Militarization Quotes

“On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Now, personally, I'd have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we're the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn't have one.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The Hanging Tree

“How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world - in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s - with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“The apparent conflict between the law and police practices may not be so important as we tend to assume. The two may, at times, be at odds, but this is of little concern so long as the interests they serve are essentially the same. The police may violate the law, as long as they do so in the pursuit of ends that people with power generally endorse, and from which such people profit.”
― Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“When the police enforce the law, they do so unevenly, in ways that give disproportionate attention to the activities of poor people, people of color, and others near the bottom of the social pyramid. And when the police violate the law, these same people are their most frequent victims. This is a coincidence too large to overlook. If we put aside, for the moment, all questions of legality, it must become quite clear that the object of police attention, and the target of police violence, is overwhelmingly that portion of the population that lacks real power.”
― Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“In Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel makes a useful comparison between the rhetoric abusive men employ to justify beating up their girlfriends, wives, or children and the publicly traded justifications for widespread racism. He writes: During the first few years that I worked with men who are violent I was continually perplexed by their inability to see the effects of their actions and their ability to deny the violence they had done to their partners or children. I only slowly became aware of the complex set of tactics that men use to make violence against women invisible and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These tactics are listed below in the rough order that men employ them.… (1) Denial: “I didn’t hit her.” (2) Minimization: “It was only a slap.” (3) Blame: “She asked for it.” (4) Redefinition: “It was mutual combat.” (5) Unintentionality: “Things got out of hand.” (6) It’s over now: “I’ll never do it again.” (7) It’s only a few men: “Most men wouldn’t hurt a woman.” (8) Counterattack: “She controls everything.” (9) Competing victimization: “Everybody is against men.” Kivel goes on to detail the ways these nine tactics are used to excuse (or deny) institutionalized racism. Each of these tactics also has its police analogy, both as applied to individual cases and in regard to the general issue of police brutality. Here are a few examples: (1) Denial. “The professionalism and restraint … was nothing short of outstanding.” “America does not have a human-rights problem.” (2) Minimization. Injuries were “of a minor nature.” “Police use force infrequently.” (3) Blame. “This guy isn’t Mr. Innocent Citizen, either. Not by a long shot.” “They died because they were criminals.” (4) Redefinition. It was “mutual combat.” “Resisting arrest.” “The use of force is necessary to protect yourself.” (5) Unintentionality. “[O]fficers have no choice but to use deadly force against an assailant who is deliberately trying to kill them.…” (6) It’s over now. “We’re making changes.” “We will change our training; we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.” (7) It’s only a few men. “A small proportion of officers are disproportionately involved in use-of-force incidents.” “Even if we determine that the officers were out of line … it is an aberration.” (8) Counterattack. “The only thing they understand is physical force and pain.” “People make complaints to get out of trouble.” (9) Competing victimization. The police are “in constant danger.” “[L]iberals are prejudiced against police, much as many white police are biased against Negroes.” The police are “the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” Another commonly invoked rationale for justifying police violence is: (10) The Hero Defense. “These guys are heroes.” “The police routinely do what the rest of us don’t: They risk their lives to keep the peace. For that selfless bravery, they deserve glory, laud and honor.” “[W]ithout the police … anarchy would be rife in this country, and the civilization now existing on this hemisphere would perish.” “[T]hey alone stand guard at the upstairs door of Hell.”
― Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“Let us concentrate on the question of why the state (meaning, here, the civil authorities) would let the police claim the means of violence as their own. Police brutality does not just happen; it is allowed to happen. It is tolerated by the police themselves, those on the street and those in command. It is tolerated by prosecutors, who seldom bring charges against violent cops, and by juries, who rarely convict. It is tolerated by the civil authorities, the mayors, and the city councils, who do not use their influence to challenge police abuses. But why? The answer is simple: police brutality is tolerated because it is what people with power want.”
― Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“It seems paradoxical that an organization responsible for enforcing the law would frequently rely on illegal practices. The police resolve this tension between nominally lawful ends and illegal means by substituting their own occupational and organizational norms for the legal duties assigned to them. Westley suggests: This process then results in a transfer in property from the state to the colleague group. The means of violence which were originally a property of the state, in loan to its law-enforcement agent, the police, are in a psychological sense confiscated by the police, to be conceived of as a personal property to be used at their discretion. From the officers’ perspective, the center of authority is shifted and the relationship between the state and its agents is reversed. The police become a law unto themselves.”
― Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

“Here, Veblen’s iconoclasm showed its range, as he simultaneously exposed modern corporations as hives of swarming parasites, derided marginalism for disingenuously sanitizing these infested sites by rebranding nonproductivity as productivity, and attacked economists for failing to situate themselves historically. On Veblen’s account, the business enterprise was no more immune from historical change than any other economic institution. As the controlling force in modern civilization, the business enterprise too would necessarily undergo “natural decay” and prove “transitory.” Where history was heading next, however, Veblen felt he could not say, because no teleology was steering the evolutionary process as a whole, only (as he had said before) the “discretionary action of the human agents,” whose institutionally shaped choices were still unformed. Nevertheless, limiting himself to the “calculable future”—to what, in light of existing scientific knowledge, seemed probable in the near term—Veblen pointed to two contrasting possibilities, both beyond the ken of productivity theories.
One alternative was militarization and war—barbarism redux. According to Veblen, the business enterprise, as its grows, spills over national boundaries and fosters the expansion of a world market in which “the business men of one nation are pitted against those of another and swing“the forces of the state, legislative, diplomatic, and military, against one another in the strategic game of pecuniary advantage.” As this game intensifies, competing nations rush (said Veblen presciently) to amass military hardware that can easily fall under the control of political leaders who embrace aggressive international policies and “warlike aims, achievements, [and] spectacles.” Unchecked, these developments could, he believed, demolish “those cultural features that distinguish modern times from what went before, including a decline of the business enterprise itself.” (In his later writings from the World War I period, Veblen returned to these issues.)
The second future possibility was socialism, which interested Veblen (for the time being) not only as an institutional alternative to the business enterprise but also as a way of economic thinking that nullified the productivity theory of distribution. In cycling back to the phenomenon of socialism, which he had bracketed in The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen zeroed in on men and women who held industrial occupations, in which he observed a growing dissatisfaction with the bedrock institutions of the modern age. This discontent was socially concentrated, found not so much among laborers who were “mechanical auxiliaries”—manual extensions—“of the machine process“ but “among those industrial classes who are required to comprehend and guide the processes.” These classes consist of “the higher ranks of skilled mechanics and [of people] who stand in an engineering or supervisory ”“relation to the processes.” Carrying out these jobs, with their distinctive task requirements, inculcates “iconoclastic habits of thought,” which draw men and women into trade unions and, as a next step, “into something else, which may be called socialism, for want of a better term.”
This phrasing was vague even for Veblen, but he felt hamstrung because “there was little agreement among socialists as to a programme for the future,” at least aside from provisions almost “entirely negative.”
― Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics

“As Fawaz Gerges has astutely argued, Egyptian nationalism developed in response to British colonization of Egypt, hence a concept of ‘sameness’ in opposition to the ‘other’ became prevalent.
Chapter 1: Genesis, page 31”
― Maged Mandour

“Before proceeding with a detailed analysis, it is worth elaborating what I mean by the word ‘state’ within the context of this book. Gramsci presented a number of definitions for the term in his Prison Notebooks, written while imprisoned by the fascist regime in Italy(1). The one that I find most relevant to the case of Egypt under direct military rule is a definition that views the state merger between the concepts of civil and political society. In simpler terms, the state as a social reformation contains both: the public apparatus of the state (political society), such as the judicial system, and the private apparatus (civil society), like the media, education system and so on (Carnoy, 1983). Accordingly, the state is everywhere and is the tool used by the ruling class to project their power over society, which is very germane to the Egyptian case. Indeed, the ultimate goal of the Egyptian military establishment is not only dominance over the public state apparatus, but the use of its position to accumulate social power, extending the boundaries of the state so that it swallows up the private sphere—establishing total dominance over society and transforming the public space into a militarized space. This metaphor has been used by Zineb Abu-El Magd in her detailed study of the military’s economic empire (Abu Al Magd, 2018), albeit through a Foucaultian theoretical lens. Abu-El Magd has argued that the military’s economic dominance allowed it to penetrate the lives of ordinary Egyptians, transforming the country into a military camp. In this chapter, however, I intend to use the metaphor to examine the military’s dominance over the state and its ability to use the state apparatus to transform the public space, in a manner that is unique to Sisi and his regime.”
Chapter 2: The New Leviathan, page 51”
― Maged Mandour, Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge

“The most notable amendment is the alteration to Article 200, which describes the constitutional role of the military. This amendment extends the military’s duties to include the ‘protection of the constitution, democracy, the state and its secular nature, and personal freedoms.’ This phrase has radical implications, the most notable of which is that it paves the way for continued military intervention in politics, if and when it deems that the secular nature of that state, democracy or personal freedoms are threatened by an elected civilian government. This is very cynical, considering that the military autocracy has been the main violator of the freedoms mentioned in the amendment. In fact, this is the military’s option of last resort, in the event that popular pressure forces a free election and that a civilian government is elected. This is a very similar argument to the one made by the Algerian military on the eve of the coup in 1992, when elections won by F.I.S. were voided, triggering a bloody civil war that lasted the better part of a decade (Evans and John, 2007). Hidden in the language of the amendment is a very dangerous ideological imperative, which identifies the military with the ‘state’ rather than with the elected government of the day. It assumes that since the military is serving the ‘state’, then the military—and only the military—is able to defend the ‘state’ against the incompetence of civilians. In other words, the amendment assumes that the military’s supremacy over civilians is the natural order of things. This assumption is deeply rooted in the regime’s ideological construct, where the ‘state’ is imagined as an almost mythical entity that has to be protected against the folly of civilian politicians and the demands for democratization. In essence, the amendment turns the concept of popular sovereignty on its head, with the source of sovereignty transferred from the popular will to the military, as the ultimate guardian of the ‘state’. This entrenches a paternalistic attitude towards the citizenry, as incompetent simpletons who, in a moment of folly, might elect a government that could destroy the ‘state’. Finer identifies acceptance of civilian supremacy as one of the pre-conditions for restraining a military’s interventionist appetite (Finer, 2002). This is clearly not the case in Egypt, where prospective future coups now have a solid constitutional basis.”
Chapter 2: The New Leviathan, pages 52-53”
― Maged Mandour, Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge