The Ivory Tower’s Capitalist Roots

 Harry Targ

Purdue University announced on Tuesday that Lilly Endowment is giving it grants totaling $100 million for two separate university initiatives. The commitment represents the largest private gift in Purdue’s history.

The grant includes $50 million to support the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business and $50 million for Purdue Computes, an initiative that focuses on computing, artificial intelligence and semiconductors.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/01/10/lilly-endowment-grants-100-million-to-purdue-university-its-largest-gift-ever/?sh=3dd917cb3566

The modern university system in the US developed at the turn of the twentieth century, as capitalism bounced back after a string of deep recessions.

Mergers created an economic system in which a few hundred corporations and banks dominated the entire economy. Interlocking directorates birthed a system of financial speculation and concentrated wealth. The government enacted pro-corporate and pro-banking regulations, allocated tax and other benefits to the wealthy and powerful, and used repression — as when President Grover Cleveland deployed the army to break the 1894 Pullman strike — on capitalists’ behalf.

During this period, higher education, which had been dominated by theological pursuits, refashioned itself to serve the modern economy. Corporations needed workers with scientific and technical knowledge, so educational institutions were established that could produce credentialed graduates.

                                                                Project Gutenberg

Theoretical work and classroom education inculcated in the young a reverence for capitalism’s blessings and the government’s conduct. Young people learned about the benefits of free-market economies, the United States’ long tradition of democratic institutions, and the glories of Manifest Destiny, which justified the American conquest of not only North America, but the Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Central and South America.

As Clyde Barrow documents in Universities and the Capitalist State, members of university boards of trustees came largely from corporations, banks, and law firms that served big business. In the Midwest and South, trustees who represented regional manufacturing and finance capital ran the universities. Their outlook paralleled the administrators at the Northeast’s major universities. Few representatives of non-elite groups, like labor unions, were ever selected to serve on these boards.

Trustees established an administrative class that both oversaw the university’s day-to-day operations and managed the faculty, who produced the school’s key commodities: education and research. They adopted managerial procedures to control mental labor in the classroom and the laboratory and institutionalized metrics that measured enrollment, publications, and university rankings to evaluate productivity.

Federal and state governments, as well as nonprofit organizations, stepped in to fund a national university system designed to serve the interests of twentieth-century capitalism. Major foundations generated studies, conducted surveys, and made recommendations that influenced both public and private universities’ policies.

Crises, from the depressions of the late nineteenth century to World War I, sparked critical analyses from some professors. Frequently, faculty faced discipline or even termination for challenging the economic system or the state. The university’s educational mission was to serve elites and the state, not provide a venue for debating important social issues.

Fast forward to today. The capitalist class has further consolidated its power in higher education since the Great Recession of 2008, the Occupy Movement of 2011, the protests around police violence in 2014, and in response to the police murdering of George Floyd in 2020. Today campuses are alive with debate about Israel’s war on Gaza and political influentials are seeking to squelch that debate.

Boards of trustees and their advisers in think tanks and political organizations have used economic and political shocks to demand greater control over and efficiency in the production and teaching of knowledge. Economically programs that are not justified as good “investments” have become vulnerable to termination. Humanities programs now have to prove their utility to the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to survive. And, with the war in the Middle East, politicians, trustees, and administrators are once again interfering in the educational processes of the university. (The similarities with the McCarthyite period of the 1940s and 1950s are chilling).

Finally, just as academic critics of child labor, anti-union policies, World War I, and financial speculation a hundred years ago faced censure and unemployment, universities are being pressured to circumscribe accepted debates. While the higher-education system has extended academic freedom and provided job security for some through tenure, attacks on these provisions are spreading as the twenty-first century reconstruction of American higher education proceeds.  From Florida to Indiana (the current SB 202 bill in the Indiana legislature would circumscribe tenure and what is taught in the classroom), politicians are committed to destroying the academic freedom, and the free exchange of ideas, that has made universities a haven for the pursuit of knowledge useful for the advancement of humanity.

 

https://www.lulu.com/shop/harry-targ-and-daniel-morris/from-upton-sinclairs-goose-step-to-the-neoliberal-university/paperback/product-vzdwyk.html?page=1&pageSize=4

 

TALKING POINTS ON ISRAEL/GAZA AND THE LONG WAR ON THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

https://purdue0-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/r/personal/targ_purdue_edu/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc=%7BB5F2B814-8DDA-4DF7-B7CF-851BE5058A8C%7D&file=Talking%20Points%20on%20Israel.pptx&action=edit&mobileredirect=true

                                            Jewish Voice for Peace

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

MALCOLM AND MANNING

Black History Month: Some Remembrances

Harry Targ

(A Rag Blog repost from July 18, 2011)

Image of Malcolm X, above, from The Daily Grind. Manning Marable from NewsOne.

“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.

 

 

 

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

 If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Frederick Douglass

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

THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM ARE ESCALATING

Harry Targ

Letter to the Editor: Resolution Defending Academic Freedom As It Relates to Teaching About Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Critical Race Theory - The Heights (bcheights.com)

(“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.

 

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.

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.”

https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/05/20/countering-cognitive-warfare-awareness-and-resilience/index.html)

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.