Peace and Conflict Studies, Part 2: Reflecting On Jake Gibb's Comments About Our Militaristic Culture

"Masters of War" by Pearl Jam



Supplement to today's lecture:

Cultural Hegemony (I mentioned this concept in my section--glad to see it mentioned again)

Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman an author on the "psychology of killing" has called violent video games "murder simulators"

James W. Loewen (author of Lies My History Teacher Told Me)

Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is very important and is now available online (although you should really think about getting your own copy ;) This has been put up by the website History is a Weapon and they have a very useful list of recommended history books along the lines of Zinn's

Also since we were discussing public education role in reproducing the cultural hegemony (in this case a militaristic one), I found a good guide to the History of Education

Jake discussed the militarization of common speech and I remembered an archive I collected for students called "The Language of the War on Terror"

Then Jake discussed "war toys" as an aspect of military culture and that reminded me of the culture jamming of the Barbie Liberation Front and the later Barbie Disinformation Organization and here is the group @tmark that funded this and other cultural jamming projects

I knew that the Boy Scouts were a frontrunner in programming for the military mindset, but was shocked by the words of the Little League Pledge (what does it have to do with playing ball?) and here is the BS Oath My favorite is this Boy Scout Law "I keep my body and mind fit and clean."

... kind of vague...

Dion Dennis has a lot to say about the dangers of these types of vague moralizing in his essay "Priming the Pump of War" More from Dennis is available at C-Theory and his website

Just a free-floating association of an excellent Atlantic Monthly article on the "creation" of the Unabomber's paranoid mindset (where was it developed):

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (of course those of you that have read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" will be familiar with this form of psychological abuse)

which then reminded me of the journal Race Traitor's article on the making of Timothy McVeigh's militaristic mindset:

The Life and Death of Timothy McVeigh (click on "new" on the left)

What is Groupthink? (communication theory)

Asymmetric Warfare

Pondering it all with Rush's "Trees"