Power, Discourse and Victimage Ritual in the War on Terror by Michael Blain

Author:Michael Blain [Blain, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Freedom, Political Science
ISBN: 9781317076810
Google: wQrtCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29880894
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Patriots vs. Traitors

Once the war had been officially declared by the Bush regime a victimage ritual was launched against internal “enemies”—the dynamism of “patriots” denouncing villainous “traitors.” After the official discourse articulated by war proponents inside and outside the Bush regime, was locked into place, any public figure who questioned the assumptions behind this discourse or, more radically, articulated a counter-discourse of the meaning of 9/11 and the appropriate response and the subsequent war, were denounced and vilified by supporters within and outside the Bush administration, punished, and threatened with violence if they did not shut up. This campaign was particularly vicious in its attacks on any public figure who dared to contest the central foundations of war proponent’s discourse: refusing to call the villains terrorists, contextualizing the perpetrators’ motives and characteristics, or discussing the background of power relations involved.

Creating and sustaining public support for the war is a political problem. In part, this problem can be solved by orchestrating periodic campaigns of ritual victimage against public figures who dissent. The implication is that they are internal enemies and traitors. The official, as well as the self-appointed “guardians of the social order,” must engage in “moral entrepreneurship” by staging highly publicized “witch hunts” to establish the norms and limits of patriotic and unpatriotic public discourse (see Becker’s [1963] account of this phenomenon in political campaigns against deviants and criminals). They actively hunt down disloyal and treasonous “deviants” to “tar and feather.” By this means they build their authority as virtuous patriots who stand tall and proud in support of the commander-in-chief and the troops. This practice functions to differentiate loyal patriots from the treasonous “dissenters” who aid and abet the “enemy.” Antiwar activists can mount campaigns and elaborate a counter-war discourse that incites direct resistance to the war, one that effectively questions the necessity and legitimacy of the war (Blain 1989, 1994). One counter to this domestic threat is to categorize dissent in the context of war as treasonous. Actors, particularly those with access to the public stage in a society founded on the liberal principle of “freedom of speech,” may interject threatening questions or challenging counter-discourses into the arena of public discourse.

The right to assemble and petition the government is enshrined in Article 1 of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” In the past this right has been constrained by the emergency constituted by a formal declaration of war by the Congress. In the age of Empire, this problem has been complicated by the leadership role played by the U.S. in “policing” world security threats. The presence of nuclear weapons has augmented a more or less permanent “state of exception” and the development of a national-security state cloaked in secrecy (Wills 2010, Danner 2011b).

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