With the public being continually prepared by governments for the prospect of a new war, whether it be with Iran or China against Taiwan, it is necessary to reflect on our inching towards a warring society. Two years into the war in Iraq, it is now time to review its effects in the Middle East, how it conditions future conflicts elsewhere in the world and the extent to which it sets us in train for continuous conflict.

Those who supported the invasion should now ask themselves how comfortable they feel about expansion of the war into Iran. The invasion of Afghanistan was easily justified by the September 11 attacks and provided a kind of slipstream impetus for the war in Iraq. Now, with the ‘success’ of the Iraqi elections, the US can surely call on those supporters again in the effort to spread freedom further still. Then there is the signal state of unfreedom in North Korea. Does the threat of global war deter the supporters of the present war from conflict in North Korea or Taiwan? And if Venezuela should threaten the supply of oil, on which the march of freedom depends, then a military excursion into Latin America would, of course, be justifiable for those who love freedom …

While the supporters of the war are considering the prospect of continuous conflict elsewhere, they might look to changes at home. The calm public discussion of the fine legal points regarding detention without trial, the occasions for torture and the extension of state powers of surveillance and coercion are signs of the inverted relation to the good life characteristic of a warring society. Pro-war liberals should consider the contradictions of exporting liberal democracy as domestic freedoms are dismantled. Rather than leaving freedom as a nebulous and all-purpose justification, it is time to examine the difficult relation between war and freedom.

A moment’s reflection was sufficient — or should have been sufficient — to see that the WMD threat, the September 11 connection and the threats posed by ‘failed states’ were always hopelessly feeble reasons for war. The only defensible reason for waging a war like that in Iraq was the liberation of Saddam Hussein’s victims, the Iraqi people. And, one ought to admit, there are conditions under which war could be justified. This is to distance oneself from the absolutist pacifist position, which holds that there are no conditions under which war is permissible. In a circumstance where a people is at risk of annihilation — as was the case of the Jews in the late 1930s or Cambodia’s killing fields — to do nothing would be morally indefensible. Granted the other reasons for war — access to oil and geo-strategic advantage — the question arises: can the war be justified on the grounds that it leads to the liberation of a people from a dictatorship?

On these grounds, Iraq doesn’t bear up under close scrutiny. The only group that came close to this situation in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were the Kurds, and, as has been pointed out by more than one commentator, the current ‘liberators’ of Iraq were content to abandon them when they were most at risk.

Freedom remains the single compelling justification for war. But what is freedom in Iraq? Certainly, for a country like the United States, which proclaims itself a republic, one might have expected republican notions of freedom to have some sway. Republicanism, after all, is founded on the idea of freedom as non-domination, which, according to republican thinkers, differs from liberal notions of freedom. Where liberals tend to see freedom as the absence of interference from others, republicans hold that intervention is permissible so long as it is not arbitrary and does not lead to a situation where the target of such intervention is deprived of acting otherwise or has no avenues of recourse.

While Saddam’s Iraq called itself a republic and comprehensively failed to come anywhere near republican standards of freedom, the freedom now being pushed out across Iraq is hardly an exemplary case either. As John Hinkson writes in this issue, this form of freedom is conceived within the logic of the postodern market, a freedom that admits of no legitimate constraints, even those that underpin communal life. Complementing this analysis, Andrew Lowenthal shows the role of Australian companies in this market. To have any credibility, proponents of the war need to put some daylight between their own espousal of freedom of the Iraqi people and the crass opportunism that is being perpetrated in their name.

Beyond Iraq, in the region, a ripple of freedom and democracy is represented as an effect of the war. The approach of a Lebanon free of Syrian control, a Palestine inching towards its state and peace with Israel, the promise of fair elections in Egypt, the beginnings of pro-women reforms in Saudi Arabia … all these desirable prospects are being sheeted home to the invasion of Iraq. Of course, these events had their own more local catalysts, particularly the deaths of Yassar Arafat and Rafik al-Hariri. But even if it is only true in part that the war in Iraq is the agent of freedom, then those of us who opposed the war need to clarify the basis of our opposition.

Beyond the gloating of the supporters of the war, who think themselves vindicated, we need to consider the rapid dissipation of the anti-war groundswell. Is it only the implacable fact of the war — the US, British and Australian governments’ undaunted enthusiasm for it — that has foundered this peace movement? Or did the unaddressed questions of what justifies war, engulfed by our proper revulsion at the thought of war, weaken the movement? These questions need to be debated so that the open-ended state of war that stretches before us can be opposed.

Rather than attempting to expose the muddied motives of the US, a starting point in a clarification of the anti-war position would be a consideration of the arguments of the pro-war Left. Albert Langer has argued that the war in Iraq is justifiable as a genuine ‘revolutionary war of liberation’, an anti-medievalist fight that a real Left would get behind but the ‘pseudo-Left’ recoiled from.

If we can step past the cavalier rhetoric — ‘Bush knows that modernity grows out of the barrel of a gun’ — then we might consider this position. The pro-war Left welcomed Bush’s move away from the policy of containment, which saw stability in the Middle East as the key goal. Where stability is at best authoritarianism and at worst dictatorship, there is something to be said for not maintaining the status quo. Liberal democracy is desirable in place of dictatorship and, presumably for Left supporters of the war, a stepping-stone to a more radical liberation. If it takes a war initiated by a superpower in neo-conservative mode to get there, then so be it.

The move from ‘failed state’ to ‘client state’ is not a justification for war argued from the notion of freedom. It is a pragmatic geopolitical argument, which is a closer fit with the aspirations of a neo-liberal empire. The ‘failed state’ argument should be answered with a truly international intervention, rather than with an occupying power. If the UN has failed in this role in the past, then the project should be to enable that flawed organisation rather than side with an expansionist adventure. For the US, it seems that a functioning state, rather than a free one, is enough, as the list of those it includes amongst its friends — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia — shows.

The problem with the analysis offered by the pro-war Left — aside from the whiff of ‘the worse it gets, the better it is’ — is that it places its hopes in the establishment of liberal democratic forms, which have proven fairly impervious to radical transformation. Why would a US-installed electoral system, functioning in an oil-rich country administered by a re-established and extensive middle class, go on to produce a socialist democracy? Why would the US allow this to happen after expending so much of itself? It is more likely that the invasion of Iraq was carried out to ensure a post-Saddam Iraq was directed away from the type of society that would reject both its local travesty of republicanism and the neo-liberal version of freedom.

For examples of more radical democratic experiments, set into action without the assistance of a modernising invader, the pro-war Left might look to Latin America. No marines helped Paraguay to depose Stroessner. In Brazil and Argentina, Lula and Kirschner are attempting to roll back the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 90s. Venezuela is now an apt counter-image to Iraq, where Chavez is using oil wealth to achieve some autonomy in the global arena and to dismantle internal racial and class divisions. Condaleeza Rice has called Chavez a ‘negative force’ in Latin America. This ominous comment should draw the attention of the pro-war Left to the broad spectrum of those the US considers the enemies of freedom.

Some supporters of the war still cling to the possibility of WMDs, or the machinery for producing them, being hidden in Iraq or having been recently removed. Others have already distanced themselves from the WMD argument with the rationale of fragmentary or faulty intelligence. The rest of us accept that soldiers and Iraqi civilians were put in harm’s way in the cause of lies. Aside from the affront to the basic liberal value of the individual freely choosing their fate on the basis of clear information, such mendacity causes wider damage in the democracies of the nations who profess to be exporting a purer form of the idea. Those liberals who argued for the war, like Pamela Bone, should be troubled by this betrayal. It has normalised war and diminished the value of freedom. The warring society takes us further still from imagining alternative ways of living that would have co-operation as the primary principle rather than the market. The war in Iraq is the deadly meeting point of ‘freedom’ as market primacy and ‘freedom’ as a pure abstraction, only invoked when it needs defending.

Neither liberal nor republican freedoms can be developed in a democracy that is geared towards war. To dismantle the warring society, the anti-war movement must widen its scope and be ready to restore freedom and truth by setting out when it is right to kill or die for them. To put war in its place, so that no-one will be condemned to live in its state.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helps us to see this more complex side of freedom when he identifies and defends a practical relation between freedom and destruction. When the first instances of looting emerged in Iraq, he infamously claimed that the looters were expressing their freedom. He accepted a relation between freedom and destruction as the price of freedom. While such a claim would not do well in Philosophy I (where liberty would be distinguished from licence) Rumsfeld may have stumbled upon a significant truth about the new situation. What has emerged is a relation between a practical everyday freedom and destructive chaos that is shocking to our understanding of the tradition of freedom. Freedom has always had the potential to run riot but now the tradition is being turned on its head.

Empirically, it is not difficult to identify the chaos that has emerged from the first stage of the US campaign in Iraq. It has already called out new acts of terror in Saudi Arabia and Algeria. Iraq itself is a cesspool of disorganised anarchy, an anarchy attributable to the irresponsibility of the occupying powers. These developments gain some meaning when Donald Rumsfeld says that he does not wish the US to occupy Iraq for very long. While no doubt this will leave unresolved problems for the US interest in the control of Iraqi oil, it is becoming clear that Rumsfeld and his fellow neoconservatives have an agenda that does not fit with the history of occupation. He is ready to move on to the next piece of the action regardless of the chaos he leaves behind. He is the champion of the super-charged blitzkrieg, a contemporary Genghis Khan with a new technology. But what is the actual relation of freedom to this process of destruction?

The importance of a certain concept of freedom to the neoconservative circles directing much of current US foreign policy can hardly be doubted. In part this draws on a long history of freedom as an orienting value, one they correctly relate back to the establishment of the United States. And, while a little bashful about the terminology, they do not hesitate to associate this quest with that of Empire itself. Thomas Donnelly, the author of Rebuilding America’s Defenses for the leading US think-tank ‘The Project for the New American Century’, sees that association in positive terms. The term Thomas Jefferson used, Donnelly reminds us, was ‘empire of liberty’. Which is to say Donnelly’s concept is one of an ever-expanding liberty within an umbrella provided by the United States. Both the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq are expressions of this ‘non-negotiable demand’ for the American principles of liberty and justice that is made practical in the decision ‘to preserve and extend Pax Americana throughout the Middle East and beyond’. When George Bush recently offered his vision of a free trade zone between the US and the Middle East, he may have been naive but he was not kidding.

Donnelly in particular, but neoconservatives more generally, regard the notion of freedom as an unchanging one. In their view the US was founded upon the same principles that are pursued today. Their practice tells a different story.

The freedom that emerged in Jefferson’s day was relative in institutional terms. Those institutions that promoted liberty — legal institutions that promoted the rights of the individual, political institutions that allowed the expression of individual power, the market of Adam Smith — were relative to a vast array of community-based and other institutions that worked on different principles. The individual often found that the center of their lives — family and community — did not especially respect their individuality, but where these were supplemented by institutionalised liberty the resulting mix gave a unique expression of constraint combined with choice: a liberal society.

Whatever is to be said about this liberal society it does not offer the freedom championed by Rumsfeld, Bush and the neoconservatives. Their liberty is much more total. They are the Right Wing ideologues of the high-tech revolution. The liberty of the internet, for example, represents a change of society of immense proportions, a society of constant movement freed from the constraints of place. But the high-tech that makes the internet possible also supports a whole range of institutions that now hold complete sway in the United States and also increasingly dominate contemporary reality around the world. Now the market is so powerful it no longer acts as a supplement to community-based institutions. Rather it reaches into the family and community sectors and takes over their functions. We are ‘freed’ from the need for community. This is a liberty of a new kind. It is one that is not very responsible at all, because there is no longer a relation between institutions of liberty and other institutions that represent community. Now it is the much more technologised relation of freedom and surveillance that increasingly displaces the civil and liberal freedoms of the liberal era.

The revamping of these institutions by high technology culminates in the new military campaign. The reconstruction of the military by high-tech allows much Shock and Awe and massive destructive power, but it assumes no community responsibility. There are no positive actions that follow the destruction. Certainly, not unlike the aftermath of the campaign in Afghanistan, the complexity of the various groupings within Iraq is of little interest. Rather than be bored with the grind of building everyday institutions, Rumsfeld wants to move on to his next target. He has the mentality of the participant of a computer game. The new acts of terror in Saudi Arabia and Algeria triggers for him new meaning. It is one to be expressed by a focus on the next stage of invasion: is it to be Syria or Iran?

The world has never seen a force like this, one that combines a certain kind of freedom with the potential for complete destruction. Certainly it has no substantial interest in political liberty, while the unspeakable outcomes of nuclear war bring no fear to these warriors. Antony Beevor, the author of Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945, recently commented that the conditions for a public to support almost any policy are a combination of fear and hatred. Fear and Hatred: these have certainly gained ascendency amongst the US public since September 11. In the hands of Bush, Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives we have to prepare for the worst over the coming period. They combine the irresponsibility of the new freedom with the opportunities provided by a malleable public unable to resist their strategies even as they threaten hell on earth.

Actual events suggest however, that all is not well with contemporary Western societies. The collapse of corporations such as Enron and Worldcom have soured the idea of unfettered markets and shareholder democracies, while the failure to address the looming global environmental crisis and the ambivalent promises of an industrial and biotechnologically driven future tend to undermine any real conviction that the West has basically ‘got it right’. Indeed the notion that our problems can be solved through the endless policing of rogue states and the boosting of domestic economies via neoliberal reform — backed up by comprehensive state surveillance — offers little comfort.

It is here that John Carroll’s new book Terror: A Meditation on the Meaning of September 11 opens up a space for a different kind of thinking. Unlike other conservatives who simply want to affirm the social and cultural status quo (backed up by a hyper-charged US as global policeman) Carroll argues that September 11 provides the opportunity for the West to examine itself as a culture. In contrast to the realpolitik utterances of the Right, Carroll finds this culture seriously wanting. In essence he argues that we have squandered our cultural heritage in a way that makes us unable to appropriately respond to last year’s attacks. Carroll argues that Bin Laden’s charges against the West — no matter how insane or crazed his actions — ought to be taken as a serious challenge to precisely the kinds of triumphalism we have seen since the attacks last year.

Carroll goes on to indict Western culture as one without foundation, without belief. Our political and cultural elites are mere shadows of their precursors. Thus George Bush’s rallying speech to the world after the terrorist attacks was made via an invisible teleprompter, revealing his essential lack of conviction or ability, while the avant-garde composer Stockhausen embodies the cultural decadence of the West when he aestheticises the destruction of the WTC as the ‘greatest ever work of performance art’. For Carroll, the response by the West to the WTC attack provides an apt illustration of a culture-in-decline, whose belief in ‘functional rationality’ is exposed through the pointless sifting and classifying of the ruins of the Twin Towers for evidence, while the hysteria in relation to Iraq and Muslim culture generally reveals the hollowness of a belief ‘in redemption through decisive action’.

While it is easy enough to take issue with the sweeping nature of Carroll’s value judgements — on all of popular culture, on the decadence of European avant-gardes and sensibilities (Stockhausen is quoted out of context) — at a certain level of generality, his points resonate. The critique of contemporary Western culture has a long tradition on both the Left and the Right, from the Frankfurt School to Alan Bloom, Daniel Bell and so on. Even ultra-radical positions would agree with many of Carroll’s descriptions of a tranquillised and totally managed culture based in consumption. Furthermore, the maxims inscribed at Delphi upon the temple of Apollo that Carroll uses to contrast with the excess of a secular humanism out of control — ‘know thyself’ and ‘nothing too much’ — would be likely to be agreed upon by many people as appropriate guiding principles for a way of being.

Here lies one of the problems with Carroll’s position. On the one hand, much of what he says provides the way towards a radical re-evaluation of the West. On the other hand (and up to a certain point) it is almost too easy to agree with what he says. Indeed, the same principles of balance, constraint and self-knowledge are endlessly touted by new age movements, have become slogans at weekend retreats for managers, and appear in every B-grade martial arts film ever made.

Is it possible to take these ideals seriously so that they do not remain clichés? Carroll is relatively unhelpful on this point, locating the problem at the level of human weakness — either decadent elites or the populace existing on a diet of tranquillisers and soap operas. The problem surely lies in the social structures that Carroll fails to analyse as much as it does in the specific lack or destruction of our sacred heritage. How is it possible to ‘know thyself’ in a culture where a flexible personality has become mandatory in work and life, where the need to constantly reinvent one’s persona arises from the constant networking and rapid obsolescence inherent in information-based or service economy jobs? Is it possible to exercise restraint in a culture which is structurally underwritten by growth, where the spiritual has not disappeared but in fact is relocated in new-age cults or in the possibility of transcendence via the techno-sciences? The wisdom to be gained by the Homeric myths and the sacred possibilities in high culture does not merely exist in the content of those myths and cultural texts, but also in the social forms that carry them. If we are to gain the potential Carroll sees in these cultural documents, then the critique of the West needs to be more multi-layered than the one he provides — a culture of decadence and a loss of spirituality. One might want to ask whether the transformation of the strong leader into weak celebrity, or the fact that Bach is simply a cultural option signifying car ads as much as the sublime, is a product at the heart of the social and economic structures of the West as much as it is about spiritual bankruptcy at the level of the individual.

The location of an appropriate way of being in the examples of ancient myth and high culture are also problematic. While they may provide examples of the restraint, noble bearing and spiritual balance that the West sorely needs as a remedy for material excess, such examples are often produced out of inhuman conditions and practices. The ambivalence of the Frankfurt School — certainly no strangers to Homeric myth or high culture — serves as a useful reminder here. Walter Benjamin’s ‘there is no document of culture that is not also a document of barbarism’, Brecht’s rather more direct ‘the house of culture is built on dogshit’, or Adorno’s emphasis upon knowing one’s tradition in order to hate it properly, allow us to reflect on the conditions of possibility for noble culture or states of being — the often inhuman conditions of the societies which generated such cultural highpoints.

Carroll’s unwillingness to locate a sense of appropriate being beyond the individual is revealed by the following passage, somewhat striking in what is otherwise a thoughtful and introspective analysis. He writes:

As a world super-power America has been as benign as might realistically be expected of it. It does not invade the territory of others, nor enslave alien peoples, nor even set up puppet states.

Apart from revealing what is perhaps an excess of introspection on Carroll’s part (how does he explain Nicaragua, Palestine, South Vietnam, Panama, or the current regime in Afghanistan?) one might also ask why there is no link between personal being and the larger social and political context which might also impact upon that sense of being. Even Carroll’s discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness underplays the colonialism that enabled Kurtz’s ‘metaphysical horror’. While Carroll’s emphasis on a sense of limits is an important social and cultural corrective, he fails to distinguish between an authentic desire to escape one’s social or political situation and the unfettered desires of the decadent desiring subject of the secular West.

If we consider the current situation the West finds itself in — a largely unilateralist US armed with a significantly new doctrine of pre-emptive action, an unprecedented militarisation of civilian populations who are both policed and policing others, together with the hopes of economic recovery hoisted on new biotechnological investment — we may very well see the collapse of the civic and liberal social forms that form the minimum condition for modern democratic life. In the absence of these forms one could well imagine a highly authoritarian version of Carroll’s arguments manifesting itself, a version where ‘nothing too much’ dovetails with the increase in paranoia and intolerance of a state defined by exclusion of difference both at home and abroad. One might speculate on the impact of another terrorist attack on the West, the subsequent further reduction of the liberal sphere and the cranking up of the military industrial complex. Such conditions might well create a society which latches onto a kind of religious and cultural fundamentalism in order to have a minimum of social glue. I doubt Carroll intends such a future but the links between cultural despair, a rejection of secular modern society and an embrace of militarised authoritarian culture have disturbing precursors.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications Editor.

John Carroll’s Terror is published by Scribe.

But what else is new? It should have become clear to everyone by now that we have slid backwards to an amazing degree, and that the slide continues. The Victorian opposition under Denis Napthine has attempted to do a bit of political product differentiation with some lunatic US-style mandatory drug laws that will see — if enacted — party-going teenagers facing five-year prison terms. The Carr Government in NSW has ensured that it will never be gazumped by the Right on law and order by going there so far, so fast — now with drug and gun sniffer dogs on trains — that any further crackdown would involve the return of trial by ordeal. And an item in our ‘Rope’ section gives us a postmodern version of that, with a twelve-year-old being electronically tagged because she broke a court order (presumably one of New Labour’s ‘antisocial restraining orders’) not to enter a town centre.

Relentlessly, unceasingly, every dimension of political freedom is under continual attack. Political freedom — what one might call actually existing freedom — always has been under attack of course, but there have always been substantial elements of resistance. Now the forces of repression are gaining ground, and we have clearly entered a grey area between a semi-democratic public sphere and polis, and a post-democratic, post-citizenship one. Recent events have made it easy for anti-democratic forces and governments to prosper, but far more than actual terrorist events is behind such a collapse. The reactionaries are cutting with the grain. The collapse of a real alternative political imaginary and the triumph of neoliberalism has made the very idea of political contestation and conflict look unreal and marginal, and shifted the debate from the qualitative — how shall we live? — to the quantitative — how much of Telstra shall we privatise? In the latter realm power takes on the aura of automatic legitimacy and legitimacy takes on the aura of inevitability — and politics, the real politics of rights and institutions, of liberty and authority, takes on the air of theology, of an ethereal and fascinating debate about things no one believes in. This is the atmosphere in which the relentless march of tagging, private prisons, anti-assembly laws, ‘house invasion’ laws, abolition of the right to jury trials (in the UK), prosecution for email jokes about terrorism (in the US) and innumerable other crackdowns have occurred. Here, the anti-terror legislation has proved a rallying point, due to the ludicrous mismatch between the purported and real nature of the threat. Hopefully it will prove the beginning of a more systematic and cross-political resistance to repression, and the point from which we begin to push back the march of unfreedom.

But these military adventures and outcomes are only part of the story of any assessment of the major effects of September 11. It is also essential to turn to conditions internal to the United States. Certain hysterical states of mind require comment but also, crucially, some basic changes in way of life; for these latter changes tend to become a model for other nations. It would be romantic to think that a State would simply accept an event like that of September 11 without retaliation. But the hysteria and the comprehensive violence of the response goes far beyond simple retaliation. It forces us to reflect on what this crusade in the name of freedom means.

The first aspect of such reflection is the degree of unbridled aggression unleashed towards any person or state that does not agree with the view of the administration in the United States. This can be justified by the shock of September 11, but such a justification misses the point. The present aggressiveness has not simply been called out by the events of September 11. The willingness of the Bush regime to ignore the attitudes of others was first expressed in the violent rejection of limited environmental agreements made at Kyoto. And the lack of concern about throwing the world back into a nuclear weapons race which is implicit in the policy towards missile defence, indicates that our only super-power was already gearing up to assert its dominance in its own interests. September 11 certainly pushed it over the edge and triggered a new fury, but we already had a novel phenomenon on our hands before September 11.

Some of this aggressive behaviour can be explained by the first economic recession in ten years in the United States. The high-tech bubble had burst and the administration was ready to defend its interests. If protection of the environment entails costs to industry in trouble, ditch the protection! However the economy can hardly explain the turn to missile defense. It is more plausible that the recession brought into the open a broad range of insecurities and these had to find an outlet — and September 11 added to these insecurities with a vengeance.

That these insecurities are now intense and able to justify extreme action can hardly be denied. We now have an administration and broad public able to openly discuss and even justify the use of torture upon ‘detainees’ and ‘suspects’ to obtain information. A legal no-man’s-land has been established where there is no legal protection available from civil courts. Nor is there any available from international courts that deal with the rights of prisoners of war. The United States now captures ‘detainees’ who have no rights whatsoever outside of the rules and whims of the administration itself. Execution without right of appeal is only one of these possible outcomes.

In other words, putting to one side nuances and detailed analysis, this aggressivity has pushed past those legal protections that characterise a whole era. This is not a matter of the norms of this society or that generation. It bears on the whole range of rights and liberties that are associated with modernity that date from Magna Carta. They include principles such as Habeas Corpus, the necessity of legal authority for government action, rights of association and rights of the individual generally.

It is, of course, possible to put this down to a temporary phase of excess and to trust in a return to good sense. This may turn out to be the truth of it, but there is good reason to doubt it. Arguably it is not a matter of this government or that politician that needs to be turned around after a temporary phase of excess. After all, the breaking down of legal protections is no more than an actualisation of what has been contemplated and acted out as fantasy in the media for some time. The ‘Clint Eastwood’ representation in film was an expression of frustration with how the legal world could no longer offer justice and manage crime. The pathetic and barbarous solution to such a break-down was typically a return to ground-zero, a resort to direct retribution without legal principle or that absolutely minimal involvement of the law implicit in ‘zero tolerance’.

September 11 has allowed authorities to cast aside caution on these legal matters and achieve a radical reactionary breakthrough. What has been acted out in the media is now the reality of the emerging ‘order’. This reality is also supported by changes in broader social realities such that an imagined return to the liberties of modernity may turn out to be a very painful and costly fantasy.

There are apparent paradoxes in this shift. In the pursuit of freedom major modern liberties are being eliminated. How can this be so? This would make sense if the concept of freedom was cynical rhetoric but the new social realities suggest a different logic at work. There are new forms of liberty and freedom today and these can be contrasted with the broader tradition of freedom with substantial consequences including legal ones. The defence of these new liberties is what the war over terror is about. As this world takes shape the great modern tradition of liberty becomes little more than a memory.

When legal institutions move into decline an easy response is to simply dismiss them as useless. A more serious approach to such a decline would study the relation of legal institutions to everyday settings. For it is the changes and the social divisions now apparent in everyday settings that make modern legal norms unworkable. These are the same changes that made September 11 possible.

Globalisation, freedom, surveillance: each of these reference points helps to outline the character of the social world that has so little sympathy for the liberal era. When George Bush announces his strategies for the defence of ‘freedom’, he is simultaneously announcing a defence of the globalisation process. And to manage society in this global era, forms of surveillance are the typical response. How do these three elements hold together?

Globalisation stands behind many of the tensions that erupted on September 11. Some people benefit from it — salubrious Manhattan is a prime symbol of these people — and others are disadvantaged. They are thrown out of work, they have their local economies and cultures undermined. There are many opponents of globalisation. Some are semi-organised in the anti-globalisation movement. But many nations and regions suffer desperation and demoralisation, sensing rather than knowing how globalisation works against them. These processes alone have generated major tensions in the world, between nations but also within nations. In the United States a very large proportion of those who are regarded as in employment, actually exist on the margins on minimal wages and in part-time unpredictable work. In these matters and tensions alone one can find one line of argument about the cause of the new aggressivity in the global world.

Economic globalisation is one thing, but behind globalisation is a global market that is also, as a structure, aggressive. And this market, unlike the market that Marx and Adam Smith knew, carries with it a culture that represents a new way of life. It is here in this global way of life that we can identify a new form of freedom that is especially fragile and is now embattled.

This new mode of freedom has been a long time coming. Beginning last century, but especially since the 1980s, the developed world has begun an experiment with a new type of culture, one where others are mostly known via distance technologies. This has always been an aspect of modern life — the postal service, for example, connects others who are distant — but now the volume and manner of it, i.e. instantaneous global interconnection dominates to such a degree that it has become a qualitatively different thing. This is the culture of the internet, the fax, the telephone and the mass media: where others more and more are only known via technology. It is this culture that supports and relies on the new global market, the economic rationalist market. It is a way of life with much glitter and fabulous wealth for some, but significant levels of indifference towards others at the same time.

This culture, so dependent on high technology, finds it difficult to empathise with cultures — like all of those in the Third World but also to some degree communities and regions in our own context — that rely to a significant degree on face-to-face structures. For such cultures knowing others in the flesh and blood and inter-generational social relations are built into the structure of the everyday. Western liberal freedoms — like freedom of association — were won within cultures of this type. They were always liberties that were a limitation upon the workings of community-based associations that value presence and place. They never displaced those associations except in limited aspects.

In the global culture George Bush is championing, liberty or freedom gains new meanings. For a start, the global market is a market where there is enhanced freedom but also indifference to others. In a broad sense others are needed for the workability of the market, but any particular other is dispensable. As a way of life the global lifestyle is one of constant movement but with no stable place. Freedom to move, freedom to start again, is a central tenet of the culture. An intense form of individualism accompanies this special form of freedom. Freedom is no longer this or that freedom. It is generalised freedom, the right to fleeting social relations, freedom as a way of life.

But this new freedom necessarily has its own limits and these do not feel like freedom at all. Because such general freedom undermines communities that value presence and place, the freedom offered by distance technologies is offset by new means: the surveillance made possible by distance technologies. Freedom and surveillance go hand in hand in global society. They form a social duo.

We have never before experienced a culture that predominantly works at a distance. But this is what George Bush offers us when he calls for the defence of freedom. He offers generalised freedom for global winners, globalised surveillance, and weapons that terrorise by virtue of how they work at a distance. The trade-off is the end of liberal freedom, in the first instance, for all those who are socially redundant — especially for “detainees”, refugees, “suspects”.

The terror of September 11 and the terror visited upon the whole of Afganhistan may yet prove to be the harbinger of a greater and more encompassing terror implicit in this struggle over ways of life. Yes, George, you are right. After September 11 the world will never be the same.

The answer is necessarily a product of subjective assessment rather than absolute measurement. Government power and individual freedom are necessarily in tension. A central feature of any constitutional democracy is that the government acquires power and the people agree to limit their freedoms by being subject to that power. The will of the majority is imposed on all through the mechanism of government power.

Every grant of power to central government reduces, to some extent, the freedom of the citizen. Individual rights are constrained in two ways:

First, by the countervailing rights of others. (Your right to swing your fist stops just short of my nose). Second, rights are constrained by government authority. My right to accumulate wealth is constrained by an obligation to pay tax. Collectively, we restrict our rights by conferring authority on government.

From this simple account, it will be seen that the authority of government operates to restrict our individual freedoms for the collective good. When government exercises these powers in ways which unduly restrict our freedom, it is seen as authoritarianism.

In a healthy democracy, the balance of central authority and individual freedoms is carefully maintained. The threat of electoral punishment keeps governments more or less sensitive to the electorate’s collective view about the appropriate limits of its authority.

Authority v. Freedom

The balance between authority and freedom is compromised in three main circumstances:

Firstly, when effective opposition is absent, or so compliant or so weak as to enable government to ignore electoral retribution. This is the position in totalitarian regimes. It was briefly the position in Victoria a few years ago. It is the position in Federal parliament as at October 2001.

Secondly, in times of war or civil emergency, when the people cede to government greater than usual powers in order to meet a collective threat more effectively.

Thirdly, when the freedoms at issue are those of the politically irrelevant — the disenfranchised or the voiceless. In relation to the third group, governments typically have, and exercise, atypical authoritarian power. The voiceless minorities are subjected to unusual authoritarian powers granted or tolerated by an electorate which is not subject to those same powers. For example, until 1967 Indigenous Australians were not entitled to vote. They had no voice in the Australian democratic process. They were treated in ways which would not have been tolerated if all citizens had been treated likewise.

Similarly, refugees have no vote and no voice. Governments are able to exercise much greater powers over them because they are silent and (for the most part) invisible.

The Australian public accepts, virtually without a murmur, the fact that asylum seekers are detained compulsorily while their claims for asylum are assessed. This policy, accepted by both major parties, would not be tolerated if it applied to white middle-class voters. It applies, in practice, to penniless non-voters from Asia and the Middle East. The government justifies it as an exercise of national authority. We accept it without questioning its moral foundation.

Is the government’s treatment of refugees to be regarded as a proper exercise of authority or as unacceptable authoritarianism?

The line between authority and authoritarianism is ultimately to be found by asking what freedoms we regard as the irreducible minimum. Any restriction of freedom beyond that point will properly be considered authoritarianism. But the analysis has another dimension. Can we allow that some groups have fewer freedoms than others? Clearly Hitler’s Germany thought so — the Jews, the Gypsies, the communists and homosexuals were stripped of the rights enjoyed by others. Before 1967, Indigenous Australians were denied rights enjoyed by others. We regard these events as aberrations: our common humanity is the baseline in which all our rights are grounded.

It is the mark of an authoritarian state to accord inferior rights and freedoms to those minorities not favoured by the government.

Australian’s Treatment Of Asylum Seekers

Against this background, consider the way we treat asylum seekers.

Compulsory detention

Quite apart from the fact that conditions in the camps fall short of any acceptable standard, there is the fact that holding refugees in detention is itself a violation of international obligations. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that:

Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law (Article 9 cl. 1).

Anyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful (Article 9 cl. 4).

The government argued vigorously, and successfully that the refugees on the Tampa, in Australian territorial waters, were not entitled to habeas corpus.

The inescapable fact is that the government has not honoured its international obligations, and it hides behind a mask of respectability while it treats refugees like non-humans.

At 23 March 2000, there were 3,622 people held in immigration detention facilities of whom 27 people were in Perth, 82 in Maribyrnong, 315 in Villawood, 805 in Port Hedland, 1,105 people in Curtin and 1,288 in Woomera. From time to time, people are held in immigration detention in other locations (DIMA website).

It is notable that a disproportionate number are held in the most remote locations. Woomera is about six hours drive from Adelaide, in the middle of the desert. To get to Curtin, you drive six hours east from Perth, through Kalgoorlie and Boulder. Port Hedland is north of Perth, about an eighteen-hour drive. These God-forsaken places, in the least hospitable parts of Australia, hold over 80 per cent of asylum seekers.

In a departmental briefing paper Mr Ruddock said:

Australia’s Migration Act 1958 requires that all non-Australians who are unlawfully in Australia must be detained and that, unless they are granted permission to remain in Australia, they must be removed from Australia as soon as practicable.

This practice is consistent with the fundamental legal principle, accepted in Australian and international law, that in terms of national sovereignty, the state determines which non-citizens are admitted or permitted to remain, and the conditions under which they may be removed.

A small truth conceals a great lie. It is true that sovereign nations can decide who may enter their territory. But Mr Ruddock conveniently overlooks other international laws and obligations concerning the treatment of refugees.

In May 2000, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission reported to the government that its detention regime was in breach of international law. The government has ignored the report.

In 2001 the Australian branch of Amnesty International reported as follows:

International law demands that detention of asylum-seekers normally be avoided, and resorted to only when necessary, and only for specified reasons:

· to verify identity

· to determine elements of a claim

· to deal with cases where documents have been destroyed

· to protect national security or public order.

International law attempts to ensure that detention in any given state is not arbitrary or unlawful and is open to judicial review. Australia, however, mandatorily and automatically detains all asylum-seekers who enter the country without proper documentation.

Amnesty International is concerned that asylum-seekers — and often refugees — should not be detained for longer than necessary under international law. In Australia, however, many remain in detention for months and sometimes years, including women and children and those suffering torture and trauma. Refugees in detention also find it difficult to exercise their right to legal representation — a right which even arrested criminals are allowed.

A very recent report of the central body of Amnesty International reported on Australia in the following terms:

Human rights advocates called for a Bill of Rights to safeguard the rights provided in international human rights treaties to which Australia is party. Their concerns were echoed by the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC), which monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. They found that treaty rights have no legal status in Australia and cannot be invoked in domestic courts, leaving gaps in Australia’s human rights system and impeding the recognition and applicability of treaty provisions.

In May, the Prime Minister failed to participate in public events to recognise past human rights violations against indigenous peoples and indicated his opposition to proposals for reconciliation …

Breaching international obligations

The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs sought revisions of international refugee standards to deter irregular movements of asylum-seekers. More than 2,940 ‘boat people’, including 500 children, were automatically detained under the Migration Act, which prohibited courts from ordering their release. Hundreds were held in tents and other improvised detention facilities in remote areas. The national Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission investigated allegations that guards ill-treated immigrant detainees and neglected medical care. In September the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had to cancel plans to investigate the immigration detention regime, after the government failed to allow it to visit.

The government claims to exercise its powers in accordance with its international obligations. That is a lie. Australia’s systematic detention of refugees directly breaches our international obligations. Its hostile response to such groups as the Tampa refugees is a betrayal of our commitment to the human dignity of refugees.

The government, armed with the largest powers imaginable, turned the full force of those powers on the weakest and most vulnerable people on earth. It did so to placate the relaxed and comfortable, the complacent, xenophobic Australian electorate. It did so in order to take a cheap electoral advantage. Such shabby conduct deserves our contempt.

Refugees Convention

The preamble to the Refugees Convention includes the following statements of principle and aspiration:

Considering that the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved on 10 December 1948 by the General Assembly have affirmed the principle that human beings shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination.

Considering that the United Nations has, on various occasions, manifested its profound concern for refugees and endeavoured to assure refugees the widest possible exercise of these fundamental rights and freedoms.

The DIMA website contains a document which sets out the standards which must be maintained at detention centres by Australian Correctional Services, a commercial operation, which is paid to run them. Compare the image with the reality:

[The operating standards] ensure that the needs of detainees are met in a culturally appropriate way, while at the same time providing safe and secure detention. They focus on areas such as dignity, social interaction, safety, security, staff training, health, accommodation, food, religion, education, and individual care needs.

An eye-witness account of Woomera from an Adelaide solicitor revealed:

two working toilets for 700 people, both leaking, sand on the floor to ‘mop up’ the leaking effluent

four working showers, for 700 people, hot water only available after midnight

food not to be taken from the dining room for children or sick adults

no coffee/tea/food between meals, only water

no air conditioning, fly screens, or heating. (Temperatures during the day reach 45 degrees; at night it falls below freezing; there are millions of flies.)

inmates have to queue for meals, medical attention, phones (two for 1300 people) for up to two hours. Persons seeking medical attention (including painkillers for broken leg, raging fever, tonsillitis, etc.) each have to queue in the open in front of the nurse for up to an hour and a half to obtain their medication.

nails may only be cut by the nurse, who will do one person per day

women must queue each day for their ration of tampons/disposable nappies

there is no baby food or formula. One woman with a six-month-old baby who was struggling to maintain breast feeding was advised to feed the baby powdered chicken stock mixed with water (no sterile equipment of course).

food is beyond description; many will not eat it.

ICCPR

The preamble to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights refers to individual rights as follows:

Recognizing that these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person,

Recognizing that, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ideal of free human beings enjoying civil and political freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy his civil and political rights, as well as his economic, social and cultural rights …

Compare this portion of an affidavit of an Iraqi woman in a detention centre (the names are anglicised for security):

1. The adults were handcuffed. I asked to have my handcuffs removed so I could hold Robin, my two-year-old son. The guard did so but two other officers came up. One of the officers dragged me by my hair and pushed me against the wall. They searched my body in a humiliating way after pushing Robin into the corner. He continuously screamed and cried. The guard handcuffed me again and tried to legcuff my child. Two other officers prevented him from legcuffing my son.

2. We arrived in Port Hedland late in the afternoon but were given nothing to eat or drink until the following morning at 8.00 a.m. For around thirty-two hours the children had no food. We were held in a small room with no toilet or water facilities whatsoever. I repeatedly asked to take my child to the toilet but often had to wait for up to an hour before being escorted to the toilet. A child of two cannot wait and I had to allow my son to relieve himself onto a bundle of clothes in the corner of the room. Later I washed these clothes out when I was taken to the toilet on one of the twice daily toilet breaks.

Declaration of Rights of the Child

The Declaration of the Rights of the Child says, in part:

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have, in the Charter, reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights and in the dignity and worth of the human person, and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom (Preamble par. 1).

The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity (Principle 2).

Here is portion of an affidavit sworn by an Iraqi woman (again, the names are anglicised for their security and, incidentally, to remind you that these events happened in Australia):

1. On a day in August 2000, on or round 5:00 am about twenty to twenty-five Centre Emergency Response Team (CERT) staff broke into our rooms and handcuffed me, my son Andrew and my husband James. They dragged Elizabeth off her bed by her shirt, and together with Alice we were driven to Juliet compound. I observed an officer filming us with a video camera. The Jackson family was taken with us and I observed each member of that family was put in a separate cell.

2. I was put in a cell with Elizabeth and Alice. Later, when we were released after fifteen days in Juliet Compound, my husband told me that Andrew had been put in a cell with him, but that later he had been in a solitary confinement cell. Billy, our five-year-old son was also put in a solitary confinement cell.

3. During that fifteen days in Juliet Compound I begged the guards to open the door so the children could use the toilet which was located outside the cell. For the first two days this request was refused/ignored. The children had to use a plastic bag which I found in the cell as a toilet. I starved myself for two days as a protest before the guards would allow the children to use the toilet.

4. My son, Andrew, later described to me his experience in detention. He said words to the effect of: ‘I needed to go to the toilet and called the guards. After a few minutes four guards came rushing down the corridor. They broke into my cell wearing CERT gear and armed with blocking cushions. They pushed me back and held me against the wall. One guard held my legs, the other held my hands behind my back. A third guard used his arm to encircle my neck and hold me tightly. I thought I would choke. The fourth guard swore at me. When I answered back, the officer punched me in the face.

5. In November 2000, our family lodged a complaint against the ACM to the Federal Police. The incident was registered but to date there has been no response conveyed to us. … Andrew later tried to hang himself.

The Future

Last year, over 8 million people arrived in Australia from overseas. Most were short-term visitors. Ninety-two thousand were migrants who were given permission to stay here permanently. About half of them came from Anglo-Saxon countries. More optimistically, about half were not from Anglo-Saxon countries. The sky did not fall.

In each of the last two years, about 4,000 boat people arrived. So they account for about 5 per cent on top of the orthodox migrant intake. Or one refugee per 5000 Australians. They risk death at sea to get here. That risk is all too real, as recent events show. It can be presumed that they were driven by fear and desperation to embark on such a venture. Those who, like the Tampa refugees, come from Afghanistan, are unquestionably fleeing one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world. A regime so bad that we are now engaged, together with the United States, in armed attack on Afghanistan.

We have a choice: imprison asylum seekers, in defiance of international law, or let them into the community after initial screening, whilst their claims for asylum are assessed.

There are four reasons why we should let them into our country and into our community:

First, because it is our obligation under international law. This is purely a formal reason, but international disgust at our present stance provides an added reason for adhering to our obligations.

Second, because they are human beings. We must treat them decently — for the sake of their humanity, and for the sake of our own humanity. The way we are treating them diminishes us.

Third, because of the long-term problems for our society if we continue to treat them badly. The world is a much smaller place than it used to be. The events of 11 September demonstrate, with horrible clarity, just how small the world is. Indonesia, where millions seek early refuge, is our near neighbour. The refugees fleeing from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are our neighbours. We are close to them all. We cannot ignore them by pretending that culture and geography create a safe distance. They do not. Nor does geography obscure our moral obligations.

If we imprison asylum seekers, they will suffer great physical and psychological harm; they will start their new lives in Australia with a legitimate sense of grievance; they will think Australia and Australians heartless. If that is the result, it is our fault. It is utterly predictable. If we imprison them, it stains our conscience and blights our future as a nation.

Finally, because it costs us so little. Suppose we allow them into the community after brief initial screening. And suppose (against all previous experience of new migrants) that not one of them found a job. And suppose we went so far as to give each of them a living allowance to enable them to live with dignity. That small exercise in compassion would cost each Australian six cents per week.

Six cents a week is a small price for a clear conscience.

Some of them would not be accepted ultimately as refugees. Of that group, some may not surrender themselves to the Department for deportation. If they manage to stay out of the Department’s way, it probably means that they are living law-abiding lives. The rest will be accepted as genuine refugees. We will have fulfilled our legal and humanitarian obligations to them, especially the children.

The alternative is to keep on doing what we are presently doing: ignoring humanitarian imperatives; ignoring international law; ignoring international scorn; and scarring a generation of genuine refugees whose claims to stay here are ultimately accepted. We should not leave out of the equation the devastating effect on these people of the way we treated them in their first few years. These people, who had the courage and wit to get themselves here have already shown, by the fact of arriving here, that they have courage and determination. They will be valuable additions to Australian society. They are a part of our future. We should not break their spirit before we admit them.

The way we treat asylum seekers in Australia is a naked example of authoritarianism. The tragedy is that those who suffer it are politically irrelevant, and those who have the power to change it either do not know or do not care.

Julian Burnside, QC, acted for Liberty Victoria in the Tampa case.

This article is also available in MP3 format by clicking here

Words failed onlookers in the moments immediately following the attacks. Footage showed hundreds of stunned, mute and dust-covered New Yorkers. The scenes were disturbingly familiar — many eyewitnesses were reminded of a movie set, yet another Towering Inferno. While these disaster-film images were too easily absorbed, their implications defied immediate description.

This was remedied in typically blunderbuss style by President George W. Bush, who broke off a primary school lesson to announce that his government would investigate ‘to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.’ This statement suggested that the culprits were not merely a few disparate individuals, but ‘folks’, or even its homophonous ‘Volk’, implying a unified, coherent grouping of people. Significant elements of the American public took this as a cue for directing anger towards specific nationalities, ethnicities and religious affiliations. The days following 11 September saw an upsurge in attacks on Muslims and even Sikhs, compelling Bush to speak from a mosque calling for restraint.

Without being able to pinpoint a culprit or motive, Bush identified these events as attacks on freedom by advocates of evil and terror. The massively ambitious aim of this new war was to ‘rid the world of evil’. Bush quoted apocalyptically from Psalm 23, while former president Bill Clinton also identified ‘evil forces’ as the perpetrators. This Old Testament rhetoric was rapidly adopted by the international media. Immediately under its masthead, the Age dramatically proclaimed a scenario of ‘Good versus evil’. The military buildup around Afghanistan has been given the remarkably biblical name ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (formerly the even less tolerable ‘Operation Infinite Justice’), both names betraying anxiety over the status of future retaliation. No location or method is suggested in these labels (as in ‘Desert Storm’). Instead, they gesture towards a precariousness of objective and uncertainty of duration.

In this rhetoric, evil is embodied by rogue individuals. Remove the villains and evil ceases to be. Osama bin Laden was quickly singled out, though persuasive evidence of this connection is yet to be made public, despite claims by Tony Blair and Alexander Downer of its existence. Bush seems to imagine himself as leading an oversized moral rabbiting expedition. ‘We will smoke Osama out’, he declared, ‘and get him running’. Another twist upon the same theme was Bush’s sheriff-like declaration that bin Laden was ‘wanted, dead or alive’. Bush is clearly more comfortable inhabiting the moral universe of the Wild West than the complex, demanding sphere of international diplomacy.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has contributed a vivid array of organic metaphors to this new verbal war. In the days following the attack we heard that terrorist networks needed to be uprooted and destroyed. The villains became unwanted weeds who should be removed forever from the garden of goodness. The terrorists operated in ‘cells’ that should be excised, like cancerous growths. Powell and his colleagues believe the coming conflict will be a dirty, muddy business. Soldiers will be struggling against other soldiers and inhospitable terrain. Despite repeated assertions of the novelty of the present situation, such possibilities sound disturbingly familiar.

Gone is the euphemistic high-tech military language of the last dozen years — of surgical strikes, smart bombs, pin-point accuracy and minimal collateral damage. Military campaigns in the Persian Gulf and Balkans saw the rise of a disembodied rhetoric of engagement, where precision technology took the place of messy hand-to-hand fighting. Talk of star wars missile defence shields has been replaced by Star Wars rhetoric of virtuous Jedi knight-figures taking on the dark side. Acknowledgements are being made that the billions spent on whizz-bang surveillance gadgets has been misdirected. Calls are being made for increased ‘human intelligence’ in the place of such solecisms as ‘digital intelligence’ and ‘military intelligence’.

In a stunning rhetorical move, Bush extended the threat to Muslims in general by announcing that the new war was a ‘crusade’, echoing the call of some Taliban extremists for a Jihad. To call this comment inflammatory is an understatement. A crusade, in this context, cannot be separated from the historical attempt by Christians to expel Muslims from the Holy Land. Not only has the language of Bush and his sidekicks often seemed ill-considered, but it has also been thoroughly unmemorable. We are yet to hear a ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech, or a phrase as pithy as Churchill’s claim that never ‘was so much owed by so many to so few’. Bush’s rhetoric has operated at the least demanding, most elementary possible level, entirely lacking substantial political ideas, such as anti-totalitarianism or a defence of egalitarian principles. It aims not to cohere a population around meaningful political goals, but instead functions as a child-like fantasy of eliminating baddies and banishing monsters. Tony Blair has contributed a mood of moral seriousness, repeatedly intoning upon the ‘utmost gravity’ of the situation, though his discourse too falls into reductive invocations of evil.

Formal political dissent in the United States has been almost entirely absent, with the single senator who called for restraint subsequently receiving death threats. Democratic processes fail when public exchange is discouraged and political leaders display unanimity. Informed, critical perspectives become invisible and discouraged when the United States asserts that the only options are being with us or against us. It is no coincidence that this contraction of public debate is being accompanied by previously unthinkable constraints on civil liberties. Independent thinking and genuine dialogue have been the first casualties in the new shadow fighting.

While Bush continues to conjure a sufficiently nefarious villain, missiles begin flying towards Afghan civilians. I suspect a chasm will gradually emerge between Bush’s condescending, simplistic political language, and the enormous suffering that such a frenzied demonisation will produce in Afghanistan. The hollowness of this political rhetoric is likely to fail over time, as the burden grows of drawn-out military action. I doubt that such B-movie language of good against evil can sustain the necessary force of persuasion as soldiers arrive back home in body bags.

At no other time has a war existed at such a crucially linguistic level. The precise shape of this rhetoric matters enormously, as it literally defines the otherwise unknown enemy. Unfortunately, the simplified and moralistic language of response has so far only stirred up anti-Muslim feeling and calls for immediate bombing. As the United States confronts the difficulties of military retaliation, the rhetoric of description needs to gesture towards deeper understanding. If a reasoned and appropriate response is to emerge to these horrific attacks, the first critical conflict is the war of words.

Douglas McQueen-Thomson is Assistant Editor of Arena Magazine.

Americans have long watched from a distance as living persons have been terror-bombed in towns such as Beirut, Belfast, and Nairobi, or in Hiroshima (1945), Hanoi and Haiphong (1972), Tripoli (1986), Baghdad (1991), Basra (1999) and Belgrade (1999). However, this time it has come home with a vengeance. Just listing a few of the cases brings home the issue in a second way. All of the instances listed from Hiroshima to Belgrade involved US forces conducting acts of terror from a distance against a US-defined evil Other. In all cases the US government knew that civilians would probably die, and in all cases they argued that it was simply necessary.

If news commentary and letters to the paper are anything to go by, even by mentioning the fact that the United States has itself acted as purveyor of terror, I will be immediately taken out of context and wrongly assumed to be saying that the 11 September attack was the deserved outcome of a history that goes back decades. Not so. Nobody deserves to be terrorised. Rather, my sympathy lies with the thousands of demonstrators who marched through New York City on the weekend after the terror, concerned about the plans of the US government.

What I am saying, firstly, is that nothing excuses acts of barbarism, but secondly, that barbarism knows no boundaries of proclaimed good and evil. As George W. Bush declares war on a network nobody is sure was involved, and as the missiles begin to hit Afghanistan, it is possible that the terror we have already experienced will be repeated and repeated across the globe. Afghanistan may be only the beginning. The obscenely named Operation Infinite Justice opened the possibility of self-confirming, escalating hostilities from both sides. That it has hastily been renamed Operation Enduring Freedom underscores the Nineteen Eighty-Four Ministry-of-Love-style use of language. This is not a comic-tragic naming in the way the strategic invasion in 1983 of peaceful little Grenada by a handful of Ronald Reagan’s crack troops was called Operation Urgent Fury. This time, unless the current direction changes radically, it will involve the tragic undermining of freedom — perhaps with a glimmer of positive rethinking of US policy towards Israel and Palestine.

Operation Enduring Freedom opens the possibility of a globally continuous state-of-war in which the enemy is both abstract entity (terrorism) and particularised ‘evil’ Other (bin Laden, with new figures of evil named as the situation unfolds). We find ourselves in a ‘post-war’ condition where the enemy no longer carries the status of national sovereignty or national territory; where the targets are defined on the run and the theatre of operation can be named without justifying evidence; where the state-at-war can rename the terms and conditions of a post-liberal society of hyper-surveillance; and where fine risk assessment and increased insecurity are two sides of the same coin.

Despite this real possibility of a horrific new kind of postnational state of war, it has supposedly become unpatriotic to doubt that American military action is both necessary and just. The rubbish that has been reported in the press is extraordinary.

Why, at a time when war seems to be going beyond old-fashioned nation-state conflict, is criticism defined in nationalist terms as un-American, or even un-Australian? Understanding the mainstream response to the attacks takes us deep into the heart of Middle America. On Saturday night, one week after the attack, the world watched as Hollywood and MTV mourned the tragic loss of life that occurred in attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. The program, a telethon fundraiser entitled America: A Tribute to Heroes, was broadcast to 210 countries. Tom Hanks, boy-next-door and star of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster war movie Saving Private Ryan, opened the evening in a low-key manner. He named the brave souls who reacted to the hijacking of Flight 93 and intoned their last words, ‘We’re going to have to do something’. Celine Dion sang ‘God Bless America’. The evening ended with the now iconic video-image of the US flag flying silently over the debris of the collapsed towers. No commentary. No introductions. No credits. It was almost moving.

I wanted to mourn, but throughout the entire program there was not an off-key note, not an unscripted moment that called for self-reflection about the consequences of massing a war machine to strike at an unverified enemy. Perhaps my response is unfair given that it was a ‘tribute’, but unfortunately the unease was confirmed at every turn by the words of the mourners. Clint Eastwood, affecting the same expression he wore in In the Line of Fire (1993) spoke with gravelly intensity about ‘ultimate triumph’:

It was the twenty-first century’s day of infamy. It was a day that will live in the annals of courage and patriotism. Tonight we pay tribute to those who were lost and those who survived the fire and the fate that rained down upon them, and the heroes at ground zero who had life and death wear an indelible badge of honour. We celebrate not only them, but all our fellow Americans, for the intended victims of this attack were not just on the planes, and at the Pentagon, the World Trade Centre. They were wherever else they roam the sky. The targets were not just the symbols of America but they were the spirit of America. And the intended victims were all three-hundred million of us. The terrorists foresaw a nation fearful, doubtful, ready to retreat. Oh, they left us wounded, but renewed in strength. And we’ll stand and will not yield. The terrorists who wanted three hundred million victims, instead are going to get three hundred million heroes, three hundred million Americans with broken hearts, unbreakable hopes for our country and our future. In the conflict that’s come upon us, we’re determined as our parents and our grandparents were before us to win through the ultimate triumph — so help us God.

By a generalising shift, expressed first in the words of US politicians, it becomes an attack on all of us, an attack upon civilisation. Doubt has become unpatriotic because the nation of America feels that any disloyalty begets social disintegration. This is the response of an insecure nation undergoing change. In this context, only clichéd reversions to the Manichean Cold War rhetoric of the kind ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ seem adequate to the momentousness of the new situation. America: A Tribute to Heroes, Clint Eastwood’s set-piece and Celine Dion’s rousing and sentimental rendition of ‘God Bless America’ take us into the fears of mainstream American culture. They also take us back to an earlier filmic attempt to understand a different war — the film Deer Hunter (1978): the war, Vietnam. The last scene of Michael Cimino’s film closes on a few friends in a small Pennsylvania town pub trying to make sense of their ravaged lives. In wan unison, but growing in volume, they sing ‘God Bless America’. The final scene is stopped in freeze-frame as they raise their glasses in hope. As the video cover says, ‘it’s more than a requiem for their dead comrades; it’s an anthem for a living American tradition of making mistakes, rueing them and starting afresh’. America, the land of the brave and the free, having forgotten the lessons of that war, redefines itself yet again as the land of transcendent promise.

It is significant that Vietnam is the one war that cannot be named at this time. The concept of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ originally referred to the pathology of a nation that believed itself to have lost the war out of weakness of will. However, in the years since that war, the concept, if remembered, has taken on a new reality. Rather than it being pathological to be obsessed by weakness, it is now necessary never to be weak. It has been renamed in terms of what has long been called ‘American exceptionalism’. Richard Nixon wrote an entire book claiming that America really won the war — it lost the peace, he said. And dozens of popular cultural moments in the meantime have confirmed this sense. During the TWA hostage crisis in 1985, President Reagan quipped into the microphone during a sound test that ‘… after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time’. Life and fictional renditions intermingle. In these times, when the rules of war are being rewritten, the mainstream American sense of its own exceptionalism is continuous with the past. There are lots of counter-examples to these themes, but it can be argued that they continue to dominate mainstream thinking and practice. One continuing theme involves a ‘mythical tribute’ to the regeneration of peace through violence. It is the peace that always comes after the conflict, like the freeze-frame at the end of Deer Hunter or Three Kings. From the Indian wars, the War of Independence to Vietnam and Kosovo, ‘peace’ is always the backgrounded but transcendental moment that links the community of fate across time. A second theme is the essential virtue of acting to defend Truth, Infinite Justice and the (American) Way. Defence always requires action. Despite the failings (or heroism) of any one particular individual or institution in the United States, or even of the state itself, there is always an active figure of redemption. President Bush knows that he might be making a mistake in the particularities of his actions, but (connecting the two themes) given that an outsider has cut across the peace of the community of fate, he has no choice but to act. He will be forgiven for acting wrongly, but not for acquiescing to an outsider’s attack on American soil.

This brings us to a third theme, the ambiguity of an abiding sense of home soil and the projection of a frontier that has no boundaries. Having its roots in an expansionist ideology called the doctrine of Manifest Destiny first proclaimed in 1845, American national interest has long been defined in terms that treated extensions of its frontier as part of its civilising mission. With the first two themes we can, for example, rewrite them with Australian examples from Gallipoli to the doctrine of ‘forward defence’. However, with this third theme of sacred soil/extended frontier the United States has an accentuated fear of the unbounded movements of others that goes beyond the fears that even mainstream Australia has evinced recently over the Tampa refugee crisis. The old domino theory and the necessity of defending the world against communists in Vietnam, was reborn against drug runners in Panama, against Arab expansionists in Iraq, and now against terrorists in Afghanistan. Australia follows the United States into crusades (sorry, I should not use that term ‘crusades’ any more). By contrast the government feels that it simply has to be there. Notwithstanding the occasional recurrences of American ‘isolationism’, the norm is for US leaders to feel an overriding pressure to act in the world.

One way of carrying this baggage of the past into the new global disorder has been to project violence from a distance. The US war-machine has increasingly been remade around weapons of mass projection. The only lesson learned from Vietnam was not to get so many young compatriots killed and wounded: 58,000 Americans dead and 300,000 wounded. We should also remember that over one million Vietnamese died. Working forwards from the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons of mass projection are defended as increasingly calibrated responses, precisely targeted, and directed as much against infrastructure as against personnel. Many Americans know from the long-term effects in Iraq and Kosovo that people continue to die long after the projection of terror has stopped; however the political decision-makers equally know that the destruction of ways of life is quickly submerged in the complexity of immediate events.

With the attack on New York and Washington, cultures and structures continuous with the past have been overlaid by something new. The United States has been attacked by a group of people who apparently have no home and no name. Moreover, they are persons prepared to put their bodies on the line. It means that the abstract war-machine projecting power from a distance will not in itself work. In one respect the coming war means going back to days of Vietnam when Americans too died in embodied combat. In other respects, as I have been concerned to say, we are in new and changing territory. Despite all the facile suggestions that Bush has shown intelligence and restraint — mostly because he does not know what to do as winter comes to Afghanistan and it becomes obvious that a cruise-missile solution will not work — we face a ‘war’ of secret missions closed even to the managed scrutiny of the world’s media, a combination of strategic abstract strikes and brutal embodied incursions. In their pretensions at least, they make up a totalising campaign that reneges on prior concerns about either Just War proportionality or the rights of those who have not been proven guilty.

A positive future will entail rethinking the mechanisms of global justice, including an international court of law and UN peace-keeping forces. It will entail nation-states rethinking their responsibility to the world. And it will entail a basic questioning of the culture of abstract global ‘peace’ that has brought us so much misery.

Paul James is an Arena Journal editor.

I was reminded of this eaves-dropped moment when I looked at the films which emerged from 1999′s millenial anticipation. It brought back the confusion of Geeks One and Two – trying to fit a desire for authenticity with an exploration of new technology. Last year saw the release of films which posed similar questions but in other ways: messing about with the idea of self and playing on anxiety about the status of the human body. Three, in particular, which take up this identity/body speculation, are Existenz, Being John Malkovich and Fight Club.

With a concentration on the body, Existenz is typical of David Cronenberg’s filmaking. Having both written and directed this latest production, he was able to exercise many of his familiar representations of a cross-over between the body and technology. Like Videodrome (1983), Existenz indulges in some salaciously gooey connections between hard technological artefacts and the soft tissue of organs. In this film, the key image is a computer-like game which is programmed into a ‘MetaFlesh Game-Pod’. It is, in turn, attached via an ‘umbycord’ to the player. The cord plugs right into the body at a ‘bioport’, looking like a cross between an anus and a power socket, located at the base of the player’s spine. Existenz explores a dissolution of the boundary between the world of objects – still objects, even if they are squishy and pulsating – and the skin-bound realm of the body. Unlike the sad story of Geek One, the body is not made absent by technology, rather a kind of technologised body dominates Cronenberg’s vision of a new self. This is a common aspect of many speculative or science fiction films now: the future has ceased to be shiny and clean, like in Star Trek, and has become instead grimy and disordered, like in Blade Runner. Perhaps since Ridley Scott’s Alien, technological development has been incorporated into the banal mess of living. Of course Cronenberg’s messy technology extends this further still, being likely to make squelching sounds as its secretions collect in a puddle on the floor. The representation of technology as an imposed order, or as a means to control human and natural environments, is replaced by a kind of organic ubiquity. Soft and meaty machines are everywhere, like microbes or creeping weeds. Instead of the Enlightenment image of the human as sophisticated machine, Cronenberg goes in the other direction. We are presented with a machine that squeaks when you massage its bumps; bringing it closer to our own fleshy potential for intimacy and horror.

I was also struck by the similarity between Cronenberg’s ‘Metaflesh Game-Pod’ and the ‘LUMP’ or ‘Life Form with Unresolved Mutant Properties’ which features in the computer-manipulated images by Australian photographer Patricia Piccinini. In Psychotourism 1996 and Psychogeography 1996, both recently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, the LUMP appears as a kind of baby being shown around simulated landscapes by a computer-glossed mum in the form of Sophie Lee. Piccinini has described the LUMP as ‘the human form completely redesigned by an engineer and an ad agency; physiognomically efficient and marketably cute’. (Gallery, Dec 1999-Jan 2000)

Aside from the visual similarity between Piccinini’s imagery and Cronenberg’s, the theme of the marketability of organicised technological fantasy is another link. (I hope this will eventually bring us back to the problems of Geeks One and Two.) The narrative in Existenz revolves around the consumer trial of a new game which plays like the now-familiar computer adventures. However, instead of images flickering in a beige box or clunky goggles, the game is acted out within the ‘space’ of the players’ minds – a kind of networked dreaming. The sinuous circuitry, kidney-shaped mobile phones, and games which hook straight into the unconscious, are the result of carefully managed marketing. All the action, real or otherwise, takes place within a focus group of potential consumers. Standing in the role of producers, the film has ‘Antenna Research’, the typically faceless corporation staffed by young designers and promoters. It is mysterious in its decision processes and apparently centreless in its structure. In the background there is a fear of betrayal from within the invisible company, creating an X File-like atmosphere of paranoia about institutions. The theme of manipulation of the individual by unseen forces is strong here, like it was in another of 1999′s body/consciousness movies, The Matrix. While that film could be read as an anti-capitalist fairy story infused with an individualist populism (which the US also produces in another form: the right-wing militia), Existenz is more mundane in its representation of the way the market reaches inside us. The manipulation of desire sits uncomfortably alongside an expectation of increased freedom, creating a murmuring dissent within. It’s a contradiction already familiar to our two Geeks.

Like Existenz, Being John Malkovich places the desire to expand the self into the heart of the contemporary consumer. But both films show this desire for image commodities being accompanied by an anxiety about how we can hold it all together. How can any part of a person – identity or body – remain inviolate against such a pervasive want? Being John Malkovich presents this terrible freedom explicitly. The film works from the fantastic premise of a ‘portal’ which allows anyone to enter the body and mind of the celebrated actor John Malkovich. The Malkovich ‘ride’ lasts only fifteen or twenty minutes, but the intensity of total integration into somebody else has ordinary people lining up to experience the ordinary life of a semi-famous man. The porousness of Malkovich’s consciousness is an accident of fate, not a condition of his fame. In this world anyone could, at some point, be open to unwilled occupation by others. Malkovich’s fear of having no part of himself which is not fluid, not able to be tapped by strangers’desires, is the other side of the consuming self. Being John Malkovich, like Existenz, shows an openness of the body leading to a kind of fissuring of being. The ease of access to alternative identities not only represents a techno-enabled liberation of consumption, but also a profound exposure of the self – identity unhoused.

In Existenz marketable objects are like bodies and in Being John Malkovich the whole self is for sale, body and soul. Both films show crowds of consumers unafraid of the technical processes which they must undergo in order to absorb other people as images. While this might be celebrated by some as a breakthrough to the post-human, the nastier side of the breach is the way we, in turn, become more like things. The logic is essentially pornographic in the way that all our desires become freely available. Our appreciation of others is separated from any surrounding meaning which might unwrap the consumable parcel. This is where Fight Club shows a swing in the opposite direction, helpfully pointing out the differences between you and your apartment. This film reasserts the body as the primary location of identity, but not without finally slipping into nihilism. The disquiet about an exposed self and the conflicting desires for authenticity and freedom, which haunt Existenz and Being John Malkovich (and our Geek friends), are the real meat of Fight Club. This longing for vividness of experience is the linking motif across the three films. Authenticity of self becomes the same as feeling things intensely. But in Fight Club the power of intense consumption has reached its limit. The strong identification through solid commodities (Ikea’s lifestyle-in-a-lounge-suite packages are targeted nicely here) is replaced by a communalism based on a reassertion of masculinity. Risk, death and violence – usually invisibly present in information societies – are made explicit. So the fearful anticipation of the plane or car crash, with which we quietly live, is instead met head-on in a kind of ritual embodiment where men beat the hell out of each other. There are parallels with Trainspotting in this withdrawal from the clean and tidy self that shops for identity at the mall or through the Internet. The alternative presented is an authenticity derived from the exaltation and suffering of a body under pressure. And I can almost see those Geek boys in the fight scenes; the murmuring need for intensity charged up to a testosterone scream. Maybe, if they hadn’t had good IT jobs to go to …

The men in Fight Club find worth in the exposure of euphemism. As they crack open the smooth surfaces of the spectacle society, as in guerrilla operations they destroy pieces of corporate art, chain stores and banking centres, they increase their sense of group identity. Even if that action is no deeper than a ‘boyish’ pleasure in destruction, the physical – even libidinal – thrill endows meaning in pointed contrast to the models offered by pop psychology or the work ethic. But Fight Club, again like Trainspotting, also points to the difficulty of containing identity in extreme physical experience. It requires continuous escalation of the way that the event, the body and the self can coincide. The whole burden of self-formation is heaped onto the body. A charismatic male leader, the physical closeness of other men and the continuous presence of risk are all that holds the group together. Along with the masculine pack mentality there is a kind of anti-modern rejection of technology, bolstering these men left behind by a de-industrialised society. Locating identity on the body appears to be stabilising, reclaiming self from the seething flow of transient images.

While Fight Club tries to fix the self in the exhilaration of the body it celebrates the primitive, presenting a physical kind of identity as constrictive nostalgia. Of course it is not surprising that a film coming out of a Hollywood studio (Fox) would portray a commune as regimented, brainwashing and backward-looking. In that generic requirement, Fight Club reverses its critique. The expansive aspiration of identity, which drives vertiginous consumption to new heights in Existenz and Being John Malkovich, even breaks out in base world of Fight Club. (Protecting the pleasures of plot, I won’t reveal the film’s exact twist on the inventive resources of identity.) The solid boundary of muscle and sweat becomes a claustrophobic restriction. Worse still, nothing comes after the intense physical moment. The face-to-face meeting with destruction and risk is merely a respite from an ongoing meaninglessness. In the end, total body identification provides an authenticity as lame as piped images and electro-simulations.

Am I any nearer a resolution of the Geeks’ prescient problem? Does the kind of oozing and physical technology offered in Existenz and Being John Malkovich provide some kind of satisfaction of their desire for intimacy? I don’t think so. Those Geek boys were talking about a kind of presence which isn’t enabled by the simulation of proximity. Getting a sense of the virtual surface of interchangeable personas doesn’t get Geek One any closer. The inadequacy of that kind of spatial solution is even a half-acknowledged tension within the films themselves: the anxiety of a constant and caustic search for authentic identifying images. And the other side of their troubles, the hope to expand the self in new terrain, tipping over into abstraction and ephemera? Geeks beware the return of the repressed body as played out in Fight Club! But physical intensity diminishes over time, not unlike the aura of the image-commodity. The body can’t contain the longing to augment the self in the world – a fact that the Computer Geek knows well.

Is there a way through? If only this Book Geek had sat down with them and talked face-to-face, instead of just listening in like some low-tech bugging device. Maybe we could have worked out a reconciliation of self: perhaps a new social form which incorporates a certain mobility of identity and a bodily security. But then maybe resolving such issues will require more than a tableful of Geeks, talking.