Week 5 Richard Nguyen Section A02

This week’s theme is the university using academia as a tool for supporting imperialism and violence. I started this week’s readings with Hamamoto’s Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence, and had a pit in my stomach reading the various descriptions of atrocities committed by the serial-killers. The underlying thread in most of the murders seem to be the fetishization of military might, combined with the Otherization of non-whites, on which those in the military committed atrocities against. What was also shocking was the fact that when exposed by the media for their actions against indigenous peoples in war-zones such as Vietnam, some of the perpetrators remained unaffected, and some even garnered sympathy. After all, its either “no big deal” or “things that just end up happening during wars”.

Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira point out in their paper, The Imperial University Race, War, and the Nation-State, that during times when the U.S. encroaches on foreign lands, University Inc. uses military-like shows of force in order to police thought that isn’t in favor of imperialism, patriotism, or nationalism. Attention is given to student protests as they cry “not my university”, but not towards two important questions: why does academia have access to military-grade suppression, and why does academia feel the need to suppress otherwise peaceful protests? I think too much focus is being placed on the transgressions themselves e.g. the act of pepper spraying protesters at UC Davis, instead of the underlying systems that enable such events to occur in the first place.

My question for this week is towards the Hanamoto reading. Those in power like to dismiss White serial-killers as “troubled”, or one of the bad apples in the bunch. However Hanamoto seems to indicate that there is a complex system of events in place that allow such serial-killers to exist. How would we be able to get the media to change their narrative to call out these serial-killers as what they really are: manifestations of our current corrupt systems?

I end with this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QXjBVC233s


Times, The New York. “Eisenhower's Warning: Military Industrial Complex's Growing Budget | Think Back | The New York Times.” YouTube, YouTube, 18 Jan. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QXjBVC233s.