Week 5 - Madison Yn

Madison Yn

ASA 002 A02

Week 5

With an increasingly relevant paradigm of serial killings, mass murders, and homicides in the U.S., perhaps it’s an indication that the federal government should investigate and address these alarming domestic occurrences rather than engage in occupying international warzones. Darrell Hamamoto’s “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence” illustrates the various types of killings and murders that have gained public attention such as serial, mass, and race murder. Many of the cases Hamamoto examines are racially charged due to influence of war culture, specifically the Vietnam war which has introduced much of controversy and tumult within the American public already. In a couple of the killings, the culprit would justify his actions by comparing his murders to the many innocent lives the military took during the war that were approved by the government. While a serial killer may have a skewed sense of ethics and judgement, they raise an interesting concept as to whether the political elites who allow and deploy massive bombings and exterminations of humans should be considered mass murderers. Not only are political elites complicit in the deaths of civilians, but their problematic actions have encouraged others to take “justice” into their own responsibility and exterminate those who racially or ethnically resemble the targets of the nation. Ultimately, the exertion of U.S. imperial military rule has resulted in an unexpected blowback of augmented cases of serial killings and mass murder, however this phenomenon has garnered little media exposure and the government fails to recognize and resolve this issue.

U.S. imperial rule does not only offer a correlation with the rise of killings in the U.S., but it has also infiltrated the world of high education as affirmed in “The Imperial University” by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira. The academy, considered a liberal institution, has garnered the support of a liberal class which has been necessary to the development of the “benevolent empire” as academics are typically akin to internalizing U.S. military intervention and occupations as humanitarian efforts to liberalize victims of political turmoil. With an imperial university in effect, the government is able to successfully produce knowledge about the state of the nation with a receptive, complying audience. While the imperial university may be a boon for those operating it, those within are plagued with academic repression of knowledge that counters U.D. neoliberal capital and philosophies. It has also transformed campus grounds into militaristic occupied zones when student activists exercise their right to protest in which have resulted in too many unjustified injuries and incarcerations. Over the years, universities have gained the reputation of upholding an “exceptionalist” mythology about American democracy and the American dream which entails individual liberty and opinions against Communist bloc, third worldist movements, and other uprising and beliefs that threaten the American way of life. The battles against these socially engineered threats have prompted leftist intellectuals and radical scholars and students to pollute the community around them with “anti-american” ideologies. The exceptionalist mythology, along with many other modalities of academic containment such as blacklisting or revocation of tenure, have minimized the room for discourse around what is permissible for scholars in the imperial university. The notion of academic freedom serves to support academic containment in a paradoxical way in which dissenters have an outlet to feel as if they aren’t acting under a socially engineering profession because they have access to “academic freedom”. However, they are still expected to uphold appropriate scholarly standards and behavior that are suggestive of limiting dissent. Not only are these external forces managing the academy, but academics and those on the inside work against each other to eliminate dissent and those with conflicting ideologies to conform to the imperialization of the university.

Should political elites complicit in the death of innocent civilian lives be considered murderers?

References:

Hamamoto, Y. Darrell. “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence.” Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire, by Carl Boggs, Routledge, 2003, pp. 277-292.

Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The Imperial University. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Bill of Fare. (n.d.). Retrieved October 22, 2017, from https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjRpoHxy4XXAhVszVQKHQT8AMwQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F353532639476164525%2F&psig=AOvVaw242uQ3Yw-9IgVVBJvq453t&ust=1508808514863013