Sparks: Pentagon designates China-backed campus cultural centers a threat to US national security

We expelled the empire from the continent and then discovered that the empire had already written itself into our institutions, our habits, and our idea of what a nation is - the flag changed, the structure did not.

The Dynamo of American power has found a new Virgin to fear, and the education that was supposed to prepare us for this century turns out to have been calibrated for the last one, in which cultural exchange was still a form of diplomacy rather than a weapon.

They speak of foreign influence with considerable authority, but I would like to know what they call the influence that has been here for four hundred years - the one that built the universities on land taken from my people and now fears a language class.

The iron house is sealed, the air is thinning, and the guards have announced that the windows must be boarded because the view outside is dangerous - the prisoners applaud, because they have been taught that the view is the threat.

A student in Ohio learns to write a character in Mandarin, and a general in Washington sees an army; the distance between the classroom and the general's map is the distance between what is actually happening and what power requires to justify itself.

You fear the teacher because you cannot control the lesson; but the lesson was never the danger - the danger is that you have forgotten what it means to be taught, and the state that fears a classroom has already lost the argument it claims to be winning.

You call the cultural center a threat - tell me, what is a threat? Is it the thing that teaches, or the thing that fears the teaching? And if a nation can be undone by a language class, what does that say about the nation?