We, in the United States, once again witnessed the killing of a person at the hands of our government. Renee Nicole Good’s tragic death was foreseeable as the current administration deploys federal agents to stir, rather than de-escalate, tensions throughout the country. The administration continues to double-down on these tactics, putting forward increasingly incoherent arguments.
Let me first state the obvious. While the journeys of some into the United States are deemed “illegal,” little interest is shown in understanding why people migrate in the first place. Yet the violent action of those enforcing immigration regulations, which curtail civil liberties – indeed even life – is deemed as “legal.” The deployment of federal agents is essentially a symbolic gesture, especially as they target cities and states that are deemed Democratic.
The administration has noted how deploying these federal agents is akin to war. This is the language used. U.S. cities are training grounds, if not battlegrounds. Citizens and ordinary people are deemed combatants.
Something more nefarious may be happening, with very deep roots. Paul Virilio, a French philosopher, cultural theorist, architect, and urbanist, warns how nation-states, to justify their own logic and national imagination, begin to colonize their own people and their people’s imagination. To understand Virilio’s warning, we need to take a couple of steps back.
In 1961, in his final speech as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex that he saw emerging and taking root after the Second World War. Eisenhower was a West Point graduate and a decorated five-star general who served as the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the fight against the Nazis. After forty-three years of service at the highest military and civilian levels, Eisenhower’s parting message offered lessons we ought to listen to today.
Although he believed that the military was necessary, Eisenhower warned that a “complex” made up of military and defense contractors could gain too much power and curtail domestic liberties and democratic processes. He encouraged an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to “compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower continued, “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded… As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.”
Paul Virilio also experienced the Second World War, albeit as a young child living in France. Virilio spent his life thinking deeply about social and political dynamics, and he became a noted philosopher and cultural theorist. Like Eisenhower, Virilio became alarmed with what he saw happening in democratic societies around him. He, too, rang warning bells, re-framing many of the same concerns to which Eisenhower had pointed.
Virilio asked whether it is now possible to differentiate between “military” and “civilian.” Although a wartime economy first came to be during World War I, it was World War II that more fully developed the military-industrial complex in which nation-states made the preparation for war continuous. Such preparation for war now involved everyone within the nation-state, wittingly or not. Everyone, “military” and “civilian” alike, became part of the war machine.
As Virilio put it, “The notion of ‘civilian’ becomes perverted.” He describes what results as “pure war.”
“Logistics,” noted Eisenhower, is “the procedure following which a nation’s potential is transferred to its armed forces, in times of peace as in times of war.” “Our toil, resources, and livelihood,” says Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, “are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.” Commenting on Eisenhower, Virilio noted how logistics are the beginning of the economy of war, which then simply becomes economy, thereby replacing political economy. Pure war is permanent war.
Virilio suggested that the logic of constantly preparing for war entails leaning into and embracing the logic of deterrence. What’s more, the logic of deterrence leads to the colonizing of the very people who the nation-state – in theory – wants to protect. But this infinite preparation hampers the development of society. Put differently, preparing for war is effectively the theft from “civilian” society.
And the people accept it! And the agents of the state enforce it!
Virilio notes how the logic of national defense – the unquenchable perceived need of the military-industrial complex – ultimately turns the military against its own people in order to justify itself. This was Eisenhower’s warning. Every aircraft carrier built is but a fully staffed hospital that is not built; every military jet produced means four schools that are not built; every bomb produced robs people of the health care their nation-state fails to provide.
An inversion occurs: the military state (and the logic that supports it) inevitably turns inside out. It no longer opposes anything but civilian society — its own civilian society. The military establishment becomes a state within a state. In order to secure the support of its people, the military establishment creates narratives to help “civilians” acquiesce to the need of such an establishment, or, if “civilians” question it, their dissent is suppressed and crushed. Virilio notes how the military turns into an internal super-police.
Virilio describes this process as endo-colonization.
Endo-colonization is the colonization of one’s own population, both by securing it – that is, by maintaining order and establishing the way things must be – and by under-developing one’s own civilian economy. Virilio writes, “We’re no longer in a system dominated by ideology. We’re in a system in which military order dominates. The only ideology is order. No matter if that order is socialist, capitalist or anything else, so long as it’s not really political but military.” Endo-colonization means that the state becomes destiny.
Rather than cultivating discrete internal colonies, the state becomes the answer to all and the controller of all. Society is crushed to death by peace (suffused with the anticipation of war).
Arrests, detentions, crackdowns on protest and dissent, intentional social polarization, and the use of the military as a super-police force are not new. These are signals of endo-colonization. For too long, people in the U.S. assumed that these were strategies of oppressive regimes, not our own. Increasingly, we see how they are tactics of states that – constitutionally at least – say they are committed to democratic principles and the rule of law.
If we are concerned about the current state of affairs, it is important to note that its roots reach back to the acceptance of and reliance on the military-industrial complex and its cultivation of a society shaped by pure war. Envisioning and working toward a different society – a society that pursues a peace that focuses on the well-being of all, not a social fabrication enforced by a few – begins by embracing vulnerability rather than security as its bedrock.
Renee Nicole Good’s death and the ongoing military “enforcement” in Minneapolis and elsewhere provide a visible witness (a testimony!) to endo-colonization and the work of the nation-state to control – colonize – its own people as it seeks to justify the logic and imagination it demands. Such actions, however, only serve to demonstrate the violence at the heart of the nation-state.
This is why peaceful resistance is so threatening. As the author of Colossians highlights about Jesus dying at the hands of his oppressors, the cross “disarmed principalities and powers, made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them” (2:15). Such action cuts through the foundation on which pure war rests, providing an alternative, life-giving possibility.
