The truth is that governance in the US has been slipping fully into the modes and mindset of a security state for a long time. The government sees large parts of its population not as citizens or constituencies, but as potential objects of a counterinsurgency campaign. The security state no longer legitimates itself by safeguarding the general welfare. Neoliberalized and mortgaged up to its testicles, it’s given up on that. It defines itself by its ability to defend the borders: to provide military triumphs, a sufficient if never unquestionable sense of safety, and some colorful, invigorating rah-rah . Since there is a limit to how often threats from outside can be conjured or concocted, it eventually turns to other enemies, internal, intestinal. Its purpose becomes defending part of the population against another part.
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War at home and war abroad cooperated. Other nations’ sovereignties surrender to our impotence over what happens within our own. Most recently, the US presided over a massacre in Jamaica: local police and military killed dozens of civilians in order to capture a single drug lord who had offended against the Americans. What we ask of our allies in South America or the Caribbean is that they become slightly less chaotic versions of Waziristan.
This means, too, that the Wars on Drugs and on Terror amount in essence to a single War: the big one, on the Poor. Mike Davis wrote a decade ago about the coming urban landscapes where states will control unemployed and disenfranchised masses of migrants with force. That’s what you’ve got in Brazil. What the US pushed Jamaica’s government to do, Dilma Roussef did at her own discretion (with, to be sure, the added push of cleaning up Rio for the coming Olympics): she called in the military to invade and clean up the favelas.
The NYPD, I’m afraid, is onto something. It’s true that the closest thing to a terror attack on the city in the last decade was foiled, not by their millions in surveillance money, but by a T-shirt vendor who noticed an oddly smoking car in Times Square. But for Mayor Bloomberg, this only means we have to enlist the entire T-shirt vending community as permanent informers. Faced with the fact that “The NYPD routinely monitored the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations at colleges including Yale, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania,” he answered: “If going on websites and looking for information is not what Yale stands for, I don’t know.” We need an enemy, and if a sophomore blogger is what we’re stuck with, run with what you got. The watching cameras multiply. This is our new world, where all the wars are civil wars.
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More here.