Imagining Justice in a Culture of Terror: Pedagogy, Politics, and Dissent

Abstract

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 stand as a clear demarcating moment in the history of the United States. These attacks on U.S. soil destroyed the comforting illusion of security and invincibility long held as the mainstay of our democracy. No longer would U.S. elites, political officials, and businessmen exist unscathed by the vengeance of the “enemies” that their own greed and imperialist visions helped to produce during the latter years of the twentieth century.

[U]nder the sign of a timeless war on global terror … dissent as a form of political activism was placed strategically by the rulers of the security state on a continuum of lawlessness leading to terrorism, a continuum in which protest was perceived as disloyal, as the unpatriotic act of the enemy within, as a threat to the safety of the polity—in short, as undemocratic.

Robert L. Ivie (2004)¹