Image by Truthout.org via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
teleSUR English on Nov. 23, 2015
In this episode of Days of Revolt, host Chris Hedges discusses the militarization of higher education institutions with journalist Alexa O’Brien. They uncover the trail of money and influence from the national security state to college programs. Hedges and O’Brien identify the ways in which this apparatus has long been in effect, and what it could mean for the future.
from the archives:
If Hope Remains Dormant, Freedom Remains Elusive by ashiftinconsciousness
Dandelion Salad 
Society has been skyjacked, by ecocidal reflex. This prescriptive, hot-house forcing environment, is a type of deterministic instrumentalism gone “feral or rogue.”
Education is obviously key, but the having said this, pedagogical theory must embrace lifelong learning, as we can only benefit from genuine, advanced study after lived experience has tempered our understanding. Authentic learning presupposes qualified teachers, and teaching is a vocation not just a didactic technique. As Chris explains, the very fundamentals of liberal critical thought have to be conserved, cultivated & developed to maximise our intelligent proclivity for formal enhancement.
What is particularly disturbing in my view, is the sheer ruthlessness of the corporate-militarised approach to life and society. It really is all about automated conditioning, “psychic driving,” goose-stepping uniformity and mass control. Indispensable research into the weaponisation of anthropology for example, is critical to a proper evaluation of these corporatised intelligence tactics & covert methodologies, controversial work already in the public domain, that Alexa refers to briefly here.
There is nothing subtle about this shameless avarice for power and dominance; the obsessive compulsion to privatise, quantify and capitalise everything within US globalised reach. This is an explosively precocious culture already in terminal decay, that may be, arguably, about to shed its corrupt legacy & criminal history, if it is indeed capable of reinventing itself; but I’m not optimistic.
Whilst in the European context of state-corporate, post-colonial spheres of “interest” and extractive logic, there is still a massive amount of dissembling, sophist blag and elitist hereditary (ie privileged) cynicism, that is deployed in secretive, insidious and misleading ways.
Many of these endemic problems are due to the transmitted legacy of profound European error.
The French are particularly adept at this camouflaged dishonesty, regarded by so many in the “higher,” deeply cynical echelons of government and business, as pragmatic necessity ~ the enduring “divine right of kings,” masquerading as post-revolutionary sans-culottes.
I find it utterly despicable. If you are truthful, sincere and honest (like Jeremy Corbin in the UK), you are ridiculed, condemned and dismissed as a naive fool at best; at worst simply humiliated and vilified as a miscreant and aberrant agitator, to be a target of public abuse in the mainstream-media stocks.
I know it may be obvious to many, but we really need to revise and recalibrate our moral compass as a species. The task is colossal, but not inconceivable. This sick system is only as robust as its weakest circuit. It is a vulnerable network ~ a hybridised military and legalistic assembly of firewalled cybernetic hierarchies, “occupied” by human beings.
We must fight for our lives and the life of the biosphere ~ it is not a question of choice, but of ethical and indigenous survival.
Not only militarization of higher education institutes becoming commercialized as a product and consumer package deal but greater concern is the programming and radicalization of students who become subversive in temperament and subversive in action.