Anti-War Revolt Against Military Capitalism In US

By Ameer Ali –

“One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and the purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypothesis which increasingly and monopolistically respected (and) become hypnotic definitions of dictations” ~ Herbert Marcuse

“If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity” ~ Albert Einstein     

Nine months after the US-Israeli War in Gaza, American universities from coast to coast are out in the field demonstrating against their respective institutions involvement in the war and demanding the authorities to “disclose” and “divest” or they “will not stop and will not rest”. Columbia, Texas, Yale, Georgetown and Princeton universities to name only the leading few have become encampments for anti-war protestors. In the 1970s and 1980s Columbia University successfully pressed its administrators to sell off investments in companies that did business with apartheid South Africa. Today they are asking the same not only with Israel, but also with companies like Google, Amazon and Airbnb that are involved in financing this war. The protestors are exposing the hypocrisy of Biden administration’s and university establishments’ complicity by arming and financing Netanyahu’s sadistic ethnic cleansing campaign. Police are resorting to arrests and disruption of student gatherings. Pro-Israeli groups appear to have been encouraged to clash with anti-war demonstrators. McCarthyism of 1950s appears to show its ugly head again. Senator Bernard Sanders exposed eloquently the other day before US legislators the moral bankruptcy of their support to Israel.  He spoke truth in front of power, and challenged President Biden for calling the demonstrations anti-Semitism.

However, there is a far more fundamental issue than the Gaza War that underpins the demonstrations. It was in 1961 President Eisenhower in his final address to the nation warned Americans of the growing power of US military-industrial complex (MIC). What he missed to mention in that address was how American corporate finance capitalism was fast turning into a military corporate finance capitalism (MCFC). War brings profit to armament producers, armament merchants, their financiers and research institutions. For example, in 2023 global expenditure on military reached a staggering $2,400 billion, and is now reported to have crossed $3 trillion.  Universities in US, UK and other Western countries have become virtual corporations and investing heavily in arms manufacturing companies. In Yale University last year, undergraduates staged a walk out calling for divesting university investment in Lockheed Martin, a leading arms manufacturer. Today, Eisenhower’s MIC has added one more arm to it to become a military-industrial-universities complex (MIUC). University student communities are aware of this killer complex and its hold on US governments. The same is true in UK. According to the UK organization Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), between 2013 and 2020 British universities had received L 189,970,044 for research on military weapons. Not only universities but also leading commercial banks and their financial subsidiaries are an essential part of this killing industry. Biden’s re-election chances hinge heavily on his support to this industry vis a vis the war in Gaza. He may win only because the alternative is even worse.

Although the immediate focus of the anti-war movement is Gaza and Palestinians, there is also another war going on for more than a year without an end but with equal ferocity and destruction in Ukraine. While Russia in Ukraine confronts the combined might of NATO, which is reported to have spent $500 billion so far on this war, Palestinians are massacred by the miliary colossus of Israel, financed and weaponized by US government and its arms manufacturers. Unlike the war in Ukraine, which is a contest for domination the one in Gaza is a war between an oppressor and the oppressed. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine Arabs, which started in 1948 with the complicity of treacherous Britian and assisted by the duplicity of UN is now continuing with greater venom and zeal with blessings from the current imperial warlord US and its Western auxiliaries.

But the economic impact of the two wars with an undeclared war on climate change is felt far beyond their immediate theatres of operation. It is not only Palestinians and Ukrainians who are getting killed, maimed, impoverished and starved, but also, according to one estimate, a total of 287 million people in 59 countries facing starvation through food insecurity partly due to fall in production caused by adverse climatic changes and partly due to supply constraints created by the two wars. Cargo shipping through the Red Sea for example has become a costly affair. As a result, rising cost of living through supply shortages and supply-push inflationary pressure are slowing down economic growth worldwide. Central Banks are fighting a losing battle to bring down this inflationary pressure, and economic growth is slowing down globally.  This is why the eruption in US universities not only exposes their universities investments in Israel and Biden administration’s connivance with Netanyahu’s sadistic military adventure and ethnic cleansing, but also highlights a fundamental crisis in the militarized world order with its geostrategic tensions.

Military capitalism has created a global bazaar for deadly weapons. These weapons are made available not only to the guardians of states but also to their non-state actors. As far as the manufacturers of these weapons and their financiers are concerned it doesn’t matter who buys them and for what purpose. What matters is the profit accruing to the captains of that industry. Leading universities and research institutions that are in need of funds to run their corporations are caught up in this deadly military-finance-universities nexus. Outside the university scene however, and on a broader level, how could anyone expect peace with justice from a world order manufactured by military capitalism and protected by its international institutions like the UN and its agencies? Even the International Court of Justice at The Hague is reported to be kowtowing to threats from US for daring to issue arrest warrants on Netanyahu and his military leaders, but at the same time Israel and US are said to be exerting pressure on UN to include Hamas among the world’s terrorist outfits.

The anti-war university protest movement, which is bound to spread to other countries soon, represents not anti-Semitism, as promoted by the “makers of politics and the purveyors mass information”, but to show that silence would mean complicity. “A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything ese” (Richard Hofstadter).

*Dr. Ameer Ali, Business School, Murdoch University, W. Australia

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