Week 5

Gabriela Garcia-Mejia

Section A03

Week 5

Hamamoto’s “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence” was a loaded and fascinating piece in which he discussed mass murders and murderers and how the militarization of American society has shaped who and why these people have killed. As Hamamoto mentions most serial killers are white males and many of the ones that killed Asian people were military members. They showed their true colors at war having such easy access to heavy duty firearms followed by a feeling of superiority or white privilege. The Vietnam War itself led to the deaths of more than 4 million people. Indirectly this war led to the murders of many Asian Americans because that hatred and views of Asians as the enemy were the driving excuse for these serial killers to continue their attacks. I find it ironic that people are displaced from their home country because of war which almost always involves the U.S. yet when these people seek refuge in the U.S. society attacks and ostracizes these communities. Their motives for being here are questioned and they are seen as the enemy, especially in the case of Asian Americans during the Vietnam War as we mentioned. Yet we do not seem to see the problem with the U.S. and the fact that we are the ones that are disrupting their country with war, killing their families, leaving them with nothing and so they have to escape the violence that we, the U.S., have caused and so really WE are the enemy to them.

A country leads by example and I think that through the years of constant war and killings through war we have allowed for that to define our society and become normalized to an extent and this hyper-militarized mentality continues to be perpetuated. As we saw in Chatterjee’s piece on the imperial university we see this militarized mentality within the institution, especially when dealing with student activism. One incident that pops into everyone’s mind here at Davis would obviously be the pepper spray incident. In general it’s disturbing the amount of money that we continue to invest into our military instead of using that to improve education, provide assistance to our low income and homeless communities, invest in jobs and the list goes on.

Question: Why is the U.S., out of all developing nations still spending so much on war/militia?

Resources:

Boggs, C. (2013). Masters of War Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis- University of Minnesota Press.

The War [Cartoon]. (2012, May 14). Retrieved April 28, 2017, from https://seriesess3.wordpress.com/4-political-cartoon/cartoon-3/