Week 5 A02 Jocelyn Centeno
“Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence” by Darrell Hamamoto explains why the
United States has such a high rate of serial murders and mass shootings. These frequent incidents correlate with the history of war culture that is embedded in America. Hamamoto’s research argues that there is more than coincidence when analyzing why there was such a large spike of these heinous crimes against specifically “yellow people” between the years 1975 and 1995. Such incidents coincide with the Vietnam War in which the American military were glorified for their “service”. This article showed that gun fetishization and military glorification dominates the American culture. The United States relies on war culture to stay in power and uses this power to oppress others including its own people. In The Imperial University Race, War, and the Nation-State by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira they explain the how war culture affects academia also. They begin with anecdotes of peaceful protests being broken up by military-like rangers. I find this sort of treatment excessive, but it makes sense when our country became the “most powerful country on the globe”. How this book connects with Hamamoto’s article is the fact that academia itself is going through somewhat of a war. Many people who try to speak up about certain topics, in this case Palestine, are being silenced or even prosecuted. “Warnings about the dangers of this deep alliance between the U.S. military and intelligence, civil society, and the academy came not only from the margins but also from the Oval Office itself.” (Chatterjee, 17) This excerpt from The Imperial University Race, War, and the Nation-State shows the precaution that President Eisenhower had to use academia for military technological development. I think it is important to realize that our society rose up because of the focus on our military and in turn it is intertwined with the American culture even though combat may be thousands of miles away.
United States has such a high rate of serial murders and mass shootings. These frequent incidents correlate with the history of war culture that is embedded in America. Hamamoto’s research argues that there is more than coincidence when analyzing why there was such a large spike of these heinous crimes against specifically “yellow people” between the years 1975 and 1995. Such incidents coincide with the Vietnam War in which the American military were glorified for their “service”. This article showed that gun fetishization and military glorification dominates the American culture. The United States relies on war culture to stay in power and uses this power to oppress others including its own people. In The Imperial University Race, War, and the Nation-State by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira they explain the how war culture affects academia also. They begin with anecdotes of peaceful protests being broken up by military-like rangers. I find this sort of treatment excessive, but it makes sense when our country became the “most powerful country on the globe”. How this book connects with Hamamoto’s article is the fact that academia itself is going through somewhat of a war. Many people who try to speak up about certain topics, in this case Palestine, are being silenced or even prosecuted. “Warnings about the dangers of this deep alliance between the U.S. military and intelligence, civil society, and the academy came not only from the margins but also from the Oval Office itself.” (Chatterjee, 17) This excerpt from The Imperial University Race, War, and the Nation-State shows the precaution that President Eisenhower had to use academia for military technological development. I think it is important to realize that our society rose up because of the focus on our military and in turn it is intertwined with the American culture even though combat may be thousands of miles away.
Question: For a society that relies heavily on its military, is it possible to reconstruct a society that does not?
Citations:
- Hamamoto, D. Y. (2003). Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence. In Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire (1st ed., pp. 276-292). New York, New York: Routledge.
- Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: academic repression and scholarly dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Whittacker, M. (2011, November 15). [Photograph]. Berkeley.
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