McChrystal & Pelosi - What does torture say about us; and what does what we say about torture say about us?

May 14, 2009

a ramble

Yesterday, I was loading salvaged warehouse shelf uprights onto a truck at Cary Towne Center, a mall in Cary, North Carolina. Across the road in the parking lot, I scanned the bumper stickers on a silver Toyota RAV4 L, license plate XZF-7063 (North Carolina). A Ranger Tab. A Combat Infantryman's Badge (CIB). Military parachutist wings.

This told me that the owner of the car was a male in the Army infantry, that he was in a theater of combat as an infantryman, that he had successfully completed the Airborne Course in Fort Benning, Georgia, and another sticker I later discovered on the front window indicated that he had served with the 82nd Airborne Division, an airborne infantry division based in Fort Bragg, NC.

Below the 201-file, I see a smaller, white sticker with a whole phrase. I walk over to the car to read it.

"You never forget your first KILL."

Like that, with the word "kill" in all-cap.

Finally, down near the Toyota icon on the hatchback, I see a fish with JESUS printed inside it.

That same morning, my project manager asked me if I had ever heard of General Stanley McChrystal. I had, I told him -- in conjunction with the investigation into the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman in 2004... why did he ask? Because, Joel (my boss) told me, he's being nominated to be the overall commander for Afghanistan.

So I had been mulling over this thing, and then I had talked on the phone with "Dannie" Tillman, Pat Tillman's mom, who was incensed that this guy had been caught red-handed in the cover-up of thee circumstances of her son's death, and then on top of it all I see this array of macho military-cultural bumper stickers alongside the name of Jesus (a gender-subversive pacifist), and about a million alarm bells went off at once.

One can't be sure where to start in unpacking what people need to know about this guy -- Stanley McChrystal, the military-culture that is refracted in his personhood, and the peculiar institutional ecology of that military.

I don't know Stanley McChrystal. I came in the Army a couple of years before him. We are both named Stanley. We were both in Special Operations. He was an officer; I was enlisted. We both served in A Company 2nd Ranger Battalion, in 75th Ranger Regiment, in 7th Special Forces, and he commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) of which was in a constituent unit once. Nonetheless, neither of us ever served in these units at the same time. A Company 2nd Ranger Battalion was also Pat Tillman's company when he was killed in April 2004. So I don't know Stanley McChrystal, and all I can say about him specifically is based on stuff that I've read. But I can say some things that don't require detailed knowledge of McChrystal's whereabouts and activities at any given time. Because I am familiar with the ways that military culture is reflected in the individuals who are part of that culture.

We'll get to McChrystal in a moment. The Killer's Toyota, the call from Dannie, the whole McChrystal thing... these all made me feel restless. The real kicker is that Obama will probably support this guy; and this at the same time that Obama just placed himself between the ACLU and a bunch of torture photographs from places just like the ones that McChrystal developed and commanded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This evening, as I'm driving home from work, I hear on the radio that Nancy Pelosi has been forced to respond to questions about what she knew subsequent to briefings in 2002 about "enhanced interrogations." From today's story by Paul Kane in the Washington Post:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today accused the CIA of "misleading" her on the use of harsh interrogation techniques in the fall of 2002, acknowledging for the first time publicly she knew alleged terrorist detainees were subjected to waterboarding more than six years ago.

Pelosi called for the CIA to release detailed portions of her own September 2002 briefing about interrogation techniques, saying that at that time she was told the CIA was not waterboarding detainees. After weeks of sticking to prior statements that she then was never "briefed" about waterboarding's use, Pelosi today said her top security adviser was part of a briefing in February 2003 in which he learned interrogators were waterboarding terrorists.

Let's combine that quote with another one:

0 292234Z APRIL 04 FM TASK FORCE

TO RUCAACC/USCENTCOM MACDILL AFB FL//CDR//INFO RUCQAS/USSOCOM PP MACDILL AFB//FL//CDR// RUEPVBT/TASK FORCE

BT [REDACTION] PERSONAL FOR CDR USCENTCOM CDR USSOCOM CDR USASOC

DELIVER DURING NORMAL DUTY HOURS [REDACTION] DO NOT TRANSMIT VIA OPINTEL BROADCAST OPER/OEF// MSGID/GENAMIN/TASK FORCE

//

SUBJ/P-4 COCERNING INFORMATION ON CORPORAL TILLMAN'S DEATH//

RMKS/SIR, IN THE AFTERMATH OF CORPORAL TILLMAN'S UNTIMELY YET HEROIC DEATH IN AFGHANISTAN ON 22 APRIL 04, IT IS ANTICIPATED HIGHLY POSSIBLE THAT CORPORAL TILLMAN WAS KILLED BY FRIENDLY FIRE. THIS POTENTIAL FINDING IS EXACERBATED BY THE UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT POTUS AND THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY MIGHTIN CLUDE COMMENTS ABOUT CORPORAL TILLMAN'S HEROISM AND HIS APPROVED SILVER STAR MEDAL IN SPEECHES CURRENTLY BEING PREPARED, NOT INFORMING THE SPECIFICS SURROUNDING HIS DEATH. THE POTENTIAL THAT HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN KILLED BY FRIENDLY FIRE IN NO WAY DETRACTS FROM HISD WINTESSED HEROISM OR THE RECOMMENDED PEROSNAL DECORATION FOR VALOR IN THE FACE OF THE ENEMY. CORPORAL TILLMAN WAS KILLED IN A COMPLICATED BATTLESPACE GEOMETRY INVOLVING TWO SEPARATE RANGER VEHICLE SERIALS TRAVERSING THROUGH SEVERE TERRAIN ALONG A WINDING 500-600 FOOT DEFILE IN WHICH FRIENDLY FORCES WERE FIRED UPON BY MULTIPLE ENEMY POSITIONS. CORPORAL TILLMAN DISEMBARKED FROM HIS VEHICLE, AND IN SUPPORT OF HIS FELLOW RANGERS AND DEMONSTRATING GREAT CONCERN FOR THEIR WELFARE OVER CARE FOR HIS OWN PERSONAL SAFETY ENTERED THE ENEMY KILL ZONE INTO WHICH BOTH IMPACTED. I FELT THAT IT WAS ESSENTIAL THAT YOU RECEIVED THIS INFORMAITON AS SOON AS WE DETECTED IT IN ORDER TO PRECLUDE ANY UNKNOWING STATEMENTS BY OUR COUNTRY'S LEADERS WHICH MIGHT CAUSE PUBLIC EMBARRASSMENT IF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF CORPORAL TILLMAN'S DEATH BECOME PUBLIC.//

DECL/DERI:DRV FROM [REDACTION] /INST-[REDACTION]-//BT

CLASSIFIED BY: [REDACTION]

REASON [REDACTION] DECLASSIFY ON: [REDACTION]

CLASSIFICATION: [REDACTINO]

CAVEATS: [REDACTION] TERMS: [REDACTION]

That was a P-4 ("personal for") Memo from General McChrystal passing along to POTUS (President of the United States) that the phony-baloney story about the circumstances of Pat Tillman's death [1] [2] [3] could not hold up. The memo was sent less than a week after Pat was killed; and when you read it carefully -- if you can understand this bastardized legal-military-publcity-speak -- it says not only that the author had been involved in the concealment of the circumstances, that he had himself participated in the fraud as one of the approving-signatories for a Silver Star award with demonstrably false statements about the incident.

McChrystal surely knew Rumsfeld personally; and according to one Rumsfeld biographer, Rummy's greatest talent was getting away with shit. Not getting caught was an art form for Rumsfeld. Working for a guy like that, you have to stay on your toes, because someone will get sacrificed when someone who gets away with shit all the time suddenly doesn't.

The Tillman case came into public consciousness alongside the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib. Rummy was busy those days, so the guys on the scene had to handle a few things themselves.

If I had been McChrystal, I'd have known by April 29th 2004 (the day of this memo) that an entire battalion of Rangers were due to rotate back to the States in four weeks. I'd have also known -- as a matter of some urgency -- that virtually every member of 2nd Ranger Battalion knew that Pat Tillman was killed by fratricide. Hundreds of Rangers were about to return to Tacoma, Washington, where they would talk to each other, to their families and friends, and to people in the bars where Rangers drink to "blow off steam."

If I had been Stanley McChrystal then, I'd have seen some hand writing on the wall; and I'd have constructed the most carefully worded memo I could to cover my own ass.

That's what you can read above, in that memo. And hey, Rumsfeld is gone; and McChrystal is on the rise.

Canny dude.

This is not the story I have to tell right now, but it's an important preface. Dannie herself has written a fine book on her own dogged investigations of the Department of Defense, and of her direct encounter with executive power. Boots on the Ground by Dusk, by Mary Tillman (with Narda Zacchino). Time to get that one out and read up before the Senate meets to give their blessing to Stanley McChrystal as the new dominant Militia Chief of Afghanistan.

I said "executive power," not Bush. Be clear.

Obama is cautious and fearful of being torpedoed by the military-paramilitary-clandestine services network. That's tactical. And that caution will cost him dearly.

But he's also Chief Executive.

Executives are loathe to surrender even a scrap of accumulated executive power.

Bush took the country into a debacle Iraq.

Obama has his sights on Pakistan -- nuclear Cambodia, for Vietnam-analogy fans -- and the nomination of McChrystal means that Special Operations will run the show (as they did in the early phases of Vietnam).

A simple truth that "leaders" never seem to get. Our actions have tremendous influences; and most of those influences are beyond our control. Instead they just keep on with their insane, grandiose, and lethal meddling.

New Rule: Strive to limit your influence to your actual capacity to control.

We all have a notion of the geostrategic influences. But this public discussion of torture has become so surreal (en-fucking-hanced! interrogation techniques! Sheesh!), and here is this man McChrystal who ran torture camps in Iraq (Did I forget to mention that earlier?) who is about to prepare the military infiltration from Afghanistan into Pakistan... nuclear South Asia. (Bad idea, O! Bad bad bad idea.)

That's what Stanley McChrystal is being hired for if the Senate confirms. It will; and the cowardice inhering in the institution of Congress will be on full display... just as it was when Nanci Pelosi et al were banging the war drums out of abject fear for their careers.

And this man -- McChrystal -- represents a culture. The gunfighter culture of Special Operations.

There's a great deal more than gunfighting to that culture -- the culture of Special Operations embedded within the larger culture of the Army. Gunfighting is the practical skill that "operators" learn in direct actions Special Ops units. There were times during my stint with Delta when each one of us in my unit were -- on average -- firing a thousand rounds of ammunition in a day, and not on full automatic spraying down a range, but reaching for precision and speed at close range and from afar. Fighting with guns is a skill constellation, a form of practical mastery.

Cultures also include language, non-lingusitic signs, interpersonal norms, music, ideas, and so on. Practical training is just one aspect of culture; but it's an important one.

If I had trained as intensely to be a carpenter, and if I had become good at it, I would think about carpentering all the time, I would see carpenter's solutions to a lot of things, and I would carry that skill confidently around with me into my own future. In tough times, even if I had a nice cushy desk job for a few years, I could fall back on being a carpenter.

Same thing is true for a gunfighter. There are thousands of these men out there now, who received a very expensive and well-drilled education in gunfighting. When times get tough, they will fall back on what they know.

Now along with gunfighting, these special operators can also acquire other skills. I was a Special Forces medic for a while. I knew how to suture lacerations, pull teeth, deliver babies, count blood cells under a microscope, splint fractured femurs, get rid of belly-worms, and so on. If the stars had aligned at the right time, I might have become a nurse; and the gunfighting would no longer be needed. Other guys learn to operate radios and build antennae, handle explosives, do construction, or identify, operate, and repair small arms.

But we never quit rehearsing -- even when we want to -- how to kill with guns.

Gunfighting requires training the mind to compartmentalize, to focus on everyone as potential adversaries, to quickly check the hands of potential adversaries for lethal weapons, and to refelxively respond to the presence of weapons by rapidly shooting two rounds into the chest of the identified adversary, followed by one shot to the head if necessary... then immediately return to observing one's sector.

This kind of extreme, detached instrumentality is part of the psycho-cultural commons in Special Operations; and that's how McChrystal can -- and must -- be read. He can and will objectify-to-kill individuals and groups of human beings... on command. His brain is compartmentalized.

As an officer in the Army, he is part of the cannibal-culture of commissioned upward mobility. He'll not only seek out opportunities for slaughter as rungs in the ladder to success, he'll write memos that are the professional equivalent of shark repellent while his peers are being eaten.

Lieutenant General Philip Kensinger -- former Special Operations Command (SOCOM) commander -- got the symbolic punishment for the Pat Tillman cover-up-- a threat to reduce his rank before he retired which was quietly allowed to fade into no action at all. Kensinger survived. He's a consultant for the government now. But there is a credible rumor that his lawyer will oppose the nomination of Stanley McChrystal to head the Afghanistan theater of the US energy war.

Gunfighter. Shark-swimmer. Torture camp commander.

What cover-ups, like the Tillman case, and running torture camps have in common is that they are both manifestations of a culture of impunity -- "exemption from punishment or loss."

McChrystal ran Task Force 6-26, which became temporarily famous after the killing of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, a boogyman figure cultivated by the US military and media complex. What made TF 6-26 infamous was their activity in Camp Nama, Iraq: torture. Massive, systematic, sustained torture, by special operators, under the supervision of Stanley McChrystal, this deceptively soft-spoken officer.

The camp in Baghdad was used almost exclusively for the torture of detainees. The torture went on before, during, and after the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Detainees were killed by their torturers, members of the most elite units in the US armed forces. Almost in celebration of the activity of the camp, placards were hung that said, "No Blood, No Foul," meaning if you don't make them bleed, you can't be charged with the crimes you are committing.

Impunity. McChrystal represents a culture of impunity.

Pelosi does, too. Be honest.

I keep coming back to that idea that culture, personhood, and nature are all reciprocally influenced. What kinds of persons will emerge from a culture of impunity, a culture of gunfighting, a culture of the most extreme kind of probative masculinity? (The big picture of Zarqawi, dead, that hung behind the Pentagon briefers after McChrystal's unit directed the airstrike that killed him, was a hunting trophy... male proof of conquest.)

Here's where I get to the evolution of Special Ops culture, and of military culture generally, and the bumper stickers on the car at a Cary mall suggesting a weaponized Jesus.

The reports of abuses inside Camp Nama were said to have outraged even seasoned CIA, FBI and DIA investigators accustomed to dealing with non-cooperative and hostile detainees, and to have provoked a culture clash between agencies and groups involved with the facility. By early 2004, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Under-Secretary for Defense Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate, DIA head Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct [an order for public consumption in the wake of serial scandals, since Cambone was himself am early torture advocate].

By June 25, 2004, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Cambone, in which he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a DIA interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The DIA officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said. The memo provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

According to the NYT article, General Boykin had earlier said (on March 17) through a spokesman that he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force. The article does not provide further detail on Boykin's response to the investigation after Cambone's and Jacoby's intervention in June, 2004. [from Wikipedia]

Boykin. Readers may not remember this guy, but when he was Deputy Commander of Delta, I was assigned there, where we we occasionally hectored into attending one of "Jerry" Boykin's "prayer breakfasts." Boykin is a weaponized Jesus advocate, a dispensationalist zealot who considers himself one of God's martial instruments in advance of the Rapture.

Now here is a strange and disturbing twist in the evolution of Special Ops culture. When I was there, some years back now, we were mostly reprobates -- hyper-profane macho drunks a lot of us -- with no time for religion. Over time, reports are indicating, the End Times Weaponized Jesus religion has gained a lot of ground in Special Operations and in the military generally. So now we are growing a culture wihtin the military that doesn't obey rules (impunity), that kills to prove masculinity, and that fuels bloodlust with a crackpot philosophy that tells them killing Arabs, et al, is a deliverance of God's justice.

If you believe that cultures mix, and sometimes badly, wait until we see the fruition of this hybrid of gunfighter practice with rapturite ideology.

Obama's support for McChrystal will be matched by Pelosi's support for McChrystal, and they will be mixed up in all this, seeking non-accountability as relentlessly as any Rumsfeld or McChrystal.

Stanley McChrystal is mixed up in all this, and not necessarily as a proselytizer. He's just mixed up in it, because this tendency in the military and his personal career happen to correspond in time and space. What both of them are is killers. They have made professional careers out of killing, and their units were not the little Special Forces A-Detachments with their peculiar linguists and trainers. These guys -- Boykin, McChrystal -- worked in "direct action" units. Rangers. Delta. JSOC. Direct action is another euphemism. It means destroying something, someone, someones.

Now it seems we are training a generation of people to torture; and I wonder if the crazy ideas are leading people to torture others, or if torturing others is the perverted origin of the penchant for male death-cult thinking.

The practice in question here, finally, is torture.

That's where Boykin and McChrystal collaborated in Iraq. A torture camp.

That's what has Pelosi on the spot now, too. Or the CIA. Or both.

Torture.

What does torture say about us; and what does what we say about torture say about us?

• Nancy Pelosi

Obama and the Military: Purely Tactical Disagreements - The Role of the US Military-Industrial Complex

In his last presidential address, US President D. Eisenhower warned his countrymen against the unchecked growth of influence of the political, ideological, economic, financial, and industrial militarily oriented machine which had emerged in the US by that time. To describe it, he coined the term military-industrial complex which later became commonly adopted. Since then the US military-industrial complex has gained a much greater clout. Quite possibly President Obama is not yet fully aware of the great extent to which the military-industrial complex is able to exert influence on him and his policies, but no doubt he is already being influenced by it. This fact must be taken into account to understand Obama's politics in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US military-industrial complex – the world's largest – is not limited to the US armed forces and companies manufacturing weaponry. It also includes the federal and private organizations oriented towards the war, including a number of legislative and executive bodies. It is also fair to say that the US intelligence community belongs to the country's military-industrial complex. The US military-industrial complex has enormous financial resources at its disposal and is extremely influential, largely due to its symbiotic relationship with transnational corporations which routinely employ the US military might and the potential of its intelligence agencies to promote their interests worldwide.

The whole enormous monster functions according to its own laws and it takes a tremendous effort to make it adjust its plans. Can President Obama make such an effort?

During Obama's presidential campaign his dovish ideas concerning the settlement of conflicts in various parts of the world – mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan - were warmly welcomed by the public and seemed to draw no comments from the military. In the White House, President Obama confirmed that his plan would be to withdraw most of the US forces from Iraq within 16 months. The army generals immediately responded by suggesting a withdrawal within 23 months citing a number of unresolved strategic problems. Eventually a compromise – 19 months – was reached, but options to prolong indefinitely the presence of the US group of forces which is due to stay in Iraq after the general withdrawal in 2010 were invoked at the same time.

Evidently Obama expected to meet with opposition from the military in dealing with Afghanistan as well. To ensure clarity from the start he called his plan the “withdrawal strategy”, but judging by the information and comments in the US media, what we are going to witness is not exactly a withdrawal. The military hold that the situation with the Talibs would turn hopeless unless the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are built up. The US Administration agreed and decided to increase the current 38,000 US and 25,000 NATO contingents in Afghanistan by 17,000 and 4,000 servicemen respectively. Unlike the case of Iraq, no specific withdrawal timetable for Afghanistan is even being discussed. Gen. David D. McKiernan who served recently as the US forces commander in Afghanistan said that a strengthened US contingent should stay in the country for at least another five years1. This would altogether mean a 12-year US military presence in Afghanistan. Other military commanders mentioned even longer terms. It appears that the notorious Bin Laden with his permanent threats is needed by Washington to justify the US military presence in Afghanistan.

And still, why is it that the US army – despite its servicemen getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan – is reluctant to withdraw from the counties? Is the new US Administration interested in resolving the problems in them or is it simply trying to maintain status quo that makes it possible for the US to pursue its own agenda in the Middle East and South Asia? The first of the above must be true judging by the statements made by Obama, but if put under scrutiny his strategy looks more like a disguise for the same old politics implemented by former US President G. Bush.

Various interests make the US stay in the two regions. First, the Pentagon has to account for the enormous amounts of taxpayers' money it is absorbing. Secondly, there are also business interests involved. It is no secret that security is one of the most serious problems confronting oil companies in Iraq, and the US army – jointly with private security contractors – certainly can help. Over more than five years of the US occupation of Iraq quite a few US army servicemen, including those from the top command, started their own business in Iraq. Commercial interests make them want the US presence in Iraq to continue at any cost.

Obama is coming under pressure from the military-industrial complex not only because of his politics in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the moderate plans to downsize certain defense programs are drawing strong criticism, especially from the ranks of Republican politicians. James Mountain "Jim" Inhofe from Oklahoma said: “President Obama is disarming America. Our sons and daughters are risking their lives fighting an enemy whose sole purpose is the destruction of our country and our way of life, while their president disarms America”2. Speaking recently at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, John Cornyn, a Republican Senator from Texas, accused Obama's Administration of attempting “to cash in a peace dividend” and weakening the US defense. He said that “great powers, namely China and Russia, are pursuing independent military modernization programs to improve their military capabilities with the intention of rivaling the United States” while Obama's Administration is cutting the defense budget in the name of domestic priorities.

As for cutting the defense budget, that is clearly an overstatement. According to a report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US military spending grew by 9.7% in 2008 and reached the astronomic figure of $607 bn (42% of the world's total). Compare: China, the country with the world's second largest military budget, spends about $120 bn on its defense.

Sen. Cornyn was discontent that in 2008 Pentagon got $50 bn less than it was promised. Besides, there is a plan not to buy the costly F-22 jet fighters and to stop manufacturing the C-17 strategic airlifters. However, lobbyists ignore the fact that the inefficient programs are being cut on Pentagon own suggestion. At the same time, a boost awaits more modern programs such as the production of the F-35 fighter and the missile defense systems capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at the initial phase of flight.

There are no reasons to regard Obama as a dove and a proponent of massive disarmament, though conflicts between him and the military-industrial complex are possible. The disagreements are purely tactical: there is a growing understanding in the ranks of the US establishment that the US is gradually losing its grip on global processes. What can it do to reverse the trend? There may be tactical disagreements, but there is unanimity among the US political class that this can be done only on the basis of building up the US military might and raising the potential of the US army to a new and higher level.

Global Research Articles by Alexander Frolov

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Bin Laden is Right? The Unwarranted Influence of America’s Global “Defense” Corporation

By Brian Bogart

You know your country’s “democratic” leadership and rationale for war are in trouble when the anointed most-evil enemy makes more sense than they do.

Although for all we know Bin Laden’s “annual message to Americans” originated below Dick Cheney’s office where Bin Laden is living in luxury chained to a pool table, its contents ring with refreshing logic relative to what usually passes for truth in and around the White House.

Analyzing his message alongside bipartisan excuses for war -- and juxtaposed with President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s keep-an-eye-on-the-defense-industry speech of January 1961 -- only Bin Laden’s words and Eisenhower’s warnings stand up to current United States Department of Defense statistics.

Outsourcing trends, hugely accelerated in the 1990s, have made the Department of Defense the largest corporate entity in history. Few big corporations in the world don’t have a handy cash-cow D contract, and small businesses and schools are especially welcome to apply. ($900 per toilet seat? Let’s sell those!)

DoD contracts get dished out everyday for everything from children’s books, cosmetics, organic dinners, and movie theater tickets to good old-fashioned nano weaponry.

Defense is the world’s top user of fossil fuels, contributor to climate change, and most financially alluring industry. All considered, the industry has the strongest lobby power in Washington and everywhere else. Defense is also the world’s foremost motivator of advanced science and technology, a global network capable of an entirely new direction in economics -- dependent, of course, on whether it’s a good D policy or a bad D policy.

That’s where We the People come in, at least according to President Eisenhower, who particularly worried about our universities.

Said Ike: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”

Judging by DoD’s own stats, we’re way past that point. More than 1,100 colleges and universities have had prime contracts with the Department of Defense in the last six years. Around 950 of those are in the United States, with the rest spread across 33 countries.

Although the number of DoD general assistance contracts to schools remained relatively constant between 2000 and 2006, the 900% increase in defense-applied research contracts and total dollar amounts awarded to schools during that period would’ve made Ike toss his lunch on TV. The total number of defense-applied research contracts to schools rose from 5,887 in 2000 to 52,667 in 2006. Total dollars to schools rose from $4.4 billion in 2000 to $46.7 billion in 2006.

Hundreds of thousands of companies in at least 198 nations and territories have held prime contracts with DoD in this century, including companies in China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Syria.

There were none in Iraq until 2003.

DoD contract trends with companies are at all-time highs, with more than 300,000 prime contractors in the United States alone (“prime” doesn’t count subcontractors and contracted individuals), a 6,000 companies-per-state average. Between 2001 and 2006, the total amount of defense dollars to companies in most states doubled. For fiscal year 2001, companies in Texas received $9.5 billion. For fiscal year 2006, the total was $27 billion.

Between the end of World War II and December 2006, US armed forces served abroad in 159 instances. These operations increased in frequency each decade, with 6 in the 1950s, 8 in the 1960s, 11 in the 70s, 22 in the 80s, 66 in the 90s, and 44 so far this decade.

It doesn’t take a bright citizen to make the case that peace is a healthy idea. But then there are politicians. With a bad policy, presidential candidates who don’t promise to increase defense spending have no legitimate chance in any party, thanks to big media’s industrial role. Money runs campaigns on strong defense for a reason: reelection. Defense is by far the largest job creator and money spender in all fifty states.

The problem is the bad policy excessively gives businesses our taxes to invest in their own financial growth. We pay for defense, defense showers that money on schools and companies, and top executives buy yachts and build stadiums. State and local leaders then raise taxes to cover what taxes should cover: the people’s health and prosperity.

Good folks put their faith, families, careers, and lives on the line for what they’re told by government. They don’t have time to investigate. Every September 11 our leadership bows its collective head before reminding us to keep shopping in “the wealthiest nation” while its infrastructure crumbles.

This year the enemy told us to think about that. With a graduate program untangling defense statistics, Bin Laden has a point that makes me wonder. Which “side” in this supposedly black and white world has the most evil to hide? Why does this man sound more like Ike than anyone in government?

It would better serve the people to hear Eisenhower’s speech every year instead of hollow tales about a bad guy our leaders tell us to fear yet, conveniently for their personal-wealth club, don’t see fit to chase down. Exploiting September 11 for profit has (among other things) legitimized the largest-ever expansion of the military industry using a nation that had nothing to do with it. That perpetuation does indeed smell like bipartisan imperialism.

Whether you’re a student or selling ice cream, teddy bears, tennis balls or shovels and oil rigs, chances are you’re part of the defense industry. And in this age of confrontation with Earth’s definition of diversity, truly hard-working diverse Americans -- workers, students, parents, soldiers -- are harnessed with a national brand of business-friendly diversity that makes them equal low-income slaves for an old-fashioned, wealthy white man’s profit scheme. Ike called it unwarranted influence. Our founders called it tyranny.

Diversity is an awareness of the human family returning to unity after a long and tortuous journey, celebrating its products of division while embracing its single origin and destiny. The next logical step for humanity is a leap beyond human-centric diversity to perceiving and promoting the human family as a fully responsible component of biodiversity.

As Ike feared, economic dependence on defense growth by the perpetuation of tensions since World War II explains the existence and growth of nearly every problem we face today. Undoubtedly, he would agree that economic dependence on defending Earth’s essential diversity is a far more lucrative and lasting prospect.

Our taxes pay for a defense that doesn’t defend our future. Our taxes go to companies that make profits we will never see. The real threat President Eisenhower spoke of is a drug that poisons society, spreads like a virus, and numbs the roots of consciousness. The American dream has become a nightmare wherein justice is irrelevant, and dishonest leaders both shun and cite hard, courageous work.

The defense industry juggernaut is not a widespread corporate conspiracy; it’s a bad-policy business trend running on inertia. Instead of calling for contractors to give up profits, change the policy, keep the network, and invest in a healthy planet.

But peace will not make money until it becomes the policy for defense, and that won’t happen without a tax rebellion, general strike, or similar surge in popular demand. (1,100 schools sounds like a student movement network.) Until the day we have a good D, the bad D pays our leaders. The people’s business is making that day arrive, because lazy government won’t surrender without a confrontation with the governed.

Meanwhile, “we must stop the terrorists in Iraq!” Terrorists, communists, whatever. Business-wise, Vietnam never ends.

That’s where we are.

At a 1992 University of Oregon event discussing the American people and their government, author Ken Kesey declared, “There are times when you gotta stand up in church and shout ‘bullshit!’”

That’s what time it is.


Sources: Statistical Information Analysis Division, Department of Defense; FY2000 through FY2006 CASE Multi-year Educational Nonprofits Prime Contracts, ST25 Multi-year States and Territories Prime Contracts, ST26 Multi-year Foreign Country Prime Contracts; and “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2006,” updated January 8, 2007 by Richard F. Grimmett, Specialist in National Defense, US Congressional Research Service.

Brian Bogart is a peace studies graduate student, diversity scholar, and defense statistics analyst at University of Oregon. His thesis project follows the 60-year trend of acquiring what President Dwight Eisenhower termed the “unwarranted influence” of the defense industry by government. Contact Brian at IntelligentFuture.org

(Excerpt from Eisenhower’s speech)

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

As we peer into society’s future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent, I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment.

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

Brian Bogart -Diversity Scholar - Defense Statistics Analyst - M.A. Candidate, Peace Studies; University of Oregon - Research Associate, Institute for Policy Research and Development; London




"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano

Breaking the Chains, A Review of Henry Giroux’s The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

by Scott D. Morris / August 18th, 2007

“Of all the enemies of public liberty war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

– James Madison, “Political Observations,” 1795

“God is pro-war”

–Jerry Falwell, 2004

The ways in which a stark and dreadful militarization permeates and impacts US and global culture is evidenced by even a cursory examination of recent news reports and events. For example, the film “300,” a xenophobic celebration of hyper-masculine militarized mass killing and brutality, was the number one DVD rental last week1; “The Bourne Ultimatum,” a film rooted in CIA torture, deceit, assassination and espionage, was last week’s top grossing box-office film2; Congressional Research Reports for the People estimates Congress has approved roughly $610 billion for the military operations instituted since 9/113; the House approved a $459.6 billion Pentagon budget for 2008 (not including supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan or nuclear weapons programs through the DOE that would push the figure well-beyond $600 billion)4; Just Foreign Policy reported one million Iraqis killed (as of August 11, 2007) as a consequence of the US aggression initiated in March 20035; The New Yorker’s most read online article last week was “The Black Sites: a rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program6; the Air Force announced that “hunter-killer” unmanned drones “loaded” with “a ton and a half of guided missiles and bombs, known as ‘The Reaper,’” will soon be headed to the grim killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan7; “Operation Straight Up,” a right-wing apocalyptic Christian evangelical troupe, will embark on a Defense Department endorsed “Military Crusade in Iraq,” to push “End Times theology” on US troops and deliver “an encouraging word from God to press on to victory8; the Bush Administration proposed to send $63 billion in military aid and weapons to the most volatile region in the world, the Middle East9; the Senate passed an enhanced surveillance bill that includes few safeguards to protect US citizens from spying while oversight is placed into the hands of Bush Administration henchmen Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and sycophant Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, etc., etc., etc.
This creeping militarization across economics, religion, politics and culture functions as a form of public pedagogy that conditions and directs our values, attitudes, beliefs, desires, allegiances, identities and identifications and is thus a matter of serious interest for those concerned about public education, the direction of knowledge, and meaningful democratic politics in their wider applications. The penetration of matters military into all corners of our social and cultural lives C. Wright Mills referred to as “military metaphysics — the cast of mind that defines . . . reality as basically military.”

When our reality and “cast of mind” is essentially defined militarily, how, we might ask, are we impacted as political, social, intellectual and cultural beings? How can we engage this “military metaphysics” in ways that aid us in developing tools for thinking critically about the causes, agents and effects of militarism, and the concomitant forces of capitalist corporatism, and, more importantly, how can we use that critical understanding toward collective work that will transform the institutions responsible for the militarization and corporatization of US politics and culture? That militarization and corporatism will impact our political and personal lives in multiple ways, perhaps critical, is a stark and inescapable reality that must be confronted, sooner rather than later, with all of our intellectual, moral and political energy. These issues and questions, and much more, are at the core of Henry Giroux’s latest book The University in Chains, a rigorous interrogation and relentless critique of the corporate, military and right-wing forces assaulting the academy (and beyond) in the United States, as well as an insightful and imaginative explication of how we might take-on the challenge of developing a meaningful democratic political culture and substantive democratic public spheres as part of a larger collective project dedicated to transforming the conditions and institutions that currently dominate so much, and threaten so many, of our lives.

Many readers will find it surprising that what they consider a bastion of free inquiry, objective thought and unbiased research, i.e. the university system, is a key institution in US culture in which this “military metaphysics” is increasingly present and influential; it is becoming, in John Armitage’s apt phrase, a “hypermodern militarized knowledge factory.”10 The militarizing factory system of university education not only includes “150 military education institutions in the United States” but also hundreds of university sites in which richly Pentagon-funded and directed research and development is pursued, military personnel (and others) develop the values and tools of the “warfare state,” and students undertake programs of study in preparation for service to “departments and agencies” of the warrior state.

The Association of American Universities has argued, “The nation must cultivate young talent and orient national economic, political, and education systems” to achieve the mutually linked goals of expanding global markets for US corporations and for victory in the war on terrorism.11 That this pursuit of military superiority and corporate domination through the university system of research and development goes largely unchallenged by academics, as well as society in general, should be a source of profound concern and pointed critique.

The militarization of the university is present in many guises. For example, former CIA director and president of Texas A&M, and current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, is just one small indicator of how the “US security state” (a nexus of political, military and corporate power and interests) is penetrating the university system. Giroux shares a telling anecdote from Cary Nelson who was asked by the UCSD provost, a former CIA employee, during an evaluation of the English Department, “if it were true the literature department would only hire communist faculty?” The question was not a joke! Nor is it a joke, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, that the CIA has become a “growing force on campus,” or that FBI director Robert Mueller has a desire “to foster exchanges between academia and the FBI,” or, how “the secrecy imposed on scholars working for the CIA” sabotages interrogation of prevailing notions, critiques of conventional wisdom, and challenges to power and authority and thus is “antithetical to the notion of the university as a democratic sphere” dedicated to critical debate, discussion and dialogue.

But why is it a problem if professors and universities are in league with US intelligence agencies and the militarized state? Should not the university be disciplined in a post 9/11 world to produce a public discourse in support of US domination of the globe through military might, the eradication of a socialist leaning New Deal society, and encourage a blurring between church and state,” all in the name of freedom of inquiry and the spread of democracy? While some do believe the university should “be disciplined” in these directions (witness ACTA — the right-wing “American Council of Trustees” — and their denunciation of the academy as a “weak link” in the war on terror, the recent firing of Ward Churchill, or, the Senate Committee bill passed in Arizona that calls for a $500 fine if professors are caught “advocating one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy,” etc.), Giroux describes how this marriage between the academy and the militarized state surrenders “the idea of the university as a site of critical dialogue and debate, public service and socially responsible research” to the pursuit of military aggression, profit enhancement, right-wing ideologies and global political and economic power.

In short, the university as an institution potentially dedicated to a substantive democratic culture, critical inquiry and the public good is transmogrified into a repressive sycophant “complicit with a larger set of institutional…commitments to war, violence, fear, surveillance, and the erosion of civic society . . .” Given this “clash of imperatives,” we should consider “what the role of higher education might be [or should be]” when “the government has a free hand to do whatever it wants in the name of national security,” (Dave Price)12 and reflect on how we might guard intellectual and moral integrity.

President Eisenhower’s oft-cited 1961 warning that “we must guard against . . . the military-industrial complex . . . [because] the disastrous rise of misplaced power . . . will . . . endanger our liberties [and] democratic processes,” also included a call to protect the universities from the stark evils of militarization. Eisenhower feared that war and violence would become the organizing principle of society and thus threaten not only democracy but the very idea of, and occasion for, politics. If politics, in brief, is defined as the way we organize ourselves in society around matters of human life, but we develop a society rooted in “military metaphysics” that is dominated by and organized around militarization, i.e. a dreadful structural machine that functions largely to produce profits, death and destruction, we undermine our possibilities for enhancing and protecting human life and thus destroy the possibility of real politics.

Before delivery, Eisenhower excised the phrase “military-industrial-academic complex” from his speech, but still warned that “the free university . . . free ideas and scientific discovery” as well as “intellectual curiosity” were threatened by “the power of money” working in the interest of the militarization of US society and profits for the arms industry. Senator William Fulbright retrieved the excised phrase later in the 1960s, at the height of the US attack on Vietnam, and noted how “the university fails its higher purpose” if it surrenders to the federal government’s pursuit of militarization and the corporate pursuit of profits. “The fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the military-industrial-complex,” about which Eisenhower and Fulbright warned has, unfortunately, continued to penetrate all corners of US culture, including the academy. Higher education has become an institution “that actively embrace[s] multiple constituencies and forms of patronage provided by the federal government, military, and corporate interests,” three essentially authoritarian structures subversive of democracy.

While it seems clear that values promoting substantive democratic practices and structures along with a democratic public spirit should be at the core of university and public education, “few in power,” in Andrew Bacevich’s words, “have openly considered whether…cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles.” One suspects those in power have other interests to occupy their time. Those other interests include producing an authoritarian politics, privatizing the economy, and employing and expanding an aggressive military machine that develop ever greater control and influence over who lives and who dies, and who wins and who loses, along with increased powers to exclude or include, to eviscerate civil rights, and to subvert democratic social values. Giroux argues persuasively that totalitarian power is becoming the norm in the US “as life is more ruthlessly regulated and increasingly placed in the hands of military and state power.”

One consequence of this accelerated militarization is a dual politics of disposability “shaped by the forces of empire,” witnessed on the one hand in “legalized” abuse, torture, rendition and murder, and on the other hand in the impunity from punishment enjoyed by those responsible for these brutal policies. In short, power brings impunity, and impunity protects power.
Under conditions in which militarism and war serve as structuring forces in the society, violence, militarization and aggression, at least for the rulers, functions as “a source of pride rather than alarm.” We should consider the impact on the rest of us when, in Michael Geyer’s words, “civil society organizes itself for the production of violence.” Across US culture, in multiple representational forms ranging from video games, to Internet sites, to films, to television programs, to advertisements, Giroux notes, “hyper-violence provides the organizing optic…while legitimating the fascistic assumption that violence is the only reasonable solution to all . . . problems.” A culture so rich in death tends to treat life very cheaply, as perversely seen in the horrible treatment of injured US soldiers returning from Iraq who are kept in rooms that include “mold, rot, mice and cockroaches” and grimly in what Bob Herbert calls “the apocalypse in Baghdad.”

A number of questions arise: How do we work through the tension between public opinions and attitudes that are generally opposed to military aggression, torture and mass violence, and the increasing militarization of “values, practices, ideologies, social relations and cultural representations” that works to not only merge politics and violence, but recode our memories and direct our experiences? How do we reverse the transition from the “welfare state,” that at least recognizes some notion of a social contract in which we are responsible for one another, to the “warfare state,” that thwarts dissent, debilitates public debate, enforces moral absolutes, celebrates aggression, and thus undermines participatory democracy? How do we overcome the capacity of the militarized state to both create “a disconnected hardening of individuals to suffering,” and to erase from view the massive trauma, brutality and barbaric destruction imposed by the US machine of death abroad? What is the proper response among academics when dissent is seen as unpatriotic and critical citizenship is considered treasonous under conditions in which militarism conditions and directs not only our perceptions of reality but the ways in which we relate with that reality?

These and other questions, offered or intimated by Giroux, must be critically engaged during a historical period in which the United States spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined, is the world’s greatest purveyor of deadly arms, is dedicated to illegal military aggression against anyone, anytime and anywhere, and is “enthralled with [a] military power [that] has become central to our national identity,” while our massive arsenal of highly destructive weapons signifies “who we are and what we stand for.” (Bacevich)
Nick Turse reports that roughly “350 colleges and universities conduct Pentagon funded research.” The Pentagon’s economic and ideological power “can often dictate the sorts of research that get undertaken and the sorts that don’t.” Giroux refers to the enormous power and burgeoning budget of the Pentagon’s military apparatus as possessing a “powerful arm-twisting ability capable of bending higher education to its will,” that is an “ominous and largely ignored disaster in the making . . . ” In short, because of Pentagon power within the academy there is a dedication toward “delivering science and technology solutions to the warfighter.” For example, in 2003 Penn State received $149 million from “the military war machine,” for research and development, while the University of Texas received $87 million, and Carnegie Mellon $60 million often to support research in space-based weapons systems, including “microwave guns, space-based lasers, electromagnetic guns, and holographic decoys,” and Future Combat Systems such as “electric tanks, electro-thermal chemical cannons, [and] unmanned platforms.” (Jay Reed)

Giroux suggests that those working in the “hypermodern militarized knowledge factories” should ask a number of critical and ‘uncomfortable” questions: “What role do intellectuals play in the conditions that allow theory and knowledge to be appropriated [ . . . in ways that] produce lethal weapons, fuel an arms race . . . and corrupt ethical standards…and what can they do politically to prevent [ . . . their work] from being militarized . . .?” And crucially, how do opposition and resistance to militarization in the academy “connect to [public intellectual] work and extend [students’ and teachers’] sense of social and political responsibility to the world outside of the academy?” One vital task for intellectuals is to employ critical pedagogical practices that promote ethical citizenship, encourage a willingness to take risks and responsibilities for a more substantive democracy, and “connect knowledge and power in the interests of social responsibility and justice.”

The University in Chains, is an intellectually rigorous and politically challenging contribution to our understanding of US culture, US politics and US education in our increasingly (and dangerously) militarized society and world, and a careful examination of the ways in which the capitalist market, the Pentagon-system, and right-wing fundamentalism corrupt and condition the academy and culture. The University in Chains is a stunning tour-de-force that meticulously examines how the multi-tiered and interpenetrating military, corporate and right-wing assaults on the university undermine higher education as a potentially and necessary democratic public sphere in which students and teachers could, and should, develop a sense of individual and social agency in the context of experiencing meaningful democratic social relations while identifying, critiquing and working to overcome authoritarian forms of power and authority.

Giroux writes with a clarity and urgency that is riveting and engaging. He operates from a fundamental recognition, “the academy and democracy are in peril,” and from a decisive question, “What is the task of educators at a time when the forces of democracy appear to be in retreat and the emerging ideologies and practices of militarization, corporatism, and political fundamentalism bear down on every aspect of individual and collective experience?” In other words, what are the responsibilities of public intellectuals during a period in which critical thought, rational considerations, radical qualities of character, and a culture of questioning, all necessary to authentic higher education and intellectual creativity, are under assault by corporate, religious, ideological and economic forces opposed to any form of substantive democratic politics and pedagogy? What role can public intellectuals, whether professors or students, perform in opening up the democratic potential of the university through “raising important questions about the mutually informing relationship among higher education, critical pedagogical practices, and the promise of a substantive democracy”?

While “contestation and struggle” still exist (often in isolation) in the academy, the university’s role as a “counterinstitution,” willing to question assumptions, interrogate prevailing notions, critique conventional wisdom, and, importantly, challenge and expose power, has been considerably undermined by militarization, corporatism, and right-wing “patriotically correct” fundamentalism. As such, teachers, students and citizens must take on the individual and social responsibility founded in the links between both critical thought and critical intervention, and rigorous intellectual work and deliberate political engagement, to invigorate the academy and “reclaim higher education as a democratic public sphere and counterinstitution” in which civic responsibility, a culture of critique, and a commitment to social engagement are rooted in a critical democratic politics and pedagogy. A question attends these insights: in whose interest, in what direction, with what goals, and with what likely consequences should pedagogical work be carried out, inside and outside higher education?

Giroux argues that higher education must move beyond the academy in ways that connect projects in higher education to the “enabling and development of social movements, public spheres, and groups of critical citizens” who recognize that in a globally interconnected and interdependent world we can no longer refuse to confront injustice, aggression, dogma and exploitation because no one is immune from the harmful, and potentially catastrophic political, personal and social consequences of militarization, corporatism and right-wing fundamentalism.
As part of a pressing process of “demilitarizing knowledge, social relations, and values,” intellectuals, students, cultural workers and citizens must move beyond the simple “consumption of knowledge” and embark on projects in oppositional and resistance pedagogy dedicated to knowledge “production for peaceful and socially just ends.” In brief, Giroux suggests, any form of peace-producing and substantive democratic education, inside and outside the academy, must work to link knowledge to commitment, learning to social change, understanding to political engagement, consciousness to empowerment and collective resistance, and the classroom to those larger social forces and public discourses that bear down on our lives in multiple contexts.

Such resistance, we can add, must be accomplished while working through the tensions between patience and urgency. We must have the patience to think rationally, reflect critically, deliberate meaningfully and free ourselves from illusions during a period in which, as Gabriel Kolko points out, “our choices are increasingly linked to their implications for human survival.” Consequently, critically reflective patience, though important, cannot be pursued at the expense of social engagement rooted in meaningful participation and effective shaping of decisions directed toward the mobilization of collective resistance to those forces intent on increasing social calamities and human suffering. In other words, we must work to ensure that we do not lose the future in the present, or the present in the future. Our safest path under these conditions is to oppose and resist the “death dealing ideology [and practices] of militarization,” capitalist corporatism, and dogmatism wherever they exist and whenever we confront them by engaging and expanding pedagogical practices that extend “notions of agency, empowerment, and responsibility that operate in the service of life, democratic struggles, and the expansion of human rights.”

There is no longer a question about whether we should resist and oppose military aggression, ideological narrowness, and corporate profit-seeking inside or outside the universities but how best to express our resistance and opposition over the short and long-term, inside and outside the academy. Corporatism, militarism, and fundamentalism operate in manifold ways to shut-down hopes and possibilities, not least of which is their capacity to debilitate dreams. The subversion of our capacity to imagine sabotages our reality to live. A reality without dreams is barbarism, a barbarism witnessed each day in the stark and dreadful consequences of US imperial pursuits.

Here is where Giroux’s notion of “a pedagogy of hope,” as it links to critical thought and imagination and critical intervention and citizenship, is vital and informative. The growing culture of fear and paranoia, the constantly invoked threats of terror, the intensifying cinema of hyper-violence and mutilation, the creeping right-wing dogmatism, the silencing, marginalizing and firing of dissidents in the academy, coupled with an absence of meaningful democratic public options produce forms of demoralization, cynicism and despair that undermine hopes and possibilities for engaged citizenship, social commitments and fighting back. Addressing this “crisis of agency” is at the heart of creating conditions for believing that a substantive democratic politics and pedagogy toward critical citizenship is possible and recognizing they are necessary. Giroux notes, “ . . . hope is a precondition not only for merging matters of agency and social responsibility, but also for imagining a future that does not repeat the present.” He notes elsewhere, in an interview with the Media Education Foundation (www.mef.tv), “If we continue to reproduce the present we may be reproducing a present that eliminates the future.” In addition, we might add, if we permit the present to crush our dreams, we lose the future. Hence, there is his call for an ethical and political vision, commitment and practice that works to not only rigorously negotiate and understand the complexities of history, and resolutely engage and change, so as not to suffer, the present, but importantly “to take students beyond the world they already know,” to one in which we not only “believe that democracy is desirable and possible,” but necessary. At its best, Giroux reminds us, “Pedagogy does not avoid commitment, it makes [commitment] possible!”

In the end, one is deeply inspired by Giroux’s impassioned concern for human rights, meaningful democracy and the future, and empowered by his critical insights into how we can break the chains and transform the university into a substantive democratic public space committed to providing students and global citizens with tools and skills to address our most urgent crises, to critically understand how economic, ideological and military power works and circulates through multiple sites of cultural production, distribution and consumption, and, to intervene as empowered and self-critical agents in the world in ways that expand and ensure the pursuit of greater and better conditions of social justice and democracy.

The University in Chains should be essential reading for everyone inside and outside the academy concerned with the increasing and foreboding militarization of the world, the corporate takeover of every corner of human life, and the narrowing ideological impositions of right-wing “super-patriot” fundamentalists. The book moves crucially from critique to a call for intervention and is therefore indispensable for those attentive to the need for fighting back, as well as those interested in matters of public pedagogy, public education, social justice, human rights, and producing a meaningful democratic vision, culture and practice.

At a time in human history when the perils resulting from silence and passivity in the face of destructive power and institutional malevolence soon promise to outweigh the perils of confronting that power and evil, Giroux’s call for a pedagogy of critical conviction, political engagement and social intervention is imperative in the continuing struggle to overcome practical political powerlessness, reclaim public space as a democratic sphere, and break the chains of injustice and oppression.

The perpetuation of a highly destructive and potentially terminal US militarism across so many spheres of our existence, in culture, politics, ideology, economics and academia, part of the large-scale “process by which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence,” (Geyer), all captured so forcefully in Giroux’s The University in Chains, calls to mind a “clash of imperatives” noted in the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”13

* Related Article: The University in Chains: An Interview with Henry A. Giroux, by Scott Jaschik

See “Top United States DVD Rentals for the week ending 5 August 2007,” online at: www.imdb.com/boxoffice/rentals. ↑
See “Movie Box Office: August 3-5, 2007.” ↑
“The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” Congressional Research Reports for the People, June 28, 2007. ↑
Andrew Taylor, “House approves $460B Pentagon budget,” Associated Press, August 5, 2007. Also see, Frida Berrigan, “Peace is not Presidential: The Candidates on the Pentagon,” Foreign Policy in Focus, August 11, 2007. The “real Pentagon budget” is closer to $1 trillion dollars per year when one includes all Military Related Expenditures such as nuclear weapons, State Department international affairs, science and space research and development, Veterans Administration, interest payments on debt accumulated from past wars, Homeland Security, military retirements expenditures, and intelligence agencies. See James M. Cypher, “From Military Keynesianism to Global-Neoliberal Militarism,” Monthly Review, June 2007. ↑
See “Iraqi Deaths Due to US Invasion,” Just Foreign Policy. ↑
Jane Mayer, “The Black Sites,” The New Yorker, August 13, 2007. ↑
See “Pilotless Robot Bomber Squadron Heads for Afghanistan, Iraq,” Associated Press, July 16, 2007. ↑
Max Blumenthal, “‘Kill or Convert,’ Brought to You by the Pentagon,” The Nation, August 8, 2007. Also see, “Military Crusade in Iraq.” ↑
William Hartung, “Myths of Mideast Arms Sales,” CommonDreams.org, August 7, 2007. ↑
Henry Giroux, The University in Chains (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007), p. 18. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are contained in The University in Chains. ↑
Ibid. p.19. ↑
Ibid, p.24. ↑
“The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” July 9, 1955. ↑
Scott Morris, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education and Technology at Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM, and an outreach coordinator for the Radical Philosophers Association. He can be reached at: dmorrisscott@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Scott.