Re: <nettime> Portland Occupation's tactical innovation

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

hei tim --

> The process you're talking about is called demobilization, and it
> has a social history. An important part of that history is how
> returning soldiers, and what exactly they're returning from, are
> mythologized. At one extreme there's _Dolchstosslegende_ nonsense
> and its US variations (e.g., POW-MIA lunacy); at the other there
> are things like the G.I. Bill. The experiences of generations of
> returning vets aren't reducible to a single analytical axis, of
> course. Still, you might want to think about where your macho
> rhetoric -- about vets who are "battle-hardened" and "tested under

From what I've looked found, those vets who return to police or other 
public/private sector law enforcement/security-related positions are around 1:8. 
That does not include ones who stay in the military as a career move (but have 
reached their battlefront deployment limits).

(see http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/pdf/IACPEmployingReturningVets.pdf, for 
example "However, there is concern that regular law enforcement academy or 
in-service training curricula do not contain course material specific to the 
needs of returning combat veterans. ... current curricula do not address the 
heightened reactions veteran officers develop in combat to enemy threats and how 
to temper these reactions to appropriate levels in policing environments.")

And I'd be mighty careful to connect the terms POW-MIA and lunacy if you are 
actually moving around the US outside of coastal urban centers...

> Remember, the G.I. Bill, which spoke very much to constructive
> aspirations, was central to America's post-WW2 prosperity. Iraq and

But that 'prosperity' was constructed primarily on hegemonic, 
militarily-controlled access to a hydrocarbon energy glut, not on 'human' 
resources (well, of course there had to be bodies and other resources to take 
full advantage of the glut -- engineers and M-I-A Complex centers like MIT and 
their training of a whole new cadre of Military-Industrial-Academic proles to 
chart the course of the complex through the '50s, '60s, & '70s (and later))...

> Afghanistan vets are returning to a country where many of the kinds
> of benefits offered to their predecessors have been withdrawn. How
> and where they see themselves fitting into the "1%" or the "99%" is
> up to them; hopefully they'll be less inclined than you to equate
> what the police are aware of with some final analysis.

Returning warriors are as multifaceted as the population, to be sure, although 
you have to acknowledge the 'you-had-to-be-there' difference.  Right, I was not 
addressing the full range of possible humans returning from these wars. But 
there are plenty of historical accounts of the patterns of instability that 
ensue in the social system when warriors return from campaigns, and those 
definitely include the 'use' of those veterans in the domination of the 
'peace-time' social system.

> Sun Tzu and Machiavelli have a lot less to say on this subject than
> Hunter S. Thompson, IMO. You might want to reread his description of
> the Vietnam Vets Against the War demo at the GOP national convention
> in Miami in '72 -- not to 'predict' anything, on the contrary, to

funny, my house mate in Sydney did happen to have that paperback of his early 
rotless jottings and dispatches on shelf which I read last fall...  while I have 
always enjoyed his writing (I was writing a politics column in my university 
paper in Colorado partly inspired by his Aspen political train-wreck 
aspirations), I would never consider his writing as a guide for living, tho -- 
except perhaps as a metaphoric invective to following ones bliss (without 
submerging in the significant body-damage)...  How many times was he jailed for 
speaking from a sense of righteous moral outrage?  (maybe amoral self-righteous 
outrage, but...)

jh


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