will be more than just hours of bickering. give me 30 minutes. i'll take you to below the me welcome done content. today we discuss america's inner and outer wars with professor the keel. paul, thing up to the 960 is the united states isn't even really a liberal democracy. it becomes a formal liberal democracy in 1965. and in 1965, you get the civil rights act and the voting rights act. and, and there, those are also tied to the war on poverty. and those 3 elements suggest that the united states is going to become a place of inclusive citizenship and shared outflow. or at least the general prosperity is going to be distributed in a way that does not exclude group differentiated population. and that's really the

promise at the moment that that and now rhetorically appears in the law. and to some extent become something that animates public policy. it's abandoned in the internal violence in the united states, militarized police, and the largest prison system in the world. along with america's endemic racism are mirrored in the foreign wars that have been fought almost continuously by the united states. since the end of the 19th century, these inner and outer wars argues historian mikhail paul singh are intimately connected. the gunning down of unarmed black people in american cities is expressed outside our borders in the gunning down of unarmed muslims in iraq, syria, afghanistan, yemen, libya, and somalia, often by militarized drones. the prison industrial complex at home is given form in

the myriad of overseas black sites, where victims kidnapped and transported to other countries by the cia are held in secret, tortured and often killed. what happens internally and what happens externally are part of the same racial ordering of capitalism and empire, and organic whole. the war on drugs and the war on terror are the logical conclusion of the racial wars that stretch back to the european invasion and conquest of north america. foreign policy and domestic politics develop in a reciprocal relationship and produce mutually reinforcing approaches to managing social conflict. singh argues there is a cross pollination between those who manage our inner and outer wars. william k. c . for example, over saw the phoenix program in viet nam, which neutralized over 26000 suspected members of the viet cong through torture and

assassinations. and then went on to help found the manhattan institute that formulated the broken windows policing strategy and poor communities. used to justify heightened police surveillance, daily harassment brutality over arrest. and the dehumanization of poor people of color, search and stops by police at home are no different from cordon and search operations in iraq or afghanistan, night raids. and felicia look like knight raids and oakland, the photos of brutalized prisoners at abu ghraib have their corollary in the photos taken by white lynch mobs in the south. richard zullie accused of torturing prisoners in guantanamo was a member of the chicago police unit. the tortured black suspects in the chicago police department own secret black site deputy assistant attorney general john you

and his 2003 memo seeking to justify torture. turn to an $1873.00 case of murdock, indian prisoners, for a legal precedent. the code name for the operation to kill osama bin laden was not accidentally geronimo america has from its founding made war on racialized enemies, always described as subhuman and condemned as incapable of being civilized. joining me to discuss the interplay of america's inner and outer wars and its nexus with capitalism and empire. is mikhail paul thing, professor of social and cultural analysis and history that new york university and the author of race and america was long war. so i want to begin by noting that i spend 20 years overseas as a foreign correspondent on the outer reaches of empire. and of course your point,

which i think is extremely important, but not understood by most of the public is that empire is really the external expression of white supremacy with all of the violence, all the racist tropes. and then, of course, often the laboratory for the methods of drac coney and control that migrate back to the united states. but perhaps you can talk a little bit about how seamless these inner and outer wars are and why her. thank you so much, chris, and thank you for having me. i'm a big admirer of your work war of the force that gives us meaning is one of the books that really shaped some of my perspective on these questions. i started writing these essays during the iraq war, the afghan iraq war really mid, mid, early, 2, thousands. and they were written over a 10 year period. and, and one of the things i was trying to make sense of is how the united states

continues to oscillate. between a kind of moral equivalent of war at home that often involves state sanctioned violence against vulnerable communities and populations from the war on drugs that you mentioned war on crime that really begins in the 1900 sixty's in 1900 seventy's . and then the outer wars which as you noted and which have been continuous throughout our history. and of course, the outer wars that we now think of as kind of on the global frontier. we're once also in our wars, in the sense that they took place on the expanding territorial frontier of the united states as it moved across the continent and became a continental empire. so there, these 2 dynamics tend to be not put together in the way in which we talk about war making in the united states. they tend to be treated very separately as a foreign policy is a kind of a kind of field domain that has its own logic,

its own, its own reasoning, its own strategic coherence, its own leads, and so on and so forth. when you start to open up the question, what one of the things that you see is that the rationale are often very similar? the treatment of enemies is often very similar. the racial dynamics are often very similar, and then you find even the personnel are often very similar. the problem that we sometimes face is that we can always keep our eye on the ball, right, because we're involved in something over they are, and we think, well, now it's over there, it's not, it's not over here. one of the things that really started me on this pursuit was an article in the new york times, right after 911, which said something to the effect of black communities. now finally have a trust in the n y, p d, because the enemies are overseas. and there's a kind of picture of a smiling african american policeman in new york saying, you know, we all now understand that we have to pull together because we're facing

a common enemy. now of course, this is just a couple of years after the police murder of alma, judy alo, the torture of abner abner lima, and brooklyn countless killings that had happened in the 1990 s, which was a very violent period in new york city. and then only a few years later you had the police killing of sean bell in new york city. and shaun bells pastor. busy came on tv and said. busy here it's just like iraq, we get no protection so that, that sense of kind of, well, we're now all on the same side was very, very short lived. and i think within african american life in particular, which is what i've spent most of my scholarly career studying. there's long been an awareness of this fact. you deal with the way we use rhetoric to mask the reality. you right, racism manifold extensions from small scale failures of interpersonal

recognition to consequential aggregation and differentiation of group vulnerabilities and privileges. similarly, vaccine it can seem on the present yet located nowhere in particular. what do you mean by that? well, race is a very, very difficult concept. for us, and we know now because we spend a lot of time thinking about it and it's everywhere in the public discussion. and it can range from interpersonal flights to something i was asked as residential segregation or mass incarceration. so when we think about racism along that kind of continuum, it can be difficult to figure out where it resides and where fundamentally comes from, you know, and i think one of the real problems we do have now is often we, we don't make adequate distinctions between these things i think we in general tend to be much more focused on interpersonal rhetoric. that is,

that is unappealing or offensive, or rhetorical flights, or the kind of racism that you sort of see in, in kind of ordinary bigotry. ok. and that, that is obviously present in american society and i'm not saying it has no relationship to these larger structural forces. but the structural forces are oftentimes lack visible to us and yet much more consequential in the way in which is i say in that passage you quote, aggregate life chances. so one of the most effective ways that racism comes to operate is really as part of the mechanism, you know, part of the machinery, the rubber being of loans, the algorithms and the, and the ways decisions get made that are often in personal and don't involve a kind of direct animal towards a particular individual, right?

so i think it's sorting out some of those aspects that were really challenged by sometimes we know it when we see it and sometimes we don't see it. and therefore, we don't know what well, racism is protean, and that it constantly changes its shape. but certainly if you are african american, you recognize or understand because you're a victim of it. that is a constant you, right? as a regime of power, racial ordering betrays political weakness, says it must continually secure and even coerce compliance and also prevent defection among perpetrators. it is unstable, an idiot, logically fragile, dependent upon morally discomforting, political public force it is subject to continue d legitimate ation. if there is a lesson that i hope to convey it is not the in x or ability of racial domination. but the record of social failure that it's defectors, critics,

opponents and survivors have illuminated. can you explain that idea? i really appreciate you quoting that passage because i think it cuts against the grain a little bit of some of the ways we talk these days. you know, i think for those of us who study race and racial domination and now think about it in terms of a long history that extends back to the plantation and the frontier. there can often be a tendency to kind of just think of this as an invariant force, something like anti blackness that resides in the heart or the soul. people using the language of original sin, or se racism is in america, dna. and i think these kinds of metaphors tend to naturalize racism as a force and to miss recognize the way in which racism needs to be both justified and concealed. that it is morally abhorrence to, to ordinary people, that it has been morally important from the origins of the united states,

slavery was a moral abomination to many of america's founding generation. it was the source of a fight and struggle. and one of the ways in which it gets smuggled into our system is through forms of simulation or through people turning a blind eye. are people agreeing to say, well, we're just not going to look at that part of the country. we're going to let this happen over there, but we know that slavery, for example, which is which is a racial. busy project was a massively destabilizing force for the 1st 100 years of the history of the united states that results in a cataclysmic civil war. it's no different now. we can see the continuities in forms of racial domination even as they change form. but we can also see the continued context that happens around these kinds of questions, especially in a context where i would say the majority of people in this country now think that black people are certainly entitled to the rights of full citizenship. so when

citizenship rights are being abrogated, when a policeman sits with his knee on the neck of a man, for, for many, many, many seconds such that the license choked out of that man. and people see that it is considered a moral abomination. and we saw it happen, millions of people that early rose up after george floyd's murder, that's not the indication of a regime that is, that is strong and powerful. so racism is reformulating itself. and i don't, i don't sort of say, i would never say that it doesn't have an appeal, you know, and it's constantly being used and leveraged for political purposes for opportunistic political purposes. there's the desire to get people to reinvest in white, white superiority, white privilege, white power, and that has never gone away. but that is not a

a powerful project in the sense that it, it operates unopposed or that it doesn't, has to figure out ways. busy to also mask, and as i said before, to simulate its operations in order to be effective. this is one of the ways in which racism enters into structures. because when it becomes overt, an apparent people tend to be more apt to oppose it directly. great, when we come back, we'll continue our conversation about america's endemic racism, capitalism and empire. with professor nick kale, pulsing blue. i'm jesse ventura is governor of minnesota. i was on the front lines of kim's politically was strangled american politics. i'm still in the white question. more me questions, birth new questions, numbers as stars and endless as this. and bring you all inside

this debt and lift your eyes from all that remains in question blue. welcome back on contact. we continue our discussion about america's endemic racism, capitalism and empire. and it's next us with professor nicole paul singh. so before the break, you were talking about the murder of george floyd, the public reaction that it was an abomination. and yet we have the largest prison population in the world. 25 percent of the world's prisoners are almost all of whom are poor and disproportionate. a number of whom are people of color and that is an a, a structural abomination. the people are not rising up against that is true. that is true. and i think, i think on the one hand, i would say we have been in the period in which there has been greater attention to

criminal justice reform. and there have been a period of recognition, at least to some greater degree than existed maybe 10 years ago. that the system of mass incarceration is an example of what i called social failure, that the this is a massive investment in walling and caging has not delivered public safety. it is not deliver prosperity. what it is delivered is an endemic injustice. but we now have to deal with and reckon, went on. so i think that that's understood. i think that people can be scared again into the idea that we need more policing and prisons and that's part of what i think is being contested right now. as the crime rates have spiked in some parts of the country and people are making a lot of the question of, of, well, has this reform imperative, you know, already gone far enough and i certainly don't think it has. so i think we're poised

right now in a, in a fight around this question and it did debate and then the struggle that has to continue. but one of the ways in which mass incarceration is of course concealed. i mean, one of the ways which math and corporation is tolerated is that it to is concealed, right? we know how prisons are placed in geographically kind of out of sight of places where people live. of course, when, when prisons are, are put into a place where they're large concentrations of population, they often in gender opposition, prisons kind of construct a concealed geography of confinement in the country. and in this sense, you refer to black sites earlier. they're a little bit like black sites. i mean, if very few people, well we're all the state prisons are in new york state for example. but when you, when you go on the map and you look for them,

you'll see that most of them are far upstate. most of them are sparsely populated areas. most of them are in parts of the state that have also seen economic catastrophe. so they're then tolerated to some degree as operations that bring some, some economic activity to the region for those who then become the staff of prisons . but for the large, public or attentive public prisons are pretty much out of sight out of mind unless we bring them into the conversation. so i think that's also an example of how they can continue to operate in a way that that doesn't engender the kind of outcry that they deserve. when i visit me, abu jamal and frank vill, a small white town in pennsylvania, they have the names of the employees on the wall. and upwards of a dozen, we'll have the last name,

the same last name because they are from the same family or extended family. you node in the book that there, there is a logic of demented logic behind, militarized police and mass incarceration. and that is with the industrialization and the creation of what marks would call surplus labor. they become the primary forms of social control. absolutely, you know, i think again, the work you did with joe sacco, thinking about sacrifice in the country. i mean, the sacrifice zones are certainly the, the, the $1000000.00 blocks that are, that are sending the vast majority of poor young black men to prison. and then they're also the industrialized towns that have nothing else but guarding labor for multi generational families. often white who are on the receiving end of the, of the, of the criminal punishment system. but who also then suffer from that

system in a different way. you know, and just to kind of bring the conversation full circle in the prison that i work in . and i won't mention it right now by name. there couple things that are notable one that you mentioned, which is the multi generational guarding that happens. it's a kind of family business. the other is, is one of the 1st things you see when you go into that prison is a fold it up flag that honors all the corrections officers that served in operation enduring freedom, which is the iraq war. and that served in prisons like abra grade because of course they needed guards to go over and participate in that. so again, it kind of shows how these, these systems are networked. how, how they rely on this kind of reciprocity this back and forth. they rely on the what we would, what we should call threat inflation,

a constant sense of threat inflation. and the threats are coming from without, from within, from people who aren't like us from people who want to do us harm and, and they prevent that that prevents us from actually seeing the, again, structural harms that have been done to these very communities that now depend upon prisons and prison guarding for the livelihood of the people who live there. so i think it's a, it's a, it's a pretty profound thing when you start to confronted and face it and understand that closely. i want to talk about the political element of this, these inner and outer wars. what you do in the book, you write the pacification process directed at black and 3rd world radical isms after the 1960 is in particular with a seed bed from which the new concepts of inequality were realized and practiced in trials by violence. the wars on crime drugs and now terror through the 1990 s the

success of neo liberal policies that rolled back welfare state protections and market regulations and the name of austerity efficiency and individual responsibility carried a similarly sharp racial edge as they sought to separate the deserving from the threatening por, at the same time as it settled into orthodoxy, neoliberalism came to represent a paradoxical bifurcation of the racial order with promises of upward mobility linked to values of racial diversity and market and investor friendly public policy and widening states of economic precariousness manage through de facto racial profiling criminalization and ever, ever stand here means tested assistance to the poor. it really is a species of internal colonialism where you carry out these drag coney in a control on

a growing underclass while celebrating diversity among the ruling elite that's orchestrating the oppression. yeah, i think that's a great passage to drive. and i think that the writing can sometimes be dense, and you do have to take a minute to, to sort of unpack it. ok. and what i'm trying to argue there, what i think is important for us to see this, this goes back to a couple of points in the discussion. if we understand that american racism is not a singular thing, but it's heterogeneous that it's prodi and we have to recognize that up to this up to the 1960 is the united states isn't even really a liberal democracy. it becomes a formal liberal democracy in 1965, and in 1965, you get the civil rights act and the voting rights act and it's, and there, those are also tied to the war on poverty. and those 3 elements suggest that the united states is going to become a place of inclusive citizenship and shared affluence,

or at least the general prosperity is going to be distributed in a way that does not exclude group differentiate populations. and that's really the promise. and at the moment that that's announced rhetorically, appears in the law. and to some extent becomes something that animates public policy. it's abandoned and it's abandoned in part. and i think king recognizes this . it's abandoned, in part because the american attention is on the war in vietnam. so the war in vietnam plays a big role in this. and it's abandoned because the welfare state reaches a certain kind of the limit for the ruling class where it is no longer going to be acceptable because it's going to cut far too much into corporate profitability. and the decisions that are made over the next decade or more are to

kind of reimagine and restructure the form of capitalism that we're going to live under. and that restructuring of the form of capital isn't involves the imposition of austerity. it involves learning from what we did in the wars to him, employ counterinsurgency at home to figure out how to prosecute wars in the world system that don't engender the same kind of opposition that the vietnam war and gender. and also to draw somewhat on the legitimacy of the civil rights movement to say yes, but we are also going to be a more inclusive society. and we're going to show that inclusiveness in these very visible symbolic ways at the top. right. so making sure that we have diverse corporate boards are making sure that we have some black see making sure we have more access to college through affirmative action. and these kinds of policies

. there's nothing wrong with many of those policies are not coming on here as an opponent to confirm that action. what i'm, what i'm, what i'm pointing out is this bifurcation, that there is a kind of elite skew that begins to happen. the diversification of the elite, which becomes a kind of way of legitimated and this new form of power comes alongside. the intensification of procuring and the enlistment of far more punitive means in order to manage that precarious. and what you are calling that surplus for within our society. and that's the kind of new settlement that emerges after the 1900 sixty's that has really kind of solidified over the subsequent years. and i think now we're really a moment where we were, i know we kind of recognizing that that's the nature of the society we live in. we don't live in a society where social citizenship really means anything. even though we have

a formal liberal democracy. we know that the rights of people are now very easily aggregated via criminal punishment, complex a society in which $70000000.00 plus adults have a criminal arrest record in a population of only about $250000000.00 adults is a staggering thing to realize, right? we really are kind of criminalized and over police nation, and of course it does impact disproportionately, but it is also something that is a general truth about the united states now. and i think unless we can get on the other made of that, we are going to lose our democracy. not necessarily just because of a kind of trumpet style demagogue. right. but because we have actually already habituated ourselves to a very significant set of off for terry and practices and institutions over many,

many decades within our own society. right, we don't have to stop there or that was professor mikael paul singh, author of the book, race and america long. mm. ah . mainstream news is in ruins. i should know because i saw it from the inside and i know how they operate, stopped falling before exaggerations, distraction in fiction for news that tells you what's really going on. tune in to our t america where we always question. i like it when the host asked a question for the guests and then actually listens to the guests answer and then react to that answer a folks dennis wheeler. here, i've got

a new shot. oh, good evening and welcome to the news and our t america. i'm fair in france here in washington, dc. well, back in 1947. the bulletin of the atomic scientist created what we know today. as the doomsday clock, it represents the hypothetical global catastrophe. i was as midnight and it's assessed by atomic scientists every january. the main factors influencing the clock or climate change and nuclear risk. do you want to know where we're at? at this moment, the doomsday clock is 100 seconds to midnight. the closest it's ever been in history, atomic scientists and their analysis wrote, quote, indeed in 2021,

the new u. s. administration changed policies in some ways that made the.