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This might be a good place to mention the primary stated goal of the United States military. No longer is it simply, as it was in the days of Manifest Destiny, the coast-to-coast conquest of the continental United States and the dispossession and/or extermination of the land’s original inhabitants. Nor is it what it was at the turn of the twentieth century—the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s ironically named Good Neighbor Policy—when the frontier was extended westward to the Philippines and beyond, where the U.S. killed one out of every ten Filipinos and did the same to residents of other countries in order to liberate them from themselves, and brought those they did not kill under their control so they could better use their land. Of course it was not only westward that they looked, but south and east as well, to bring as much of the globe as possible under U.S. control. Nor is the goal merely what it was fifty years ago, when National Security Council documents stated the obvious need for “a political and economic climate conducive to private investment,”91 and when State Department Policy Planning staff head George Kennan said that if “we” are to maintain a “position of disparity” over those whose resources “we” must take, “We should cease to talk about vague and . . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization,” and instead should “deal in straight power concepts,” not hampered by idealistic slogans about “altruism and world-benefaction.”92 All of this is merely another way to say the same thing I’ve been hammering so far, that in order to move resources into cities—in order to steal resources—you have to use physical force. Nor does the present goal leave as much to the imagination as it did a mere decade ago, when a Defense Planning Guide (written when current Vice President Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense) stated explicitly that the U.S. must hold “global power” and a monopoly of force,93 and that it must make certain that no others are allowed even “to protect their legitimate interests.”94

Instead, after all this time, those in power have finally gotten to the point. Or rather, their powers to surveil and kill have finally caught up with their lust for control. And they have articulated this clearly. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recently put out their Joint Vision 2020, which defines their goals for the next twenty years and beyond. The U.S. military, according to the first words of this document, consists of: “Dedicated individuals and innovative organizations transforming the joint force for the 21st Century to achieve full spectrum dominance.” To make sure we get the point, the military bolded the phrase “full spectrum dominance.” Just in case we still don’t get it, the phrase is repeated thirteen more times in this brief, 8,700-word document, and is specified in U.S. military press releases and articles as the “key phrase” of the vision statement.95

I suppose we should at least thank them for their directness, although the question remains, as always: do we really get the point?

COUNTERVIOLENCE

The condemnation of liberation movements for resorting to violence or armed struggle is almost invariably superficial, hypocritical, judgmental, and unfair, and tends strongly to represent another example of the generalised phenomenon of “blaming the victim.” The violence of the situation, the pre-existing oppression suffered by those who eventually strike back, is conveniently ignored. The violence of the oppressed is a form of defensive counterviolence to the violence of conquest and oppression. In no armed national liberation movement I know of in history has this not been the case.

Jeff Sluka 96

THIS BOOK ORIGINALLY WAS GOING TO BE AN EXAMINATION OF THE circumstances in which violence is an appropriate response to the ubiquitous violence upon which this culture is based. More specifically, it was going to be an examination of when counterviolence, as termed by Franz Fanon, is an appropriate response to