I've been listening to the G8 leaders and the conservative commentary on the London bombings. What I'm hearing is a particular kind of discourse that is buried within the chatter about terrorism and the rally around the flag patriotism.
The discourse says that the Islamic terrorists threaten the destruction of democracy itself, with all the values that democracy embodies and protects. In order to combat this threat effectively, democracies need to do acts that are evil in themselves but constitute a lesser evil than that posed by terrorism.
Another strand of the discourse is that we are caught up in a war on terror. The actions of Al-Qaeda are those of terrorism; terrorism cannot be countered by political means; it can only be met by war. And war entails the use of coercion, force, and violence.
Another strand is that we have to do all that is necessary to ensure the security of the (American, or Austrlaian, or British etc) people. So it is necessary that democracy, with its rights and liberties, may require an abrogation of at least some of its rights and liberties, at least for some persons and for a limited time.
It's a situation of emergency that makes it right to do this in the service of good of the civilised freedom loving peoples.
That is the conservative discourse I've been hearing in the wall to wall media commentary around the London Bombings. It makes me uneasy. But I'm not sure how to tackle it.
What is easy to say is that the state of emergency (or exception) has become the normal:--that is the insight of some of the work of Giorgio Agamben.
But I'm not sure how to deal with the ethics of this. On the one hand we have those saying that it is necessary constraining liberty in democracies to deal with threat of evil. On the other hand, we have libertarians talking in terms of the erosion of basic human rights by the national security state.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 8, 2005 04:23 PM | TrackBack