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In the classics of 9/11 anniversary articles, “freshness” is an eternal theme: “unprecedented” changes triggered by “unprecedented” threats.
Commentators mourn the “lost innocence” of the United States-erasing the blood of colonial colonization, imperialist expansionism, and enslavement from the slate of American history for centuries.
Authorities condemned the expansion of mass surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties as “[Osama] Bin Laden’s victory over American freedom-erased the pedigree of policing, surveillance, and counterinsurgency measures that have long suppressed Native, black, and Latino dissidents in the United States.
The writers lamented that the airplane has changed from a symbol of “freedom and adventure” to a weapon of “fear and doubt”-forgetting that the use of airplanes as a tool of terror was not invented by Al Qaeda in 2001, but in the 1900s by Italy, France and the United Kingdom. Early colonists in Libya, Morocco, Iraq and other colonial violence laboratories. The use of “air policing” and bombing to control the colonists heralded the physical and mental destruction of today’s drone warfare.
The narrative of the rupture of radical history on 9/11 is maintained by radical erasure-blurring the continuity between the excised colonial past and the purified colonial present.
In fact, the so-called new paradigm of post-9/11 war is similar to what the military historian John Grenier called the “first way of war” in the United States: a full-scale attack on indigenous peoples laid the foundation for the United States. The basis of genocide. From the “Indian War” to the “War on Terrorism”, “civilized people” used the notion that their targets were too “uncivilized” to abide by the (Europe-centric) laws of war to launch extraordinary violence.
In its infamous series of legal memos on the war on terrorism, the U.S. Government’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) cited a series of impressive colonial precedents from around the world: from the Indian War and the U.S. military occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, Authorized the deployment of troops in the United States to combat “terrorist activities”; British colonialism from Kenya, French colonialism in Algeria, and apartheid South Africa deprived captured fighters of the Geneva Convention rights; once again from the Indian War, the Guantanamo Military Commission The kangaroo court was legalized; the British colonization projects in Ireland and Israel in Palestine legalized torture disguised as “enhanced interrogation”; and again from Israel, they refused to enter the International Red Cross.
In the eyes of Orientalists, the use of precedents in the Islamic legal tradition (taqlid) has been pathologically transformed into more evidence that Muslims succumbed to the past. On the other hand, Western common law’s insistence on precedent—a tool for the continuous reappearance of colonial reasoning—is considered to be a sign of its exemplary rationality and justice.
The U.S. Army’s field manual on the post-9/11 counter-insurgency (COIN) publicly stated that it “drew on colonial doctrine and the code of conduct of the U.S. Marine Corps occupying Latin American countries.” The introduction of praise was written by the head of the Harvard Human Rights Center-human rights and colonial requirements are two aspects of the same COIN.
The first in the “classic” reading list recommended by the manual is “Small Wars” by Charles Callwell, a 19th-century British major general.The original subtitle was “Empire Soldier Tactics Textbook,” which allegedly “provides lessons [from Callwell’s military experiences in Afghanistan and South Africa] This is still very valuable today.”
People don’t know what “lessons” to learn from “Little War”, which is full of comments such as “All Orientals are born to like tricks and deception”, “Red Indians are notorious for their duplicity and cunning”. . “, “In Asia, he is the master who strangles the people’s throats mercilessly.” “Fanatics and barbarians must come to justice and cringe, or they will rise again.” It contains more than 100 references to “barbarians”, A place of “barbarians” and “uncivilized races”.
Of course, in contemporary anti-terrorism vocabulary, “barbarians” are no longer officially called “barbarians”. Instead, new terms such as “illegal enemy combatants” were devised to justify expulsion from the protection of international humanitarian law.
Likewise, society is no longer blatantly labeled as “uncivilized” in order to rationalize imperial aggression, invasion, and reform. On the contrary, the goal of such intervention is now described as a “failure” state, or “unwilling or inability” to eliminate hidden threats within it. The doctrine of “unwilling or impossible”-popular in the war on terrorism-was first proposed by the United States and Israel in the 1970s in an attempt to give legitimacy to their extraterritorial military exercises.
“The process of asserting novelty [in the wake of 9/11] It is a key political strategy that enables supporters of radical international reforms to justify many of their pre-existing imperial ambitions more successfully than before,” said legal scholar and UN expert Obiola Okafor ( Obiora Okafor) observed.
For example, European colonial juris All-out war is “necessary to ensure peace.” “; Centuries before George W. Bush made “humanitarian” aggression great again.
Ironically, the demand for new things is itself an ancient imperial strategy. Okafor reminded: “New things and differences were key factors in a series of absurd legal exercises in the 16th and 19th centuries, which ultimately led to Foreign Europeans grant themselves the international legal rights of compulsory occupation. And govern the land [in the Americas, Africa, and Asia]. “
Although the term has been renamed and the legal framework has been revised, the potential motivation for differentiation and domination still exists. As in the previous colonial period, the ruled was not simply excluded from the law, but included in order to be conquered.
Labeling such a terrorist regime as “war” is misleading, because war means that both parties have the legal right to use violence, but they are vulnerable to violence. On the contrary, as in the colonial slaughterhouses and torture chambers of the past few decades, the imperial powers sought one-way permits for barbarism and control.
This is reflected in the demonization and prosecution of Muslim fighters by the United States, such as the former Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, who is the “terrorist” who killed American soldiers-according to international laws of war, this is a legal military Target. In contrast, mass killings of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen by the US military are usually exempted and, if disclosed, are classified as “collateral damage” or “enemy killed in action.”
“WAT [War Against Terror] Represents a set of policies and principles that reproduce the mission structure of civilization,” the legal scholar Anthony Angie warned in his basic book “Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Formulation of International Law.” “It is precisely by invoking the underlying primitive imperial structure in international law, This so-called new initiative attempts to undermine and change existing international law…relying on a very old set of ideas to exert its power-about self-defense, humanitarian intervention, and conquest. “
However, colonialism and imperialism are always regarded as an anomaly: a response to the inherent violence of “them”, not a performance of “us”. Colonial violence has largely been erased from legal history, although it has a core formative role and has been marginalized as a “little war”-“thus trying to eliminate the most common form of war in the modern world so far. “, political theorist Mark Neocleous pointed out.
Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, Emer de Vattel, Henry Dunant and Friedrich The historical “fathers” of international law such as Friedrich von Martens have been baptized and revered for colonial entanglement; the creators of today’s imperial atrocities are also getting rid of their shame.
The author of the OLC Torture Memo, John Yoo, is now a law professor at a prestigious school, his boss Jay Bybee is an appeals court judge, and the White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales, who accepted their torture logic, is a law school dean. At the same time, liberation survivors of the Guantanamo torture camp are struggling with physical and mental disabilities and barely making ends meet on the poverty line; all their efforts to seek compensation from US government officials have been rejected by the US court. Empire means never having to say sorry.
We are told that “never forget” and we are asked to “forever forget” are two aspects of the same power operation. In this way, the colonial era continues, engraving every new chapter of violence on it as if it were the first one.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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