Masters of War

Nick Reich is a member of Socialist Alternative. Currently studying at ANU, he has been active in the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment and the divestment campaign with Students for Palestine. He is one of the organisers of Palestine Action Group Canberra and can be seen chairing the weekly Palestine protests.

Cover art, illustration and typesetting by Yerin Park A Socialist Alternative ANU Publication June 2024 Printed on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land.

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I MASTERS OF WAR ...........................................3 APPENDIX: A PROFILE OF ANU COUNCIL .........9

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MASTERS OF WAR A STUDENT MOVEMENT has exploded across the world against university complicity in the current Israeli genocide. Since October 7 2023, thousands of students have been involved in large city street demonstrations, smaller direct actions, online activism and many more forms of political organising in solidarity with Gaza. But student involvement in the movement took a leap forward following the establishment of a protest encampment at Columbia university and the attempted repression of it.

political meetings have democratically debated the camp's approach to winning its demands.

In response to this mass and vibrant expression of students politically organising for justice, ANU offered only repression. Two weeks after the commencement of the encampment, on the 76th anniversary of al-Nakba, the university summoned 7 students to a meeting with the Deputy ViceChancellor. At this meeting they were told that whilst the university respects and values their right to protest, they must leave the encampment by Friday otherwise they would be in breach of the university code of conduct. When they asked why they had been singled out, the Deputy ViceChancellor assured them that they didn’t intend for these notices to be given only to them, the rest of the students involved in the camp would also be directed to leave. She then pushed across the table a stack of blank pages with pens on them and encouraged the students to list the names of anyone else involved.

Following Columbia, ANU's Gaza Solidarity Encampment was established on April 29 on the lawns of Kambri, the freshly developed corporate centre of the university. During the first month of the camp being stubbornly planted there, over a dozen rallies have been held, thousands of leaflets and hundreds of posters have been distributed, regular teach-ins have been held, a general meeting of over 600 students voted to support the camp and daily

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A week and a half after that, at 8am on Reconciliation Day, the encampment was awoken by two dozen security guards surrounding them. They were given letters ordering the camp to pack up immediately, and referring to the fact that police were ready to intervene. Sure enough, three vans full of officers loomed in the background.

In every statement they made, the ANU has reaffirmed their commitment to protecting freedom of assembly and the right to free speech. As they said this, they dragged students through McCarthy-esque tribunals to issue arbitrary orders restricting how they should protest and brought in legions of police to impose order through force.

In an incredible show of force, hundreds of students and community members rallied to defend the camp. When the hundreds of students involved in the camp congregated, they discussed, debated and voted on their response to the forceful escalation, ultimately deciding to stand their ground and fight. 100 students sat in the centre of the camp, the phone number of a lawyer written on their forearm in preparation for being arrested, and around 200 more protestors formed a human chain around the grass to block any police advance, chanting and singing for hours on end. Ultimately, the police were forced to withdraw, promising to return the next day with more officers ready to carry out arrests.

The aim of this article is to look at how the university operates and fits into broader society in order to answer the question of why the ANU administration is so resistant to the demands of this protest encampment. To answer that question will help students and activists resolve all the strategic political questions of what it would take to win.

THE INTELLECTUAL ARMS TRADE One of the major demands of the student movement is for universities to divest from weapons companies that supply Israel and their genocide in Gaza.

Without the globalised supply chain enabling the manufacture of

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advanced weapons such as F-35 jets, Israel’s capacity to rain fire and destruction on the impoverished population of Gaza would be diminished. By extension, all those who fund and facilitate the production and delivery of arms are themselves complicit, no matter how much they may express their own “concerns” about civilian deaths.

More important than their investment portfolios is their supply of research partnerships and educated graduates to these arms companies.

University of Sydney promotes their close partnership with Thales, University of Queensland has a joint research centre with Boeing, to list just a few examples. For their part, ANU boasts a close relationship with Northrop Grumman Australia (NGA), who as recently as 2022 took 89% of their massive revenue from the sale of arms. ANU maintains a number of scholarship programs and an externship program with NGA, who also sponsor ANU's rocketry club. An indication of their privileged relationship: in 2019 the university invited NGA to help fix their IT issues after a major cyber attack. The full extent of joint research partnerships between them are unknown, but clearly there are close connections. The friendship demonstrates ANU’s open commitment to funnelling graduates into companies like NGA, as well as carrying out joint research, so that those companies can remain at the cutting edge of development in war and death.

Around the country a pattern emerges: Melbourne University has a joint lab and many research partnerships with Lockheed Martin,

This represents more than just a strategy by the university to vie for profitable funding lines. Staying at the cutting edge of the international

ANU has over 1 million dollars (that we know of) invested in just such companies: BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman etc. In fact, basically every university in Australia has similar investments. This certainly makes them a modest blood money profit and ought to be immediately divested, but it isn't the core of the relationship between Australian universities and the war machine.

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arms race is crucial for any government who wants to “project power” and demolish their enemies.

To serve this aim, they cultivate advanced arms industries by promoting joint research at public universities.

This hawkish contribution to the nation's war machine has been core to ANU's purpose since its foundation, for which they have been compensated handsomely.

those aims align with the interests of all of the major arms manufacturers and Israel's own military aims. Blood soaks every portion of this network of complicity, even if it's the IDF that pulls the trigger. Israel has long been the closest ally of the Australian government in the Middle East and so has escaped all sanction from them after months of genocidal violence, on top of decades of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and mass murder before that. If ANU acted to contradict that stance–be it under pressure from student protestors or on their own moral terms– they would risk severing their close relationship with the Australian defence establishment.

A few current examples of this are that ANU is a member of the Government's Defence Science and Universities network, they house the Australian Signals Directorate, the ADF's spy agency, and they are expanding their nuclear physics department in order to train technicians to staff the nuclear submarines acquired through the AUKUS deal. Not to mention ANU’s defence strategy departments, like the International Relations department or the College of Asia and the Pacific, being heavily integrated with the defence establishment, providing strategic advice to the defence force.

To update their Socially Responsible Investment policy is one thing, but to fully accept what the protestors are arguing - that arms companies like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman are dripping from head to toe with the blood of innocents - would be unacceptable to the ANU. That would require the university not just to divest, but to cut all research partnerships and discourage rather

The university is and always has been tied by a thousand threads to Australia's military aims. Currently,

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than encourage graduates from joining those companies.

Furthermore, it would challenge ANU’s place in the Australian military establishment, who prize their alliance with Israel even as they commit genocide.

of evil is nowhere more odious than in a corporate HR department.

University workers felt the brunt of this when hundreds of staff were sacked or pushed into redundancy through overwork in 2022.

Students have suffered the corporate cold shoulder when hundreds of courses were cut, and some degrees entirely discontinued.

All the while new buildings go up, costs for on-campus living explode and the university announces a line of exciting new projects in partnership with banks, consulting firms, tech companies and government departments. The Council is always concerned with helping their friends in politics and business first and foremost.

The argument is about more than just money. It cuts to the core of the role of universities in society: should they act as a wing of the military or not?

THE COUNCIL WILL DECIDE YOUR FATE So who is making these decisions and how could they justify themselves? Day to day decisions are made by the Vice-Chancellor and her management team, but ultimate power resides in the ANU Council. The Council is made up of 5 current or former corporate directors and executives, 4 disciples of Silicon Valley, 1 political lobbyist for big business and 1 former Liberal Party leader. The university is structured along corporate lines by these vultures, always profit seeking and managing friction or discontent through authoritarian HR practices. The modern banality

The university bosses view of the students is shaped by their position as managers within the Australian economy.

The university’s paramount role is to fill skills shortages and acquire strategically important research advantages over rival economies.

Student concerns are subordinated to these aims, opposition is just another problem that needs to be managed as it arises. Whilst this petty dictatorship over students’

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lives prevails, it must be justified by the university in much kinder terms.

to pale in comparison to the historic and moral importance of fighting however we can to end the horror. Especially when the university, which is supposed to be the vehicle for self-advancement, is part of a network of complicity in that genocide.

Where students are seen by the university as future graduates for businesses to use and exploit, we are encouraged to see ourselves as bolstering our skill sets to be more marketable to employers. Where research is directed along lines amenable to business and military needs, researchers are told that they are helping solve practical social problems. Where the curriculum teaches a very narrow school of thought, students are told we are thinking critically and openly.

As protests challenge the university to publicly answer this charge of complicity, the corporateauthoritarian crackdown replaces their standard appeal to open critical thinking and selfadvancement to change the world.

Freedom of speech and the right to protest are jettisoned in favour of police on campus, arbitrary moveon directives, statements of concern and closed door promises of superficial change.

And so, whilst students are inpractice funnelled, directed and controlled by the university, we are encouraged to feel in charge of our own destiny and on a pathway to helping change the world for the better.

This situation presents ANU students with a clear choice: do you return to a status quo of finding your niche in a university that feeds grist to the mill of genocidal warindustries, or do you resist?

But there are limits to such a marketing strategy - limits which are starkly revealed when a student protest movement takes hold.

Thousands of students over the last few months have witnessed an uninterrupted genocide livestreamed to us. For many, the prospect of self-advancement began

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APPENDIX Here is a who's who of the non-academic, government appointed members of the ANU Council:

JULIE BISHOP is the Chancellor of ANU. She is most well known as a Liberal Party politician, serving as a minister in the Liberal Government from 2013 to 2018. The Liberal Party has always been a party serving the interests of big business in Australia, a perfect fit for Bishop. Her career as a corporate lawyer included notorious cases such as representing CSR against their former mine workers suing for compensation for silicosis they got. Their strategy was to drag out the case until the victims died. In government, her party enforced vicious anti-refugee policies, attacked unions and carried through major neoliberal budget cuts, to name only a few of their crimes.

GENEVIEVE BELL is the Vice-Chancellor of ANU. She spent 18 years at Intel in Silicon Valley as a resident anthropologist, and upon her return to Australia to lead ANU’s 3A facility was also a non-executive director on the board of Commonwealth Bank. She writes and lectures primarily on questions of techno-optimistic futurism, but has also been thoroughly inducted into management schools of corporate America and Australia.

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ALISON KITCHEN is the Pro-Chancellor of ANU. She is a director of National Australia Bank (NAB) and a director of the Business Council of Australia (BCA). The BCA is the peak business lobbyist in the country, notorious for campaigning against pro-union industrial relations laws, environmental restrictions and taxes on the rich to fund social services. Kitchen is also the former National Chairman of KPMG, one of the big four consultancy firms that has been under scrutiny for corruption recently due to the massive outsourcing of public service work. KPMG themselves were charged with widespread cheating on integrity tests and corrupt dealings with the NSW Government Transport authority, both of these happening during Kitchen’s tenure.

TANYA HOSCH is the Executive General Manager Inclusion and Social Policy at the Australian Football League (AFL), and occupies many other advisory bodies on Indigenous issues for corporations such as NAB.

ROB WHITFIELD is a non-Executive Director of Commonwealth Bank, former CEO of Westpac Institutional Bank and former Secretary of NSW Treasury and Industrial Relations under the Liberal state Government. During his time at Westpac there was a major money laundering scandal connected to child exploitation in the Philippines. During his time as secretary of treasury he carried through a substantial

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privatisation project of the NSW electricity grid, initially proposed by Mike Baird.

LARRY MARSHALL is a controversial former head of the CSIRO. Bringing his Silicon Valley mindset when he was appointed in 2014, Marshall spent his time trying to align the CSIRO more closely with business interests and away from pure science. One consequence of such a strategy was that he dealt with fossil fuel companies like Santos to embark on a project investigating Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which is widely recognised as an unrealistic technology used by the fossil fuel industry to defer actual lowering of emissions.

Last year he was pushed out of the CSIRO and promptly took up a position as non-executive director on the board of Fortescue Metals. This company, run by Australia's richest man, has recently been in a controversy over mining indigenous land. Fortescue has still not provided any compensation or received permission from the Yindjibarndi people to carry out mining on their land, despite them receiving permission from a larger local Aboriginal corporation, composed of most of the community leaders and elders. Fortescue's operations in the area have destroyed about 250 cultural and sacred sites.

SARAH PEARSON worked closely with Julie Bishop for years as head of innovation in DFAT. She has worked for corporations like Cadbury and the Queensland state government, always on the subject of science and innovation for business development.

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PADMA RAMAN is CEO of the Federal Office for Women. She is a lawyer who has previously worked for the human rights commission.

ANNE-MARIE SCHWIRTLICH is an archivist and former Director-General of the National Library of Australia.

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