Archive for category: #Imperialism

The following article is adapted from a panel discussion hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Chicago in February 2023, entitled “Counter-Terrorism and Empire: State Violence and the Right to Resist.” This panel was the culminating event of SJP UChicago’s #IsraeliMilitaryOffOurCampus campaign, a quarter-long student movement in the winter of 2023 aimed at exposing the University of Chicago’s ties to the propagandistic “Israel Institute” and opposing its decision to host “counter-terrorism” courses taught by Israeli military personnel, notably Brigadier General Meir Elran.

The discourse of “counter-terrorism” has risen to prominence in recent decades, providing political justification for such acts as the US invasion of Iraq and the ongoing Israeli colonization of Palestine. By exploring counter-terrorism’s origins, imperial applications, and entanglement with other systems of gendered and racialized violence, this discussion raises important questions about anticolonial struggle, discourses of state violence, and the role of academic institutions in normalizing and perpetuating them. Special focus is placed on how these global forces come to manifest at University of Chicago and with the university’s police department. The panel can be viewed here.

The story I want to tell has to do with the Philippines in the early twentieth century. But it will also have to do with policing across the United States and here on campus, and ultimately with the University of Chicago.

In 1898, the United States declared sovereignty over the Philippine Islands, places which President McKinley and most Americans had no idea even existed. But as a result of the Spanish-American war in 1898 the US did come to learn about the Philippines. It sent its troops there to fight the Spanish, and upon defeating Spain, it seized the Philippines and its millions of inhabitants as its new colonial territory.

The problem for the Americans was that the Filipinos, who had been subjected to Spanish rule for 300 years, were not happy about the Americans coming and subjecting them to more colonial rule. They had in fact already declared their independence from Spain, and so they established an independent Philippines: The Philippine Republic. They took up arms against the United States, leading to the so-called Philippine-American war which lasted officially from 1899 to 1902 but continued in various forms afterwards.

This was a formative war for the United States: it was the first overseas guerilla war the US fought, one that prefigured what would happen later in Vietnam. But unlike in Vietnam, the Americans essentially won, crushing most of the rebel resistance. The war ultimately cost some 400,000 Filipino lives.

The war involved brutal acts of violence on the part of American soldiers, including the use of barbaric torture to extract information from Filipino rebels, and a horrific massacre on the island of Sumar in 1902. Led by US General Jacob H. Smith, US forces attacked villages in Sumar, killing civilians and even children. General Smith had ordered his troops: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.” This campaign lasted four and a half months, and an estimated 15,000 Filipinos were killed.

Importantly, this violence was justified to the US military and to the American public on the grounds that Filipinos were criminals and terrorists. And here we get to the discursive logic behind counterterrorist discourse. In American discourse, the two terms “criminal” and “terrorist” were more or less the same. Supposedly, Filipinos were criminals because the very act of taking arms against the United States to call for independence—according to the Americans’ new laws, about which Filipinos had no say— was a crime. Filipino resistance fighters were called terrorists because they were presumably forcing average Filipinos upon pain of violence to join their cause. They were called terrorists simply because they took up arms and were fighting against colonialism and for freedom. General Jacob Smith in fact justified the massacre at Sumar on the grounds that earlier that year Filipino troops had killed fifty US soldiers. Rather than classifying this as an act of wartime defense, or as an act of legitimate rebellion against an occupying oppressor, the Americans called the attack a massacre by Filipino terrorists. It was a crime and an act of terror.

State violence in the Philippines—from massacres to torture—returned to the US through individuals like August Vollmer.

The logic of counterterrorism was this: the Filipino insurgents were not freedom fighters, but irrational violent terrorists who respond only to force. And if they respond only to force, state violence against them is justified.

What does this have to do with policing?

The state violence in the Philippines, and state violence everywhere, from massacres to torture, to all of the US army’s counterinsurgency operations, did not stay put. As with so many cases of imperialism, some of them came back to the United States through a number of individuals, one of whom was a man named August Vollmer. Vollmer was the chief of police at Berkeley starting in 1905, and today, Vollmer is memorialized by historians and police officers alike for being the “father of modern policing.” Ask any police officer—ask any University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officer: “do you know August Vollmer?” They’ll say, “yes, he’s the father of modern policing!”

Vollmer is responsible for innovating all kinds of new tactics and policing strategies in the early twentieth century, all of which spread around the country to make modern policing what it is today. For example, prior to this period, police forces were not mobile or mounted. You just had a few cops walking around on their beats on foot. But Vollmer came up with the idea of putting police forces into mobile squads that would patrol on bike, motorcycles, and ultimately squad cars: moving all over the city, concentrating force and raiding houses like early SWAT teams. In a sense, he invented the early SWAT teams and inspired other police departments in the US to create their own mounted forces.

Vollmer also invented a police tactic known as pin-mapping. This involves taking a map and putting a pin wherever you found a crime to show hot-spots of criminal activity. It allows police to then mobilize their forces and concentrate them there.

Now, today this is called spot mapping or “predictive policing.” Every department uses this in some form. They use more complicated algorithms, but essentially these are all Vollmer’s tactics of finding out where crime is and where it happened, and then mobilizing police forces there and saturating those communities with police forces.

Pin-mapping and “predictive policing” are racist tools of state power.

This tactic is essentially how racist policing is justified; police are sent only to those areas of high crime, but those areas that they think are high crime or that show up on a map are only areas of racial minorities. Not because racialized minorities commit more crimes, but because of historical biases in data collection and racist assumptions about criminality. Pin-mapping is a racist tool of state power.

Vollmer popularized this too, along with many other police tactics. Now, the question you might ask is, where did Vollmer’s innovations come from? And a large part of the answer comes from the fact that Vollmer, before he became police chief, had been part of America’s colonial empire and in fact had served in the Philippine-American war.

Vollmer had been part of America’s colonial counter-insurgency regime, squashing so-called terrorists. In fact, he had been hand-picked to join a new elite colonial counterinsurgency unit charged with penetrating the interior to conquer and capture rebel leaders, not unlike the sort of units that killed so many civilians in Sumar. Only after this did Vollmer return to Berkeley and become chief of police. And he brought with him some of those very colonial counterinsurgency techniques—those so-called counterterrorist techniques—that he had been exposed to and used in the Philippines.

His idea of mounting police forces, for instance, came partly from the American army’s new counterinsurgency units that penetrated the Philippine archipelago. In other words, the early police mobile units that Vollmer created and popularized—these early SWAT forces—were modeled upon America’s “counterterrorist” regime in the Philippines. The same goes for his pin-mapping techniques: the US army had innovated pin-mapping techniques specifically as a new tool to track the movements of Filipino insurgents in order to locate their camps in the vast terrain of central Luzon and embark upon their search-and-destroy missions. It was through pin-mapping that the US army was able to send troops to Sumar and conduct a brutal and murderous campaign against civilians that was justified as counterterrorism. Vollmer saw this as a tactic that could also be applied to policing—he called it the art of making war on the map.

Using techniques of so-called “counterterrorist” state violence in the colonies and applying them to “criminals” in the US followed only naturally.

After all, Vollmer himself stated repeatedly that he thought of criminals as racially inferior, as he and other US imperialists classified Filipinos and justified their colonial rule on racial grounds. They said the same thing about criminals, who were after all, seen as terrorists, just as terrorists were thought of as criminals.

Thus, using techniques of so-called “counterterrorist” state violence in the colonies and applying them to “criminals” in the US followed only naturally. It’s fitting that Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors, leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, titled their memoirs When They Call You a Terrorist.

These examples of pin-mapping and mounted units are just two examples of how so-called counterterrorist tactics in America’s colonies returned home. For example, in the 1910s and 1920s, some police around the country were soon discovered to be using modes of torture to extract confessions, largely from Black Americans. They used a technique called the “water cure.” This was an early variant of “waterboarding” that we know was used in Iraq. Police tried to extract confessions from suspects by holding them down and pouring water down their throats. But this too was an effect of empire.

The American military first learned about it during their colonial counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines. This was the chosen mode of torture used by the US army during the Philippine-American war. It was also reportedly being used by US forces in the 1910s during the US occupation of Haiti.

Racist policing in the US in the early twentieth century through today has its origins in America’s colonial occupation of the Philippines. Policing is a colonial invention. It is an invention of so-called “counter-terrorist” state violence. The state violence of military engagements overseas, of counterinsurgency operations, and “counter-terrorist” tactics, do not stay put, they do not only live in the site of their origins, they move around. And in this case, they came back to the imperial metropole to fundamentally shape state violence at home with disastrous effects.

Policing is a colonial invention.

Presumed criminals here in the US become treated like presumed terrorists, ostensibly warranting violence by the same set of counterinsurgency tools, tactics and techniques used in the colonies.

The circulation of state terror has continued ever since. It has taken many different forms, has been used by US empire, the British empire, along with other colonial states, a list which today includes Israel.

Consider a training program that has been going on between US police and Israeli military and police ever since 2001. Since then, officials and officers from US police forces around the United States have been sent to Israel to learn and observe counterinsurgency and so-called counter-terrorist techniques from the Israeli military and the Israeli national police. A delegation of officers from towns in Massachusetts in 2017, for example, toured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the border with Syria, and Israel’s municipal police academy, to learn about intelligence gathering and surveillance, and other tactics like roadblocks and weapons for crowd control, which they have been trying to bring back for policing in the United States.

US police also learned various other Israeli police tactics, with one US county sheriff who attended going on record to say, in reference to how Israeli forces used force during arrests, “We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.”

US police officials from all around the country, in fact, have participated in this program, with numbers of police officials going on these training missions exceeding the thousands. Attendees include police officers from the Chicago Police Department, as well as a man named Chief Timothy Fitch. In 2011, Fitch was sent to Israel for training. He returned home by 2014 to serve as St. Louis County police chief, thus overseeing the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which is part of St. Louis County.

We see this pattern repeats with earlier in the century, when folks like August Vollmer went overseas, learned tactics and techniques of state violence there, and brought them home for police to use on domestic populations. Again, state terror overseas, created in the name of countering terror, created to mete out violence against presumed terrorists and so-called criminals, this state terror does not stay put. It is not something that just happens far away, it circulates everywhere, and comes home.

Finally, what does this have to do with the University of Chicago?

Let me return to August Vollmer, for Vollmer did not stay put either. After his stint at Berkeley, and then after serving as chief of police in Los Angeles, he traveled around the country and was hired by various police departments to advise them in adopting the new techniques that he had brought back from the Philippines. He even advised the Chicago Police Department. While in Chicago, he held a conference at what is today Windermere House in Hyde Park. This conference brought together police officials from around the US so they could share policing practices, and all the new policing tactics that Vollmer had brought back from the imperial frontiers. Vollmer’s efforts were so popular in town that in 1929 he received a telegram from a man offering him a new job based upon his work.

At the University of Chicago, August Vollmer became the very first professor of police administration in any American university.

That man was named Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins had just been appointed president of the University of Chicago, and he hired August Vollmer to create a police training program here at the University of Chicago. Hutchins appointed Vollmer to be professor of police administration at the University of Chicago, making August Vollmer the very first professor of police administration in any American university, and making the University of Chicago the first university to have a professor of police administration. His office was located in room 317 of the social science research building, two doors down from my current office.

Now Vollmer ended up teaching a number of courses here for a few years, but he did not stay—he moved back to California in the 1930s. And while the University of Chicago today does not have an official police administration program anymore, it does have its own police force, which is one of the largest private police forces in the country. And of course it uses many of the tactics and forms that Vollmer himself innovated. The University of Chicago also has the Crime Lab, which works with the Chicago Police Department, and which hired as its director a former Los Angeles police officer named Sean Malinowski. Malinowsky is widely known for leading the LAPD in adopting so-called predictive policing. This is a form of policing rooted in Vollmer’s pin-mapping techniques, and which has, by all accounts, been a primary method of racist policing, a tool by which police justify their over-policing and harassment of Black and Latinx communities.

All of this to say that not only is it the case that state violence circulates globally and lands at home, but also that there are parts of the University of Chicago that have long played a part in cultivating, promoting, spreading, and normalizing the intellectual tools of such state violence. This state violence goes under the moral cover of the label “counterterrorism” or “counter- crime,” but is ultimately just another form of violence against humanity.

All of this is why I would insist that the struggle against police violence here in the United States cannot be separate from the struggle against colonialism overseas. This is also why the struggle against police violence here at the University of Chicago should not be separate from the struggle against colonialism, and vice-versa. And neither should it be separated from Indigenous struggles in the US, Canada, and Australia, or elsewhere. Empire and its violence is global, connects us all, and so resistors to empire and its violence must also be global and connected.

The post The Colonial Origins of the UChicago Police appeared first on Rampant Magazine.

Sutthipong Kongtrakool/ Getty Images

Signs of de-dollarization are showing in FX and central bank reserves, JPMorgan said.
But the dollar remains the dominant currency in global transactions.
“Some signs of de-dollarization are emerging; this trend is likely to persist but USD should maintain its large footprint for the foreseeable future.”

While a near-term rupture in the greenback’s dominance is unlikely, divergence away from dollar usage is beginning to show, JPMorgan analysts wrote in a Monday note.

“Some signs of de-dollarization are emerging; this trend is likely to persist but USD should maintain its large footprint for the foreseeable future,” they said.

For now, the currency remains “top-of-class” in global transactions, and accounts for 88% foreign exchange volumes, while its share of trade invoicing has remained steady for two decades, between 40% and 50%.

However, this has been set against a decline in the US share of global trade, as the country’s exports fell to a record low of 9%.

And the dollar’s share of foreign exchange reserves has also dropped. That trend was accelerated after the West froze Russia’s $330 billion in reserves last year for its Ukraine invasion — prompting other nations to decrease their reliance on the US currency.

“De-dollarization is evident in FX reserves where USD share has declined to a record as share in exports declined, but is still emerging in commodities,” JPMorgan said.

Meanwhile, the dollar has started to lose to gold, as foreign central banks have bought the commodity in record volumes over the past few quarters. The yellow metal now compromises 15% of total assets, versus the dollar’s 44%.

JPMorgan pushed against the prospect of a yuan-dominated currency regime, as the Chinese currency’s international presence remains small: compared to the dollar’s 43% share of SWIFT payments, the yuan compromises 2.3%.

Still, analysts acknowledged China’s efforts to push the yuan abroad, noting progress in cross-border transactions and liabilities, but expect it to be limited on account of the tight control regulators hold over the yuan.

Other institutional outlooks on the dollar’s future include that of Goldman Sachs, which found that there are no viable alternatives to threaten the greenback, even if the currency faces new risks.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)

Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.

In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.

Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)

Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

Lessons from History on Imperial Decline

I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.

And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.

As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.

As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.

For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.

That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.

Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.

Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?

Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.

Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.

The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.

History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.

What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.

Featured image: 20201005 16 God, Guns & Trump, Western Ohio by David Wilson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

by Roberto Bissio^*

A reform in the international financial architecture is needed and urgent. High level UN officials and civil society agreed on that proposition during the UN Summit on the Least Developed Countries.

“The international financial architecture is absolutely no longer fit for purpose. It is morally bankrupt” said UN deputy secretary general Amina Mohammed in a candid dialogue with civil society organizations at the closure of the Civil Society Forum on the last day of the Summit on the Least Developed Countries held in Doha last March 2023.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thinks young people should earn the right to vote by joining the army, like in the sci-fi classic Starship Troopers. It’s a political nonstarter, but it says a lot about how conservatives see the world.

A still from Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers. (Tristar Pictures / Touchstone Pictures)

If you don’t know who Vivek Ramaswamy is, I don’t blame you. He’s currently hovering around third place in polls on the race for the Republican presidential nomination behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis — but it’s a distant third. And he’s been so reluctant to criticize the front-runner that I can’t help wondering if his real goal is to become Trump’s running mate.

Like Trump himself was in 2016, Ramaswamy is a wealthy businessman with no political experience. Like the rest of the Republican field, he wants to invade Mexico. The most distinctive thing about Ramaswamy is a policy position so extreme that his own campaign staff reportedly hates it. He wants to raise the minimum age for automatic voting rights to twenty-five.

That’s obviously pretty eyebrow-raising in itself, but what really caught my attention about Ramaswamy’s proposal is that it would allow some eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds to get back their right to vote. They could earn it back by passing a civics test, becoming first responders, or joining the military.

The idea of earning the right to vote by joining the Army is hilariously reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s science-fiction classic Starship Troopers (1997). In the world of the movie, as viewers are told in bombastic public service announcements, “Service guarantees citizenship!”

Of course, Verhoeven knew he was making a dystopian satire. Ramaswamy is overruling his staffers’ concerns because this proposal represents his fondest political hope. And it’s one that reveals a lot about how the Right sees the world.

Ramaswamy vs. Young Voters

Plenty of Republican politicians have been willing to chip away at young people’s voting rights through such mechanisms as passing laws forcing college students to drive back to their hometowns if they want to register to vote. It’s not hard to see why — in the 2022 midterms, 63 percent of voters in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age range voted for Democrats.

But only a politician as eccentric as Ramaswamy would openly advocate the age group’s disenfranchisement. Actually implementing his proposal would take a constitutional amendment. It’s awfully hard to imagine that happening. And if there’s one thing that would get even fewer eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds to vote Republican, it would be nominating a candidate who openly said that he didn’t think they should be allowed to vote.

But as much of a nonstarter as it may be in those senses, so far it doesn’t seem to have disqualified him the eyes of Republican primary voters. Right now, Trump overwhelmingly dominates the race, with DeSantis coming in a distant second — but depending on which polls you’re looking at, Ramaswamy is doing about as well as or better than people like Nikki Haley, who used to be governor of South Carolina, and Mike Pence, who just three years ago was vice president of the United States. And it’s not impossible to imagine Ramaswamy actually getting Pence’s old spot on the 2024 Republican ticket. Stranger things have happened.

Whether his star continues to rise or not, though, so far other Republicans don’t seem to be treating Ramaswamy as a crank. And that’s interesting in itself.

Voting Rights and the Right

The majority of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds losing their voting rights is a stomach-churning idea. Millions of people who live on their own and work in workplaces regulated by labor laws and have their lives shaped by government policies in a thousand other ways would lose the right to shape those policies. But raising the age isn’t even the worst part of Ramaswamy’s proposal.

The idea that voting rights come with the transition from dependent childhood to relatively autonomous adulthood makes sense in a general way, but any specific cutoff is bound to feel a bit arbitrary. No one wants to extend the franchise to twelve-year-olds, and there has to be a cutoff somewhere, but there’s surely nothing magical about eighteen as opposed to, say, seventeen or nineteen. And the way we stagger the rights of adulthood in American society has little rhyme or reason to it — sixteen for driving, eighteen for voting, twenty-one for drinking or — in most states — renting a car. As much as twenty-five seems like an unreasonably late age for the most basic right of citizenship, I suppose I might feel differently if I hadn’t grown up in a society that set the bar seven years younger.

The part that’s much worse, and much more revealing about how many conservatives see the world, is that — starting with the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age bracket — Ramaswamy’s fantasy is all about changing the way we think about voting rights. The fundamental premise of democracy is that everyone has a basic right to self-government.

Those of us on the socialist left take this idea to its logical conclusion. In the workplace no less than the political realm, we apply political theorist Michael Walzer’s maxim that what “touches all” should be “decided by all.” We don’t think some people should have more power over the shape of our collective existence than others just because they have enough money to own their own business.

But even more mainstream small-d democrats who wouldn’t go that far think that the right to have an input at least in political decisions is innate. Like, say, the right to free speech, you don’t need to do anything special to earn the right to have a say in decisions that impact you. It’s something everyone should have just for being a person.

The truth is that the Right, with its love of hierarchy and its instinct toward seeing politics through a prism of individual sin and individual virtue, has never been entirely comfortable with that idea. There’s something about the notion of making people jump through hoops to earn a right to have a say in their society’s collective decision-making that scratches a deep itch in the right-wing soul.

Robert Heinlein, Paul Verhoeven, and Vivek Ramaswamy

Science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein was certainly scratching that itch when he wrote the original Starship Troopers novel in 1959. Heinlein started out as a New Deal liberal, and even volunteered for democratic socialist Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor of California in 1934. But he’d made a sharp turn to the right by the 1940s. He’s often thought of as a libertarian, which might imply anti-interventionism in foreign affairs. But in the 1950s, Heinlein was every inch a Cold Warrior, and that shows in Starship Troopers, where humans are engaged in a brutal and righteous war against an alien race of Arachnids (or “bugs”) who seem suspiciously, well, collectivist.

In the world of the novel, the only way for anyone — male or female, young or old — to become a citizen of the Terran Federation with a right to vote in the federation’s elections is through military service. The protagonist, Juan Rico, does exactly that, and the battle scenes make for a good read. But the lion’s share of the novel’s word count is taken up with lectures in which Heinlein’s ultra-militaristic ideology is put into the mouths of drill instructors, “History and Moral Philosophy” teachers, and other characters.

The genius of Verhoeven’s adaptation is that, first, he reverses this ratio, transforming his Starship Troopers into a much more entertaining story and, second, he brutally satirizes Heinlein’s militaristic authoritarianism even as he retains much of the original dialogue. Bombastic music, dark, over-the-top humor, and military imagery suspiciously reminiscent of the Third Reich make it abundantly clear what Verhoeven thinks of lines about how, for example, “the moral difference between a civilian and a citizen” is that a citizen “accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic.”

Vivek Ramaswamy would let civilians become citizens at the age of twenty-five — and even before then, he allows a couple of alternate routes to voting rights. A candidate for president, who may harbor real hopes for at least the VP slot and who in any case doesn’t want to be laughed off the debate stage, is bound to restrain his fantasies a bit more than a science-fiction novelist writing about warfare between humans and insect-like aliens seven centuries in the future.

But the instinct to see political power not as something everyone has a basic human claim to participate in, but a prize some are more worthy of than others, ties together Heinlein and Ramaswamy — and reflects a much deeper conservative impulse. So does the idea that warfare is a particularly worthy and virtuous activity.

Personally, I’ll take a hard pass on that vision. Peace and democracy may not stir the blood the way war and hierarchy do — but they’re infinitely better for us.

I love Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. And I’m sure a movie depicting a society where everyone’s needs are met and everyone has a meaningful say in collective decision-making would be far less entertaining to watch. But that’s the world I’d actually want to live in.

Charles “CQ” Brown, Jr., Oversaw Secret Bombing Campaigns in Iraq and Syria that Killed Many Civilians and Has Been Deeply Involved in Dispursing Weapons to Ukraine When President Joe Biden named General Charles “CQ” Brown, Jr., to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military officer in the U.S., the […]

New study finds U.S. responsible for nearly 300 million deaths—and counting In September, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation—established by a bipartisan act of Congress in 1993—opened the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C., which aims to spotlight the plight of the alleged 100 million victims of Communist ideology. The 100 million figure was […]

William A. Galston

May 30, 2023 3:33 pm ET

Jake Sullivan speaks to the press at the White House, April 24.

Photo: Michael Brochstein/Zuma Press

Jake Sullivan,
President Biden’s national security adviser, delivered a speech in April about economic and foreign policy that deserves more attention. Mr. Sullivan crisply laid out a critique of what he regards as the excessively market-oriented policies of recent decades and offered an alternative, a “foreign policy for the middle class.”

His speech reflected fundamental changes in the American economy and political order over the past three decades. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the Clinton administration (in which I served) was confident that the emerging global order of market economies and democratizing nations would benefit the U.S. and the world.

For a decade, events seemed to vindicate this view. The American economy grew vigorously, and the gains were shared broadly. U.S. manufacturing stabilized during the 1990s. Real wages grew, and, despite a surge in worker productivity, the U.S. ended the decade with as many manufacturing jobs as it had begun.

Then the bottom dropped out. Between January 2001 and the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007, the U.S. lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs, about 20% of the total. By the end of the recession, another two million were lost. Most of these losses were permanent, devastating many small towns and rural areas.

These developments helped fuel the populist revolt that began with the tea party and culminated with
Donald Trump’s

election. They also challenged assumptions that had guided both political parties for a quarter-century. Support for free-trade agreements weakened, symbolized by Hillary Clinton’s shift on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious multinational pact she backed as secretary of state but repudiated during her presidential campaign. President Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese products entering the U.S. market.

With this history in mind, Mr. Sullivan led with a key assertion: Past policies have “hollowed out” America’s industrial base. At the heart of these policies were assumptions that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently, that the type of economic growth doesn’t matter, and that economic integration would make nations more responsible and open and the world more peaceful and cooperative.

Each assumption turned out to be partially false, he argued. When certain types of investments yield positive externalities—such as building an ecosystem of innovation—their benefits won’t be fully captured in market prices, which reduces investment in these sectors below optimal levels.

All growth is not created equal.

Michael Boskin,
chairman of George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, once said: “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? A hundred dollars of one or a hundred dollars of the other is still a hundred dollars.” But the difference is obvious: Potato chips have consumer value but no strategic significance, and a sharp reduction in their availability would have no negative effect on other economic sectors.

Nor, Mr. Sullivan argued, had economic integration yielded the expected results. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization gave it all the advantages of access to America’s open markets without liberalization or democratization. The result: a “China shock” that hurt millions of American workers, the growth of China’s subsidized state sector, a turn back toward outright autocracy in Beijing—and a hardening of anti-Chinese sentiments across the American political spectrum.

At the heart of the response Mr. Sullivan proposed is a “modern American industrial strategy” that would invest public funds in sectors essential to economic innovation and national security—semiconductors, critical minerals and energy—as well as in traditional public goods such as infrastructure. “Our objective is not autarchy,” he said, “it’s resilience and security in our supply chains.” The point of new trade agreements is no longer tariff reduction but promoting national objectives—security, sustainable economic growth and the creation of good jobs that allow workers to support their families.

In effect, Mr. Sullivan has updated

Alexander Hamilton’s
1791 “Report on Manufactures,” adapting the first Treasury secretary’s strategy of promoting domestic manufacturing through protection for key industries, coupled with robust public investment.

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This shift has been challenged in Democratic circles. Former Treasury Secretary

Lawrence Summers

It’s hard to know whether events will prove Mr. Summers right. But it’s clear that political support for the market-centered approach of the immediate post-Cold War era has weakened in both political parties. What will replace it? Donald Trump’s “America First” or an alternative that leaves room for international alliances and institutions without sacrificing the interests of U.S. workers?

Mr. Sullivan deserves credit for setting out an organized response to the question. If others have better ideas, it’s time to present them so we can begin the debate our future requires.

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In this insightful discussion, Vijay Prashad, a prominent Indian historian and commentator, shared his valuable insights on various subjects, including the role of the Indian diaspora in shaping global perspectives on Indian politics and culture, his motivation to study the intersections of imperialism, capitalism, and globalization, and the enduring effects of colonialism on India and other colonized nations. Through his profound knowledge and expertise, Prashad provided thought-provoking perspectives that shed light on significant historical and contemporary issues.

As the Director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Prashad continues to shape critical discourse and provoke thoughtful analysis. Prashad has authored numerous influential publications, which serve as intellectual milestones in understanding historical and contemporary issues. With a profound understanding of global politics, Prashad’s works unravel the intricate intersections between power, culture, and resistance, offering invaluable insights into the complexities of our world.

Excerpts of the interview;

Question [Q]: As an Indian historian and commentator, how do you see the role of the Indian diaspora in shaping global perspectives on Indian politics and culture?

Answer [A]: The Indian diaspora is varied, oscillating between people who have almost no politics to people who are adherents of the far-right. There was a time when the Indian diaspora was the home of the Left. The first left-wing Indian political party was established in California in 1913. It was the Ghadar Party. Many of those who were attracted to it later went to the USSR to learn how to become Communists, and then went on to join the Communist movement in India. The Communist Party of India was founded in Tashkent (USSR) in 1920, mostly by emigré Indians, a different kind of diaspora. But, after independence, the nature of migration changed, as sections of the Indian middle-class left the country for economic reasons and their political life mirrored the journey of the Indian middle-class within the country. The middle-class Indian diaspora today is the exact complement of the Indian middle-class inside India.

Q: What motivated you to study and write about the intersection of imperialism, capitalism, and globalization, particularly in relation to the Global South?

A: I was born and brought up in Kolkata, India, which is a city of great marvels but also a city of immense inequality. To people like me, born into education and means, the striking aspect of our lives was the gap between what we experienced and the absolute devastation of poverty that defined the lives of people around us. That social inequality hit me hard and continues to strike me. It is what forced me to learn about why inequality is reproduced, to seek answers from the facts, and therefore to discover that the source of such inequality was the ugly profit-driven system of capitalism that had absorbed wretched hierarchies that predate capitalism, such as the caste system. Why was India not able to transcend the caste hierarchies and the ugliness of capitalism? It was not just because of the greed of the Indian bourgeoise and the landlords, but also due to the immense power of the neo-colonial structure maintained by the former colonial powers. You can’t understand the poverty on the streets of Colombo, for instance, without having a full understanding of the imperialist system.

Q: In your work, you often highlight the impact of imperialism on the countries and regions it has affected. How would you describe the lasting effects of imperialism on India and other colonized nations?

A: Firstly, it is important to note that British imperialism – which ruled India for centuries – stole tens of trillions of pounds from the Indian people. Several economists have tried to calculate this enormous ‘drain of wealth’. Profits made in India and wealth built in India were not reinvested in the country but taken and invested in the United Kingdom. This led to a cascade of underinvestment in India, and therefore the impoverishment of the country. Second, as a consequence of this underinvestment – the lack of use of capital formed in India – was that there was reduced employment opportunities for the people, including lack of investment in agriculture that led to the catastrophic famines of the Victorian Era. Third, the British imperial state in India failed to invest in social development – namely in health and education – which grievously impacted the living conditions of people. When the British were booted out of India, the literacy rate was a mere 13% (in the UK, during the same period, the literacy rate was about 98%). These three impacts – theft of capital to the UK, the underinvestment in Indian agriculture, and the lack of social investment – have had long-term, catastrophic impacts on India.

De-Dollarisation Clashes With India-China Border Dispute

Q: Some critics argue that anti-imperialist movements and ideologies often romanticize and idealize certain regimes or leaders, even when they may have engaged in oppressive practices. How do you respond to these critiques, and how can anti-imperialist movements avoid falling into this trap?

A: The journey out of the neo-colonial structures is not easy. People in very poor countries, with backward state institutions, struggle to establish their sovereignty over their territory and to create dignity for their people. They face attacks ceaselessly, which often leads beleaguered states to turn inward. The problems within the path of anti-colonial projects are nothing compared to the problems that structure those failures, namely the neo-colonial system. It is convenient for the old colonial powers to point fingers at the problems inside the post-colonial states, but harder for them to accept their own role in creating the enabling conditions for state failure and oppressive practices.

Q: What are some key challenges faced by post-colonial countries in achieving economic and political sovereignty, and how can they address these challenges effectively?

A: The most important challenges are two: first, the obduracy of the old colonial powers who refuse to allow for sovereignty and thereby use any means (including invasions and coups) to hold onto power (even if they allow for flag independence), and second, the theft of wealth by the colonial powers that leaves the new states in a dependent relation to their former colonial rulers, but this time not through political power but through economic interconnections. If a post-colonial state tries to establish its sovereignty over its own territory and raw materials (such as Chile in the early 1970s), it faces economic sabotage and then a coup (1973). This story repeats itself over and over again.

Q: Your work often critiques Western interventionism and imperialism. However, some argue that there are instances where international intervention can be justified, such as in cases of genocide or human rights abuses. How do you navigate this complex ethical terrain?

A: Obviously, there must be room for external intervention in times of genuine genocide. That principle is not established by the United Nations. However, that principle is also misused by the West to fulfill its own aims. For instance, it used the term genocide to justify the destruction of Libya in 2011 (after the bombardment ended, Amnesty International showed that there was nothing like genocide happening in Libya). Furthermore, Western interventions – such as in Iraq – have led to massive destruction (including loss of life and human rights abuses). We need to be very careful when we hear talk of genocide, since the term has been used instrumentally by Western powers to justify their own military interventions for their own narrow imperialist ends.

Q: The concept of “third worldism” has been central to your analysis. Could you explain this concept and its relevance in today’s global context?

A: Actually, I do not use this term, since the term itself is not precise enough. I use the term ‘Third World Project’ to specify the social dynamic set in place at the tail end of the colonial era, when colonized states got together to drive a combined agenda against the neo-colonial system. These states met in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955, and then later established the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. This Third World Project was destroyed in the 1980s during the Third World debt crisis, when they lost their political strength due to the devastation of their economies and the use by the West of the International Monetary Fund to damage the integrity of the new states. Today, we have a different context, different possibilities. That is our history.

Q: Marxist ideologies have been widely criticized for their historical association with authoritarian regimes. How do you address these criticisms, and what do you believe is the role of Marxism in building a just and inclusive society?

A: The term ‘authoritarian regime’ is an ideological term. Its most scientific basis was provided by Hannah Arendt in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which made the case that fascism and communism are much the same thing. The association between fascism and communism is not only analytically lazy but it performed a task for the Western imperialist states that wanted to defame communism despite the historical role played by the USSR in the destruction of Nazism. So, what do we mean by authoritarian regimes? We do not add in their list the totalitarian regimes set in place by Western imperialism after the coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), nor the money-driven democracies in the West that have corrupted democracy and driven people into either total social passivity or neo-fascist rage. Marxists stand against these kinds of totalitarianisms.

Q: Climate change is an urgent issue facing the world today. What are your thoughts on the responsibility of wealthy nations in addressing climate justice and supporting the Global South in tackling environmental challenges?

A: My thoughts are not as significant as the treaty obligations of the Western powers, who signed the 1992 Rio framework of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, which means that they recognize the common problems of environmental destruction and climate change but see that there are differentiated responsibilities based on the historical abuse of the planet by the imperialist powers. This is a treaty obligation. And yet, the West has not lived up to their own obligation. They should be taken to the International Criminal Court for this malfeasance.

Q: Your book “The Darker Nations” focuses on the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Bandung Conference. How do you view the relevance and legacy of these movements in the present-day geopolitical landscape?

A: Today, the context of that period when the Third World Project shone is very different. Certain states in the developing world – China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa – have taken on an important role in global leadership. The establishment of the BRICS (2009) and the emergence of the New Non-Alignment has opened up new possibilities. This opening is built on the legacy of the past, but it does not repeat them. These large states no longer want to accept the claim by the West that their parochial interests are universal. These states want to put forward their own national interests. We have to closely study this New Non-Alignment.

Q: Identity politics has become a contentious topic in recent years. What is your perspective on the role of identity-based movements in social and political struggles, and how can they contribute to broader movements for justice and equality?

A: The term identity politics is very general. Of course, there are historical social hierarchies – such as the caste system and patriarchy – that have to be frontally challenged and defeated. These will take place by broad based struggles against caste and patriarchy. An idea has come to the fore that only the victims of these systems can fight in this struggle. This narrows the fight and makes it weaker. We need to assemble broad based struggles of all people to fight to liberate humanity from wretchedness.

Q: How do you view the relationship between Marxism and anti-imperialism? Do you think Marxism provides an effective framework for addressing the unique challenges faced by post-colonial societies?

A: Marxism is one of the only frameworks that properly addresses the crisis-ridden system of capitalism that produces imperialist tendencies amongst its most powerful countries. No other theory of the world properly explains the cycle of crises and the punctuality of wars. If another theory comes along, let me know.

Led by China and India: The Global South Is Trying To Fix the UN

Q: However, some argue that globalization and capitalism, despite their flaws, have brought significant economic development and lifted millions out of poverty. How do you respond to this argument, and what alternative economic models do you propose?

A: If you look at the UN data, you will find that the country that has lifted the most number of people out of poverty is China. And the Chinese people have not eradicated absolute poverty through globalization and capitalism. They have done so, as our Tricontinental study shows, by the central work of the Communist Party of China and the state apparatus, which in a very studious and clear way went after certain social problems that had to be overcome for poverty to be eradicated. Countries that have weakened state structures – a necessary byproduct of extreme neoliberalism – have seen their poverty rates rise.

Q: Your analysis often focuses on the negative impacts of imperialism and capitalism. However, can you acknowledge any positive aspects or unintended consequences that may have emerged from these systems?

A: Can’t see any.

Q: In your view, what are some key lessons that can be drawn from the history of anti-colonial struggles, and how can they inform and inspire contemporary movements striving for liberation, self-determination, and social justice?

A: The most important lesson is from the hard work of the people who built these movements, their patience in working to establish the mass character of their movements, and the sacrifices they underwent to establish their movements and our freedom. Hard work, patience, and sacrifice: three things that we have to learn for our own times.

Q: In conclusion, as artificial intelligence continues to advance, there are concerns about its potential impact on the global workforce. How do you envision the future of work in a world increasingly driven by AI, and what steps can be taken to mitigate any negative effects on employment?

A: Capitalism necessary applies the latest in science to enhance the productive forces, whose advancement lifts the productivity rate but then eventually leads to crisis upon crisis as the rate of profit falls. This is a cycle of increased productivity and then heightened crisis that has been ongoing since the late 19^th century. AI is just the latest in a new technological breakthrough. The only way to mitigate the negative impact of unemployment is to socialize the gains from productivity, which is another way of saying to transcend capitalism and go to socialism.

(CounterPunch) by Nilantha Ilangamuwa

kabul-drone-strike.jpg?id=33673060&width

The post-9/11 War on Terror may have caused at least 4.5 million deaths in around half a dozen countries, according to a report published Monday by the preeminent academic institution studying the costs, casualties, and consequences of a war in which U.S. bombs and bullets are still killing and wounding people in multiple nations.

The new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs shows “how death outlives war” by examining people killed indirectly by the War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.

“In a place like Afghanistan, the pressing question is whether any death can today be considered unrelated to war,” Stephanie Savell, Costs of War co-director and author of the report, said in a statement. “Wars often kill far more people indirectly than in direct combat, particularly young children.”

u201cBREAKING: Our latest estimates reveal that deaths in post-9/11 war zones top 4.5 million.u00a0nnRead more by @MiriamABerger in the @WashingtonPost: https://t.co/nefwgALoP6u201d

— The Costs of War Project (@The Costs of War Project)
1684181702

The publication “reviews the latest research to examine the causal pathways that have led to an estimated 3.6-3.7 million indirect deaths in post-9/11 war zones,” while “the total death toll in these war zones could be at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown.”

As The Washington Post—which first reported on the analysis—details:

Since 2010, a team of 50 scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians participating in the Costs of War project have kept their own calculations. According to their latest assessment, more than 906,000 people, including 387,000 civilians, died directly from post-9/11 wars. Another 38 million people have been displaced or made refugees. The U.S. federal government, meanwhile, has spent over $8 trillion on these wars, the research suggests.

But Savell said the research indicates that exponentially more people, especially children and the most impoverished and marginalized populations, have been killed by the effects of war—mounting poverty, food insecurity, environmental contamination, the ongoing trauma of violence, and the destruction of health and public infrastructure, along with private property and means of livelihood.

According to the report, “The large majority of indirect war deaths occur due to malnutrition, pregnancy and birth-related problems, and many illnesses including infectious diseases and noncommunicable diseases like cancer.”

u201cThe @WashingtonPost covered it in todayu2019s exclusive. Fantastic coverage by @MiriamABerger [2/nhttps://t.co/Rck6BCpVwiu201d

— Stephanie Savell (@Stephanie Savell)
1684180628

One 2012 study found that more than half of the babies born in the Iraqi city of Fallujah between 2007 and 2010 had birth defects. Among the pregnant woman surveyed in the study, more than 45% experienced miscarriages in the two-year period following the 2004 U.S. assaults on Fallujah. Geiger counter readings of depleted uranium-contaminated sites in densely populated Iraqi urban areas have consistently shown radiation levels that are 1,000 to 1,900 times higher than normal.

The study also found that some deaths “also result from injuries due to war’s destruction of infrastructure such as traffic signals and from reverberating trauma and interpersonal violence.”

u201cFactoring in Costs of War estimates of direct deaths of between 906,000 u2013 937,000 people in these war zones brings the total of estimated deaths to at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting. [5/11] https://t.co/3m3JrCzqkRu201d

— The Costs of War Project (@The Costs of War Project)
1684181702

Savell said that “warring parties who damage infrastructure with an impact on population health have a moral responsibility to provide quick and effective assistance and repairs.”

“The United States government, while not solely responsible for the damage, has a significant obligation to invest in humanitarian assistance and reconstruction in post-9/11 war zones,” she added. “The U.S. government could do far more than it currently is to act on this responsibility.”