Resisting Americans

Abstract

In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler laments the loss of the value of dissent as part of the fabric of contem-porar y A merica n democrat ic cu ltu re. A “you’re w ith us or you’re w ith the terrorists” narrative spun in post-9/11 America serves to stifle intellectual debate from the Left, quell the media, and make a mockery of the antiwar movement. This suppression of dissent works in tandem with a suspension of civil liberties for illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists, all working toward producing a consensus on what certain terms, such as “terrorism,” get to mean and for whom it is reserved. Butler writes:

The United States, by using the term positions itself exclusively as the sudden and indisputable victim of violence, even though there is no doubt that it did suffer violence. But it is one matter to suffer violence and quite another to use that fact to ground a framework in which one’s injury authorizes limitless aggression against targets that may or may not be related to the source of one’s own suffering.³

What Butler identifies as a first-person narrative renders the suffering of others, or more to the point, the violence inflicted upon the Other, most notably Arabs, in the “war on terror”, invisible; their lives made to not count, their deaths thus ungrievable and public mourning impossible.

If someone did this to my street, I would pick up a weapon and fight. I can’t kill these people. They’re not terrorists. They’re fourteen-year-old boys, they’re old men. We’re occupying the streets. We raid houses. We grab people. We send them off to Abu Ghraib, where they’re tortured. These are innocent people. We stop cars, we hinder everyday life. If I did this in the States, I’d be thrown in prison.

Darrell Anderson¹

I didn’t know much about the Geneva Conventions, but I knew one thing: what I had witnessed was wrong. We were soldiers of the U.S. Army. In Iraq, we were supposed to be stomping out terrorism, bringing democracy, and acting as a force for good in the world. Instead we had become monsters in a residential neighborhood.

Joshua Key²