We are, if the president is serious here, a nation that has narrowly constricted its marketable talents to the deployment of violence. We can’t manufacture much of anything, but we can kill you. We can’t fix our schools, or build adequate levees to protect a city like New Orleans from floodwaters. But we can kill you. We can’t reduce infant mortality to anywhere near the level of other industrialized nations with which we like to compare ourselves. But we can kill you. We can’t break the power of Wall Street bankers, or jail any of those bankers and money managers who helped orchestrate the global financial collapse. But we can kill you. We can’t protect LGBT youth from bullying in schools, or ensure equal opportunity for all in the labor market, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or any other factor. But we can kill you.
Posts tagged war on terror
Posted 2 years ago
that there are masses of flag waving white people gathering in the streets outside the white house (and possibly other places) may be the most unsettling revelation of the night.
Posted 2 years ago
By his focus on how territory animates world politics, Stuart Elden demonstrates how far we are from the borderless world of popular fantasy. More specifically, in this deftly argued and richly empirical book, he shows how, in responding to 9/11 as an act of war, the U.S. government, through its association of al-Qaeda with the Afghan Taliban and in its preemptive invasion of Iraq, directly undermined the very territorial integrity norm that the terror of 9/11 was held to have violated. In this way, ‘terror’ sheds light on the continuing political importance of territory.
John Agnew
My geography professor just sent me a link to Stuart Elden’s work and I now feel compelled to read it.
Posted 2 years ago
But the irony is more insidious than just this paradox. The new multicultural American identity, co-authored by Takaki and others, constitutes a critical ideological support for the so-called war on terror which includes the invasion, and ongoing occupations, of Iraq and Afghanistan. Our culture is purportedly inclusive, tolerant and, by and large, non-violent, in its resolution of domestic conflict. Their culture, by contrast, is not. Our multiculturalism is contrasted with the inherent violence of Islam and the peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia as a justification for perpetual military intervention and custodial oversight.
Needless to say, this is an extremely reductionist perspective about the US, the Middle East and Central Asia, but it is this, more than anything, I think, that explains the inability of many moderates and liberals to dissociate themselves from American militarism.
Posted 2 years ago
Amnesty links US to Yemen attack
A US cruise missile carrying cluster bombs was used in an attack in Yemen that killed 55 people, most of them civilians, Amnesty International has said.
The London-based rights group released photographs yesterday that it said showed the remains of a US-made Tomahawk missile and unexploded cluster bombs that were apparently used in the attack on December 17 on the rural community of Al-Maajala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province.
”Amnesty International is gravely concerned by evidence that cluster munitions appear to have been used in Yemen,” said Mike Lewis, the group’s arms control researcher. ”Cluster munitions have indiscriminate effects and unexploded bomblets threaten lives and livelihoods for years afterwards.”
This blog has been retired.
