How the War on Terror Makes Us Slaves (Keith) by X.

It is widely acknowledged now that Bush rules through fear but what is not usually acknowledged is that fear, like all ideology, needs institutional grounding. Ideologies don’t just seep up out of the ground they need to be organized and disseminated. The institutional basis for fear is organized around the “War on Terror.” There are a number of apparatuses devoted to the production of fear in the U.S. like the department of homeland security and the Patriot Act. In New York City, for example, fear is produced and cultivated when we hear, while riding the subway, that “the police have the right to inspect all packages” or “if you see something suspicious call the police” or when we see in soldiers in Penn Station or police carrying automatic weapons. No amount of police can make us “safe” but their presence is not intended to make you safe, but to make you afraid. The anti-war movement, such as it is, must become a movement against the war on terror. As the majority of the country now opposes the war in Iraq we must make it clear that Iraq is but one symptom of the problem which is the war on terror itself.

The War on Terror dovetails with previously existing discourse to create a fascistic common sense of which Rudy Giuliani stands out as supreme spokesman. The fascistic common sense solidified through fear works in the following way: pose any social problem and the obvious solution is fascistic. For instance, the solution to crime is more police and more prisons, the solution to a terroristic attack or even supposed threat is the suspension of civil rights and police are allowed to search people on mass transportation at random. The correct response to these violations according to the ideology of fear is played back for us regularly by the media through the “man on the street interview”: “its worth it if it stops terror,” “its worth it if it saves one child,” “if you have nothing to hide you won’t mind being searched.” The “man on the street” in these examples (not chosen for prime time by accident!) is not only consumed by fear he is speaking like a happy slave. The War on Terror has consolidated a long turn from the “home of the brave” to the “home of the coward” from the “land of the free” to the “land of the slave.”

Long ago Benjamin Franklin made a remark that is often repeated of late: “Those who would exchange liberty for security deserve neither.” The meaning of his comment, however, is not as clear as it first appears in the present context. Franklin like the other so-called “founders” believed in Natural Rights and the social contract. The idea is expressed in the preamble to the declaration of independence which states: “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…” “Inalienable” means that they cannot be taken or given away they are sourced in nature or god, NOT the state or government. You cannot trade liberty for security because you cannot allow the government to take away your rights-- they are inalienable. The idea that the government gives you rights that it can take away was the definition of tyranny for the founders. According to social contract theory we join a government (the contract) to collectively protect our natural rights. If you think the government gave you the rights and you “allow” the government to take away your rights you do not deserve freedom or liberty because you accept your slavery.

Revolutionary Democracy, as we are developing it on the blog, needs a very different conception than the classical liberal theory of natural rights. Natural rights are based on “god” or “nature.” But, this is where Natural Right theory fails; “god” does not really exist, and god is certainly not going to intervene in the world to help us get the promised rights. We cannot appeal to god or nature to get back the freedom which the war on terror and the ideology of fear have taken. While fighting in the courts or appealing to the ACLU and the like is well and good, only the revolutionary democratically organized power of people can secure these rights. The rights are but codifications of social freedoms won by people “in the streets” or in the parlance of political science in “civil society.”

Interestingly towards the ends of his life Malcolm X began to argue that we needed to move beyond the struggle for “civil rights” and begin to struggle for “human rights.” He said we cannot fight within the United States for civil rights because what we are in effect doing is asking the people who take away our rights to give us our rights. Instead he argued we need to fight for human rights and take the struggle to the United Nations where other nations (especially the so-called third world nations) could support us. Malcolm is addressing the fundamental problem in natural rights theory: on the one hand the rights come from god or nature but on the other you need some sort of institutional power (the government or the United Nations) to get them. Malcolm recognized the problem and although a religious man he didn’t expect Allah to deliver the rights but he made a crucial error by appealing to the United Nations for rights. Moving beyond Natural Rights theory means we need both a new explanation (or theory) of where our rights come from (not god or nature, but organized people) an we need new institutions (what we call dual power) to establish and secure them.

In the 70’s when the movement was not yet utterly defeated there was a massive expansion of our rights and social freedoms. The Civil Rights Movement that Malcolm wanted to move beyond won rights not from god or nature or from the state, they won the rights in the struggle and the rights became codified in the state, e.g., desegregation, affirmative action, Roe V. Wade, birth control, sex ed, lowering the voting age, etc. Even the suburbs were affected. As a kid growing up in a NJ suburb I remember the public high school had an “open campus,” students were allowed to come and go as they pleased (the campus was “closed” with the Reagan onslaught). Now the schools are mini concentration camps with guards and metal detectors. The drinking age in the 70’s was 18 etc, etc.

The point is that rights do not come from the government as in fascistic theories of which we currently live under as common sense, nor do they come from god or nature as the “founders” believed, they come from organized people and the most powerful form of organization is revolutionary democracy because it wastes no one’s energy but utilizes and unites our collective social power. As we mentioned before the idea that “power comes form the barrel of a gun” is wrong (which, by the way, is why “the greatest military the world has ever known” can’t beat a country without much of a military to speak of). Power (and our “rights”) comes from organized people.