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THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIREAbu Ghraib and the American Media by Lila Rajiva ISBN:
1-58367-119-6/$14.95 paper |
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Excerpt from Chapter 10 It is this sanctified contempt for the Other that is at the heart of Abu Ghraib and militates against any reading of it as a war crime of errant individuals. The half-dozen reservists are no more than scapegoats in a program of racial and religious abasement that was conceived as completely legitimate. The photographs horrify us precisely because they express this sense of legitimacy, much as the postcards of the 1920s depicting laughing crowds watching Negroes being lynched conveyed acceptance at the time.(33) Such sanctified terror is rooted not only in Zionism, then, but in the sectarian beliefs of fundamentalist Christians from which many elements of the Promethean ideology are drawn. From biblical righteousness, the Promethean sense of the state as virtue incarnate; from Christian dominionism, the impetus to expand; from apocalyptic ruminations, the Promethean obsession with terror.(34) And through all of these runs an unexamined sense of supreme moral satisfaction, a Puritan certainty about the nature and precise physical location of evil in the other that is translated not simply in the messianic language of Americanism but even in the shibboleths of liberalism. Evil is outside, out there in the world, radically disordered, deserving of eradication. To fully understand Abu Ghraib, therefore, we need to shatter the linguistic policing behind which torture masquerades as “national security,” “necessity,” and “protecting our freedoms”; we need to free ourselves from the control of the singular language of Babel, the empire of universal law and reason. We need to comprehend the extent to which the totalizing discourse of reason itself masks those local meanings and sufferings in which humanity resides. When we do so, what appears behind the mask is a confusion of meanings that evades easy categorization. A study of hundreds of communications by Bush, Ashcroft, Powell, and Rumsfeld between September 11, 2001, and May 2003 found four characteristics common to them—a set of Manichean distinctions between good and evil and security and danger, a description of the war on terror as a "mission," conflation of the will of God and the export of freedom and liberty by America, and claims that dissent is a national and global threat.(35) Quasi-religious language is deployed on behalf of exceptionalism, but the exceptionalism is only superficially crafted to appeal to religious sentiment. Underlying the veneer, the language is intensely inflected with attachment to the soil and fear of its violation and echoes the Zionist ideology of soil. We find repeated terms and phrases, such as “homeland," with its distinctly Germanic flavor, and "we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here." This is not the language of ethical or spiritual religion, but that of the religion of the state, of territory and power. I have termed this ideology Promethean for its refusal to submit to objective criteria of the good or the just while claiming to represent them. Not so much abrogating law as assuming the function of law-giver, the new messianism uses the language of law for its content—human rights, justice, liberty— in order to press its claims, but its framework is intensely revolutionary. This is understandable. Overtly religious rhetoric has a poor chance of success in a country whose self-image is of a melting pot. Those who believe in the unquestioned “goodness" of American force have included not only Zionist neoconservatives —and Israel is the non-negotiable heart of neoconservatism—but Cold War hawks who once saw in the spread of communism an equally radical threat to the West.(36) Despite its religious overtones then, the rhetoric of American empire is fundamentally neither conservative nor religious in the conventional sense but expressive of an ideology of power in which religion has been consciously deployed. Under the rubric of civilizational conflict, a war of religion is invoked, but the rhetoric of religion itself conceals the more familiar language of territory and resources, the struggle of political interests. What interests and for whose benefit? The Americanist language would suggest American national interest; the pervasive influence of Zionism would suggest Israeli. Of course, publicly if not privately, Zionists like to argue that there is no difference between the two. Ideology, which grows more powerful as the total state accelerates, smoothes over these discrepancies in words, these failures of meaning. It throws out vague threats to the “national interest” and postures aggressively behind the official narrative of a global war on terror by the universal empire. This is the propaganda discourse of Babel but what does Babel conceal? When the propaganda narrative of terror is pierced, what lies behind? Notes (33) David Garland, “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in 20th Century America,” Working Papers, Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, March 2004. (34) Frederick Clarkson, “Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence,” Public Eye Magazine 8, nos. 1 & 2 (March/June 1994). See also Katherine Yurica, “The Despoiling of America: How George W. Bush became the head of the new American Dominionist Church/State,” Yurica Report, February 11, 2004. (35) David Domke, God Willing?: Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the 'War on Terror,' and the Echoing Press (London: Pluto Press, August 2004). Steven Goldsmith, “Research details use of religion to help sell war on terror, Iraq,” University of Washington News, August 10, 2004. (36) Max Boot, “What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?” Opinion Journal, December 30, 2002. See also Claes G. Ryn, “The Ideology of American Empire,” Orbis47 (2003). |
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All material copyright © 2005 by Monthly Review Press |
