By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society casts a dark shadow over the United States. The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor people of color and any vestige of the social contract. Free market policies, values and practices with their emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections and the deregulation of economic activity now shape practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States.
Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, non-commodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly militarized - or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings, which maintain ultimate fidelity to increasing profit margins. Citizenship is now subsumed by the national security state and a cult of secrecy, organized and reinforced by the constant mobilization of fear and insecurity designed to produce a form of ethical tranquilization and a paralyzing level of social infantilism.
Democracy cannot serve, as it has, as a pretext for abandoning civil liberties, democratic values and any semblance of justice.
Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which "violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma," legitimizing war as a permanent feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics. (1) Under such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose the values of a militarized neoliberal regime on everyone, shattering viable modes of agency, solidarity and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism, danger and war now fuel a war on terrorism "that represents the negation of politics - since all interaction is reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and destruction, not only to the adversary but also to one's side, and without distinguishing between guilty and innocent." (2) Human barbarity is no longer invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the war on terror.
In the aftermath of these monstrous acts of terrorism, there was a growing sense among politicians, the mainstream media, and conservative and liberal pundits that history as we knew it had been irrefutably ruptured. If politics seemed irrelevant before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it now seemed both urgent and despairing. But history cannot be erased, and those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly continued to appear to have little significance or political consequence. Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists' attacks, democracy became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost 14 years later, the historical rupture produced by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate. The script is now familiar. Security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities. Under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the government lied about the war in Iraq, created a torture state, violated civil liberties and developed new antiterrorist laws, such as the USA Patriot Act. The Bush administration imposed a state of emergency that justified a range of terrorist practices, including extraordinary rendition and state torture, which made it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions. (3)
Please continue this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30086-the-war-on-terrorism-targets-democracy-itself
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment