The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization by Steve Martinot

Author:Steve Martinot [Martinot, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2010-06-17T21:00:00+00:00

The Legalist Rhetoric of Intervention

A juridical dimension to this interventionary project is revealed if we look at the recent invasions as an “attack sequence.” Starting with Grenada in 1982, there have been military assaults on Nicaragua (1982), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq again (2003). Each one violated a central principle of international law. Not only was each an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, in violation of the UN Charter (to which the United States is one of the original signatories), but each killed many people (hundreds in Panama, thousands in Yugoslavia, tens of thousands in Nicaragua, over a million in Iraq), did serious damage to an economy (at times creating a toxic environment through the use of depleted uranium in Serbia and Iraq), and created an internal refugee situation in the victim nation, also in direct violation of international law. Each one pretended to bring a criminal to justice, suggesting that in this attack sequence the criminalization of the target was more directly (i.e., less analogically) related to the white supremacist criminalization of those it racializes. And each received overwhelming support in the United States, at both institutional and popular levels. Let us look at the structure of these invasions.

The invasion of Afghanistan was ostensibly to arrest Osama bin Laden, for ostensibly having organized the events of September 11, 2001, though the FBI admitted it had no proof of a connection. Instead, the United States was charging him for the August 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya,5 though apparently not seriously, since the “warrant” could easily have been served in July 2001 when he was receiving dialysis treatment in the American Hospital in Dubai. Instead, in violation of international law, Afghanistan was bombed, with enormous civilian casualties and without stated political goals beyond “getting bin Laden.” Whole villages were obliterated. Thus, a military campaign was launched whose massive technological violence led only to “clearing the land” of any coherent political organization. All to arrest one man?

After the Taliban were removed from government, an interim administration was invented by pasting together various warlord factions that had previously been kept in check by the Taliban and whose rule was foreseen to be worse than the Taliban they replaced. While Afghani women spoke out against the invasion, knowing their situation would not improve, they were nevertheless used to propagandize for the invasion with messianic rectitude.6 Indeed, messianic purpose is always better served by gratuitous action and an absence of express political goals.

Domestic objection to this assault remained small. What little there was received inordinate censure or repression. Public figures who spoke against the attack were vilified (e.g., Bill Maher). People were fired from jobs, students who wore anti-war T-shirts were suspended from school, university professors were sanctioned, and so on.7 The internal atmosphere thus matched the vigilante mentality (impunity) of the invasion itself.

What was missing, of course, was real judicial legitimacy. The government’s reference to international (UN) legalisms was deemed sufficient by politicians and the media to both symbolize and authorize the illegal intervention.

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