By Gene Ray, transform.eipcp.net, 6 February 2008
The following text was written for Kulturrisse (Vienna) and will come out in German in March.
Six and half years into the US-led “war on terror,” its most disastrous effects, above all on the people of the Middle East, are well known. This war of systemic enforcement is exposed and condemned by the death, destruction and misery it has inflicted on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere. Less obvious and visible, however, is the attack simultaneously being waged against progressive social movements and struggles under this sign of planetary state of emergency. In the context of a general militarization of everyday life, an unprecedented expansion and perhaps qualitative intensification of official surveillance, and an erosion of basic civil and democratic rights, there is a clear tendency among states, almost without exception, to criminalize established forms of dissent and protest and to re-categorize forms of civil disobedience and direct action as “terrorism.”
The “war on terror” has to be grasped as an innovation in the global use of repressive state power. In effect, it normalizes, as well as globalizes, aspects of the state of emergency or exception – that power of the state to declare the existence of an absolute and intolerable enemy. Following the atrocities of September 11, 2001, the US president did not suspend the US Constitution or declare a curfew. But he did perform the speech acts of emergency and exception, including a classic activation of the friend-enemy distinction: “Whoever is not with us, is with the terrorists.” The proof of the state of emergency can be found in the arsenal of expanded powers asserted in legislation from the USA Patriot Act of 2001 to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and in similar laws adopted by states across the world. But these markers of exception were combined, in a very schizophrenic way, with an insistence that the normality of everyday life will not be disrupted. “Go shopping,” the US president famously told Americans. In other words, good citizens are expected to accept and embrace the new state powers not as a temporary break with normality, but as the arrival of a new normality.