Nicholas (Nico) LeMon

Bio

Nico LeMon was born in Rochester, New York and raised in central Florida from age six. He began his adult life serving in the United States Army Infantry. He was an active duty enlisted infantryman typically positioned as a rifleman or machine-gunner in the weapon’s squad of his platoon. He was stationed for one year in Camp Casey, South Korea under the 2nd Infantry Division. He later relocated to Fort Benning, GA, USA and served in the 15th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division and deployed to Al Madain, Iraq as a dismounted mechanized infantryman.

The events of his deployment and his return to the US as a full-time university student changed his perspective on the legitimacy of warfare as a state-sanctioned institution. As an undergraduate he attained honorary status at Stetson University and was inducted into two honor societies: Pi Sigma Alpha Political Science Honorary Society, and Sigma Iota Rho International Studies Honorary Society. He graduated cum laude from Stetson University at the top 20 percent of all students in his class majoring in political science and minoring in international studies. He published a research note on illegal immigration in the US and the racialized discourses on the topic. His senior thesis examined the normalization of professional grassroots lobbying firms that incontrovertibly sway the course of political elections.   

A year after his graduation from Stetson University, he relocated to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an advanced placement (AP) English instructor in Anhui Province and a private English instructor in Shanxi Province. From there he participated in non-degree courses on Chinese cultural and political philosophy. The next step for LeMon was to relocate to Japan as a native English teacher and a graduate student at Doshisha University’s Graduate School of Global Studies (GSGS), Kasasuma Campus Kyoto. He graduated summa cum laude from Doshisha University. At Doshisha GSGS he published a research note on the PRC’s official development assistance in Africa under the rubric of David Shambaugh. The paper was aimed at facilitating discussion on the PRC’s presence in Africa as opposed to the OECD and highlighted many of the prevailing discourses on the topic.

His thesis was a critical discourse analysis of far-right white supremacists and their view of Japan within the milieu of online messageboards. His thesis is, in fact, an attempt to break new ground for critical discourse analysts. He found Foucault’s work useful as an analytical framework for explaining such discourses and their results in the real world. He now prefers to write more about theory and philosophy and how they might engender praxis for peace activism. He is currently interested in explicating sociopolitical motivations via discursive regularities stemming from classical traditions (e.g. Platonism, materialism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism). This observation might be better understood as a discourse analysis version of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.