As you thumb through our “Back to School” guide, here’s food for thought from Marshall McLuhan: “School is the advertising agency,” McLuhan wrote, “which makes you believe you need the society as it is.” Yes, prison-like high schools equipped with surveillance cams and ruled by fascist vice-principals make perfect sense as ad agencies for our regimented, techno-demented society. And colleges and universities that have junked higher learning in favour of vocational training for the military-industrial-media-marketing complex make even more perfect sense. Sounds grim, but do not despair. There’s a funny side. Hidden in the staid political science department at Dalhousie, for example, there’s an academic comedy team that gets a third of its budget from the Canadian military. Fear not, however. Dal’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies is definitely not a propaganda arm of the Department of National Defence. It’s only posing as one. The joke is on the stiff generals and humourless bureaucrats who funnelled just over $267 thousand in tax money last year to the merry policy wonks and retired navy skippers at the CFPS. (Eleven similar centres at other Canadian universities also receive military handouts from Ottawa.)
Like all great comic artists, the jokesters at Dal’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies and their academic colleagues across Canada turn reality inside out. Here’s how. First, they issue turgid treatises larded with academic gobbledegook so they sound like ‘experts.’ Then, when the news media call, they spout snappy one-liners. In 2005, for example, Canada’s military budget was the 12th largest in the world and the sixth largest in NATO, yet academic jokesters in the CFPS and other military-funded university centres had been claiming for years that Canada needed to spend even more. Every time I heard this inspired nonsense I split my sides laughing. But dumb Steve Harper, like Paul Martin before him, fell for the gag. Now taxpayers are coughing up another $15 billion for ships, planes, choppers and trucks plus $5.3 billion in new military spending over the next five years.
By far the zaniest of the comedians at CFPS is Dal political science prof Frank Harvey. His academic papers warn of the inevitability of more “high impact” terrorist attacks on the United States. Just a matter of time, writes Harvey, even though the average American is less likely to die in a terrorist attack than from cancer caused by toxins in food, air, water and consumer products. But terrorist warnings generate hysteria—always knee-slappingly funny. And then Harvey spouts another zinger about how Canada needs to keep a fearful Uncle Sam happy by spilling our blood in the unwinnable war in Afghanistan and signing up for that hare-brained US missile defence system.
In October 2002, Harvey and I shared the stage at a panel discussion organized by CFPS. Back then, I still hadn’t caught on that he was only fooling, so I made the mistake of taking Harvey seriously as he argued that invading Iraq made strategic sense for the US. “What about the thousands of Iraqis who would die?” I asked. “This is a moral question, not just a strategic one.” After the invasion, I finally got the joke when Harvey penned a paper claiming the US had acted in self-defence. Yes, tens of thousands of Iraqis die as the US defends itself. Very funny, Frank. Just hilarious.
The funniest joke the CFPS tells is that militarism makes us safer. Like spending billions on the kind of obscene high-tech killing machines that will be on display next week at the Halifax Air Show. The merry pranksters at CFPS surely know the opposite is true, that no one is safe in a world armed to the teeth. (World military spending now tops $1 trillion every year, a 34 percent increase in the last decade.) But true to form, the CFPS comedians continue to spout nonsensical one-liners as they collect those big Defence Department cheques, winking and laughing all the way to the bank.
Were you in on the joke? email: brucew@thecoast.ca
This article appears in Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2006.
Congratulations to Wark for clarifying things for us all. He not only misunderstands all aspects of global politics and conflict but he gleefully launches libels against those who do. Here are six free lessons for Mr. Wark: – Conflict was a recurring phenomenon of the international system long before any “military-industrial-media-marketing complex” could ostensibly help feed the cycle of modern violence.- The international system is one of anarchy where no single policing order exists. Under such conditions, coercive force can be employed by anyone (state or otherwise) at any time.- Under these conditions, the most rational behaviour is to protect oneself through the use and threat of military force. Wars are a result, as unpleasant as that seems.- Terrorism is a clear and present danger to the US and Canada alike. Canada’s failure to defend itself directly is, however, only the lesser of two dangers – a successful terrorist attack in the US will create such catastrophic security and economic spin-offs for Canadians that we will not recognize our country the morning after.- Frank Harvey’s entire academic career has been an attempt to understand the rationales and causes of conflict in order to assist those in government to manage it. He would rather find truth than find popularity, but that certainly doesn’t make him a joker.- The CFPS, with which I have substantial contact, functions as an institute of thought that allows academic work on the nature of conflict affecting all Canadians to take place. Without Government funding, little would happen.
Congratulations to Wark for clarifying things for us all. He not only misunderstands all aspects of global politics and conflict but he gleefully launches libels against those who do. Here are six free lessons for Mr. Wark: – Conflict was a recurring phenomenon of the international system long before any “military-industrial-media-marketing complex” could ostensibly help feed the cycle of modern violence.- The international system is one of anarchy where no single policing order exists. Under such conditions, coercive force can be employed by anyone (state or otherwise) at any time.- Under these conditions, the most rational behaviour is to protect oneself through the use and threat of military force. Wars are a result, as unpleasant as that seems.- Terrorism is a clear and present danger to the US and Canada alike. Canada’s failure to defend itself directly is, however, only the lesser of two dangers – a successful terrorist attack in the US will create such catastrophic security and economic spin-offs for Canadians that we will not recognize our country the morning after.- Frank Harvey’s entire academic career has been an attempt to understand the rationales and causes of conflict in order to assist those in government to manage it. He would rather find truth than find popularity, but that certainly doesn’t make him a joker.- The CFPS, with which I have substantial contact, functions as an institute of thought that allows academic work on the nature of conflict affecting all Canadians to take place. Without Government funding, little would happen.
It’s not unreasonable to slag government for its frequently mediocre achievements, but let’s not kid ourselves by forgetting that we do so from a nice, safe distance. Policymakers, eviscerate them though we might, do not have this luxury; they are expected to use real-world resources to address real-world threats. In this light, government engagement of academic resources within Canada to investigate issues like terrorism – and to generate ideas as to what to do about them – is perfectly reasonable. Such efforts, particularly in the case of terrorism, are based on all governments’ fundamental responsibility to protect their citizens. Mr. Wark is aware of this, just as he knows that cancer statistics and the relative odds of terrorist-induced death do not obviate events like those that occurred in London, Bali, Madrid, and the U.S. In the wake of these events, there is not a government on the planet that can afford not to ask itself ‘what if?’ when considering the terrorist question. These dynamics – i.e., between fundamental responsibilities of government and their equally fundamental requirement to prepare to face possible threats – are the sorts of things that Canadian military and political analysts devote their professional lives to.It is unlikely that any CFPS academic, particularly Frank Harvey, would tolerate in his or her own writing the discursive latitude that Mr. Wark grants himself. I have no problem with a critique of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, but let’s devote some fraction of Harvey’s consistent analytical rigour to the undertaking. This requires more than a haphazard association of high school cameras, fascism, Canadian military policy and CFPS funding, a clumsy effort that smacks of the same buzzword-laden symbolism for which conservative elements in Canada and the U.S. are regularly (and quite rightly) taken to task. It also requires a willingness to deny oneself the cheap-seat point of view and put oneself in the position of the beleaguered policy-maker. If the ‘what if?’ question is not to your liking, Mr. Wark, surely you could have a go at ‘if not this, then what?’
It’s not unreasonable to slag government for its frequently mediocre achievements, but let’s not kid ourselves by forgetting that we do so from a nice, safe distance. Policymakers, eviscerate them though we might, do not have this luxury; they are expected to use real-world resources to address real-world threats. In this light, government engagement of academic resources within Canada to investigate issues like terrorism – and to generate ideas as to what to do about them – is perfectly reasonable. Such efforts, particularly in the case of terrorism, are based on all governments’ fundamental responsibility to protect their citizens. Mr. Wark is aware of this, just as he knows that cancer statistics and the relative odds of terrorist-induced death do not obviate events like those that occurred in London, Bali, Madrid, and the U.S. In the wake of these events, there is not a government on the planet that can afford not to ask itself ‘what if?’ when considering the terrorist question. These dynamics – i.e., between fundamental responsibilities of government and their equally fundamental requirement to prepare to face possible threats – are the sorts of things that Canadian military and political analysts devote their professional lives to.It is unlikely that any CFPS academic, particularly Frank Harvey, would tolerate in his or her own writing the discursive latitude that Mr. Wark grants himself. I have no problem with a critique of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, but let’s devote some fraction of Harvey’s consistent analytical rigour to the undertaking. This requires more than a haphazard association of high school cameras, fascism, Canadian military policy and CFPS funding, a clumsy effort that smacks of the same buzzword-laden symbolism for which conservative elements in Canada and the U.S. are regularly (and quite rightly) taken to task. It also requires a willingness to deny oneself the cheap-seat point of view and put oneself in the position of the beleaguered policy-maker. If the ‘what if?’ question is not to your liking, Mr. Wark, surely you could have a go at ‘if not this, then what?’
It is not necessary to accept the Realist assumptions of (soon to be Dr.) Wilner to agree with the thrust of the response. This piece is simply an attempt at a hatchet job masquerading as an argument on International Politics. It contains the usual mix of undeveloped politics on which readers who are already disposed to Wark’s arguments will infer far more. So, more Americans die of consumer products than terrorism (pre-9/11 it used to be diarrhoea). Sure, but that is not where the debates are taking place (the real debates, not this pompous intellectual self-pleasuring), but rather on issues such as potential deaths, the effects of further attacks on international politics etc.I wish I had been at the panel to which the author alludes. I suspect the reasons this piece was written lie more in the relative performances of the contributors there than it does to the substance of Harvey’s arguments.