| |
| Join Our Newsletter |
 Please Select sub-criteria |  |
|
|
|
|
| |
| Elevating the Political to Code-Red |
04 |
|
|
| |
| |
| |
The Fifth Annual Report to the President and the Congress (the ‘Fifth Report’ presented on December 2003, is unquestionably a landmark in terms of the way the alternative politics is to be assessed, securitised and engaged with in the public domain. The report’s findings clearly reveal a shift in attitude as to how we should approach security, revealed by what the reports advisory panel called a ‘New Normalcy’. Terror, and the future risks thereof, should no longer focus upon the exceptions but upon the normal. As Michael A Wermuth [Senior RAND policy analyst] has stated, ‘It was the panel members firm intention to articulate a vision of the future that subjects terrorism to a logical place in the array of threats from other sources that the American people face everyday – from natural disease and other illness to crime and traffic and other accidents to mention a few’. As a direct result of this understanding we are faced with two very important developments.
Firstly, with this visible acknowledgement of a state of ‘normalcy’, we are faced with the implication that a state of virtual terror is to be perceived as a normal everyday condition. This presents us with an astonishing admission that clearly begins to threaten the traditional binary between the civilized ‘we’ and the barbaric ‘they’. For even in terms of public proclamations this distinction is starting to become more complex and less demarcated. A useful working example in this shift has been revealed in a conference that was held by Belgian Euro-Atlantic Society on May 27th 2004. This conference, which was attended by amongst others former Secretary-General of NATO and Minister of State Wily Claes, Minister of State Herman van Rompuy, Colonel William Bergman (US Army) and Todd Huizinga (Member of the American delegation at the European Union) focused in all seriousness upon ‘Belgium’s al-Qaeda image’.
This becoming-al-Qaeda of an entire country revolved around the fact that Belgium was a quiet, ordinary, everyday place. With this understanding we are clearly moving away from the exceptional. In that what is being implied is that the securitisation of alternative designs for life (actual or potential) should directly move its focus out of the realms of the inhospitable, the cave-dwellers of the earth’s most uncivilised lands, towards the potentiality of the normal, quiet everyday people of an everyday place. An approach equally confirmed by the British Metropolitan Chief of Police in waiting, Sir Ian Blair, who has vowed to take the War on Terror out of the cities and into the real frontline – the suburbs.
Secondly, normalcy is no longer afraid to tackle the normal everyday threats that the Liberal project has had to publicly appease or at least entertain in recent years.That is, it has now begun to publicly and sophisticatedly intensify its attack upon the state-centric socialist projects and even autonomous indigenous claims.Take two recent examples in Latin America to illustrate the point. First we find a renewed desire to tackle Venezuela’s leader Hugo Chavez because of his apparent ‘subverting’ tactics that are spreading a new socialist cancer throughout the Americas. In its reporting of this headline incident the Financial Times of London left no place to the imagination with its second page article - an article that was less about its content and more about its accompanying image. This image pictured Chavez in a laughing rendition with the Iranian ‘terroristbelieved- to-have-connections-with-al-Qaeda’ administration. And secondly, in recent months we have found two interesting and parallel movements taking place on the Mexican political scene. Not only did President Vincente Fox take it upon himself to once again speak for the indigenous and call an official end to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, but in almost simultaneous procession Fox news started to run reports on the possible threat of Islamic terror being embraced within the indigenous communities. In both cases the association with Islamic terror is put to work in order to draw association and render a-political challenges to the Liberal system. Clearly ‘You are either with us or you are against us’.
When less becomes more
This gradual encroachment upon the alternatives has clearly benefited from a subtle use of discourse that can on two distinct counts be seen through the attempts to shorten the signifier and yet extend the significance. Firstly, it is important to recognize that the future-becoming of terror which we are all warned is inevitable and therefore needs securitising very much depends upon terror’s visualisation, its spectacle. In order to compliment this, we find that following the attacks of September 11th 2001 our signification of the events moved to the more media-fashioned 9/11. With 9/11 we have a quantum shift in significance, moving out of the realms of yet another day in the annuls of human suffering, to becoming ‘the’ point of reference – the day we are told the world changed forever. For, all the events that now follow, and all the potential future threats of terror that could emerge anywhere and anytime draw upon and connect to the imagery of that day.
This virtualisation of political terror should not however be viewed in an isolated context. Importantly, it can be situated amongst the emergence of a much wider attitude concerning the way that we have been approaching all dangers to a secure life. That is our approach to all the life-threatening and terrifying ‘risks’ (to borrow from Ulrich Beck) we face.This leads us onto our second change in signification, the complimentary shift also witnessed as the Global War on Terrorism shifted its parameters to become a Global War on Terror. Whilst as Noam Chomsky continually reminds us, the definitions employed to signify the ‘terrorist’ were loose enough to apply to anything that offered any alternative, ‘terror’ as a frame of reference to be securitised is unquestionably more expansive in terms of its objects, potentialities and probabilities.
The significance of this change cannot be emphasized enough, and becomes readily apparent when we then change our lines of inquiry away from identifying who are the terrorists? And what is a terrorist act? Towards an understanding of what is terror? Or indeed to whose terror are we referring? In response, by conceiving that terror is an extension in the frame of reference for all alternative and autonomous forms, then by invoking terror as the new signifier such formations are now unlimited in the bodily form itself. The form that terror adopts is no longer necessarily political. Indeed, this expansion in signification actually steps away from the political, as it tries to remove the political off the radar, thereby enabling all these autonomous forms, whether human or not, to become part of the same terror, and hence the same security problematic, a problematic that requires the management of risk in place of political solution.
This change to focus upon all terror as risk has a profound impact upon the political, since it signifies a shift towards an a-political response. This could alternatively be presented as a conscious strategy to strip the
system of any alternative politics. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us, that the life that is stripped of the political is the life that is bare (zoe), and thus for Sovereign power a life that can be killed without sacrifice. Bare life can be exterminated if the health of the system in question is threatened or can be improved. Therefore if the future of this Liberal project is found in its attempts to render all alternative-life politics in the words of
Agamben ‘bare’, then it is equally attempting to render all life potentially extinguishable, since it is reduced exclusively to a potentially dangerous life.
Towards a Liberal Tyranny?
What this article has set out to question is, what does the future of the political hold if we continually feel, at a global level, the War on Terror’s security embrace? If we can conceive of the argument underlying this
piece that the Liberal project can speak the politics of domination and oppression that we should clearly be troubled. In that one possible outcome of this war into the future will be a permanent war on which the system will completely depend in order to maintain its control over populations ‘in the interest of security’. And as such the system to which we are all increasingly becoming part of will be more akin to a Global Liberal tyranny reminiscent of its Athenian heritage. Within which the political is sealed to the unruly masses and only open to the technical and leisurely endeavours of the privileged few. A world in which the only thought permissible is that represented by sanctified knowledge. Such a future, which will no doubt wrap itself in the language of democracy and freedom, presents a terrifying prospect in that this system will result in a death of the political as it reduces all life to bare life - that is a life stripped of its politics, and whose life will become permanently surveyed in order to protect a narrowly defined body politic.
| |
| |
| |
| |
« First < 2 3 4
Page 4 of 4 pages
| |
|
|
