Week 5 - Jamie McCaa

Jamie McCaa

ASA 002 Section A03
Week 5

Both "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence" as well as "The Imperial University" examine the ways in which U.S militarism influences other factors - namely, the production of knowledge at universities and the production of serial killers. While reading both of them, I kept thinking of a conversation we had in discussion last week - about whether or not people in powerful positions are more likely to commit crimes. While reading "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence", when the author said "there is little indeed that separates [mass murder elites] from the more notorious mass murderers", it made me think about how ability to perform crimes is all about access to resources (Hamamoto 285). Ideologically, these (white) men who commit mass killings, whether they be on the civilian scale or on the genocidal scale are not too different - but their ability to do damage is all reliant on their access to power and resources; the closer one is to the heart of the empire, or the institution, the more access one has to power, and therefore, the more killing can be done. There is such a close relationship between bureaucratic power and ability to control the lives of others - whether through directly ending lives or just limiting what they can do in their life (keeping scholars from producing knowledge that would be 'controversial', etc).

One thing that I found in common with both of the articles is that it seems as though the violence enacted on minority communities, as well as the scholars who try to speak out against U.S imperialism, is influenced by a perceived threat to U.S power. In the case of the mass killings of Southeast Asian Americans deatiled throughout "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence", the Asians in question are perceived as "threats" to the U.S out of war veteran's connections with U.S wars in Southeast Asia... but scholars speaking out against Israel is also seen as a threat to U.S militarism. Both are met with violence - physical, verbal, and psychological. Dismantling the power system in place that allows the censorship of "threats" - either through termination or through silencing - is an absolute must; I don't want future generations of academics and minorities to live under this repressive system.

Question: In "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence", the author claims that "mass murder of the over-the-top sort...becomes possible only with the proliferation of semiautomatic weapons in a hyper-militarized civilian society" (Hamamoto 282). Is blocking access to semiautomatic weapons enough to halt mass killings? What about the deeper, ideological issues that inspire these killings - the dehumanization of Southeast Asians, the feelings of white supremacy? As long as these ideologies are supported (overtly or covertly) by the state, will violence continue?

References:

Hamamoto Y, Darrell. (2003). Empire of Death and the Plague of Civil Violence. Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire by Carl Boggs (pp. 277-292). Retrieved October 22, 2017.

(n.d.) Addicted to War [digital image]. Retrieved from http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html on October 22, 2017.