Week 5

Week 5 - Don Elijah Atienza
A03




     Through this week's readings, we can see how imperialism affects the people within our nation. In Darrel Hamamoto's "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civil Violence," we see how our militarized nation plays a large role in the actions of murderers and psychopaths. Some of these people served in our military, as a result this desensitized them and they executed their terrible actions with extreme prejudice. In “Imperial University,” by  Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira we see how the university has become militarized in its own way. Whenever the university feels threatened by its students they send in police officers with military grade weapons. An example of this can be the pepper spray incident at UC Davis in 2011.
    Before reading these articles, I already had an idea of the reasons behind the killers actions that were described in Hamamoto's article. These men and even woman returned to the states from war with the mindset that they have the power and authority over those that they deem beneath them. What I never really realized was that, in some way, the administrators of our universities abuse their power in the same way. We often think as universities as places of free speech and that the students have the power to make changes. As described in Chatterjee and Maira's article, however; universities are under corporate control and they will do anything in their power to continue getting the funding they need. This translates to using a militarized police force in order to control protesting students.

  Thisleads me to the question what can us students do to make the higher-ups realize that this is not the solution? Their way of handling the situation makes this kind of control the norm and it opens up possibilities of escalation.

References

1.Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. 

2.Hamamoto, D. Y. (2003). Empire of death and the plague of civil violence. In Boggs, C. (Ed.), Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire (pp. 272-296). New York, New York: Routledge.

3. Uc-berkely-protests [Digital image]. (2017, February 2). Retrieved April 30, 2017