November 16, 2005
John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, in an open letter to the Australian people assured us --people or citizens--that the Bali Bombings were committed by 'a murderous group of Islamic fanatics who despise the liberal democratic, open life of Western nations, such as Australia'. (The Australian,26 Nov, 2002). That sentence continues to ring in my ears to this day. Good and evil are seen as clear cut and democracy represents a self-evident good--it embodies freedom that is our way of life.
But who is this 'we' in the good liberal democracy that constitutes our way of life? It is not those arrrested for terrorism. They are bad. It is not the refugees. They too are bad. Nor is it those those who committ sedition. They are opposed to freedom and our democratic way of life. 'They' are aliens who can be taken into custody during a state of exception--the war on terrorism, The 'we ' are the patriots, the good patriots.
The anti-terrorism legislation is what John Howard, the Australian PM, calls exceptional measures for exceptional times. The exceptional can be reinterpreted in terms of the category state of exception
Is the state of exception within the juridical order or is it external to it (ie., political and so extra juridical)? Or does what is internal and external blur and go fuzzy. Those who write about the discourse of terrorism do not link this discourse to a state of exception. But that is what the war on terrrorism is: it is a state of exception, and it is this that justifies the curtailing of individual liberty in our liberal democracy.
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