Salting the Mine

I was thinking about a story I recently read documenting how missionaries in Thailand prey on the prostitution that results from the cultural destruction they contribute to, when I came across an article about weaponizing culture by following the links in this post by Melissa Farley.

As the article points out, using American universities as instruments of war is not by any means new, but militarizing academia for the purpose of cultural combat is all too reminiscent of the unsavory psychological warfare practices against Native Americans by church and state. Recruiting anthropologists and social scientists for the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative is like waving a huge red flag in front of the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Expecting this perverse program to win hearts and minds in the Third and Fourth Worlds is ludicrous. It will, however, succeed in cultural devastation, thereby creating new enemies to justify the lucrative war-on-terror industry. Salting the mine, so to speak.

(Melissa Farley is a preeminent authority on prostitution trafficking and an associate scholar of CWIS.)