world outside the workplace).

All of these changes are occurring while both universities have acted in various ways to repress dissenting voices and acts that oppose policies of the national and state governments on race, gender, and support for US wars. At IU, for example, police with weapons were called to campus in response to protests of US support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

Purdue University

Purdue University is a Big Ten university, a land grant institution and one of the two large and well known public universities in the state of Indiana (there are several public and private universities in the state). It has been known historically for strong programs in agriculture and engineering.  To its credit and largely because of the nationwide ferment in the 1960s  the university committed itself to create vibrant programs in other disciplines, many in the College of Liberal Arts.

Among the many programs developed over the last fifty years included a nationally recognized graduate program in American Studies, important programs, both undergraduate and graduate in African American and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and programs of excellence in research and teaching in English, History, Sociology, Political Science, Communication, and Psychology, just to name a few. Even students who came to study engineering, computer science, agriculture, or business appreciated and enrolled in the many liberal arts courses mentioned above. Also every administration and faculty from the 1960s till quite recently recognized the inextricable connection between STEM related fields of specialization and a broad liberal arts education.

In addition, administrators, faculty, and students recognized that the history of the nation, the state, and even the university and its community had inadequately served minorities. Higher education was supposed to be accessible to students who historically had been denied such education because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Former Purdue President Mitch Daniels said it well in a ceremony renaming two residence halls after African American students of the 1940s who had been denied access to housing:

“Purdue University and its land grant sisters around the country were put here more than a century ago to start lowering and removing barriers and promote the upward mobility of free peoples and that has been our history ever since,” Daniels said. “We’ve been too slow about it in many ways and many times, but the progress has always been forward.

Sometimes, it takes courageous and resolved people, like the Parker sisters, to push things further – and thank God they did.”

 https://www.purdue.edu/vpsl/news/perspectives-stories/fall-2021/parker-halls-monument-to-sisters.php

It All Changed on May 30, 2025.

 On this date Purdue University announced that all DEI programs would end. Offices were closed. Websites were taken down. Even the closure of DEI programs was announced at a retirement party for a DEI supervisor.

In addition, It was announced that the university would no longer be cooperating with the school newspaper, The Purdue Exponent. Although the Exponent was a non-university corporation, the university had provided spaces for distribution of the paper on campus and helped distribute the paper to those locations. The university indicated also that the newspaper should take the “Purdue” name off the logo of the newspaper.

Finally, shortly thereafter, it was announced that some 40 undergraduate and/or graduate programs with low enrollments, as defined by the Indiana legislature, would be cancelled. While these programs existed across the university a majority of them were in the liberal arts, including programs addressing substantive issues involving race, gender, and class.

Among the concerns raised by members of the faculty, students, and community have been the following:

1.The dismantling DEI programs

2.The justification for the unilateral, automatic, and unaccountable dismissals of workers in DEI programs. This is an issue of worker rights.

3.The lack of any input from the faculty and staff. Was the University Senate consulted at all? AAUP calls the norm for consultation "shared governance."

4.A seeming refusal to discuss the decisions or provide any information about them and their consequences.

5.The unilateral ending of formal ties with the Purdue Exponent at almost the same time that the announcement about DEI was made public.

6.And more recently the University Senate voted to censure the Provost for a variety of reasons relating to unilateral decisions and lack of consultation with faculty on educational matters such as the closing of the Honors College.

In sum, most faculty, students, staff, and members of the Greater Lafayette community and citizens of the state hope to see Purdue University return to its historic path of building a rich, diverse, educational experience for all

Conclusion

The state government, college administrators, and the federal government are seeking to roll back higher education to its historic role of training young people to serve the society as is and to socialize them to accept the legitimacy of government policies and US institutions. (Perhaps the most egregious of these policies is to reduce or eliminate coursework and research that address the undersides of US history such as the experiences of slavery and war).

Despite the press releases both universities circulate regularly, these universities are becoming shells of their former selves. They have embraced almost all the demands for change that have come from rightwing politicians, selected corporations, and the military. The rich diversity of the student body and the varieties of education that began to be developed in the 1960s and 1970s has disappeared as the curricula and university personnel reflect more the wishes of the state legislature and political appointees to the Boards of Trustees.