International education and imperial penetration, co-optation and control

Abstract

The imperative for international education, in its content, scope, depth and pedagogy, is both an effect and cause of increasing globalization. International education is also used as a major instrument of ‘soft power’, in the projections of power and influence of the US Imperium. This paper explores, with concrete examples, some of the evolving, and increasingly sophisticated instruments, issues, approaches, techniques, players and intentions embodied in the uses of international education programs and approaches in the penetration, co-optation and control of targeted social formations by the US Imperium. New research in brain science in the West, coupled with research in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, political science, cognitive psychology, media studies, etc., have led to increasing use of more subtle, sophisticated, flexible, mobile, adaptive, culturally appropriate, and even subliminal, approaches to projections of political, economic, social, cultural and technological influence and control of targeted populations, as well as in identifying and cultivating students and faculty with potential for influence in their respective societies, and to become future instruments ‘in place’ to aid in the continuing expanded reproduction of the globalized system of the US Imperium.

Keywords:

• international education
• imperialism
• imperial penetration cooptation and control

Notes

¹ Edward Bernays, along with Walter Lippman were ‘credited’ with being the pioneers of and leading contributors to the ‘science’ of techniques of modern propaganda, advertising and persuasion employed in modern international education. Bernays took the approach that the most effective persuasion and propaganda was that which created the set of values, beliefs and tastes that led a person to believe that his choices were his own and not influenced by others. Bernays sought to create advertising and other forms of propaganda and persuasion that would not cause a person to jump up and go to a store to buy a particular product or brand, but that would cause him to be in a situation that demanded a particular product that would lead that person to the product that would then recommend itself. Bernays never really addressed the naked contradictions in his own statement vis-à-vis having a protecting a ‘democratic society’ on the one hand, and, or versus, the ongoing and conscious ‘manipulation’ of the masses by hidden elites on the other hand.

² ‘Hard power’ refers to instruments of covert and overt force and direct coercion. These may include war, military power, embargos, proxy military forces, denial of aid, sanctions, coercive diplomacy, bribery, debt peonage, alliances, and various kinds of covert operations. ‘Soft power’, a term attributed to Joseph Nye of Harvard University, but actually originating with Chinese philosophers like Lao-tzu, refers to the power that comes from attraction and cooptation: the attractiveness of dominant economic, political, cultural, ideological and legal practices, relations, institutions and systems of one social formation acting to influence, draw in and co-opt the citizens, dynamics and trajectories of another targeted social formation. The new term ‘smart power’ is now being touted by the Obama administration to refer to the ‘optimum’ combinations of hard and soft power that best achieve imperial strategic objectives which include the disguise of hard and soft power projections, their effects and in whose service (class interests) they are employed. Soft power can be and is used by non-imperial and socialist social formations powers such as China for allegedly hegemonic purposes (see Kurlantzick 2007 for an analysis of China's use of soft power to gain influence in the world's political arenas, and also Young Nam Cho and Jong Ho Jeong 2008).

³ The term ‘international education’ is a general or all-inclusive term for the subjects, priorities, agenda, pedagogy, breadth, depth, relationships (the Chinese expression ‘guanxi’) and physical/human/social ‘capital’ associated with various educational programs.

⁴ In the West, particularly in the United States, all sorts of new approaches and frontiers of ‘brain science’ are being explored (by neurobiologists, cognitive psychologists, experimental psychologists, anthropologists, economists and biochemists), with the intent of finding new, more effective and more subliminal neuro-physiological mechanisms that can be used for more effective persuasion, mind control, interrogation, indoctrination, propaganda, marketing, political campaigns and ‘manufactured consent’. They are looking for both the universal and culturally-specific neuro-structures, connections (synapses) triggers and physiological responses associated with various stimuli (colors, patterns, words, ideas, images, humor, etc.) as they typically, and often subliminally excite or inhibit various neuro-structures, chemicals (e.g. epinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, histamine), and processes associated with pleasure, pain, fear, familiarity, fight-or-flight, and other responses (e.g. cortico plasticity, neurogenesis, neural differentiation).Their work is increasingly being incorporated into marketing, design and content of educational hardware and software, textbooks, political campaigns. For an overview see: Gardner (2009); Shermer (2008); Shermer (2004); Ariely (2009).

⁵ As Napoleon Bonaparte put it: ‘History is merely the fable that has been agreed upon’. Quoted from http://Thinkexist.com/quotation/what_is_history_but_a_fable_agreed_upon/344741.html.

⁶ The term ‘World War III’ was allegedly coined by Pak Bo Hi, formerly of the South Korean CIA (KCIA) and a close lieutenant of the cult leader Moon Sun Myung, head of the so-called Unification Church, a Theo-fascist cult with extensive resources and a global reach through various fronts, who characterized ‘World War III’ as a global war, between systems and ideologies, socialism versus capitalism, as a protracted global war, for ‘hearts and minds’.

⁷ By ‘existential threat’ it is meant that a certain system or ideology is deemed a strategic threat merely by its existence even without any covert or overt acts of aggression or threats by that system or ideology against others. Those who use this concept of ‘existential threat’ understand, and intend, that when systems, values and institutions of one system outperform those of another in terms of what matters most to the masses, they can and do act as ‘attractors’ (soft power) of people and allegiances to new systems away from others. They intend that capitalism, their versions of Western ‘culture’ and nominal political pluralism (equated with ‘real democracy’), will act as attractors of the allegiances of peoples away from socialism or any forms of indigenous sovereignty, self-determination and independence. Even as China has been a leading creditor of the United States, and even as China has not given signs of any hegemonic intentions or hostility against the United States, even as China has been a victim of terrorism including by Al Qaeda, Bob Woodward, in his 2004 book Plan of attack (2004, 12) says: ‘When all the intelligence was sorted, weighed and analyzed, Tenet [then head of CIA] and Pavitt agreed there were three major threats to American national security. One was Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network … A second major threat was the increasing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, WMD – chemical, biological and nuclear … The third was the rise of China, especially its military, but that problem was five to fifteen years away’. It is quite clear that the policy-makers in the centers of the US Imperium do not believe in the peaceful competition yet coexistence of differing socioeconomic and politico-legal systems and regard the mere existence of socialism anywhere as a threat.

⁸ The term ‘social capital’ has come back into new usage and meaning relative to its origins. Since in mainstream economics ‘capital’ means anything that has been produced and used to produce something else, then physical capital refers to tools and the like, human capital to human skills, education and experience, and social capital refers to institutions that foster hope, trust, social cohesion, cooperation and buying into the dominant system and its core values and relationships. Among neoclassical economists they now use the term to refer to relationships of reciprocity (you do for me and I return the favor and we both maximize our individual utility functions by appearing to cooperate, yet we remain, it is alleged, ‘individualist maximizers’). Education is not only central to and part of the definition of human capital, it is essential to the development, content and protection of the social capital of systems as well.

⁹ Lemkin (1994). Genocide is defined as: any of the following acts committed with any intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. By ‘national pattern’ it is meant the dominant institutions, cultures, relations, power structures, systems of governance and traditions of a given nation.

¹⁰ Freedom of religion is protected by the Constitution of China; but cult practices and intentions are not and for good reasons. Although some mainstream religions like Roman Catholicism have powerful cults like ‘Opus Dei’ within them, mainstream religions can be differentiated from cults in that typically cults, unlike the mainstream religious denominations: a) have closed and layered dogma with followers allowed to know true dogma and intentions of the cult only in stages according to how trusted the followers are; b) covert, coercive and deceptive recruitment practices; c) internal controls for monitoring and deterring exits of members; d) various forms of calculated covert and overt mind control and programming; e) hegemonic intentions and intolerance for the very levels of diversity of thought and religious pluralism that they demand for themselves; f) coerced isolation from family members and friends not in the cult; g) covert rituals and practices and retribution against those who reveal them; h) hidden agenda and ultimate objectives known only to trusted insiders; i) a charismatic and autocratic leader with absolute, unquestioned and unquestionable authority. An example of covert intentions from one of the ‘sacred texts’ of the Mormons is:

• You will see the constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread … A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America … [T]he land will be left without a Supreme Government … [Mormonism] will have gathered strength, sending out Elders to gather the honest in heart … to stand by the Constitution of the United States … In these days … God will set up a Kingdom, never to be thrown down … [T]he whole of America will be made the Zion of God. (Joseph Smith, May, 6, 1843, founder of Mormonism, quoted in Abanes 2002, xvi)

Listeners of KSL Radio's ‘The Doug Wright Show’ were surprised on 9 November 1999 when Wright's guest, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch (a devout Mormon) quoted the infamous ‘White Horse’ prophecy. The prediction by Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, contains what has always been the Mormon American Dream – i.e. the transformation of the U.S. government into a Mormon-ruled theocracy divinely ordained ‘not only to direct the political affairs of the Mormon community, but eventually those of the United States and ultimately the world’ (Abanes 2002, xvii).

¹¹ This pattern continues today with many ‘mainstream’ religious denominations, and some cults as well, continue to offer educational exchanges and programs that act as fronts for economic, political, cultural, military and intelligence power projections from metropolitan centers of the Imperium to the targeted regions of the periphery. Their names often change as they are exposed, but some like the Mormons, Scientology, the Unification Church under Moon Sun Myung, Falun Gong, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lyndon LaRouche, wealthy, virulently anti-communist, ultra-conservative, pro-capitalist, and often heavily connected with or used by Western intelligence services, retain their parent organizational names and operate through fronts with ‘high-sounding’ names, to conceal their true origins and intentions. Some organizations like the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) have gone bankrupt and have been taken over by cults themselves (Scientology) but still give some useful lists of currently operating cults (their competitors) and others that have taken over what the Cult Awareness Network used to do before being taken over (International Cultic Studies Association or ICSA, http://www.factnet.org/cris_org.htm).These cults, along with ‘mainstream’ religious denominations, mostly Protestant and Evangelical, are increasingly involved in teacher exchanges and ‘Teaching English Abroad’ programs to nations hungry for mass education in English the lingua-franca of global politics, culture and economics; they not only raise money for their respective institutions, but act as spotters for local men and women to be recruited as local agents for them as well as to serve as agents for foreign intelligence services and commercial interests.

¹² The exception to this pattern of practices was the British and US systems of Indian Residential and Board Schools in the United States and Canada where they had a slogan that captured the two phases of genocide referred to by Lemkin: ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man’. In these cases, ‘education’ meant a direct, violent, overt and unapologetic assault on the ‘national patterns’ of the Indigenous nations with only marginal or ersatz attempts to impose any ‘national pattern’ or integrate Indigenous peoples into the dominant ‘national pattern’ of the colonizing or imperial powers. See Churchill, Ward. 2004 Kill the Indian, save the man: The genocidal impact of American residential schools. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Press.

¹³ In the context of China, Martin Jacques (2010, 90) reports: ‘Until 1900 the idea of reform was virtually always articulated within a Confucian framework – with an insistence on the distinction between Chinese “essence” and Western “method” (or, in the famous phrase of Zhang Zidong (1837–1909) “Chinese learning for the essential principles, Western learning for the practical applications.”)’ Among the foreign influenced uprisings in Chinese history, the Taiping Uprising (1850–1864) that cost an estimated 20 to 40 million lives, was according to the historian Paul Cohen, guided by an ideology that was a ‘bizarre alchemy of evangelical Christianity, primitive communism, sexual Puritanism and Confucian utopianism’ (quoted in Jacques 2010, 87).

¹⁴ This was taken from the internal bbs system of one of the top universities of China in 2006 where significant changes were made after this message, from a former teacher of English left this message:‘From the bbs system at [deleted] University, China: Hi! How are you? I hope you are doing well in school and feeling happy. I am back in New York now and miss all my students at [deleted] very much. But there is another reason that I am writing to you. There is something I must tell you. Something very wrong and dangerous is going on in the foreign languages department at [deleted] University. What is going on at [deleted] University? Almost all the other foreign teachers at [deleted] University are members of a cult. What is a cult? A cult is a type of religion that is illegal in China and most of the world. A cult is a very dangerous thing. Why are cults so dangerous? A cult tricks you into joining it and then it slowly takes you away from your family, your friends, your career, your country, and your life. Almost all the other American teachers in the foreign languages department at [deleted] are members of a cult called “Mormonism”. They are not at [deleted] to teach you. They have come to [deleted] as secret missionaries and want to try and make you become Mormons too. Why does [deleted] allow them to be here? [deleted] University doesn't know that they are Mormons. They have found a corrupt person in the [deleted] department and have paid [this person] a lot of money, and given [this person] many gifts, so that [this person] will lie to the department and tell them to hire Mormons to teach English at [deleted]. Why do the Mormons want to teach at [deleted]? Mormons believe that they must brainwash every person in every nation into becoming one of them. Maybe this sounds impossible, but they are very rich and powerful and are now the fastest growing religion in the world. Their members take orders from one man, one voice who can command them what to do and what to think. Now they have their eyes upon China, and that is why they have come to [deleted]. As you know, [deleted] is the [one of the] most famous universities in China … many famous political leaders all went to [deleted]. The Mormons know that [many of] the future leaders of China will likely come from [deleted]. They believe that if they can make the students at [deleted] into Mormons, then their church will control over China. If they are so dangerous, why let them teach here? As I said, they have found a corrupt administrator in the department of [deleted], and they have paid [this person] so much money that [this person] is willing to betray [this person's] people and nation. The [deleted] English Summer Camp is completely run by the Mormons and taught by the Mormons.

Starting next semester ALL of the English teachers at [deleted] University will be Mormons. What do they want to do to the students? They want to make you a Mormon. If you are a Mormon then you must obey the Mormon Church without question. You must give your money to the Mormon Church. If your families are not Mormons then you will be forced to leave your family and not see them again. If your friends are not Mormons then you will be forced to leave them and not see them again. How do I protect myself? These are the words that they use: Mormon, Mormonism, L.D.S. (acronym for Later Day Saints), BYU (acronym for Brigham Young University, a Mormon recruitment center, not a real school). If any of the foreign teachers at [deleted] say they are Mormon, LDS, Latter Day Saints, or if they say they went to BYU or Brigham Young University then BEWARE. What is BYU or Brigham Young University? BYU or Brigham Young University is a school in the United States. But its real goal is as a recruitment and training center for Mormons. Many [deleted] students have been tricked into attending BYU. They are told they can go to America and attend a famous school, and then they are trapped at BYU and brainwashed. Please be very careful. What can we do? The only thing you can do is to warn the other students so they know to protect themselves. A student who becomes a Mormon will soon be taken away from China and from their family and their lives. I love you all and it pains me that Americans are doing such terrible things in China. Not all Americans are like this. It is only a few, the ones we call Mormons. Please be careful of them and do not agree to become one of them.’ Internal ‘bbs’ system at [deleted] University, Beijing, China, published missive by an anonymous former teacher of English, November 2006, see also Abanes, Richard, One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church, Four Walls Eight Windows Press, NY/London, 2002.

¹⁵ Perkins (2006, 166–7, 183, 184).

¹⁶ Increasing percentages of foreign students in the West are choosing to remain to live and even state their original intention was to emigrate permanently from their countries of origin in seeking foreign studies opportunities. After a brief decline, foreign Ph.D. graduates are staying in the U.S. at near-record levels, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, February 3, 2010, http://orise.orau.gov/news/releases/2010/fy10-20.htm.

¹⁷ NGOs are typically broken down into: BINGOS (business-friendly international NGOs); CSOs (civil society organizations); DONGOs (Donor-organized NGOs); ENGOs (environmentalist NGOs); GONGOs (government-operated NGOs); INGOs (international NGOs, like Oxfam); QUANGOs (quasi-autonomous NGOs); TANGOs (technical assistance NGOs); GSOs (grass-roots support organizations); MANGOs (market advocacy NGOs); CHARDS (community health and development); they are not subject to international law as are states and thus often act as proxies for governments.

¹⁸ These foundations, institutes and sources of ‘expertise’ have a powerful influence in generating and maintaining libraries, data bases, metrics, categories and constructs, and research connections that are used by various governments and media. With the megaphone effect that comes from well-endowed patronage, they take on the aura of the only official and ‘reliable’ data and research bases from which to draw. Their publications are typically glossy, rich in graphics and other visuals that sometimes hide meager content as well as rhetorical intentions, as they play their roles in generating the ‘acceptable’ metrics (categories, indicators and methodologies) by which the respective and relative performances of competing systems, governments and their policies are measured and judged. Those who can set the systems of measurement not only affect what is or is not being measured, but also they affect the actual values of the measurements and outcomes of those measurements.

¹⁹ See New study finds U.S. math students consistently behind their peers around the world, American Institutes of Research, November 2005, http://www.air.org/news/index.cfm?fa=viewContent&content_id=451; Glod, Maria. U.S. teens trail peers around world on math–science test. Washington Post, December 5, 2007, http://www.air.org/news/documents/Release200511math.htm; Forgione, Pascal D. International test scores: Poor U.S. test scores tied to weak curriculum, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/04/AR2007120400730.html?nav=emailpage ‘Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of Ph.D. scientists and engineers employed in the United States who were born abroad has increased from 24% to 37%. The current percentage of Ph.D. physicists is about 45%; for engineers, the figure is over 50%. One fourth of the engineering faculty members at U.S. universities were born abroad. Between 1990 and 2004, over one third of Nobel Prizes in the United States were awarded to foreign-born scientists. One third of all U.S. Ph.D.s in science and engineering are now awarded to foreign born graduate students.’ Wulf, William A. The importance of foreign-born scientists and engineers to the security of the United States, statement to the U.S. House of Representatives, September 15, 2005.

²⁰ In my classes I do an exercise on the first day of class to illustrate ideological framing and manipulation. I ask my students, who are seeing their textbook for the first time, how, not knowing anything about the author of the text, they could judge the likely ideology and rhetorical intentions of the author. Usually I get answers like ‘from the preface’ or ‘from the biography of the author’. I then ask them to look in the subject index of the text and given them a list of constructs to look for: imperialism, neo-imperialism, racism, sexism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, genocide, etc. I then ask the students if they can define these terms and if they have anything to do with economics. I then ask them that if they cannot yet define these terms, how will they ever learn them if they have been omitted from the text? Attitudes, agenda, expectations, values and allegiances can be as effectively shaped, perhaps more so, by what is carefully omitted from examination as what is examined even from an ideologically jaundiced perspective.

²¹ See: Parmar and Cox (2010); Lukes (2007); Mattern (2007); Nye (2008); and Nye (2009); Fraser (2005).