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Markus,<br>
I've taught a series of courses examining imperial culture in Japan and
the US for several years now and I have to say that the atmosphere
three or four years ago felt incomparably more menacing than in the
last year or two, especially since the last election which finally and
publicly repudiated quite a bit of what Bush has been up to. <br>
<br>
<b>Of course this all depends on who you are.</b> If you were Arab and
Muslim you were likely shaken down by the local police and may have
been among the thousands detained without charges for weeks to months
without access to counsel, due process, or notification of your family.
If you were a consistent anti-war protester you were likely filmed by
undercover members of the local force's "anti-terrorism" unit and had
your phone tapped. If you were Juan Cole you were denied a job at Yale
due to pressure from the History department for telling the truth too
loudly. The constitution was being shredded and the justice system was
being converted into a criminal conspiracy of legal hit men for the
benefit of the Bush/GOP cabal in ways we are only just beginning to
discover (the White House just announced today that, "oops!," it
"mishandled" White House e-mail on GOP addresses and servers that would
have told us what level of baseless charges they required US attorneys
to file against Democratic candidates in order not to get fired over
the last five years). <b>We still don't really know just how
authoritarian things have gotten over the last few years</b> because
the Bush administration has so far turned over almost no documents of
consequence related to the dozens of unconstitutional and illegal
cowboy crime gang activities they've been up to. It reminds me of how
many people were led to believe there was little violence against women
in the 1950s just because no one kept records tracking it. We still
have almost no idea what the state has been doing in our name over the
last six years.<br>
<br>
By 2001 in the blogosphere the right had built up a cadre of blogging
lawyers out for heads like Hugh Hewitt in California and the Powerline
folks in Minneapolis. They directly tied into the right wing talk radio
and mass media infrastructure and the Drudge Report, the effective
editor of the "liberal" mass media in the US. <i><b>David
Horowitz was actively organizing coercive publicity and trumped up
controversies against academics in Middle East studies who are not
reflexive neoconservatives. </b></i>Failure to teach ideological and
historical fantasy was being portrayed as a partisan lapse in
objectivity and a failure of moral character. The immediate pressure
wasn't being directly applied to East Asian
studies--yet. That just means we weren't on the radar yet, not that
they aren't coming with their propaganda guns loaded. <b>Academia
dealing with history <i>is</i> being pulled into a battle between
mythological orthodoxy and reality-based research, often with the
collaboration of right-wing students feeding the hit machine the raw
meat they are looking for. </b>Academic historical opinion in national
public discourse went down in flames with the 1990s debate over the
Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution and still has yet to rear its
head in response in a serious way. The Smithsonian utterly capitulated,
making it clear that as long as the GOP was paying the bills, national
museums were going with mythological versions of US-E.Asian relations,
not the truth.<br>
<br>
In 2001-2003 the general reaction to most of the material we covered
in my class ranged from <b>"Why haven't I ever heard of this stuff
before</b> (for example,
the Filipino-American War, the colonial status quo in the Pacific
through the 1930s and 1940s, parallels between Japanese fantasies about
the Second World War and US fantasies about Vietnam, etc) to <b>"Why
isn't any of this ever on the news?"</b>, to<b> </b><b>"If this is
true, why haven't we impeached Bush yet?"</b> More lately the reaction
has been more along the lines of: <b>"I knew the Bush administration
was out of control and I already had contempt for them, but this is
even worse than I thought."</b> I have not had a student who simply
refused to engage historical fact since around 2001. I don't know if
that is self-selection on the part of students, or what. It probably
has a lot to do with the difference between humanities majors and the
other majors more financially ambitious young Republicans tend to
choose. Minnesota has been split about fifty/fifty GOP/Democrat through
the last several elections and has a Republican governor so it is not
likely to be a function of university-wide culture.<br>
<br>
There certainly is a significant top-down aspect to how things have
been working. Polls rejecting Bush policy are often in the 60s and 70s
against before they are even raised seriously by DC pundits and the
decade long reflexive elite opinion maker assumption that Republican
foreign policy views are presumptively more realistic and serious has
died very hard, always last and least with the mainstream media
punditocracy. <br>
<br>
On the other hand, we can't underestimate the continued power of the
right wing noise machine that has effectively sustained an alternative
reality for going on 15-20 years now. <b>Much of the largely older
audience for Rush/Fox/RNC/Bush disinformation and dirty tricks live in
such a different world it is now nearly impossible to have actual
debates and discussions over world events with believers in this other
world. </b>Quite a few of them <b><i>have</i></b> jumped ship on the
Bush administration, but this is largely because they now look like
losers (not enough troops, not enough firepower in Iraq, etc) and
appear to have abandoned certain conservative dogmas, not that these
people's world views have significantly shifted. <b>There is no doubt
a minimum 25-30% of younger students who also believe the propaganda
implicitly.</b> Until the assault on the constitution and the authority
of the thugs in the White House are rolled back in a major way, I for
one am hardly happy about how things look on the political front in the
US. <br>
<br>
If I were to look for a silver lining in the darkness that supported
what Markus was saying about the lack of a sense of student
participation in enforcing Bush's new world order at home, it would be
that <b>the very fact Rove's core strategy for distorting the
direction of American political development centers on
disenfranchisement suggests that public opinion is significantly
against him.</b> Still, uncounted votes don't count. As long as that
goes on, we will have thugs in the executive branch diverting our tax
dollars to their favorite religious and corporate welfare queens. <br>
<br>
The corporatization of the university is also privatizing academia out
of existence in many ways. We all teach in vocational training programs
now. Corporate tyranny is increasingly as dangerous to freedom of
thought as the tyranny of a single political party. Copyright law is
increasingly criminalizing freedom of thought.<br>
<br>
The bottom line is that there <i><b>are</b></i> significant respects
in which Bush/GOP thuggery is distinct from fascist European thuggery,
but that doesn't make it less thuggish, anti-intellectual, or
dangerous. It is still thuggery and they still run the executive
branch, so watch your back, even, if not especially, in the virtual
world.<br>
Mark
Anderson<br>
<br>
Mark Nornes wrote:
<blockquote cite="midAB5F0E02-E6E6-45E7-A453-18651DC8E0EC@umich.edu"
type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span">
<div>Jonathan wrote, </div>
<div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span"
style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span>I
wonder if the rhetoric of force is a contemporary means to deal with
the question of life under fascism. Of course, for those Americans on
the list, we might be able to ask similar questions of ourselves?</span></span></blockquote>
</div>
<div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder">
</div>
This is an excellent and important question. I taught Pacific War film
this semester—taught....one class left. Throughout the semester, I felt
a little pressure. An obscure <i>force,</i> from the students, that
put me on guard. Now of course this is incomparable to the pressure or
force of life in Japan in the 30s or early 40s, but Jonathan has posed
the question. And it made me think about my experience this semester.
There were connections to made to the present day situation in every
class meeting. I gestured at them constantly, wanting to go in and
explore them completely with the students but usually leaving them as
thought provoking gestures. Basically, I know there are soldiers,
military otaku and neoconservative youth in the class, and I wasn't
sure how to deal with that and for all sorts of reasons. </span>
<div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder">
</div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span">This week I showed them Thin Red
Line and, as a film that's clearly designed to get you to think about
war itself as opposed to saying something specifically about WWII, I
used this as an opportunity to segue into Iraq head on and full steam
ahead. What I found was that the situation is indeed, utterly unlike
the force one might find in a militaristic or fascist state. Rather,
with the exception of the soldier, none of them felt any connection to
the current war and didn't mind talking about, and pondering, their
lack of connection and diffidence. Whatever pressure or force I felt
was self-censorship because dealing with it seemed like such a pain. </span></div>
<div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder">
</div>
<div>In short, it was one of the weirdest discussions I've ever led. </div>
<div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder">
</div>
<div>Markus</div>
</blockquote>
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