Progressive Violence: Theorizing the War on Terror 113849772X, 9781138497726

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 Imperial background and the US power elite
3 Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism
4 Biopolitics of terrorism
5 Ethics of truth
Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Progressive Violence

This book examines the role of collective violence in the achievement of solidarity, shedding light on the difficulty faced by sociology in theorizing violence and warfare as a result of the discipline’s tendency to idealize society in an attempt to legitimize the idea of progressive social change. Using the global War on Terror as a focal point, the authors develop this argument through the related issues of power, knowledge, and ethics, explaining the War on Terror in terms of the Anglo-American tradition of imperial power and domination. Exploring the victimage rituals through which society is brought together in the ritual domination and destruction of a constructed “villain,” Progressive Violence: Theorizing the War on Terror also considers the price of the liberal moral values in terms of which the global war on terror is frequently justified, and the volume of “progressive violence” involved in advancing the cause of freedom. The authors use this case to theorize the general role of vicarious victimage ritual in the social genesis of political violence and sadism, and its calculated use by politicians to achieve their imperial aims. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in terrorism, violence, and geopolitics. Michael Blain is Professor of Sociology at Boise State University, USA. He is the author of The Sociology Terrorism and Power, Discourse and Victimage Ritual in the War on Terror. Angeline Kearns-Blain was previously Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Boise State University, USA. She is the author of Stealing Sunlight: Growing up in Irishtown and I used to be Irish: Leaving Ireland, Becoming American.

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128 Critical Theories and the Budapest School Politics, Culture, Modernity Edited by John Rundell and Jonathan Pickle 129 Social and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media Higher Diversities David Toews 130 Towards a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices Between Existential Analytic and Social Theory Dimitri Ginev 131 Experiencing Multiple Realities Alfred Schutz’s Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning Marius I. Benţa 132 Human Flourishing, Liberal Theory and the Arts Menachem Mautner 133 Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century The Skeptical Radicalism of Judith Shklar Giunia Gatta 134 Norbert Elias and the Analysis of History and Sport Systematizing Figurational Sociology Joannes Van Gestel 135 Progressive Violence Theorizing the War on Terror Michael Blain and Angeline Kearns-Blain For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/ RSSPT

Progressive Violence Theorizing the War on Terror Michael Blain and Angeline Kearns-Blain

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Michael Blain and Angeline Kearns-Blain The right of Michael Blain and Angeline Kearns-Blain to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-49772-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-01810-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

We dedicate this work to the Nasomah, “The people by the deep water,” who lived at the mouth of the Coquille River on the Oregon Coast for thousands of years.

Contents

List of figures ix List of tables xi Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 Imperial background and the US power elite 18 3 Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism 51 4 Biopolitics of terrorism 81 5 Ethics of truth 112 Appendix 135 Index 153

List of figures

2.1 Empire, Victimage Ritual, and Biopolitics of Terrorism 19 2.2 Multi-Network Diagram of How the Power Elite are Drawn from Three Overlapping Networks of People and Institutions. The Power Elite are the Members of the Three Overlapping Circles. They are Encompassed in the Dotted Line Within the Venn Diagram. Source: By permission G. William Domhoff. Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich, Seventh Edition (McGraw Hill Education 2014) 43 3.1 Structural Analysis of Melodramatic Pattern of Meanings Implicit in Political Victimage Ritual. Source: Smith and Riley (2009:100–101), Jameson (2016) 58 3.2 Drones in Paradise. An Everyday Apocalypse, a contribution to 2016 ­Hieronymus Bosch 500 by Ivica Capan. By permission of Ivica Capan 2018 60 3.3 Percent President Bush’s Weekly Speeches Invoking “Evil” and “Terror” Terms in Relevant Political Contexts, January 2001–June 2008 62 3.4 Percent Annual US Presidential State of the Union Reports to the Congress Invoking Evil and Terror Terms in Political Context, 1790–2016 63 3.5 Index of PVR Intensity: Percent of Weekly Whitehouse Speeches Attacking Terrorists 65 4.1 Frequency of Peer Reviewed, Scholarly Articles in Sociological Abstracts Subject “terrorism,” 1960–May 2016 (n = 3565–May 2016) 86 4.2 Percent Total High Citation Journal Articles (>5) in Sociology Abstracts Published in ‘Terrorism’ Journals 1977–2016 (May) (Terrorism 1977–1991, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 1992, Terrorism and Political Violence 1988) 87 4.3 Subject Categories, “Political Violence” and “Terrorism,” Sociology Abstracts, 1952–2016 (May), ProQuest, Accessed 8 June 2016 87

List of tables

2.1 Etymology of English Imperial Discourse, Social Institutions and Social Types 22 2.2 Genealogy of Anglo-American Imperial Practices 24 2.3 Top-Ten US Arms Exports Recipients Before and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and before and after the 2001 Terror Attacks (US dollars). Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, accessed 11 December 2017 www.sipri. org/databases/armstransfers 46 4.1 Percent Articles Linking Subjects and Discourses to “Terrorism” in Influential Articles Indexed in Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012). Source: Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WOT (2002–2012) 88 4.2 Percent Articles Linking Subjects and Discourses to “Terrorism” in Influential Articles (>5) by Journal Type Indexed in Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012). Source: Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WOT (2002–2012) 89 4.3 Percent Articles Linking Subjects and Discourses to “Terrorism” in Influential Articles Indexed in Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012). Source: Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WOT (2002–2012) 99

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to many wonderful people who have provided the many types of support required to complete a project like this monograph. First, we would like express our gratitude to Neil Jordon, Senior Editor at Routledge Publishers, for believing in the merits of this project and issuing us a contract, and Alice Salt, Editorial Assistant for Sociology at Routledge, for her conscientious and steady hand in guiding us through the myriad details of the production process. We would also like to acknowledge the continuing support of faculty and staff of the Department of Sociology and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Boise State University. In particular, we are grateful to the Chairs of Sociology Department (Martin Orr and Arthur Scarritt) for their financial support and reductions in teaching load that allowed us to accomplish this time-consuming task. We are especially grateful to Patricia A. Dudziak Kerr, Administrative Assistant, who stepped in and assumed some of advising demands placed on us, providing the additional time to complete this project. Many student Research Assistants have contributed in a substantial way to this project. They have helped us collect and analyze the data: Macy Boggs, Amity Harrison, Jennifer Simpson, Nikki Weihe, Eiko Strader, Loraine Hand, Traci Harris, Christian Hungate, Amber Mack, and Anali Tuha. And finally, we would like to thank the professional colleagues who read and discussed earlier presentations leading to the conclusions articulated in this monograph. At Boise State University (BSU) we would like to acknowledge Professor Edward McLuskie’s theoretical contribution to our work. His graduate seminar, “Communication, Power and Critical Theory,” provided the fertile ground for the emergence of many of the critical theory points advanced in this monograph. This project also benefited directly from the thought-provoking questions posed to us by colleagues in the Sociology Department at BSU, Professors Virginia Husting, Rosaura Conley-Estrada, and Arthur Scarritt, who offered serious and thoughtful responses to our presentation of this project at the Sociology Department Faculty Speaker Series, fall 2016.

xiv Acknowledgements Our colleagues in the wider academic community have influenced this work in many small and large ways. They have played major roles in facilitating and advancing our theoretical project, particularly those colleagues who commented on our presentations at national and international conferences. These conferences allowed us to develop and articulate various aspects of the theoretical and empirical analysis we present in this monograph. We should begin at the beginning of the project that has culminated with this monograph. We appreciate the participants in the American Conference of Irish Studies-West conference (27–9–2013, San Francisco, ­California) where we first broached the ideas and data on the imperial background of Irish immigration and the “white settlement” of the Oregon territory, who encouraged us to go forward with the larger project. On the theoretical level, we would like to mention the helpful suggestions made to us about our project and emerging attempt to theorize the WoT by attendees of the mini-conference on “Capitalism, the politics of Inequality, and Historical Change” sponsored by the Comparative-Historical and Political Sociology Sections of the ASA (Columbia University, 14–9–2013). Likewise, we also should reference the commentary produced in response to our paper presentation to the RC08 History of Sociology Section session, “Geopolitical Framing of the Social Sciences,” on the at the ISA World Congress, Yokohama, Japan, on the power/knowledge dynamic generated by the WoT and its historical effects on theories of political violence. We benefited a great deal from papers presented in this session on the historical effects on Japanese sociology of World War II and the American occupation, and the effects on sociology and its development in in the context of political violence and domination in China and Indonesia. We also need to acknowledge the many contributors to the two sessions we organized and presided over on the “The Political Sociology of the War on Terror (WoT)” at the 3rd ISA Forum of Sociology (Vienna, Austria, July 10–14, 2016). We gleaned many important ideas that allowed us to refine our theoretical elaboration of the many power effects of the WoT, for instance, the refugee crisis in Europe, the representation of “terrorism” in the mass media, and the transformation of policing and securitization of everyday life in many societies. In this regard we would highlight the strong and continuing support of Professors Joseph De Angelus and Brian Wolfe, ­University of Idaho, who presented papers and agreed to be session discussants. We also greatly appreciate the thoughtful attention given to our attempts at theorizing the WoT earlier that summer to the ISA RC16 Sociological Theory Conference (Cambridge, UK 27–29 June 2016). We learned a great deal from this group of excellent theorists about how to conceptualize and theorize the war in cultural sociology perspective. Finally, we also want to indicate how much we have appreciated the suggestions and comments made by G. William Domhoff, University of ­California, Santa Cruz, California. We have sought his advice concerning his class dominance theory of the US power structure. He has been generous

Acknowledgements  xv in his responses for comments to our thinking in this area. This has been especially important in understanding how Domhoff’s application of Michael Mann’s theory of social power to the development of his multi-network theory of the structure of the US power elite, particularly in thinking through imperial power/knowledge dynamic linking the policy-planning-network to the US WoT to the corporate community and social upper class.

1 Introduction

The aim of this book is to problematize political violence and its absence from sociological theory, and to offer a corrective. We argue that this problem has been eclipsed by a sunny, progressive, liberal understanding of human society and progress. It theorizes “progressive violence” and the US-inspired global “War on Terror” (WoT) in terms of three interrelated issues: power, knowledge, and ethics. We argue that sociologists have a problem theorizing the phenomena of political violence and its role in human social life. Sociologists have no problem condemning it as “barbarism” or as an “outrageous” violation of the weak and the oppressed—which it absolutely can be. Sociologists have idealized sociality to legitimate their desires for progressive social change. It has also covered up their willing participation in acts of political violence directed against tyrants and terrorists, “enemies of progress,” and “enemies of freedom.” They have ignored or played down the robust evidence presented by historical sociologists that political violence targeting domestic and foreign enemies generates powerful and intense in-group solidarity. Evidence in support of this argument is based on a long-term historical genealogy of political terrorism culminating in the WoT. The empirical case studies that inform this project are summarized and past research updated. Past research traced the Anglo-American concept of terrorism to the power struggles of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, and its elaboration and functioning in Anglo-American political and administrative discourses (Blain and Blain 2012). These developments also played a major role in the emergence and legitimation of 19th century positivist sociology. The insecurity generated by the dangers of civil war and revolutionary movements continues to drive the biopolitics of terrorism. It has continued to influence how sociologists and social scientists more generally think about political violence (Blain et al. 2016). In spite of this, the actual violence of war, military action, and revolutionary movements is a relatively neglected field within contemporary sociological theory. As some argue, sociological theory and sociology in general is largely “a demilitarized zone” (Joas 1999; Joas and Knöbl 2013; West and Matthewman 2016). One searches in vain for a chapter on violence, warfare,

2  Introduction and the military in introductory sociology textbooks. The military does not appear in the list of chapters on social “Institutions.” This seems odd given the nations that produce much of the most influential sociological theorizing in the world today are the same nations involved either directly or as enablers of much of the violence in the world today. It does seem relevant to this discussion that many of the nations involved in perpetrating the WoT contain in their borders some of the most influential sociological establishments in some of the most prestigious universities in the world. In the US, for example, military institutions are deeply embedded in our everyday cultural life and communities. The global reach of the US military also means that this is true of many other nation-states in the world. Given this historical situation we think that the lack of interest in violence, war, and the military in sociological theorizing seems obtuse; we suspect it might be the result of a deliberate and therefore unethical decision. This theme is elaborated in a final chapter on truth ethics in research on political violence. As far as we know there is no theory of warfare presented in introductory theory texts; the one or two exceptions critique sociology for its failure to deal with military institutions, warfare, and political violence that have constituted modern society (Giddens 1985; Tiryakian 1999; Joas 2013). Gidden faults the dominance of a narrow economism in 19th-century sociological theory. Joas attributes this gap in thought to modernization theory. Tiryakian blames the Enlightenment tradition. Very few sociologists acknowledge the decisive influence the specter of French revolutionary “terror” and its influence on the 19th-century social sciences. Wallerstein (2011) argues that the specter of French revolutionary terrorism contributed to the triumph of centrist liberalism as a governing system of thought. The power-knowledge dynamic that it set in motion led to the constitution of the social sciences (i.e., economics, political science, and sociology). The theory sections of sociology textbooks usually do not focus on political violence as a theoretical problem. It is something sociologists are against. Society is based on cooperation and solidarity, not the Hobbesian sanction of sovereign terror and the violence of victimage rituals perpetrated on deviants and enemies. Sociology is the knowledge generated in defense of society. Violence, in post-structuralism, can be conceptualized as the excluded Other of positivism—even presentations of Marxism (class struggle and class warfare) and power conflict theory. One can find Sociology textbooks with chapters on political sociology and “political” institutions that devote a few paragraphs to the topics relevant to war and the military. Discussions of military violence may also be a tangential aspect of the section on social movements. This is no accident. A whole generation of social movement theorists devoted themselves to delinking social movements from the specter of fascist “terror” and revolutionary warfare to fashion a more “positive” view (Blain 1994). The Chapter on “Deviance and Crime” does deal with criminal violence and homicide. There is no discussion of war crimes.

Introduction  3 At the same time, the WoT and its imperial “security” and counterterrorism practices have seriously problematized some of the fundamental assumptions of sociology. The US-led WoT and its global proliferation of counterterrorism practices have seriously problematized the old differentiation between criminal and political violence. Criminologists have targeted the prison as a socialization agency that radicalizes inmates, transforming them into terrorists (see Blain’s 2014 review of Mark Hamm’s 2013 book on this topic); criminologists are also directly involved in the National Security Agency (NSA) sponsored research in support of the WoT. These links and lines of research are elaborated in greater detail in Chapter 4 on the biopolitics of terrorism and Chapter 5: Ethics of Truth. Our approach to these issues and questions owes a great deal to the late Michel Foucault. He thought that there were three possible fields of genealogical investigation. In one line of investigation recorded in his posthumously published lectures, Foucault (2011) traced the genealogy of ethics in relation to the “Courage of Truth.” Nietzsche had first posed this question in statements regarding the radically modern scientific ethic and the willingness to sacrifice for the truth. The questions posed by this will to truth, particularly the nuclear scientists involved in nuclear weapons programs— Robert Oppenheimer opposition vs. Edward Teller’s advocacy—had inspired Foucault to focus on the power/knowledge dynamic. As we all know, Oppenheimer resisted the development of more powerful nuclear weapons. As a consequence, he was attacked as a communist and ostracized, while Edward Teller, a virulent anti-communist, was valorized as the father of the “super” Bomb. Telling the truth can be dangerous, particularly telling the truth to those who have power over your life and can exercise the sovereign right to inflict death. Foucault’s lectures focused on several aspects of the relation to the truth, overcoming cowardice, and the willingness to risk sovereign death to speak truth to power. As a result of the central role of the power/knowledge dynamic in modern society, these issues of truth had taken on special significance in relation to scientific knowledge.

Power/Knowledge dynamic The reason why “sociological theorizing” is a demilitarized zone relates directly to the difficulty theorists have facing the terrifying truth about political violence and sadism. The power/knowledge dynamic involved is complex and difficult to untangle. The reasons are more complicated than the authors cited before allow. This knot can get us into the heart of our problem with any approach that evades the problematic linkages connecting power elites, victimage ritual, the biopolitics of terrorism, and phenomenon like the WoT. Members of the power elite that rule American society and manage the Department of Defense (DOD) and its military institutions will not financially support this kind of research and in some cases will actively oppose

4  Introduction and attack researchers who do (see Blain 2012). Social scientists get blowback when they seek to know what is going on with the military and war, or when they link these practices to power and domination. Researchers can be stigmatized by their involvement in critical research that targets “counterterrorism” programs and research. They can be defamed by public authorities as threats to national security or anathematized as unpatriotic traitors to the cause. These researchers can be excluded from professional communities on grounds that they constitute a threat to the legitimacy and authority of the discipline (e.g. Mills and Noam Chomsky). Another reason is epistemological. It is no more reductive to link the war and the military to power relations than to link it to culture or religiosity. War is a social power relation and a social mode of domination. We need to think of history, culture, and power in the same theory. Sociological theorizing is part and parcel of the “reflexive modernization” that constitutes modernity. As a result of the overemphasis on political-economy and industrialism, the Classic theorists ignored the constitutive role of political violence in modernization (Giddens 1985). Modernization involved the active destruction of traditional societies and in some cases the genocide of indigenous people. As such we need to be very skeptical of accounts of “Wartime Sociology” provided by insiders in the “sociological establishment,” an establishment largely dominated by Americans in the post-WWII period and deeply embedded in the power structure of the “warfare” state. Some theorists critique Mills’ account of the power elite and the new middle class, and the role of the US military in global politics for its neglect of culture and civil society. They fail to mention his trenchant critique of popular culture, social scientists and professors, and their role in the “Cold War” (Mills 1959). Many sociologists wrongly assume that research in this tradition stopped after Mills (Domhoff 2017). It is true that most of this research focused on how their class interest influenced the power elite’s way of defining the national interest and the Cold War. They are wrong to claim that research in this tradition came to an end. Only when Mills’ power elite analysis began to inform anti-war and peace movement activism did it become anathema to theorize the military and war in sociology (Blain 1989). In addition to Joas’ (1999) account of sociology’s troubled relationship to war and the military (invoked in West and Matthewman 2016) we add SaintAmand’s (1996) critique of Enlightenment social theories. We reject SaintAmands’ use of Rene Girard’s functionalist explanation of ritual victimage as caused by social conflicts and tensions generated by disruptive and clashing mimetic desires. Again, the problem with Girard’s is the same problem we have with some proponents of neofunctionalism and cultural sociology. He refuses to face the terrible truth that knowledgeable elites orchestrate victimage rituals as a calculated means of politics. Victimage ritual, we argue, is a rationalized and refined political strategy employed by power elites to achieve their agendas. Girard reduces ritual victimage to a nonrational and mechanistic response that functions to resolve potentially disruptive

Introduction  5 social conflicts and tensions generated by clashing mimetic desires. Again, the problem with Girard’s analysis is the same problem we have with the “strong program” in cultural sociology. Girard refuses to face the terrible truth that knowledgeable elites orchestrate victimage rituals by amplifying mimetic desires as a rationally, calculated instrument to achieve their political goals. In fact, his theory, taught in many universities to the elites of society, provides the template. Victimage ritual, we argue, is a rationalized and refined political strategy employed by power elites to achieve their agendas. Amand is more trenchant than Tiryakian (1999) on the agency involved in the active suppression of the problematic of hostility in human social life. He argues that Enlightenment social theories were tailored to the interests of progressive movements, revolutionary liberalism, that that functioned to legitimate the violence of the modern nation state as “progressive” mode of power and domination. The philosophes assumed things about “human nature” that entailed the “laws of hostility.” These theorists emphasized the positive and played down the negative. Some theorists were revolutionaries who supported “terror” as a legitimate means to achieve the democratic goal of building a liberal, egalitarian society. The assumptions they made (and many sociologists still make) were tailored to their utopian desires to engineer the good society—a laudable goal. The knowledge of the laws of society would serve to legitimate the use of political power and policing projects to insure domestic security and imperial sovereignty entailed by these projects. The active and willful suppression of the problem of violent conflict entailed by their theories of human nature and society were immediately and justly mocked by Diderot, de Sade, and Nietzsche. This linkage to the terror generated a series of reactionary discourses linking the French revolution to “evil” and the social pathologies of modern “liberal” societies. The emergence of the social sciences in the 19th century and their continued functioning right up to the present have to be approached in a much more complex way in a historical genealogy of “liberalism,” the social sciences, and “political violence” (see Blain 2007, also Wallerstein 2011). Needless to say, we think sociological thought has been and continues to be in the verifiable history of the present deeply embedded in the power structures that shape the everyday life practices of modern society. We also think Domhoff’s (2017) power elite account of the “policy planning network” in the US, and its links to the elite universities, is directly relevant to an analysis of social scientists’ involvements in the current wars. This line of research shows how social science knowledge functions in the history of the present and the WoT. The charge that this knowledge of the power elite does not relate to the everyday life, military, and warfare in our societies is empirically false. It continues to inform political activism and resistance right now and in the present. There is a problem with the many sociologists who depend on the “insider” accounts and textbook accounts of the history of sociological thought. These histories need to include research on the social and psychological

6  Introduction sciences by historical sociologists who are not so interested in legitimating a theory campaign in the discipline or in spinning yarn so tailored to the interests of the sociological elites at the time. We recommend Mills’ (1959) or Giddens (1985) as well as the work of many others we reference in this book. A good place to begin would be Simpson’s (1994) monograph detailing the historical emergence of the social science field of “communications research” and a public opinion industry from WW II and its “psychological warfare” programs. One of the most enduring and vexing problems in sociological theorizing is the inability of theorists to face the sadism clearly evident in “rationalized” military violence. The spectacle of mass violence provides pleasurable viewing on the daily news. We hoped that as champions of the “strong program” of sociological theorizing and research on war and the military that you would propose some kind of cultural analysis of military violence. In this perspective, how would you conceptualize the practices of warfare? Is it a cultural practice, political performance, spectacle of human sacrifice? One could build on Alexander’s (2004) account of 9/11 as a flawed political performance in thinking through the full implications of the WoT. Alexander concluded with the political point that the “terrorism” of 9/11 represented a failure of democratic politics, an act of despair, and an end to politics. We want to extend this critical judgement to the massive military violence of the WoT. The high-tech homicide bombings, the policy of kinetic aerial warfare, involving thousands of bombings and civilian deaths, flattening whole cities and destroying vital human infrastructures, destroying the lives of millions of people in the territories affected, requires some kind of cultural analysis. These massive power performances by the perpetrators of the WoT need to be understood against the background of Western culture. Warfare in this perspective is continuous with the long history of our imperial culture (i.e., Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, Spenser’s Faerie Queen, and ritual practices of Savage Warfare in the American Mythology of the New Frontier, articulated in films like the Birth of a Nation and Star Wars).

Victimage ritual Sociologists need to rethink the relation between society and victimage ritual. They have idealized sociality to legitimate their role as “positivist” social scientists in the policy network of the US power elite and their desires for progressive social change. They have ignored or played down the intense in-group solidarity generated by hatred of out-group enemies. It is anathema to many social scientists that groups can fall into hate as well as love, that we get intense pleasure from vicarious participation in victimage rituals, that the ritual domination and destruction of the villain produces intense pleasure as well as moral outrage. Theorists need to deal more directly with the actual geopolitical practices of political and military violence. The power/terror dynamic was central

Introduction  7 to the emergence of the liberal nation states and empires, the settler colonialism, and it continues to be central to a theory of the US-led WoT. That imperial tradition survives in the contemporary strategic practices of the national security state. We need to face the truth that the geopolitical power dynamics of empire provoke and produce cycles of resistance and political violence. We conceptualize the WoT as a mode of imperial power by means of global political victimage ritual. We document the extensive and intensive rhetorical practices vilifying terrorists as threats to “innocent lives” and glorify the heroic struggles to destroy those villains as a “life and death” struggle to defend innocent civilians. These acts of heroic sacrifice have been elaborated in mass media spectacles broadcast to a global audience— for example, the “man-hunt” and “assassination” of Osama bin Laden and its reflection in contemporary films. We offer a perspective on how to rectify this gap or denial by theorizing case of the WoT. The authors argue for a deeper understanding of the historical “genealogy of terrorism” in relation to the practices, institutions, and techniques of power politics and imperialism. We link it to the problematics of political violence, evil, and sadism, arguing that the liberal nation-state presupposes and produces the terrorist as its discursive correlate. We argue that social and sociological theorists need to pay more attention to the practices involved in convincing enough of the public of the biopolitical motive: fighting “the fight so that others might live.” The authors argue for the relevance and value of Kenneth Burke’s thinking to critical discourse theory, the tactical operations of Empire, and how the Manichean narrative of the war on terror shifts in order to advance the strategic current interests of the US power elite (Duncan 1962; Burke 1967; Ivie 2005). The concept of victimage ritual can focus attention on the link between this narrative and the actual practices of victimage ritual, highly publicized violence, torture, and warfare. The authors fuse concepts of “victimage ritual” and theories of power and knowledge regimes, then tie these concepts together to produce a powerful and influential perspective on how to analyze the dynamics of political violence. In past research we have traced the genealogy of the concept of terrorism, the links between that discourse and certain problems in governing liberal nation-states and empires, the relation of that discourse to understandings of good and evil, and the emergence of the social sciences as a response to the problem of political violence. Our aim is to reengage with the problem of theorizing political violence by reactivating the Weberian tradition of historical sociology and its elaboration in terms of research in political sociology derived from C. Wright Mills’ (1956) theory of the US power elite (extensively elaborated in rich empirical research by his disciples) (Domhoff 2017). Along with a few other critics mentioned before, we argue that sociologists have a problem theorizing phenomena like political violence, warfare, victimage ritual, and the

8  Introduction role that victimage ritual plays in society (Duncan 1962). So far as we know Randal Collin’s (2008) is the only sociologist to deal directly with the phenomenology of acts of violence. This argument will be elaborated in terms of three related issues: power, knowledge, and ethics. This book provides a demonstration of this thesis by theorizing the WoT in terms of the practices of “progressive violence.” These theory problems with political violence are deeply embedded in the discursive regime of social theory and social research. The 18th-century Enlightenment philosophes idealized sociality to legitimate their desires for progressive social change. They ignored or played down the powerful and intense in-group solidarity generated by collective acts of victimage ritual in the form of warfare, public torture, and acts of political violence. Previous research by the authors traced the Anglo-American concept of terrorism to the power struggles of the great terror of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. These events also contributed to the emergence and legitimation of positivist sociology and functionalism. Conservatives like Burke and Maistre depicted the French revolutionary terrorists as “hounds from hell,” linking democratic violence to the perspective of “good and evil” (Blain 2015). This “good struggling against evil” rhetoric has reappeared in contemporary political discourse. Comte’s positivism, empirical sociology, and functionalism were a strategy to provide a rational means to counter the prospect of revolutionary violence and civil war and institute a society founded on a universal love of humanity. These ideas continued to influence how sociologists and social scientists more generally think about violence and terrorism. It’s a social pathology that can be cured by the intervention of positivist sociologists. We theorize the WoT as a mode of imperial power and subjection by means of victimage ritual. The power/terror dynamic is central to the ­Anglo-American tradition of imperialism and the US-led WoT. This thesis is advanced through a genealogy of Anglo-American Empire and how that cultural tradition survives in the contemporary practices of geopolitics. The WoT is a mode of empire by means of global victimage ritual—e.g., the use of well-publicized “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “torture,” or the “man-hunt” and “assassination” of Osama bin Laden detailed in the news and reflected in contemporary films and television programs. It is unacceptable to many social scientists that “society” can be constituted through the ritual domination and destruction of villains and that this cycle produces intense pleasure. This problem is also reflected in the difficulty that many sociologists and social scientists have with the role of agency in political violence. We deal with the theoretical problem of agency in the WoT through an elaboration of Mills’ power elite theory of the US power structure, and the participation of the economic, political, and policy networks that produce the foreign policies and geopolitical strategies implemented in the global WoT. The WoT is not simply a reaction to the threat of Islamic terror. The desire for

Introduction  9 full-spectrum dominance is articulated in US geostrategic doctrine. The military is oriented to that totalizing goal. The idea that the WoT is simply a response to the geostrategic aims of terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL is a one-sided view of a power struggle involving multiple actors. The power/knowledge dynamic as it relates the WoT reflects the problem sociologists have with violence and terror. Terrorism has often been understood in terms of good and evil. Ironically, the condemnation of terrorism as evil has surfaced again in social science discourse. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, these ideas have been elaborated inside social science knowledge in terms of the biopolitics of terrorism. Islamic terrorists are “religious fanatics” and “extremists” inspired by notions of good and evil—a regression to the past, barbarism, etc. They desire to create a new Caliphate in the Middle East. Politicians representing the geopolitical interests of the power elite condemn terrorism as evil, as motivated by minds that hate, who justify the murder of innocent and powerless people. At the same time, social scientists explain terrorists’ political violence as motivated by Islamic notions of good and evil. Our recent work on social science discourse and the biopolitics of terrorism documents the shift from “political” ideology explanations to “religious” explanations of terrorism. Of course, this has the effect of reinforcing the idea that terrorism is essentially a regression to the dark ages of barbarism and ignorance. The ethics of social science are directly implicated in idealizing the nonviolent character of human beings and society in service to various programs of progressive social reform. This book argues that the WoT has mainly been justified on grounds of advancing the progressive values of liberalism. We must face squarely the huge amount of “progressive” violence involved in advancing the cause of freedom. The wars against so-called totalitarianism states cost millions of lives. Modernization has come with a very high price; there have been millions of victims of progress. Weber and Mills practiced an ethic of truth. They faced all of this “political violence” fairly and squarely. The sociological establishment at the time marginalized and vilified Mills as too political for doing so. There is a fine line. As Mills (1959, also Weber 1922) notes, getting the empirical facts straight is the first obligation of the ethical social scientist. Ignoring those facts is a failure to meet one’s professional and scientific responsibility. The politician must practice an ethic of social responsibility. Sociological theorists were shaken out of their dogmatic slumber by the shocking war crimes perpetrated by the US and its allies during the Vietnam War, all in the name of liberal democracy. The main ethical as well as epistemological issue, as we see it, is the incapacity of sociologists to face directly the facts regarding the practices of violence in war and military. Theorists seem to want to disengage from the problematic of agency in creating and maintaining a massive military establishment devoted to violence and homicide by retreating to the nonviolent everyday world of “peace” and civil society. Sociologists should be

10  Introduction theorizing the mass extermination programs perpetrated against indigenous people around the world in the name of Empire and Western civilization; they need to theorize the strategies of “chemical warfare” and “terror bombings” perpetrated by the belligerents involved in the Great wars, the Holocaust, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and think of the terrible destruction of the Middle East wars, refugee crises, increased terrorist attacks in response to US-led coalition military interventions. These histories and their rearticulations in art, poetry, and film, constitute the cultural background influencing the agency of the political and military elites orchestrating these wars. We do not believe that ignoring this reality is justified or ethical. Civil society is certainly important in resistance to these activities. But civil society is not the whole story. You cite Phillip Smith’s (2005) research on war narratives generated in a number of nations leading to the Gulf wars. We think this kind of cultural analysis is important. It is important to realize in theorizing this data that elites are knowledgeable and informed in their interaction with civil society, publics, and social movements; they know very well that the management of narrative is a fundamental tactical problem affecting the probability that they will achieve their political goals. It is an old problem addressed by Machiavelli and many other tutors and advisors to monarchs, emperors, and presidents. Elites are aware of these problems. They know how to orchestrate political victimage rituals that target their opponents as villainous others who must be destroyed. They have access to “insider” discourses cloaked in national security secrecy, employing the latest social science knowledge, to manage the narrative attacks of opponents of their war policies, pacifists, and peace activists. Public support for imperial wars depends on gaining public identification with the military campaign. Once the military engages, elites may stay the course in spite of public opposition. In the midst of the Iraq War, President George Bush countered a growing public narrative against that war by adopting a new “social science” informed counterinsurgency strategy and doubling down on the war (See Field Manual 3–24: Counterinsurgency, Department of the Army, 2013; Foreword by General David H. Petraeus, Ph.D., Princeton University). Some theorists accuse those working in the Weberian/Mills’ tradition, those who think culture, power, and violence in the same perspective, of putting forward a reductive theorizing of the problem of war and the military in terms of power relations (Alexander 2011). This is simply not true. Weber and Mills placed “cultural” questions at the center of their analysis of military violence and warfare—for example, Mills’ analysis of the US power elite’s use of the “military metaphysic.” Our contention is that this metaphysic is part and parcel of the Anglo-American imperial tradition. Its descent can be traced from at least to the 17th century, when it was explicitly articulated in Hobbs’ political theory, and that theory has functioned as a rhetoric of war motives ever since. We do agree with Alexander (2004, 2011) and Smith (2005) that the political violence of warfare is a

Introduction  11 profoundly cultural affair. We accept Alexander’s (2011) theoretical proposition that power needs to be conceptualized as performance. We reject the idea that we should decenter our analysis away from elite performances and practices (for a similar critique of decentering, see Blain’s 2013 review of de Goede’s 2012 otherwise superb analysis of the WoT and “speculative security”). Members of the US power elite, as rational and knowledgeable actors, know that wars are political performances and that they must direct and orchestrate victimage rituals to motivate and legitimate military campaigns. We argue in this book that the political violence employed by the perpetrators of the WoT is part and parcel of an imperial tradition that survives in the practices of modern culture. In the world today, it is no longer acceptable to claim Empire, power, and domination as the positive rationale for military violence of the type and intensity we see today. But the imperial ambition behind liberal internationalism, to impose our system around the world, and to exterminate any threat to that project, cannot be denied by any truthful observer of the current world scene. The imperial is clearly visible in the “counterterror” practices of the WoT. There is so much empirical evidence that the elites are “rationally” knowledgeable about the use of victimage ritual in organizing campaigns of military violence that it seems naive to insist that these are new theoretical ideas. Our past research on peace movements indicates that the leaders are rationally and consciously aware of their involvement in political performances, and that political leaders they oppose are calculating in their deployments of cultural politics (Blain 1991, Blain 1994).

Outline of chapters Chapter 2 does two things. First, it argues that any coherent theory of the WoT requires an analysis of the US power structure and the political agency of political elites. The history of Anglo-American imperialism sets the stage for this argument. We argue that, in spite of denials by the representatives of the US power elite, the historical background of imperial practices, including the practices of white settler colonialism and campaigns against terrorists and terrorism when the colonized resist occupation and domination by the colonized, continue to influence geopolitics in the present. We have placed a detailed case study of imperial agency that exemplifies these theoretical points in the Appendix. George “Lord” Bennett participated in the white settlement of southwest Oregon in 1880–1991. What makes Bennett’s significant is that he was a descendent of those who had participated in the English settlement of Ireland in the 17th century. Bennett was well-educated at Trinity College Dublin. Most importantly he wrote a detailed and well-known history celebrating the implantation of English puritans in Munster and the founding of Bandon Ireland. Bennett (1898, 1927) also wrote about his participating in the settlement and founding of

12  Introduction Bandon, Oregon. Bennett was steeped in the imperial history of Ireland, which he carried forward in his participating in the settlement and closing of the Western frontier. Second, Chapter 2 theorizes the role of the US power structure and the agency of the US power elite in orchestrating and prosecuting the WoT. We adopt the approach of C. Wright Mills as elaborated in G. William ­Domhoff’s class dominance theory of the US power structure that stresses the domination of the social upper class, the corporate community, and policy network in the WoT. The politicians who represent the interests of this power structure orchestrate the victimage ritual (VR) process through the corporate-dominated mass media that exploits the appeal of Pentagon-­ produced spectacles of high-tech military violence and legitimates and normalizes the practices of the WoT. The policy network produces the policies that legitimate and rationalize “foreign” policies like the “Cold War” or WoT. Social scientists play direct roles in the research and policy processes that generate the knowledge and biopolitics that legitimate WoT. Chapter 3 argues that social scientists have not been able to face the problem of political violence squarely. This chapter proposes the concept of victimage ritual as the right concept to solve the problem. Theorists have looked away from the massive amount of political violence perpetrated against the enemies of liberalism and freedom (colonial wars, wars against totalitarian regimes). In the overall approach we advocate, we think social theorists need to deal with the violence directly by focusing on the structuring and functioning of victimage ritual. This approach is exemplified with empirical research on the WoT. Chapter 3 argues that a focus on VR redirects analytical attention to the actual practices of political violence. First, we present the results of a semiotic analysis of the structure of VR. This involves a presentation of new research on US presidential discourse in the Bush (2001–2008), Obama (2009–2016), and Trump regimes (2017). The discursive regime of the WoT is structured around three interrelated polarities of meaning: power, morality, and biopolitics. Second, we examine a series of power effects produced by VR: constitution of enemies, incitement to acts of political violence and sadism targeting that enemy (including regimes and populations that allegedly support the enemy), and constitute the objects of knowledge accepted by positivist social scientists (terrorists, Islamists, Jihadists, etc.). The rhetoric of liberalism has played a central role in legitimating and motivating the political violence that produced modernity. The process involves imperial power struggles and elite-orchestrated victimage rituals, which, in turn, generates the subjects and objects of “terrorists” and “terrorism” of social science knowledge. Past research by the authors has focused on how VR generates and legitimates violence against opponents of empire. Chapter 3 extends that analysis to the genealogy of terrorism in relation to evil and the problem of political sadism (e.g., the torture and destruction of enemies). Edward Said raised this issue in his studies of “The Pleasures of

Introduction  13 Imperialism” in his study Anglo-American culture and imperialism. But he did not directly deal with the “pleasures” of violence in acts of domination. The first section picks these themes up by tracing the historical linkages between the French Revolution, the Great Terror, and the conservative condemnation of this event as evil and implicating sadism. This linkage is also a key to understanding post-WWII reactions to Nazi terror and the Holocaust as the incarnation evil. It includes a discussion of the debate inside contemporary American philosophical thought regarding the problematic use of the rhetoric of evil. The vilification of individuals and groups as evil is part and parcel of legitimating political violence and sadism. Some argue for a secular use of the concept as a useful tool in spotlighting oppressive regimes, racism, sexism, and other forms of ordinary violence. It concludes with the related problem of cruelty and sadism in political violence. Political victimage ritual can incite people to engage in cruel and sadistic violence as well as moral outrage. The idea that people desire revenge and gain pleasure from inflicting pain and suffering on others to satisfy that desire has a role to play in understanding the imperial desire and “agency” involved in imperialism and the WoT. Winston Churchill one described Empire as the “Great Game” of power. Chapter 4 weaves a genealogy of social science knowledge in relation to the WoT in terms of the existing biopolitics of terrorism. The process involves imperial power struggles and elite-orchestrated victimage rituals, which, in turn, generated the subjects and objects of social science knowledge. The power struggles associated with the US-led war on global terrorism has contributed to the genesis of many new objects of knowledge and possible lines of research on terrorists (e.g., Islamic terrorists, Axis of Evil, jihadists, suicide bombers, experts on terrorism, counterterrorism, ISIS, etc.). This process involves a repetitive cycle involving geostrategic moves and countermoves by the US power. These moves include orchestration of political victimage rituals targeting state and non-state terrorists, and a correlated biopolitics of knowledge. Past research on political victimage rituals and the way this dynamic generates new possible object/subjects of social scientific knowledge are highlighted. This power/knowledge dynamic is described in terms of the theories and concepts appearing in Anglo-American social science in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The limits of current theorizing in “counterterrorism,” particularly the shift in emphasis from political to religious theories of fanaticism, are highlighted as well as the possibilities of future research. The results of a discourse analysis are presented, which tracks trends social science discourse in the field of “terrorism” since the 1970s. It confirms the thesis that social science discourse has mainly followed the geostrategic interests of the US-led empire. It documents the shift from “political violence” to “terrorism” as the main theoretical and empirical object as well as the shift from a focus on political extremism (Cold War, political ideology and progressive desires, and terrorism) to the religious motives behind terrorism (Islamism, desire to create an Islamic state).

14  Introduction And finally, Chapter 5 deals with Ethics of Truth in relation to the problem of political violence. It is directly concerned with the difficulty that sociologists and social theorists have in dealing with violence and terror in society. Enlightenment philosophers created universal theories of human nature and sociability—premised on the mechanism of imitation, to legitimate the State and the Law. Human beings, they argued, are by nature social, cooperative, and peaceful. Socialization and positive modeling would be the solution to the problem of violence was positive modeling. They played down the possibility that society and imitation was ambivalent and a source of envy and dangerous rivalries that can cause political violence and victimage ritual. In the process, they idealized human sociability and played down the problem of violence. Violence was a regression, a thing of the barbaric past, and would have no place in civilized society. Reason and knowledge would produce a peaceful future. Of course, there were those who mocked the naiveté of Enlightenment social thought. This final chapter will review that critical literature. As an ethical matter we must not ignore the role of Empire, power struggles, violence, and the pleasures and sadism involved in political violence and specifically the US-led WoT. This means acknowledging the tradition of imperial practices, the will to dominate, and agency inspired by those practices, the pleasures of satisfying those desires. Hence, we need to focus on the biopolitics and power/knowledge dynamics of the WoT, including the role of the social sciences in the war. This situation raises ethical issues at stake for social scientists. There are the well-publicized problems with some social scientists in the practices of torture, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism programs in the WoT. Social science does not deal with political violence, the role of the military in that violence, or its social consequences. As noted above, one searches in vain for a chapter on violence, warfare, and the military in sociology textbooks. This seems obtuse given the societies that produce much of the most influential sociological theorizing in the world are the same nations involved in much of the political violence in the world today. It does seem relevant to this discussion that the nations in the US-led WoT contain in their borders the most influential sociological establishments in some of the most prestigious universities in the world. In the U.S., for example, military institutions are deeply embedded in everyday cultural life, national holidays, ROTC in schools and universities, and communities. The global reach of the US military also means that this is true of many other nation-states in the world. This seems odd given the US and its allies in the WoT directly participate in or enable much of the political violence, wars, and state-sponsored terrorism going down in the world today. We argue that the lack of interest in war and military violence in sociological theorizing seems obtuse; sometimes we think it might be a result of a deliberate decision. Warfare and violence could be brought up in many different contexts. As far as we know there is no theory of warfare presented

Introduction  15 in sociological theory texts. As far as we can tell, war is not an institution in our culture. It has no list of functions. We add some additional reasons to the author’s explanation of why “sociological theorizing” does not deal with political violence more directly, particularly the problems of state terrorism. The most obvious reason for this situation is that the power elite that rules US society and manages the DOD and its military institutions do not financially support this kind of research and in some cases will actively oppose, attack, and marginalize researchers who do study these issues. Social scientists get blowback when they seek to know what is going on with the military and war, or when they link these practices to power and domination. Researchers can be stigmatized by their involvement in critical research that targets “counterterrorism” programs and research. esearchers can be defamed by public authorities as threats to national security or anathematized as unpatriotic traitors to the cause. They can be excluded from professional communities by their colleagues as threats to the legitimacy and authority of the discipline (e.g., C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff, Michael Parenti). The unwillingness of sociologists to face directly the practices of ­v iolence in war and the political sadism involved, we argue, raises fundamental ethical as well as epistemological issues. There is no denying the empirical truth of the deliberate and rationalized agency involved in manipulating public opinion and civil society into supporting political violence and sadism to achieve their goals. There is so much empirical evidence that the elites are “rationally” knowledgeable of the role of civil society and the nonrational aspects of war and organizing campaigns of military violence, and effectively use it to manipulate the public, that it seems naive to insist that these ideas can be mobilized to build a new cultural sociology of the military and war. Counterterrorism practices have seriously problematized the power/knowledge dynamics of the WoT. Some social scientists and criminologists specifically are in fact directly involved in the NSA-sponsored research in support of the WoT. We need to theorize the terrible truth that knowledgeable elites orchestrate victimage rituals as a calculated means of politics. Victimage ritual, we argue, is a rationalized and refined political strategy employed by power elites to achieve their agendas.

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16  Introduction Blain, Angeline Kearns. Tactical Textiles: A Genealogy of the Boise Peace Quilt Project, 1981–1988. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1994. Blain, Michael. “On the Genealogy of Terrorism.” In Interrogating the War on Terror, edited by Barbara Staines, 49–66. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. ———. “Power and Practice in Peace Movement Discourse.” In Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change. Vol. 11, edited by Louis Kriesberg, 197–218. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Inc., 1989. ———. Power, Discourse and Victimage Ritual in the War on Terror. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. ———. “Power, Victimage Ritual, Terrorism [Potere, Rituale Di V ­ ittimizzazione e Terrorismo].” In Le Maschere del Male. una Sociologia del Male, edited by ­Giorgio Pacifici, 113–52. Milan, Italy: FrancoAngeli, 2015. ———. “Power, War, and Melodrama in the Discourses of Political Movements.” Theory and Society 23, no. 6 (1994): 805–38. ———. “Review of Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies by Marieki de Goede.” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 5 (2013): 1460–62. ———. “Review of The Spectacular Few: Prison Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat by Mark Hamm.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 55, no. 3 (2014): 262–64. ———. “Rhetorical Practice in an Anti-Nuclear Weapons Campaign.” Peace & Change 16, no. 4 (October 1991): 355–78. ———. “Social Science Discourse and the Biopolitics of Terrorism.” Sociology Compass 9, no. 3 (2015): 161–79. Blain, Michael, and Angeline Blain. “Theorizing the War on Terror.” In Sociological Theory (RC16) Conference. Selwyn College, Cambridge UK: International Sociological Association, 27–29 June, 2016. Burke, Kenneth. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’.” In The Philosophy of Literary Form. 2nd ed., 191–220. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941 [1967]. Collins, Randall. Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Domhoff, G. William, and eleven other authors. Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America? New York: Routledge, 2017. Dugan, Laura. “The Making of the Global Terrorism Database and Its Applicability to Studying the Lifecycles of Terrorist Organizations.” In The Sage Handbook of Criminological Research Methods, edited by Dadd Gadd, Susanne Karstedt, and Steven Messner, 175–98. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2012. Dugan, Laura, and Erica Chenoweth. “Beyond Deterrence: Raising the Expected Utility of Abstaining from Terrorism in Israel.” American Sociological Review 77, no. 4 (August 2012): 597–624. Duncan, Hugh D. Communication and Social Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Foucault, Michel. Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1983–1984. Translated by Graham Burchell. Edited by Frédéric Gros. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence: Vol. 2, a Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Introduction  17 Goede, Marieke de. Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Hamm, Mark S. The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Ivie, Robert. Democracy and America’s War on Terror. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Joas, Hans. “The Modernity of War: Modernization Theory and the Problem of Violence.” International Sociology 14, no. 4 (December 1999): 457–72. Joas, Hans, and Wolfgang Knöbl. War in Social Thought. Translated by Alex ­Skinner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. LaFree, Gary, and Laura Dugan. “Introducing the Global Terrorism Database.” Terrorism and Political Violence 19 (2007): 181–204. LaFree, Gary, Laura Dugan, and Susan Fahey. “Global Terrorism and Failed States.” In Peace and Conflict 2008, edited by J. Joseph Hewitt, Jonathan ­Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr, 39–54. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. ———. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Saint-Amand, Pierre. The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, & the Enlightenment. 1992. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Minneapolis: University of ­Minnesota, 1996. Simpson, Christopher. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Smith, Phillip. Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Tiryakian, Edward. “War: The Covered Side of Modernity.” International Sociology 14, no. 4 (December 1999): 473–89. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, Vol. IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ———, Editor. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946 [1921]. ———. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946 [1922]. West, Brad, and Steve Matthewman. “Sociological Theory as Demilitarized Zone: Examining Disciplinary Inattention to War and the Military.” Theory: The Newsletter of the Research Committee on Sociological Theory (RC 16) of the International Sociological Association (Winter 2016): 10–14. www.isa-sociology.org/en/ research-networks/research-committees/rc16-sociological-theory/.

2 Imperial background and the US power elite

This chapter argues that a coherent theory of the War on Terror (WoT) requires an analysis of the US power structure, the imperial agency of its power elite, and the calculated use of political victimage ritual (VR) to legitimate and motivate wars against their geopolitical opponents. Our leaders have repeatedly denied their imperial ambitions during the “Cold War” and have reiterated these statements after declaring the WoT. We argue that the historical record belies this denial. We do so by providing an account establishing the continuity in imperial practices while the discourses justifying these activities have changed. Contrary to Go’s (2011) comparative historicalsociology of British and US imperialism, who finds striking “parallels” in the patterns, practices, and institutions of British and American modes of imperialism, we find striking continuities in these practices. We disagree with Go’s historical-comparative approach for two reasons. He neglects the crucial background of British imperialism in Ireland. His comparative-­ historical method treats the British and American cases as isolated events. The genealogical method employed here emphasizes “continuities” in these practices. Our research finds continuities in these practices. Fields (2017) finds continuity in the Anglo-American imperial practice of land “enclosure” that legitimates dispossession of the land, from the 17th century. English enclosure of peasants from their land, to US settler colonialism dispossession of Amerindians, right on to the current use of enclosure as a legal basis by the Israel’s in the settlers movement to dispossess Palestinians from their lands. Second, this chapter adds another thread to a larger project to ­produce a genealogy of the discourses and practices of political terrorism and ties this genealogy to the substantial literature on settler-colonialism and genocide (Elkins and Pedersen 2005; Veracini 2013). A brief account of Anglo-­A merican imperialism is outlined. We argue that this deep cultural background of Anglo-American imperial practices continues to influence the strategies and tactics, institutions and practices of “progressive violence” that constitute geopolitics in the present. A more detailed case study is of George “Lord” Bennett as an imperial social type who operated as a “petty sovereign” in the settlement of 19th-century Oregon territory. ­Bennett was a direct lineal descendent of the English settlers in the 17th-century

Imperial background and the US power elite  19 British colonization of Ireland. Bennett is doubly interesting. He wrote a book about his ancestor’s role in the building of the “walled town” of ­Bandon, Ireland and left an unfinished manuscript of his role in the founding of Bandon, Oregon. Finally, we theorize the role of the US power structure and the agency of the US power elite in orchestrating and prosecuting the WoT. We adopt the approach of C. Wright Mills (1956, 1959) as elaborated in G. William Domhoff’s (2014b) class dominance theory of the US power structure that stresses the domination of the social upper class, the corporate community, and policy network in the WoT. The politicians who represent the interests of this power structure orchestrate the victimage ritual process—WoT as a mode of imperial power by means of victimage ritual—through the corporate dominated mass media that exploits the appeal of Pentagon-produced spectacles of high-tech military violence and legitimates and normalizes the practices of the WoT. The policy network produces the policies that legitimate and rationalize “foreign” policies like the “Cold War” or WoT. Social scientists play direct roles in the research and policy processes that generate the knowledge and biopolitics that legitimate WoT. The following analysis employs a model of empire and imperial practices represented in Figure 2.1 that features two interrelated clusters of practices. There are two stages in the cycle of imperial power struggles, political victimage ritual and biopolitics. Power struggles provoke VRs. Biopolitics,

Figure 2.1  Empire, Victimage Ritual, and Biopolitics of Terrorism.

20  Imperial background and the US power elite as we describe it later and elaborate in great detail Chapter 4, is an opportunistic response to elite-organized political VRs. The rhetorical structure of PVRs can be captured in elite discourses that mix epic struggles of good against evil in literature, particularly the literature of epic poetry. In modern culture these epic stories can be found in the form of popular culture. Slotkin’s (1973, 1985, 1992) cultural histories show how US imperial attitudes and practices were articulated in American literature and the myth of the settlement of the western frontier. Imperial moves into “virgin” territories provoke indigenous populations to resist generating violent political power struggles. This occasions the emergence of new objects of knowledge that imperial administrators study and new policies that administrators employ based on that knowledge to achieve their objectives. This specific configuration of practices emerged in 17th century in the work of imperial administrators in the 17th-century English colonization of Ireland and the imposition of a “plantation” system. Victimage ritual is the practice of seeking out a victim to scapegoat in order to expiate communal guilt. A political victimage ritual involves the spectacular use of scapegoating as a calculated means to achieve political goals. The tactical use of this device is a key feature of imperialism. Blain (2012) shows how the history of struggles against terrorists (i.e., Indian Wars. WWII/Nazis, Cold War/Communists) has played a constitutive role in Anglo-American imperialism, the continuity of imperial practices, and contemporary US-led Empire. VRs against terrorists have a specific genealogy in relation to the dynamic of US-led Empire. British imperialists generalized the practice of categorizing as terrorist any organized resistance to British rule. As Anglo-American elites extended their sovereignty over territories to defend or extend their ­Empires, resistance was inevitably provoked. “Terrorism” was the label most ­frequently applied to the activities of leaders and groups involved in resistance. Henceforth, they would be branded as terrorists. Given the “liberal” value orientation of these imperial elites, terrorists were portrayed as threats to security, life, and liberty. Policy networks composed of experts provided the knowledge to further the political elite’s aims and agendas. The leaders and groups labelled terrorists were scapegoated in moral, liberal, and biopolitical terms. They were vilified as evil, uncivilized tyrants and racial monsters—the ­ultimate “outsiders.” The global war on terror is only the latest manifestation of this mode of Empire and subjection by means of victimage ritual.

Imperial background The genealogy of Anglo-American “empire” can be traced to the British colonization of Ireland and the implantation of English and Scottish Protestants in Munster and Ulster, Ireland (1500–1600). We argue that this tradition is alive and kicking in the geopolitical activities of the US power elite. There is no space here to detail that interpretation here. But these patterns and practices are well established in the historiography of colonization of Ireland, North America, and the so-called “Commonwealth.”

Imperial background and the US power elite  21 Genealogy is an approach to interpretive social science. The practice of using etymologies to do genealogy was invented by Nietzsche (1887) and elaborated by Foucault (1977). Both thinkers thought that (1) the study of ­language and discourse was a valid way to study the self-interpretive activities of a ­society—Christian moral values, judgements of good versus evil, or modern scientific discourses, judgements of normal versus abnormal, and (2) that these interpretive practices had to be interpreted in the context of the power relations in society—who is speaking the discourse. In one of his last interviews with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault (1983) stated that he thought there were three domains of genealogy were possible. First, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, an historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents (p. 237) The practice of using etymologies is a well-established practice in the conduct of historical genealogies (see Blain 2005, 2007, derived from Nietzsche 1887 and Burke 1968). It is based on two assumptions: (1) language, lexicon, and discourse are strong empirical indicators of the interpretive activities and cultural understandings of members of a society—Christian moral values, good vs. evil, modern scientific discourses, judgements of normal versus abnormal, and (2) that the meanings of these interpretations and understandings have to be socially situated in the context of the current power relations in society—who is speaking or writing to whom and in historical and social context. The etymologies of imperial terminology described as follows provide grounds for thinking that the Greco-Roman imperial tradition was passed along to the English monarchs through education as well as ongoing practices. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) etymologies trace the genealogy of the English discourse and practices of “empire” to Greco-Roman sources. These etymologies are grounded in an analysis of the surviving ancient texts. As such, they are strong empirical indicators of the existence of discourses and practices. The etymology of empire indexes the deep historical background of these practices, providing solid evidence of a tradition of empire and its periodic reactivation across the generations. The knowledge of the language contained in these ancient texts was transmitted from one generation of to the next, inspiring new generations of ruling elites to engage in new imperial adventures. The etymologies show how the senses of words like colony change over time as they are rearticulated in new languages and discourses in response to new historical situations. The definitions reported exemplify the practices of empire.

22  Imperial background and the US power elite Table 2.1  E  tymology of English Imperial Discourse, Social Institutions and Social Types Social Institution

Social Type

Ancient imperium, n (Roman, Latin)

imperator /imperātrīx n (Roman, Latin)

colōnia, n (Roman, Latin)

colōnus, n. (Roman, Latin)

English (1500) British Empire, n plantation, n colony, n settlement, n

imperial majesty = king / queen planter, n colonist, n settler, n pioneer, n

Table 2.1 summarizes the system of signifiers that constitute the discourse of empire: social institution (empire, colony, plantation, and settlement) and associated social type (emperor/empress, colonist, planter, and settler). These texts transmitted a historical knowledge of the practices of Empire that inspired and enabled future generations. The OED etymologies trace the genealogy of the English discourse and practices of “empire” to GrecoRoman sources (on the strength and weaknesses of OED as a course, see Willinsky 1994; Winchester 2003). These etymologies are grounded in an analysis of the surviving texts. The etymology of empire indexes the deep historical background of these practices, providing solid evidence of a tradition of empire and its periodic reactivation across the generations. The knowledge of the language contained in these ancient texts was transmitted from one generation to the next, inspiring new generations of ruling elites to engage in new imperial adventures. The etymologies show how the senses of words like colony change over time as they are rearticulated in new languages and discourses in response to new historical situations. The definitions reported exemplify the interpretive practices of Roman and English writers in reference to their imperial activities. The English word “Empire” derives from derived from 12th century ­Anglo-Norman and Old French, and the Roman, Latin term imperium. It signified “an extensive territory under the control of a supreme ruler (­typically an emperor) or an oligarchy, often consisting of an aggregate of many separate states or territories.” Empire was associated with “power, authority, supreme dominion, sovereignty, and authority. In later use, it included “an extensive group of subject territories ultimately under the rule of a single sovereign state.” Specific references to the “British Empire” emerged in the 17th century with the rise of Britain to the status of a trading and sea power. Its use was frequently associated with the colonization of Ireland and North America. It was also used to designate Britain’s extensive “overseas” colonies in the Caribbean, the Americas, the East Indies, India, Australasia, and Africa.

Imperial background and the US power elite  23 Imperator first signified a “military commander” and later a “victorious general.” During the period of the Roman Republic, the senate conferred the title of emperor on Julius Caesar and Augustus, with the special sense of the “military powers” of the “sovereign ruler” of the Roman Empire. From this time, the emperor was understood to be “superior in dignity to a king.” This practice continued in the Holy Roman Empire (e.g., the Frankish king Charlemagne was titled emperor by the pope). From the Middle Ages it was also applied “to monarchs ruling over wide territories outside Europe” (frequently the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese). Since the 16th century, Russian tsars were frequently called emperors. The sovereigns of Muslim nations were more likely to be called sultans. From the 19th century the title of emperor has been widely applied to sovereigns throughout the world, particularly those ruling a territory regarded as constituting an empire. The English did not use emperor; instead they used “your imperial majesty the king [queen]” to refer to the monarchs who ruled the British Empire (king/ queen derived from Germanic languages, Old Norse). The English word “colony” also derives from Roman, Latin. The OED etymology reveals its uses, institutions, practices, and social types. The Latin term colonia meant “farm,” “landed estate,” or “settlement.” It was the proper term for “a public settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country, where they, retaining their Roman citizenship, received lands, and acted as a garrison.” They were mostly formed of veteran soldiers who had served their time; hence it was applied to the place so occupied, or to towns which were raised to the same rank and privileges. The Roman coloniæ in Britain were London, Bath, Chester, and Lincoln. Specific references to English colonies in Ireland and Virginia proliferate after the 1550s. Colonus designed “one who colonizes or settles in a new country,” or “takes part in founding a colony,” or “a member of a colonizing expedition” or “body of emigrants who settled abroad as an independent self-governed state, unconnected with the mother city save by religious ties.” The OED quotes referencing English colonists specifically first appear in the 1700s and mainly to English colonists in Pennsylvania. The etymology of “plantation” and “planter” is directly significant in relation to the concept of biopower and the biopolitics of empire. They are from the classical Latin plantatio and 6th-century Roman sources. This sense links the practices of “planting and propagating” to the biopolitics of “planting and propagating” loyal Roman, and later Anglo-Protestant, subjects and populations in English colonies. The sense of the power of “plantation” is productive and multiplicative rather than repressive and deductive. The use of “plantation” and “planter” proliferate during the 16th-century English colonization of Ireland. The power of the “plantation” is multiplicative rather than repressive. Its association to agricultural practices is significant: “propagation from cuttings,” something “planted,” or “a plant.” From 8th-century British sources, it signified “a foundation and institution,” and from the 12th century “a nursery.” Plantation linked to a British colony first appears in 1624. Most of the OED quotes specifically reference

24  Imperial background and the US power elite plantations in Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia. One of the OED quotes is derived from Cromwell’s famous statement regarding the decisive role that the “implanted” English protestant “planters” played in the success of the Irish campaign. The concept of “pioneer” captures the “military” sense of a “planter” or “colonial settler” as a social type with “garrison values.” A garrison is a fortified outpost with military troop. It comes from the Old French pionnier, n. designating a “foot soldier,” and the practice of an “an infantry group going with or ahead of an army or regiment to dig trenches, repair roads, and clear terrain in readiness for the main body of troops.” Pioneer acquires a strong “settler-colonial” sense by the 19th century, designating a “person who is amongst the first to explore or settle a new country, territory, or region; an early colonist or settler.” Table 2.2 glosses some of the highpoints in this history, a method adopted by the Cambridge School of history called “serial contextualism” (see Armitage 2017 history of the contested definitions of “civil-war,” targeting Ancient Roman, early modern Europe, 19th century to present). The chart also includes glosses of the relevant contextualized victimage rituals, biopolitics, and mythological practices components amplifying these processes are summarized in Table 2.2. The evidence in support will be elaborated in greater detail in the following discussion and later chapters. Table 2.2  G  enealogy of Anglo-American Imperial Practices Agents

Victimage Ritual

Biopolitics

Epic Myth

EnglishIreland (1500–1700s)

Monarchs Cromwell Militias

“Papists” military conquest massacre, public torture

plantation system W. Petty “Down Survey” transplantation

Faerie Queen (Spencer 1596)

USAmerica (1600–1800s)

Presidents politicians militias

“Indians” massacres public torture “savage war”

territorializing reservation system Lewis-Clark survey scientific racism

The Frontier “Custer’s Last Stand” (Slotkin 1985)

USWoT (2001– present)

Power Elite Allies military, DOD “special” forces

“Islamic terrorists” aerial war, “drone assassination torture

CIA, NSA global surveillance global data bases social, psych. Science

Star Wars (Lucas/ Spielberg 1970s–present)

Imperial background and the US power elite  25 A brief description of the Ireland and North American cases follows. It will provide the empirical grounds for arguing that these two cases represent an indispensable background for an understanding of contemporary US imperial activities and the WoT. They provide powerful evidence for the survival in contemporary geopolitics of a continuous tradition of Anglo-American imperialism or genealogical continuity across time and space. The discourses and practices have changed but the underlying structures remain the same.

English colonization of Ireland The 17th-century English colonization of Ireland illustrates the structure and dynamics of empire as a mode of subjection by means of victimage ritual. Ireland was an “unsettled” territory. McCormick (2009) characterizes the English view of the Irish, including the assimilated English-Irish at the time, with a quote from the epic poet and English planter, Edmund Spenser’s (1596) A View of the Present State of Ireland: “the most parte of them are degenerated and gowen almot mere Irishe’ themselves” (p. 91). Ireland constituted a “practice frontier,” a political experiment in “militant protestant” imperialism. It illustrates how imperial practices constitute sovereigns as subjects acting on the actions of others, as emperors and empresses, monarchs, prime ministers and presidents, and states as great powers. The capacity to overcome resistance from competing states and empires, and indigenous populations is central to this dynamic process. It also involves agents at the point of contact, who are ready, willing, and able to implement those sovereign desires, to settle new territories, fight the wars, and to administer the colonies. Max Weber’s (1905) protestant ethic interpretation of the spirit of capitalism also applies to the “pioneer” spirit of Anglo-American settler-colonialism. Foster’s (1988) modern Irish history provides a detailed account of the imperial background and contemporary political dynamics in Elizabethan England, the Protestant vs. Catholic antagonism, the English “civil wars” that influenced the Plantation of Ulster (1586–1611), and Cromwell’s later ferocious, brutal, and murderous military campaign. Cromwellian Ireland involved the violent usurpation of the land and removal of the Irish to the West of Ireland, beyond the pale (R.F. Foster 1988, Chapter 3: “Plantation: Theory and Practice,” Chapter 5: “Cromwellian Ireland”). Both periods involved spectacular massacres of the indigenous populations who resisted the conquest. Cromwell orchestrated his “well-disciplined” army to deliberately, that is, as a matter of strategic and tactical calculation, perpetrate the infamous massacre of the indigenous population at Wexford in 1649. “Protestant” militias organized from the growing Anglo-Irish population loyal to the crown and Cromwell also played prominent roles in support of the repression. Bennett’s (1869) is also a good account of this dynamic in Bandon, Ireland County Cork, Munster, and his ancestor’s role in the latter

26  Imperial background and the US power elite atrocity. As we shall see, a similar dynamic kicks in during the settlement of Bandon, Oregon and the US conquest and “white” settlement of Oregon territory in the late 1800s. Sovereign-Biopower. Biopolitics has been more or less explicit in the legal concept of sovereignty at least since Aristotle defined “man” as a political animal (Agamben 1998). The 17th and 19th century colonization of Ireland and North America reactivated the Greco-Roman imperial discourse and moved thought and knowledge of politics toward an explicit conception of biopower and biopolitics. In close proximity to England, Ireland and the Irish functioned as an ideal “practice frontier”—an experiment that would influence and inspire many subsequent projects of imperial biopolitics (Foster 1988; McCormick 2009). Militant protestant “planters” sought to constitute a new mode of social life and the subjection/exclusion of the Irish. As we shall see, the knowledge of the Irish experiment also influenced the colonization of North America (Go 2011; Kakel 2011). Sovereign power is materially manifested in proclamations, declarations of war, treaties and truces, political appointments, and legislative acts. In 1541 the English monarch, Henry VII, proclaimed himself “King of Ireland,” authorizing his loyal subjects and agents to extend his sovereignty over the whole island. Elizabeth I authorized the English plantation of Munster in southwest Ireland in the late 1580s. James I renewed the project by instituting the plantation of Ulster in Northern Ireland in the early 1600s. In 1606 a “Commission for remedying defective land-titles” was created and followed up by a 1608 “Commission to Survey Six Ulster Counties,” smoothing the way to 1610 “Ulster land assigned to British undertakers” and to 1621 “Patents granted for plantations in Leitrim, King’s County, Queen’s County, Westmeath” (Foster 1988: 599). The biopolitical discourses and practices are clearly evident in the record. Literally, the “plantation” strategy meant the “implanting” of loyal and industrious English settlers. The agricultural metaphor captures the biopolitical understanding of these practices. It is clearly articulated in the identification of the “colonists” as “planters.” This biopolitical sense, in turn, is elaborated in terms of a militant Protestant, utopian desires to create and foster the growth of an ideal society. These understandings and desires were represented in the making of plans and designs of “plantations” (see Map 4: Plantation of James I, Foster 1988: 108). McCormick (2009) has documented W. Petty’s role in producing the “Down Survey,” the biopolitics of transmuting the Irish into “English subjects” by factions in the colonial administration of Ireland in Dublin and London. McCormick is primarily concerned with establishing the influence of Petty on the birth of “political arithmetic” or “statistics,” and modern economics including Karl Marx who touted Petty’s contribution to his materialist views. The crucial point here is that it was developed as an administrative practice of the Irish population that emerged as part and parcel of the English colonization of Ireland. He sketches the context.

Imperial background and the US power elite  27 Epic Mythologies. There is a well-established interpretation in the critical literature that links Greek and Roman epic poetry to the discourses and practices of imperialism. Epic poetry articulates and clearly constitutes the cycle of the hero as the subject of imperial desire (Tonkin 1989; Bernard 2017). This understanding has been attributed to modern analysis of the hero myth, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (heroes = Gr. Ulysses, Lat. Odysseus, and the mythical foundation of the Roman Empire, the Aenid: hero = Aeneas) (Edith Hamilton 1942, Michael Grant). Modern recognition of this link has been noted by poets and literary critics, and powerful cinematic reverberations have occurred as well. Bernard (2017) notes two poems by Auden, “The Shield of Achilles” and “Secondary Epic.” The latter poem, she argues, equates Caesar Augustus, the terrible “blond” conqueror who commissioned the poem from Virgil, with Hitler and the Nazis. Bernard also references Robert Lowell’s “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid.” Lowell, she shows, often used the Roman Empire to make cautionary tales about warfare, ego, and human folly. He knew that the Aeneid had been embraced since the time of our founders as a kind of model American epic. “Just as Aeneas and his Trojans left their scene of defeat and headed west across the sea, built by Fate, to settle in a new land and establish Rome and empire, so, too, the Puritans left England, where they have been persecuted, sailed west, and founded a new City on A Hill—and its eventual entitlement to empire as well.” Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) wrote the great epic poem The Faerie Queen (1596). It was self-consciously written in the Greco-Roman spirit of imperialism. He wrote it during the earliest stages of the Plantation of Munster while in residence near Cork, Ireland. This poem is a transparent political allegory of the English project to colonize Ireland and the Irish. It clearly articulates the spirit of “militant Protestantism” and “expansionist” desires inspiring English imperialism. The Faerie Queen was widely understood to be a thinly veiled personification of Elizabeth I. In sum this poem narrates the liberation of Ireland in allegorical fashion as a transcendent struggle of good (Protestant values) against evil (Catholic Church and the Papacy). It tells the epic tale of a “Red Cross Knight” commissioned by “Gloriana, Queen of Fairy Land,” of the struggle to liberate a kingdom from the grips of an evil dragon. The Knight personifies “militant protestant virtues” such as “holiness.” His “commission” by the Knight by the Queen articulates her sovereign wish to liberate a kingdom from the Papacy. The “evil dragon” personifies the domination of the Kingdom by the Catholic Church and the papacy. It provided the English “planters” with a “poetics of settlement” to motivate them to venture forth and implement the sovereign’s desire to colonize Ireland (Carey 2011: 29). Generations of Anglo-Irish imperialists would be inspired to defend, fight, and die for the “Protestant Ascendency” in Ireland. These texts influenced the agents of empire at the point of contact. Robert Boyle, Earl of Cork, personified the 17th-century New English landowner, planter, and entrepreneur that colonized Ireland (Foster 1988: 14). Boyle

28  Imperial background and the US power elite built a great fortune and reared a huge family; he was based in Cork but influential in London. Like the rest of the New English landowners, he wanted to remain apart from the indigenous Gaelic-Irish and Old English-Irish, and not only for religious reasons. Preoccupied by relations with the Crown and the other New English landowners, Boyle resented Dublin officials as much as the native Irish and Old English (Catholic descendants of the earlier Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland). He cultivated his estate and made money with aggressive energy, passing along to his children “the mingled insecurity and self-congratulation of the parvenu” as well as “the garrison values of the frontier.” Foster concludes: “Within the planter culture were the seeds of what would later be known as Anglo-Irishness.” He might have added that his culture also contained “the seeds” of Anglo-American “settler-colonialism.” Resistance-Victimage Ritual. The biopolitics of empire provokes a cycle of resistance and VR. The “natives” must be removed and transplanted by violent means. These “dividing practices” constitute a mode of subjection. The plantation of Munster provoked fierce Irish resistance and a brutal military campaign of VR targeting the Irish. Thousands of Irish lost their lives and were forcefully removed from their land. Irish resistance radicalized the English agents of imperialism. The English colonizers used Irish violence against the New-Irish “planters” as rhetorical ammo, to vilify the Irish and justify their forced transplantation. The expropriated lands were made available for more implantations of English Protestant planters. “New English Protestant plantation in Munster from 1585 and Ulster from 1609—­already the focus of extensive Scottish Presbyterian immigration—­ threatened Irish and Old English property and status alike” (p. 91); Old-English remained Catholic after Protestant Reformation; as a result of the Catholic/ Protestant conflict in England, Catholics = king-killing zealots; English government and New-Irish lumped Old- and indigenous Irish into the same Catholic category of Papists. The English understandings of the Irish and their “wild shamrock ways” had always been contemptuous and derogatory (Foster 1988: 15–34). The English signifiers of difference are familiar. The Irish were uncivilized, idle and lazy, barbaric and brutal savages, and in response to rebellion, bloodthirsty murderers. The Irish attacked the New-English “planters” because they were “envious” and “resentful” of their material achievements. The Nine Years War, 1594–1603 intensified the vilification. The war provided a new pretext for expanding English imperial dominion over Irish populations and territories. The increasing encroachments on Irish lands resulting from the Plantation of Munster and efforts underway in Ulster provoked the Nine Years War (1594–1603). The rebellion was organized and lead by the Irish-Gaelic “Chieftains.” It became the pretext for a radical intensification of the imperial project and the Plantation of Ulster. The Nine Years War was the largest conflict fought by England during the Elizabethan era. At its height 18,000 soldiers were fighting in the English army in

Imperial background and the US power elite  29 Ireland. The English military defeated the rebellion by engaging in scorched earth tactics targeting the Irish population, who died in great numbers from random killings by the English military and Protestant militias and the resulting famine. A similar pattern of resistance and intensified biopolitics is observed in response to a new Irish Rebellion (1641) that lead to a brief Irish “Confederation” and end to English colonial rule (Foster 1988: 101–3; McCormick 2009: 90–94). The larger geopolitical context involved the Protestant Reformation, religious conflict, and the rise of Oliver Cromwell, champion of the protestant cause in England. Therefore, Irish attacks on Protestants in Ulster had a double significance. The Irish/English contrast signified a religious difference, Irish Catholic in contrast to English and Scottish Protestants. Irish victimage rituals perpetrated against the New-English in 1641 provided the pretext for Cromwell’s invasion and recolonization of Ireland: “The original Ulster rebellion of October 1641 had sparked widespread violence against English Protestants, which, combined with the effects of cold, hunger, and disease on those turned out of their homes and stripped of their possessions, resulted in several thousands dead” (p. 92). The number of dead was rumored to be 154,000; Sir John Temple’s (1640) The Irish Rebellion, the standard Protestant account, inflated the number to 300,000. The idea that the Irish “Papists had launched a war of extermination” against the Irish Protestant population justified Cromwell’s invasion. It would contribute directly to a vicious victimage ritual against the indigenous Irish, public tortures, massacres, and ultimate would lead to a massive “transplantation” of the Irish population. The Irish massacre of thousands of Ulster Protestants in 1641 provided the pretext to vilify the Irish as “bloodthirsty murderers” to motivate and justify Oliver Cromwell’s brutal reconquest of Ireland. The Parliament appointed Cromwell as “civil and military” governor of Ireland in 1649. Cromwell’s response to the creation of an Irish Catholic and Royalist “Confederation” was a military campaign of sovereign terror and subjection of the Irish rebels and population by means of VR. This VR involved spectacular massacres (Drogheda and Wexford), executions and tortures, the deliberate destruction of crops and land to incapacitate and terrorize the Irish population, and the eventual transplantation of “Catholics” to the West of Ireland and expropriation of millions of acres of Irish land. Thousands of Irish were “transplanted” to a “reservation” in the west of Ireland. The actual aim was genocide of the Irish population in Ireland. The best estimate is that Cromwell’s conquest and its direct effects (casualties, famine, disease, and export to the Caribbean as slaves) reduced the Irish population by 600,000 or 40% of the preconquest total of 1.4 million. Within a decade, the percentage of land possessed by Catholics dropped from 60% to 20%, and two-fifths of the land mass was transferred from Irish Catholics to British Protestants. A case can be made that it was one of the greatest episodes of “ethnic cleansing” in Western European history (Morrill 2003).

30  Imperial background and the US power elite The horrific effects of Cromwell’s war against the Irish “Papists” helped clear the way for the recolonization of Ireland. “A decade of fighting, intermittent famine, and latterly the plague—which raged throughout the period of Cromwell’s invasion—may have killed off a third or more of the prewar population of perhaps 1.8 million. Of those that survived, 35,000–40,000 soldiers were allowed to leave and take up service in Continental Europe (roughly 20,000 had already gone during the 1640s), which between 15,000 and 25,000 men, women, and children were transported to English colonies in the West Indies and Virginia. Besides the horrific human toll, the land itself was wrecked, stocks destroyed, and trade at a standstill” (Foster 1988: 93). Biopolitics-Governmentality. The 16th-century settlement initiative in Munster was a large-scale undertaking requiring the resources of the English state. The policies and practices of “plantation” involved the introduction of utopian Anglo-Protestant settlements in Ireland and massive population movements into, within, and out of Ireland (Foster 1988: 59–78). Already by 1600 in ­Munster the ambitious planter Richard Boyle had molded the countryside around ­Lismore to the English style: “a ‘lordly mansion’, surrounded by a stocked dearpark, selected bruit-orchards, fish-ponds, stud-farms, eyries, a meticulously constructed rabbit-warren” (Foster 1988: 7). At the same time, North Armagh and southeast Antrim had been already “landscaped” into village patterns by building Big Houses. These efforts were extended by James I in 1602 to the Plantation of Ulster. By 1622 there were probably 12,000 settlers resident in the colonized Munster lands. Settlers of English and Scottish descent made up about 1% of the population of Ireland in the 1600s; by the early 1700s, they made up 27% of Ireland’s population (Foster 1988: 13). Cromwell’s reconquest of Ireland was followed by a series of British parliamentary acts in the 1650s to consolidate the colony: “Act for the Settling of Ireland,” (1652), “The Down Survey and allocation of forfeited Irish lands” (June–Sept. 1653) and “Arrangements for Transplantation Act of Satisfaction” (Sept. 1653), and “Settlement Act for the Assuming, Confirming and Settling of lands and Estates in Ireland” and “Act for Convicting, Discovering, and Repressing of Popish Recusants” (1657). The implementation of these acts consolidated the “Protestant Ascendency” in Ireland for the next two centuries. The restoration of English rule that resulted from the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland had a direct effect on Knowledge and the eventual emergence of the “Positivist” social sciences. William Petty (1623–1687) exploited the opportunities generated by the conquest to invent a new approach to survey research—the “Down Survey of Ireland” and a new form of governmental rationality he called “political arithmetic.” These new “instruments of government” enabled the “transplantation” of the Irish population, the implantation of thousands of English subjects in Ireland—mainly “adventurers and soldiers” who had served in Cromwell’s army—and the “transmutation” of the Irish into English subjects (McCormick, 2007, 2009: 168–208). A student of Thomas Hobbs, Petty had political and scientific ambitions,

Imperial background and the US power elite  31 and was an enthusiastic participant in Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland. Two of his most influential texts, Political Arithmetick and the Political Anatomy of Ireland (both written in 1671–1672), were manuscripts containing policy proposals circulated to a few powerful players in the British government who had connections in the British Parliament. McCormick (2009: 117) summaries the ramifications of Petty’s survey: The Down Survey is chiefly known neither because of its contribution to the development of political arithmetic nor even because of its innovative division of labour, but because it was the rock upon which successive Acts of Settlement founded two centuries of ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ in Ireland. It enabled the redistribution of approximately 8,400,000 acres of land from Catholic to Protestant owners—transforming Ireland’s social geography and cementing English colonial domination of the island. Irish Catholic landownership, roughly 80% in 1600 and still nearly 60% in 1641, was reduced to 22% in 1688; the Cromwellian settlement, and its instrument, Petty’s survey, made the difference. (McCormick 2009: 117) Petty was at the forefront of a nascent biopolitics of population and the emergence of the social sciences. The survey was conducted in the aftermath of Cromwell’s devastating conquest. It produced the database British colonial administrators in Ireland would employ to resettle the Irish and settle thousands of “planters” in Ireland, a change at the very foundation of 200 years of British colonial rule and the “protestant ascendency.” He proposed an ambitious plan to “transmute” the Irish into loyal, English subjects. His proposal involved a scheme to “exchange” Irish and English women. Irish women would be exported to England and required to marry Englishman. And English women would be imported to Ireland to marry Irishman. As a result, the Irish would have English children and form family bonds. This would bring about a “transmutation” of the Irish into loyal English subjects, thus resolving the Hobbesian problem of hostility between the two populations and perpetual war. Petty’s work is also credited by Marx and others as the founder of the field of empirical political-economy and the use of numbers as precise measurements in social sciences (McCormick 2009: 306–12).

US colonization of North America, 1800s Recent historical research on the origins of American nationalism emphasized the dominant role of Protestantism “evangelism” and frontier “revivalism” in the 19th-century settlement of the American frontier (e.g., Haselby 2015). This overemphasis on religion in the settlement of the North America frontier neglects the decisive role of the federal government and the military in the process. The “experiment” conducted in the conquest and colonization of Ireland became a strategic and tactical model for the US colonization of North

32  Imperial background and the US power elite America. British expansion into North America was a part of a broader transatlantic and imperial background, pitting England against its imperial rivals—the Netherlands, France, and Spain—who desired to “plant” settler colonies in the “New World” of the Americas. English agents of empire employed the Irish model in their North American settlements and colonization projects. Veterans of the Irish campaign were prominent among the military adventurers who set out to “conquer” North America. The VR tactics employed during the “Irish wars” were recycled during the “Indian wars” on the American “frontier” (Kakel 2011: 84). The American “plantations” recycled the English “plantations” in Munster and Ulster. Sovereign Biopower. The US political elite shared with the British a common knowledge of Greco-Roman imperialism and its epic expansionist desires to extend their territory and dominion westward. English colonial experience in Ireland provides an explanation for the striking continuity in the patterns of British and US Empires. Go’s (2011) is certainly correct, that the thesis of American exceptionalism is falsified by the empirical record of US imperial practices in the settlement of North America. The Anglo-­A merican US political elite were inspired by the same “militant Protestantism” that inspired the colonization of Ireland. It gave religious legitimacy to the “manifest destiny” of the Anglo-American juggernaut to colonize and settle the vast western frontier. The emergence of America was God’s gift to mankind. It would constitute a new “city on the hill” that would differentiate it from the European nations. The struggle to extend the American empire to the West was a great struggle of good against evil and the civilized against the savages. These desires were articulated in 18th-century American literature and the myth of the settlement of the western frontier (Slotkin 1973). It was in the mythic-ritual crucible of savage wars and the regeneration through violence that scapegoated the “savage” Indians that American imperial nationalism would be articulated. The break with Britain allowed the Americans to deny the obvious facts of imperialism. It freed Americans from restraints imposed by British imperialism. After the break, huge numbers of Americans swarmed over the Appalachian mountains. The US population increased rapidly from 1790 with 100,000, to 1820 with 2.25 million. By 1821, nine new states entered the union: Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri. The western territories became battlegrounds in a momentous struggle that defined the new nation: These struggles led to the rise of Andrew Jackson. There were also associated with the greatest explosion of Christian religiosity since the 17th century and since the Reformation. The War of Independence posed but did not answer the question of American “imperial” nationalism. The federal government faced two problems: Native Americans and related land claims, and the establishment of US sovereignty over the frontier. The US Army played a decisive role in defeating the Indians, freeing up land for settlers and speculators (see Bennett case

Imperial background and the US power elite  33 study, Appendix). Haselby (2015) describes the process as a “unique continental colonization project.” Haselby has a whole chapter on the writings of the Connecticut Wits—literary figures such as David Humphreys, Joel ­Barlow, Noah Webster, Timothy Dwight, and John Trubull. In the 1760s they produced an idealized image of America that was Protestant New England writ large. This group imagined an “American empire” that was aggressive, hierarchical, and theological, but also antislavery and antiracist. The US would become an “imperialistic society” of devoutly Christian farmers, artisans, and tradesmen led by a virtuous elite bent on conquering the entire world. Many Americans had regretted the break with Britain in 1776; the War of 1812 confirmed their worst fears. They were discredited by Andrew Jackson’s 1815 defeat of the British in New Orleans. Still, Protestant missionary and moral improvement societies reached the American West and farthest corners of the globe. The political elite was less concerned with Protestantism as a means to “personal salvation” than as an instrument of nation-building and imperialism. Jackson was a dedicated patriot and imperialist; but as a populist opposed to big business and the bankers, he appealed to those on the frontier, the “small farmers” and “settlers.” Jackson sided with frontier settlers on the Indian question, favoring elimination rather than civilizing reform. The colonization of the rest of North America involved the “plantation” of European “settlers” and African “slaves” into a moving western frontier in the 1900s. The California Gold Rush and Oregon Act (1850) energized this massive movement of people. The US military followed the British imperial approach (Go 2011: 40–46). Go describes a three-step process: (1) the federal government would appoint a territorial governor and three judges, (2) when the number of “free white males” passed 5,000, then a legislature could be created, and (3) once the legislature created a constitution, it would be submitted to the US for acceptance or rejection. Resistance Victimage Ritual. Inevitably, this provoked resistance. “Indian” resistance to “White” settlements on Indian lands, “Savage Wars” targeting Indians, and the English colonization of Ireland and North America had a direct influence on the US approach to the colonization of North America (Kakel 2011). Kakel’s larger goal is to show how the English and American “settlercolonial” projects directly influenced the Nazi imperial project to colonize the East. Kakel describes the process this way: In their colonizing efforts, English settlers would encounter ‘other’ peoples in Ireland, Virginia, and New England, resulting in social constructions of ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’. Like the Irish, the native peoples of North America were viewed as the ‘other’, but this ‘otherness’ was not yet definitely fixed by ‘race’. In British North America, the social construction of race appeared within the economic context of competition

34  Imperial background and the US power elite for Indian lands. To be sure, to deny the humanity of the Indians, to define them in non-human terms, and to picture them as ‘Godless savage beasts’ made it easy for the Euro-American invaders and settler colonists to argue that these non-peoples were ‘disqualified’ from the right to possess land. (p. 48) She goes on to point out that that these constructions were not clear-cut “racial” categories of “white” and “red.” These understandings had to be constructed, and “whites” and “Indians” had to be goaded into violence and hatred against each other. Kakel describes how notions of the Indians’ “savagery” justified, in the colonists’ views, brutal victimage rituals in the form of wars of expiation and land dispossession. In Virginia and New England, Indians who resisted ‘settlement’ and colonization of their lands would be treated, as in Ireland, like ‘wild’ and dangerous ‘beasts’. The success of the Virginia and New England settlements soon provided a base for further expansion and settler colonization.” (p. 115) Biopolitics-Governmentality. The transplantation of “Indians” to “reservations,” and the need to administer these captive populations, was managed by federal government’s “Bureau of Indian Affairs.” Indian schools were created to “transmute” “Indians” into “civilized” and “productive” Americans. The reservations and schools would make Indians available as research subjects. These developments contributed to the emergence of ethnology, a branch of scientific racism, and finally Anthropology as a field of knowledge and cultural science. The Lewis and Clark expedition plays important role in this part of the process.

George “Lord” Bennett and the “White” Plantation” of Southwest Oregon These dynamics were repeated and repeated in fractal patterns from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The settlement of southwestern Oregon illustrates the victimage ritual-biopolitics dynamic in more fine-grained empirical detail. The continuity of the imperial is well illustrated by George “Lord” Bennett (1827–1900), Irish immigrant, historian of Bandon, Ireland, cofounder of the town of Bandon in southwest Oregon, 1891, and a prototypical agent of 19th-century Anglo-American “settler colonialism” (Appendix) Bennett’s case is significant for a couple of reasons. He was well-educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He would go on to publish an influential history of the settlement of the “walled” town of Bandon, Ireland (Bennett 1869). The wall was erected to exclude Papists. His history was written in an

Imperial background and the US power elite  35 undisguised spirit of “protestant triumphalism.” He also published a chapter on the settlement of Bandon Beach, Oregon (Bennett 1898), as well as a posthumously published account of “white” settlement, extermination of the indigenous population located in the area, and the subsequent development of Bandon, Oregon (Bennett 1898, 1927). Bennett’s successful project to colonize southwest Oregon depended on the genocide of the indigenous people who had occupied this space for thousands of years. Bennett’s case is doubly significant because he traces in his writings his ancestor’s role in the English “plantation” of Puritans and the development of the “Walled” town of Bandon, Ireland and the Cromwell’s genocide of the indigenous Irish in the 1600s, to the “white” plantation of Bandon, Oregon. To quote Bennett The name of Bandon was derived from a colony of English Puritans planted in the south of Ireland by Phane Beecher, a London alderman, more than thirty years before the Mayflower and the Primerose landed their Puritan colony in New England. (1927: 350) There is a striking continuity in imperial practice between the Anglo-Irish practice of walled towns and the Oregon colony. It was illegal for “Indians” to enter in Bandon, Oregon (Blain and Blain 2013). Bennett’s history of Bandon, Ireland celebrated the colonization of Ireland and the “Protestant Ascendence.” His ancestors were direct participants in the Elizabethan “Plantation of Munster.” Thomas Bennett became Governor of Baltimore Castle, county Cork, Ireland, and created a Baronet in 1603 (Beckham 1997: 25). George Bennett settled in Cork with the title of Earl of Tankerville and became a baron in 1682 and an Earl in 1714. The Bennetts passed down their titles to their son’s side of the family. As Bennett states in his unpublished history of Bandon, Oregon, “The Name of Bandon [Ireland] was derived from a colony of English Puritans planted in the south of Ireland by Phane Beecher, a London alderman, more than thirty years before the Mayflower and the Primrose landed their Puritan colony in New England” (Bennett 1927: 350). Bennett’s (1869) history of Bandon, Ireland celebrates the history of that “walled” town as an example of the triumph of good “Protestant” planters over the uncivilized “Celts” and “Irish.” Bennett’s (1869) account of Crowell’s Irish campaign against the “Papists” and the role of victimage ritual in the process exemplifies the imperial pattern. He vilifies the indigenous Irish with lurid descriptions of the outrages they perpetrated against the settlers: The cruelties they committed were diabolical, and were aimed “ at extirpating out of this island, not only the Protestant religion, but also your Majesty’s most loyal subjects;” and so effectual was the progress made in carrying out this design, that, before the end of March, no less than

36  Imperial background and the US power elite one hundred and fifty-four thousand of the Protestant inhabitants had lost their lives. It is true that all those had not their brains knocked out; neither were they all hanged or shot; but thrusting men and women, with the helpless offspring who clung to them, without either food or fuel, and stripped stark naked,\ out into the bitter winter season of “ 1641,” and forcing them to remain there until they fell doad with cold and hunger, was a less humane, but a more wholesale method of destroying them than either of the former. Thousands perished thus! Bennett repeatedly describes the massacres against the settlers. He reiterates over and over again their “massacres” by the indigenous Irish. Cromwell’s brutal invasion is thus legitimated as a response to “the Great Rebellion” by these descriptions of Irish terror and violence. Bennett’s description of his actions is justified by these means as legitimate retaliatory violence. Such was the state of Ireland when Cromwell arrives in Dublin and moves against the rebels in Drogheda. He characterizes Cromwell as a virtuous, brave, and just defender of the British and Protestant settlers: Most of the garrison were put to the sword, amongst whom was Colonel Boyle (one of the Cork family); and the rest, amounting, it is said, to not more than thirty, were transported to Barbadoes. The terrible slaughter at Drogheda so terrified the neighbouring garrisons, that Dundalk submitted immediately—as did several forte and castles.:. In justice to Cromwell, it is but right to state that, previous to opening fire on the town, he sent the besieged the following laconic message:—“Surrender, and quarter. No surrender, no quarter.” This pattern of victimage ritual would be reiterated almost verbatim in Bennett’s account of the conquest and settlement of southwest Oregon. The indigenous people are treacherous, cruel, and savage. The settlers are simply defending themselves. The 19th-century Irish famine and the resulting political terrorism targeting Protestant landowners in the West of Ireland were significant circumstances in Bennett’s decision to sell his land and house and leave his wife and youngest son in Bandon, Ireland, and strike out for Oregon. Bennett learned about Oregon from Harry Baldwin, an old friend from Bandon, Ireland, who served in the US army for fifteen years and ultimately settled near Bandon, Oregon. In 1852 Baldwin, with a US army troop, shipwrecked near the area. Baldwin wrote about the Coquille River 1852 and wrote to Bennett about it. Bennett arrived in Oregon in 1873 with two sons (Joseph W. and George A. Bennett). He is described as “a visionary and a promoter” (Beckham, 1997: 24). He envisioned that a prosperous town could be built on the site. Bennett bought Thompson Lowe’s claim and additional beachfront property as well as adjacent timberlands. In 1874 he petitioned to have the area south of Coquille

Imperial background and the US power elite  37 River turned into a precinct (part of Randolph precinct, n. of Coquille River). He called it Bandon precinct; Bennett was appointed the first Justice of Peace. By 1878 he had cleared over 400 acres of land for grazing his animals. Resistance-Victimage Ritual. Bennett and Baldwin were able to occupy and settle the Coquille river valley as a result of the genocide of the indigenous people—the Nas-o-Mah Band of Lower Coquille who had inhabited the mouth of Coquille for 2000 years before “white men” showed up. Indian Agent Josiah L. Parrish enumerated the total number of Coast Indians as 1230, including near the Coquille River. The first contacts with the Oregon coast were in the 1820s. They were fur trappers and traders, operating out of the Hudson Bay Company in Fort Vancouver. The trappers hunted Sea Otter. The “pioneer settlement” and quest for gold and land caused dramatic changes in the area that would become Bandon, OR, during the 1850s. Miners found gold at Whisky Run, near Bandon, in 1853, attracting hundreds of miners (Beckham 1997: 10–13). By 1852 gold prospectors had spread throughout Oregon and the upper Klamath River, located south of the border in northern California. The invasion of Indian space provoked violent victimage rituals orchestrated against the indigenous people. Hoping to establish a town to supply mines in southern Oregon and northwest California caused a conflict at “Battle Rock,” 1851 (Beckham 1997: 4–10). These events provoked the famous Rogue River Indian wars of the 1850s, culminating in the genocide of the Indian populations in Oregon and California. The Rogue and Yakima Wars erupted in the Oregon territory at the same time. They resulted from imperial confrontations, in part orchestrated by the federal government, between native people and white immigrants and the “belief in the ineradicable savagery of the Rogue River peoples” (Schwartz 1997: 68). President Polk (1845–1849) was an avowed imperialist who openly campaigned for the US occupation of the Northwest territories, dispossession of the Indians, and settler colonialism (Beckham 2015). The governor at the time supported the elimination of the Indians. However, the roots of these two wars were not the same: The Rogue River War was the epitome of a type of conflict that grew from gold rush conditions in California--the war to make money. The Yakima War…the first example of a new kind of Indian war, a war made to enforce the new reservation policy. It grew out of the determination of federal officials…to confine eastern Washington and Oregon Indian people to reservations, which required that they be brought into submission and forced to observe a dubious treaty (Schwartz 1997: 83) Governor George Curry authorized organization of volunteers for a territorial army because “Indian peoples had violated their treaty and were ‘menacing the southern settlements with all the atrocities of savage warfare”

38  Imperial background and the US power elite (Schwartz 1997: 87, on the genocide of California Indians in meticulous detail, see Madley 2016). About the miners in southwest Oregon, Beckham states, “Not concealing their racism, [the miners] wrested village sites from tribes, raped the women, murdered the men, and despoiled the streams once filled with abundant runs of fish” (1997: 13). In 1851 Redick McKee, the Indian treaty commissioner for northern California, wrote that in every instance of difficulty with Indians, “whites have been the aggressors” (Beckham 1997: 13) This was also reiterated almost verbatim in a report by the Oregon Indian Agent, J. L. Parrish (1898: 104–113). Hostilities continued from 1853 to 1854. Beckham (1997) reports the massacre of the Nas-o-Mah people of the Lower Coquille Indians in 1854 with primary source documents. Bennett (1927: 331) provided the following account of the massacre: At all events, this was the only overt act they had ever been charged with. The volunteers, aided by Tommy Lowe, Fleming, and a few others from this quarter, stole down one morning quietly and unperceived; fell on them whilst they were asleep, and slaughtered all the men, women, and even the papooses, they could club or shoot. Very few escaped. Some jumped into the river, and tried to swim across, but they were shot to death in the water, and one or two made their escape through the woods, but the most of them were slain just where they lay sleeping, and their unburied bodies remained a sad and melancholy spectacle for years afterwards. At length they were buried just as they lay in all that piece of ground extending from the Bandon Hotel to the eastern end of Pacific street. As a result of repeated clashes, federal officials decided to remove all Indians from southwest Oregon by 1856 and confine them on the Coast and Grand Ronde reservations. The surviving Coquille Indians were removed to the Siletz reservation by 1856–1857. Hostilities continued from 1853–1854. Federal officials decided to remove all Indians from southwest Oregon by 1856 and colonize them on the Coast and Grand Ronde reservations. The “savages” were removed from their homelands to protect them from the brutal violence perpetrated by the militia authorized by the Governor of the Oregon territory. Once the Indians were removed by the miners and first pioneers, the petty agents of imperialism—such as the so-called Anglo-Irish “visionary and promoter,” like George “Lord” Bennett—moved into the Coquille River Valley to develop the rich resources in the area (Beckham 1997: 20–24). Biopolitics. The biopolitics of the Anthropology of Native American people along the Oregon coast is described in Tveskov’s (2007) account of cultural identity, particularly in the contest of power and resistance dynamics of imperial colonialism—with all of the genocidal violence associated with it as their subsequent relations “dictated” mainly by the “dominant society.” Although, that is not his primary concern.

Imperial background and the US power elite  39 The most important feature of Tveskov’s account for present purposes is his reference to the Anthropological archives on these peoples archived at the Smithsonian, mainly in the 1930s. Tveskov places this transformation in precolonial and postcolonial contexts. As he states, “Oral traditions of contemporary Oregon coast tribes as well as the results of anthropological research over the last 100 years…” The colonial context was not of primary interest to these early anthropologists. What interested them were the “complex social arrangements, high population densities, and a maritime hunting, fishing, and gathering ecology” that characterized these people. He goes on to state that “in the late 19th to early 20th century, anthropologists who interviewed American Indian elders from the region were struck by the extent that individual households-rather than villages, clans, or chiefdoms-served as the fundamental political, social, and economic unit.” The “savages” had been transformed by Anthropologists into interesting “objects” of knowledge and subjectified and objectified in the ethnographic literature.

Power elite and the WoT We think that this imperial background survives in the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of the US power elite orchestrated WoT. It is against this background that the WoT must be understood. The power dynamics of settler colonialism generates power struggles that lead to deliberate campaigns of genocide against uncooperative indigenous populations such as the Irish and Native Americans. In response to resistance from indigenous populations, political elites organize vicious campaigns of subjection by means of spectacular victimage rituals. The genealogy of the WoT is the late modern version of the Anglo-American wars against the Irish and Native Americans. It is derived from practices that emerged during the English colonization of Ireland and America. Ahmed (2013) directly links these imperial practices to the modernization process, so-called globalization, and the inevitable destruction of traditional tribal societies. The US-led global WoT is the latest manifestation of this genocidal process. The WoT is, therefore, NOT a direct function of Islamic terrorism. In our perspective, the “violence” in this process is part and parcel of the imperial moves by organized elites (English settlement of Ireland, US settlement of West, US WoT), resistance (by indigenous people), and violent victimage ritual responses to resistance (deliberate, genocidal campaigns to destroy and eliminate those who resist). The WoT is best theorized as a sequence of events that involve imperial moves by US power elite directed forces into new territories (i.e., recently, Africa, Middle East, Central and South Asia-Pacific), the emergence of organized resistance in response (sometimes from so-called terrorist or “rogue states” as well as tribal societies), and a final denouement that leads to the violent subjection of so-called “terrorists” organizations who resist imperial subjection by modernizing and civilizing forces. Ahmed provides detailed descriptions

40  Imperial background and the US power elite of these power struggles. The agents of imperialism produce modernizing campaigns to centralize power to govern territories and the tribal societies who resist those campaigns. These populations are vilified and subjected to the high-tech military violence, homicide bombers, and drone attacks, euphemistically called “counterterrorism.” Much of the literature refers to the imperial agents orchestrating these power struggles with abstract nouns such as “the English” or “the British,” or “the Americans” or “US.” We think the use of these abstract nouns can be problematic. They function to gloss over the imperial agency of political leaders. In part this denial is rooted in the discourse of US history promulgated by US historians. “One of the central themes of American historiography,” observes William Appleman Williams, “is that there is no American Empire,” quoted in Barkawi and Laffey’s (2002) article on “Retrieving the Imperial,” also Laffey and Weldes (2004) on the public’s memory of the Kent State University massacre of student, anti-war protesters response to the Vietnam War. The anti-imperial tradition is also embedded in one of the founding patriotic mythologies of American nationalism regarding the US War of Independence, celebrated annually in “Fourth of July” ceremonies, is that the US was founded through a victorious “War of Independence” asserting its “liberty” from the yoke of the British Empire. This historical discourse has functioned to “cover-up” the sustained imperial biopolitics that constituted the US as a North- American empire and the extension of these activities around the world in the 20th century and the constitution and maintenance of the US as a global “superpower.” This nationalism has functioned as camouflage for the sustained imperial politics that the US has engaged in, including the War with Britain (1812) and Mexico (1848), and the extension of those activities to the Asia-Pacific region, to Japan, the Philippines, and beyond. The victorious struggles against Soviet and Nazi imperialism have had a similar and powerful impact on American understandings of self and other. These ideas have reinforced the view that the US plays a purely defensive (as opposed to an offensive imperial) role in the world. These “wars” and their “blowback” have been central to the ascent of the US to the status of a global empire (see Johnson 2000, 2004). As we have argued in this chapter, political power subjects are constituted through sovereign imperial power practices. The US was constituted through the willful agency of federal government elites to engage in a civil war and imperial conquest. These activities take planning and the massive coordination of human and material resources. The historical construction of the US as a global power is an accomplishment. This takes the willful agency of elites to mobilize and orchestrate imperial campaigns mobilizing militaries and the masses to achieve their objectives. We think that C. Wright Mills’ (1956) power elite perspective and G. William Domhoff’s (2014) elaboration, modification, and refinement of Mills thought provide the most empirically grounded theory of the US power

Imperial background and the US power elite  41 structure and its participation in the WoT. As Mills (1959) repeatedly emphasized, the US power elite ruling an enormous power structure had accumulated unparalleled “history making” powers (Mills 1959: 182–183). We think this history-making capacity explains the US power elite’s “Cold War” and WoT policies. US imperialism did not stop with the end of the Soviet empire. The WoT represents a tactical shift in the legitimation and targets of that imperial strategy. The assemblage of global networks and practices linking Empire, US power elite, and “terrorism” is complex (Blain 2012: 63, 2013). Theorists of “Empire” such as Hardt and Negri (2000) and Go (2011) also do not conceptualize the imperial agents of Empire with any degree of specificity. The following quote regarding military intervention and terrorism is typical: …Today military intervention is progressively less a product of decisions that arise out of the old international order or even U.N. structures. More often it is dictated unilaterally by the US [emphasis added], which charges itself with the primary task and then subsequently asks its allies to set in motion a process of armed containment and/or repression of the current enemy of Empire. These enemies are most often called Terrorist, a rude conceptual and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality. (Hardt and Negri 2000) Postmodern Empire is radically decentered in terms of space and time. It is an Empire based on biopower and biopolitics. It rules over “human nature” by producing productive liberal agents who desire a well-disciplined and secure normality. The aim of rule is the managed regularity of “social life” in its totality. There is no mention here of who in the US is making the decision to intervene. It is a strategy without a strategist. This omission is in part due to Hardt and Negri’s incoherent, postmodern desire to differentiate their view of Empire from previous views. Their theory has been decisively critiqued by Barkawi and Laffey (2002). The main focus of their critique is on Hardt and Negri’s assertion that imperialism is a thing of the past. Hardt and Negri adopt the position that the US is not into traditional imperialism. The world market has been achieved. Modern sovereignty is collapsing in the face of globalization. The world can know be described as “smooth space.” Barkawi and Laffey argue their claim that territorial borders are no longer relevant is patently false. “Processes of liberalization also have another side,” they argue, “namely, a massive effort to make it harder for undesirable flows—be they illegal economic migrants, asylum seekers, illegal drugs, crime, or contraband—to cross borders (Barkawi and Laffey 2002: 121). The second reason Hardt and Negri give for an end to imperialism derives from the exceptional character of the US. With the rise of the US, we are witnessing the emergence of a “post-imperial international system.” They assert further that Hardt and Negri’s analysis

42  Imperial background and the US power elite of international security and the role of nuclear weapons overlooks significant political-military developments in world politics: the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and al Qaeda and the WoT. They are indicative of new forms of resistance to imperialism. They cite many statements by influential American policy analysts who are resurrecting the use of the discourse of imperialism. As with Rome and Great Britain, American imperialism has and will continue to generate resistance. Within the conceptual categories of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, these most recent developments in the history of imperial relations in world politics remain invisible. Go’s (2011) account also glosses over this issue by categorizing the British or American “states” as imperial actors and agents. He does allow for the possibility that a dominant ethnic or national group in the core state is dominant over the subjected populations in the imperial system. But he avoids specifying who those groups have been in the British or American Empires by focusing on their policies and practices. He is most concerned to confront the idea of American “exceptionalism” in thinking about US imperialism. However, there is no way around the problem of agency in depictions of the leading role of political representatives of the US power elite in Empire, the WOT, and political violence. The US is not just a personified “state actor.” Post-structuralists in the field of International Relations have deconstructed and debunked reified concepts like “state actor” (George 1994). The “US” that decides to prosecute a global WOT is in reality a complex social network that can best be described by Domhoff’s (2010, 115–18) class dominance theory of the US power elite. Figure 2.2 depicts Domhoff’s multinetwork account of the US power structure. The power elite as he describes it is located at the intersection of three interlocking social networks: the social upper class, the corporate community, and the policy-planning network. Although he does not deal directly with Empire, his theory clearly implies that the representatives of the US power elite have a direct influence on the decisions, politics, and activities of the US President and his foreign policy team. The interests of the social upper class dominate the corporate community and the policy-planning network. In turn, the corporate community’s global economic interests and agendas are translated into foreign policy by political economy and security “experts” in the planning network. US Presidents and their foreign policy teams implement those agendas. The idea that the US power elite plays a decisive role in Empire is also warranted by Domhoff’s (1990a, b, 2014a) research on how the policy-planning network, the Council on Foreign Relations, articulated upper class interests in terms of US “National Interest” during WWII and how it affected the Cold War agenda that lead to the Vietnam War. Independent research by Shoup (2015) confirms Domhoff’s finding on the role of The Council on Foreign Relations or what Shoup calls “Wall Street’s Think Tank.” This network has played a pivotal role in directing US neoliberal geopolitics. He critiques the theory dominant in political science that the impetus driving US imperialism

Imperial background and the US power elite  43

Figure 2.2  Multi-Network Diagram of How the Power Elite are Drawn from Three Overlapping Networks of People and Institutions. The Power Elite are the Members of the Three Overlapping Circles. They are Encompassed in the Dotted Line Within the Venn Diagram. Source: By permission G. William Domhoff. Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich, Seventh Edition (McGraw Hill Education 2014).

was the elite’s ideological aim to spread “Lockean liberalism” around the world. He rejects this theory on empirical grounds. Domhoff and Shoup agree that the Council on Foreign Relations, key players in the policy-planning network, worked and had to define the “national interest” in terms favorable to social upper class and the corporate community. The documents he uses as evidence underscore the important but subordinate role that “experts” played in the policy-planning process. The role of the President and foreign policy elite was primarily to implement policies favoring the interests of US corporate capitalists through Presidential edict and Congressional legislation. The policy-planning network, as we shall see in Chapter 4 devoted to the biopolitics of terrorism, links power to knowledge in the WoT. It is important to note that expert power supplements but does not trump the structural power and authority of the US power elite. Members of the power elite face complex and difficult issues in the policy-planning process and

44  Imperial background and the US power elite need experts to fashion specific foreign policies. These experts are trained by the universities in foreign policy relevant research, but are not directly employed by universities. They are more likely to be employed by think tanks located near Washington, DC or university institutes financed by soft money in the form of grants, and invited to consult with government Commissions, government agencies such as the Department of Defense, or testify to congressional committees. As we shall see in Chapter 4 on the biopolitics of terrorism, “terrorism” experts linked to the Rand corporation played an important background role in defining “international terrorism” as the new threat to US national security. Experts also play a role in the mass media as “talking heads” providing expert authority to back up the rationality of the President’s foreign policy decisions. The knowledge industry also includes the War colleges and system of universities that train the cadre of professional military officers. Training in the social sciences is required. Go’s (2011) analysis of the dynamics of Empire can also be useful in thinking about why the US power elite decided to declare a global war on terrorism. Go differentiates liberal forms of Empire from previous forms founded on a repressive and tyrannical use of violence. Again, he glosses over the agency of the US power elite in arguing that its use of violence or liberal government in defense of Empire is tactical. Go argues that since 1973 the “US” has entered a period of decline, the final stage of the cyclical pattern of Empire, ascent (1803–1945), hegemony (1946–1972), decline (1973–present). The events that underscore this period of decline are the Arab Oil Embargo (1973), the defeat and withdrawal of the US military from Vietnam (1974), and the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. The response of the US power elite has been to continuously increase military expenditures and aggression, and a discourse regarding the status of the US as the “indispensable nation.” The unique circumstances linking the political economy of war and oil, the Middle East and “terror,” neoconservative discourse, and the Israeli/Arab conflict set the stage for a global WoT. Both Hardt and Negri’s (2000) and Go (2011) adopt Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to differentiate the two modes of sovereignty depicted in ­Figure 2.1. Traditional imperialism is based on a repressive politics of death, the logic of spectacular and overt forms of repression and violence. Modern modes of sovereignty, as practiced by the British and the Americans under conditions of Empire, implement a politics of life. This implies an important relation to knowledge. The practices of biopolitics complicate as well as mask over the relations involved in contemporary Empire. In many respects, the repressive mode of sovereign violence is at odds with the practices and discourses of biopower (Oksala 2010). Foucault recognized this problem. He did not argue that the practices of “liberal governmentality” had replaced the practices of repression. Torture and overt displays of spectacular violence did not disappear. They had simply gone through a complex realignment in terms of the biopolitics of liberalism and the practices of governmentality. The Bush and Obama regimes claim to be “saving American lives” by torturing and droning the “enemies of freedom.”

Imperial background and the US power elite  45 The 9/11 attacks allowed the power elite to introduce a new military doctrine of preemptive war that legitimated and motivated the expansion of US empire. Dunmire (2009) has published a meticulous intertextual analysis of the discourse of the Bush doctrine that traces it to documents produced by neoconservative think tanks in the post-Cold War context. Ronald Cox (2017: 127, 134–140) argues on historical and empirical grounds for the direct relevance of the idea of a military-industrial complex to a power elite analysis of US foreign policy. By empire, Cox means the 800 military bases deployed around the world in as many as 135 countries and 40% of total global military spending. The global situation results from transnational corporate dominance of the policy-planning network that influences elite foreign policy preferences. The crisis produced by the 9/11 attacks gave impetus to the policy preferences of the military-industrial complex sector of the corporate community. The investment in the war directly benefits the corporate economy involved in supporting the WoT. Various estimates of the so-called “costs” of the ware include Stiglitz (2008) with $3 trillion and Amanda Cox (2011) with $3.5 trillion. From a power-elite perspective, these so-called costs are interpreted as “benefits”—a Keynesian stimulus to the military-industrial related sectors of the corporate economy (national defense, homeland security, veteran services, etc.). The contribution of corporate military industrialism to the US domestic economy is sizable. By focusing on the costs of the WoT, Stiglitz and Cox miss the benefits of the US political economy of war. Crawford (2016) estimates that the US has spent $4.79 Trillion on US WoT-related activities. One additional way to measure this impact is to tract the data on the substantial involvement of the US in the global arms trade (31.1% share 2010–2014, see Fleurant 2015). The Stockholm International Institute of Peace Research, Stockholm, Sweden, tracts global trends and access to their data sets. T ­ able 2.3 summaries the SIPRI data on the top-ten US arms exports recipients, 1950–2016. This data is doubly significant because it indicates the level of US involvement in arms production and the global arms trade as well as US imperial activities, geostrategic interests, and alliances with geostrategic targets over time. ­Geostrategic activities and alliances are directly reflected in these data arms recipients. During the Cold War period 1950–1979, five of the ten re­ urkey, UK, cipients are allies in NATO countries: Germany, Italy, Canada, T and France. Iran and Israel are the two top recipients in the Middle East. Cold War alliances are reflected in arms sales to Japan and Taiwan. The 1979 Iranian revolution provoked a shift in alliances reflected in the 1980–2001 data. Iran drops off the list and Saudi Arabia and Egypt join Israel on the top-ten positions. This lead to a major US presence in Saudi Arabia, one that facilitated the subsequent mobilizations in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the invasion to make an Iraqi regime change in 2003. Of course, the UK and France, with their own military political economies, continue to be major US allies in the WoT. Australia, also a major player in the alliance fighting the WoT, moves into top-ten arms trade recipient status after 2001.

46  Imperial background and the US power elite Table 2.3  T  op-Ten US Arms Exports Recipients Before and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and before and after the 2001 Terror Attacks (US dollars) Rank

1950–1979

1980–2001

2002–2016

1

Germany ($33.828b)

Japan ($33.806b)

S. Korea ($11.121b)

2

Iran ($25.030b)

Saudi Arabia ($22.162b)

UAE ($9.359b)

3

Japan ($21.021b)

South Korea ($19.881b)

Saudi Arabia ($8.334b)

4

Italy ($16.079b)

Egypt ($18.053b)

Australia ($7.515b)

5

Canada ($14.915b)

Taiwan ($17.416b)

Israel ($6.293b)

6

Israel ($14.693b)

Turkey ($15.748b)

Japan ($5.667b)

7

Turkey ($13.285b)

Israel ($14.373b)

Egypt ($5.197b)

8

UK ($12.326b)

UK ($10.835b)

Singapore ($5.178b)

9

Taiwan ($12.248b)

Netherland ($8.462b)

Taiwan ($4.881b)

10

France ($11.685b)

Greece ($7.841b)

Turkey ($4.529

Total

$280.514b

$261.132b

$117.746b

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, accessed 11 December 2017 www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers

The 9/11 attacks created a “critical juncture” and political crisis that the US power elite exploited setting the WoT and Bush military doctrine policymaking agenda. The long-term effects have been further centralization of power in the Executive Branch of the US federal government and increased influence of military corporations and Department of Defense agents in the policy making process. Cox (2017) reviews the substantial evidence of the close ties between the Bush administration, military corporations, and the Department of Defense. Civilian boards provided the key linkages between these institutions. Defense contractors, in particular, were active in think tanks and lobbying networks that contributed to Bush Administration’s “military response to 9/11” and more influence to those who advocated full militarization. The Project for a New American Century (established 1997; see Dunmire 2009), a main source of the discourse constituting Bush’s 2002 national security strategy of preemptive war that lead directly to the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, was financed by military corporations and oil corporations, was the direct tie linking these corporate actors

Imperial background and the US power elite  47 operating through a policy-planning network to the Bush administration. Members of the Project for a New American Century could trace their origins to groups dating back to Cold War and Albert Wohlstetter, an influential neoconservative professor at U Chicago. Neocon discourse goes beyond the “realist” policy of preponderant power sufficient to overcome any potential opponent. Neoconservatives advocated “rollback policy” positions developed during the Cold War. “In fact, the membership of the Committee on the Present Danger, also heavily financed by military contractors during the Cold War period, overlapped with the membership of Project for a New American Century as it was established in 1997” (Cox 2017: 134). The “rollback policy” emerged in response to the 1950 “Cold War” crisis response to the 1949 Soviet nuke test and the creation of the National Security Council Report NSC-68 (Cox 2017, also Scott 2007: 18). It has been continuously reactivated at crucial junctures like 9/11. It has reemerged in response to threatened cuts in military spending, following the defeat in Vietnam and the call to the end of the Cold War in the early 1970s (“Committee on the Present Danger”) and the 2004 response to end of Cold War after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1980, which created an urgent need to redefine a new mission in the world for the Department of Defense. Paul Wolfowitz, a member of the Bush regime in 2002, had been the author of the earlier, 1992, Defense Planning Guidance document and PNAC, calling for a global militarization robust enough to effect regime change of so-called rogue states, especially in the Persian Gulf. The rollback policy has been reactivated continuously since 1950. Chapter 3 addresses how political actors, typically US presidents and members of their foreign policy team from the policy-planning network, once they have decided to make a major geopolitical move against their opponents who resist their agendas around the world, orchestrate spectacular victimage rituals targeting their enemies. It also addresses the selection of enemies. The principle of the tactical polyvalence of discourses is employed to explain the use of “terrorists.” It is one way to kill many birds with one stone, a kind of blank check that can be signed to authorize a perpetual and permanent state of exception and authorize new war. Chapter 4 describes the biopolitics of terrorism, the way expert social scientists elaborate a knowledge of “terrorism,” their debates about the true causes of terrorism, and how this knowledge functions in the context of the policy-planning network.

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50  Imperial background and the US power elite McCormick, Ted. “Transmutation, Inclusion and Exclusion: Political Arithmetic from Charles II to William III.” Journal of Historical Sociology 20, no. 3 (2007): 259–78. ———. William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. ———. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Morrill, John. “Rewriting Cromwell: A Case of Deafening Silences.” Canadian Journal of History 38, no. 3 (December 2003): 553–78. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo. Translated by ­Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1887 [1967]. Oksala, Johanna. “Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity.” Foucault Studies 10 (November 2010): 23–43. Parrish, J. L. “Report of J. L. Parriah, Indian Agent, Etc.” In Pioneer History of Coos and Curry Counties, Or., edited by Orvil Dodge, 104–13. Salem, OR: Capital Printing Co., 1898. Schwartz, E. A. The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath, 1850–1980. ­Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Scott, Peter Dale. The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Shoup, Lawrence H. Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976–2014. New York: Monthly Review, 2015. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985. ———. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. ———. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by A. C. Hamilton. Longman Annotated English Poets. New York: Longman, c 1596 [1977]. Stiglitz, Joseph, and Linda Bilmes. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Tonkin, Humphrey. The Faerie Queene. New York: Routledge, 1989. Tveskov, Mark. “Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast.” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (September 2007): 431–41. Veracini, Lorenzo. “‘Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 2 (June 2013): 313–33. Virgil. Aeneid (Latin / English), 70–19 B.C.E [2015]. ———. Aeneid Book VI. Translated by Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 70–19 B.C.E [2015]. Waldman, Carl, and Molly Braun. Atlas of the North American Indian, Revised Edition. New York: Checkmark Books, Imprint of Facts on File, Inc., 2000 [1985]. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1905 [1995]. Willinsky, John. Empire of Words–the Reign of the OED. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford University press, 2003.

3 Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism

The US power elite orchestrate massive victimage rituals in the name of fighting the enemies of freedom. It is difficult to face the reality that political elites such as the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis risked the total annihilation of hundreds of millions of people in a nuclear attack to force the Soviets to back down. General Curtis Lemay, in charge of the Strategic Air Command, had constructed a nuclear doomsday machine that involved dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on hundreds of Soviet and Chinese cities. The Kennedy administration, like many administrations since World War II, have threatened to use it. This was not a rational calculation about the security and survival of the US homeland. It had been a political calculation to ensure winning the next election (Ellsberg 2018). This chapter argues that social scientists have been unwilling to face the problem of massive violence that facts like this pose. It proposes the concept of political victimage ritual as the right concept to solve the problem. Theorists have looked away from the massive amount of political violence perpetrated against the enemies of liberalism and freedom (colonial wars, wars against totalitarian regimes). In the overall approach we advocate, we think social theorists need to deal with the violence directly by focusing on the structuring and functioning of victimage ritual. This approach is exemplified with empirical research on the WoT. Chapter 3 argues that a focus on VR redirects analytical attention to the actual practices of political violence. First we present the results of a semiotic analysis of the structure of VR. This involves a presentation of new research on US presidential discourse during the Bush (2001–2008), Obama (2009–2016), and Trump regimes (2017). This discursive regime, in spite of tactical and strategic shifts to meet the situation, is structured around three interrelated polarities of meaning: power (insiders and outsiders), morality, and biopolitics. One of the advantages of the discourse of terrorism is its tactical polyvalence, its capacity to kill many birds with one stone. Second, we examine a series of power effects produced by VR: constitution of enemies, incitement to acts of violence and political sadism targeting that enemy (including regimes and populations that allegedly support the enemy), and constitute the objects of knowledge accepted by positivist social scientists (terrorists, Islamists,

52  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism Jihadists, etc.). The rhetoric of liberalism has played a central role in legitimating and motivating the political violence that produced modernity. The process involves imperial power struggles and elite-orchestrated victimage rituals, which, in turn, generates the subjects and objects of “terrorists” and “terrorism” of social science knowledge. Past research by the authors has focused on how VR generates and legitimates violence against opponents of empire. We extend that analysis to the genealogy of terrorism in relation to evil and the problem of political sadism. Examples of this type of sadism are the torture, ritual executions, pulverizing of enemy populations and the infrastructure they depend on to live, and triumphalism. Edward Said (1993: 1932–1960) raised this issue in his studies of “The Pleasures of Imperialism” in his book on Anglo-American culture and imperialism, but obliquely Said did not directly deal with the “pleasures” of violence in acts of domination. The first section picks these themes up by tracing the historical linkages between the French Revolution, the Great Terror, and the conservative condemnation of this event as evil and implicating sadism. This linkage is also a key to understanding post-WWII reactions to Nazi terror and the Holocaust as the incarnation evil. It includes a discussion of the debate inside contemporary American philosophical thought regarding the problematic use of the rhetoric of evil. The vilification of individuals and groups as evil is part and parcel of legitimating political violence and sadism. Some argue for a secular use of the concept as a useful tool in spotlighting oppressive regimes, racism, sexism, and other forms of ordinary violence. It concludes with the related problem of cruelty and sadism in political violence. Political victimage ritual can incite people to engage in cruel and sadistic violence as well as moral outrage. The idea that people desire revenge and gain pleasure from inflicting pain and suffering on others to satisfy that desire has a role to play in understanding the imperial desire and “agency” involved in imperialism and the WoT. Winston Churchill one described Empire as the “Great Game” of power. The genealogy of terrorism is deeply embedded in the power/knowledge (P/K) dynamic involved in governing “liberal” societies and empires. This P/K dynamic can be modeled as a three-part cycle: power/political victimage ritual/knowledge. This chapter theorizes how political victimage rituals produce two effects: sadomasochistic desires to destroy the “enemy” and new objects of knowledge. This chapter weaves new historical understandings into the genealogy of the concept of terrorism. The linkage of “terrorism” and “evil” was essential to the constitution of the modern understanding of this phenomenon. The concept of a political victimage ritual and the violent scapegoating of evil others can bring into clear focus the actual practices of political violence. It can begin to remedy the widely recognized problem that many sociologists have had with theorizing violence (see Giddens 1985; Saint-Amand 1996; Tiryakian 1999; Collins 2008; Joas and Knöbl 2013). The WoT is a mode of power and subjection by means of

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  53 political victimage ritual (PVR). PVRs function to justify, legitimate, and motivate the violence and sadism; they are part and parcel of the genesis and functioning of political violence (e.g., public torture, capital punishment, aerial “terror” bombings of civilians). The ritual destruction of the “enemy=scapegoat” is consummated in acts of violence, including torture and high-tech homicide bombings. Following the French Revolution, British imperialists wasted no time in generalizing the practice of categorizing as terrorist any organized resistance to British rule (see “terrorist, n. and adj.” 2b: “1806 F. Plowden Hist. Rev. State Ireland, V. 83, Providence could scarcely have reserved for her [sc.Ireland] a more healing blessing, than the appointment of a viceroy... whose firmness checked the sanguinary ferociousness of the terrorists” [OED 2012]). As Anglo-American political elites extended their sovereignty over new territories to expand their Empires, resistance on the part of indigenous people was provoked. “Terrorism” was applied to the leaders and activities of groups supporting domestic or anti-colonial resistance. Henceforth, they would be branded as terrorists. Given the “liberal” value orientation of these elites, terrorists were portrayed as “existential” threats to security and freedom. The policy networks supporting Empire provided the knowledge to further the political elite’s aims and agendas. The leaders and groups labelled terrorists were scapegoated in moral, liberal, and biopolitical terms. They were vilified as evil, uncivilized, racial monsters—the ultimate “outsiders.” I have argued that the global WoT is the latest manifestation of this mode of Empire and subjection by means of victimage ritual. Power struggles and the reciprocal cycles of victimage ritual they provoke have profoundly altered popular culture and discourse, and the order of knowledge. The French Revolution, and the French/British antagonism that followed, forged positive and negative concepts of political “terrorism” and “terrorist,” and a politically reactionary, “conservative” discourse added a negative “evil” connotation to the term (Hunt 1974: 41; Berlin 1990: 91–174): Positive: Terror = Justice: “…the principle of our Republic is this: to influence the people by the use of reason, to influence our enemies by the use of terror… In times of peace, virtue is the source from which the government of the people takes its power. During the Revolution, the sources of this power are virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror will be a disaster; and terror, without which virtue is powerless. But terror is nothing more nor less than swift, severe and indomitable justice…” (Robespierre, 1794, quoted in Hachey and Weber, 1972: 16–19) Negative: Terror = Evil: “Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists…are let loose on the people” (Edmund Burke, 1795, quoted in OED Online, 2012); and “Only the evil genius of Robespierre could

54  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism achieve this miracle.” “What distinguishes the French Revolution and what makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically evil; no element of good relieves the picture it presents; it reaches the highest point of corruption ever known; it is pure impurity.” (Joseph de Maistre 1796) The specter of democratic Terror gave powerful impetus to the rise of the “positivist” social sciences in the 19th century and continued to energize their further development in the 20th century (Blain 2007, 2009). Wallerstein (2011) confirms this in his analysis of the 19th-century triumph of “Centrist Liberalism” and the rise of the social sciences: In terms of the politics of the period following 1815, there were two main political legacies of the revolutionary-Napoleonic era. One was the image of the Terror, which informs French and world politics to this day—a Terror that is inextricably associated in the minds of many with democracy. For a long time, the Terror was in fact the chief argument the notables used against the extension of the suffrage… The second legacy, which was intimately tied to the first, was the unceasing drive to seek to exclude the lower strata from the political arena of the nation entirely. (2011: 24) Since Hannah Arendt’s 1963 publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, this problem has haunted contemporary secular and social scientific thought. In fact, it has become cliché to refer to the “banality of evil” (Judt 2008). Evil has permanently marked our historical understanding of the unique nature of the political atrocities that define the 20th century—totalisms (militarism, fascism, communism), Nazi death camps and the Holocaust, Stalinism and the Great Terror, Soviet Gulags, Japanese bombings of Chinese cities, Pearl Harbor. These discourses were so dominant during the “Cold War” that they functioned as a paradigm of political thinking—a very self-serving one from the standpoint of US-led Empire. This paradigm defined the character of American nationalism in its role as the “exception”—as self-appointed “leader of the free world” and the only “indispensable nation.” These utterances constitute the current catechism of US nationalism (Agamben 2005). President Obama’s (27 May 2014) “Remarks to the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony, West Point, New York” enunciate that discourse: In fact, by most measures, America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world. Those who argue otherwise—who suggest that America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away—are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics. Think about it. Our military has no peer. The odds of a direct threat against us by

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  55 any nation are low and do not come close to the dangers we faced during the Cold War. Meanwhile, our economy remains the most dynamic on Earth; our businesses the most innovative. Each year, we grow more energy independent. From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations. America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. Here’s my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage. Every conflict inevitably recycles the struggle against Nazi or Communist “evil,” and every leader-enemy must be personified as a reincarnation of Hitler or Stalin. The impact of these struggles on 20th-century social science has been profound. The social science disciplines were consolidated as a permanent feature of American research universities. After World War II, American social scientists produced thousands of social science studies on the conditions causing the development of “authoritarian” as opposed to “democratic” personality types. This line of thinking has reemerged in debates about the “personality traits” of terrorists. Lester et al. (2004) reviewed the characteristics of suicide bombers. “Contrary to previous commentary,” they argued, suicide bombers share personality traits such as “authoritarian personality” characteristics and that psychological profiles of suicide bombers might be possible. Suicide bombers might be characterized by the same risk factors that increase the probability of suicide. Kruglanski and Fishman (2006), on the contrary, differentiate two psychological perspectives on terrorism, approaching it, respectfully, as a “syndrome” or as a “tool.” In the “syndrome” view, terrorism represents a psychologically meaningful construct with identifiable characteristics on the individual and group levels of analysis. The “tool” perspective represents terrorism as a strategic instrument that any party in a conflict may use. These authors claim that research thus far found little support for the “syndrome” view. “Terrorists do not seem to be characterized by a unique set of psychological traits or pathologies. Nor has research uncovered any particular ‘root causes’ of terrorism.” The fact that variation among terrorists is so great means the “tool” view is more valid. They argue for an analysis of terrorism in terms of “means-ends” psychology. The “tool” view implies that perpetrators might find terrorism more or less appealing under certain conditions, therefore, offering guidance for the “war on terrorism.”

56  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism The September 11, 2001 “terrorist” attacks (9/11) and subsequent global War on Terror transformed the “Cold War” paradigm by changing the cast of characters personifying the problem of political evil. Power struggles provoke reciprocal cycles of terror and counterterror. Al Qaeda mounts a victimage ritual against US-led Empire; the US reciprocates by mounting a victimage ritual against Terrorists. The Bush administration (2001–2008) employed all the resources of the “Imperial Presidency” to orchestrate a sustained political victimage ritual against Terror. This VR positioned the US in the melodramatic role of wounded but heroic leader in a life and death struggle against evil terrorists. The terrorists were inspired by an evil and fanatical Islamist desire to reconstitute a Caliphate. The crusade against terrorist “evil” also functioned to legitimate a reassertion of the leadership role played by the US in Empire. Millions of shattered lives later, these power relations have generated deep reverberations in political discourse and knowledge.

Political victimage ritual Victimage ritual is the practice of seeking out a victim to scapegoat in order to expiate the guilt of some social group or individual. A political victimage ritual (PVR) involves the rhetorical use of ritual scapegoating as a calculated means to achieve political goals. And this rhetorical device is central to the power/dynamic of “liberal” societies. The deliberate use of this device is a key feature of modern politics. A well-conducted and effective PVR can create and sustain social solidarity and social cohesion in the midst of destabilizing power struggles. It can also generate new categories of scapegoats to destroy and objects of knowledge to research—­narcoterrorists, bioterrorism, Islamofascists, etc. Modern politicians have rationalized the use of PVR as a political tool for exercising power in campaigns against their enemies. The Nazi campaign against das Juden constituted a political paradigm of this practice. Although the Nazis did not invent this practice, they rationalized and refined it as a technique of political propaganda and warfare (Duncan 1962; Burke 1967; Cuzzort and King 1980: 238–52; WagnerPacifici 1986; Blain 1988). There are two moments in a PVR: guilt and redemption. PVRs constitute a violent situation and interaction ritual chain. These violent situations are shaped by an emotional field of tension (Collins 2008: 19). The emotions of guilt and need for redemption play a central role in the process. Power struggles understood in these terms are melodramatized, implicating an antagonism of violators and victims, heroes and villains. There are two ideal-types victims in PVR: in-group and out-group. The first moment in a power struggle is violation/guilt, the destruction of innocent and powerless members of the in-group, and the scapegoating of an immoral and powerful violator. The opponent in a power struggle is vilified as an irresponsible

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  57 subject of some act of violence (e.g., Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda). The violation of the in-group victims generates a social need to atone for the guilt caused by the violation. The victims are memorialized and eulogized by powerful authorities representing the ingroup as victims of wicked and diabolical violators. The violation must be projected on to an out-group. In Nazi rhetoric discourse, that violation was the defeat of the German nation in World War I. The victims that defeat produced functioned to constitute the villainy of the Jews as a racial scapegoat and outsider. They also functioned as a constant incitement to legitimate the ongoing struggle to destroy the destroyer. The ongoing power struggle also produces a second set of in-group victims or heroic martyrs. Nazi political rituals emphasized the fallen “troops” and wounded and maimed “veterans” who gave their lives in the line of duty and were betrayed by the evil Jews who had “stabbed” the German nation in the back. The second moment in a PVR is the glorification of heroic political violence to defeat and destroy the enemy-scapegoat. The constitution of the hero through vilification of the enemy as a destroyer of “innocent life” or “women and children” is a main feature of the emotional logic of acts of violence. Innocent victims constitute the guilt and villainy of the evil other and the demand for revenge and justice. As we shall see later in this chapter, a US presidential speech includes triumphalism based on past victories, particularly World War II. The Obama regime played down the vilifying practices of the Bush regime’s WoT rhetoric until September of 2014 and the appearance of ISIL on the scene. A Whitehouse Weekly address that month flatly states “We will degrade and Distroy ISIL”. This new campaign gave impetus to the surge in troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama regime would resort to the tactics of vilification and heroization more frequently and intensively in speeches to military audiences. This tactic is an important part of the emotional logic of leadership in the midst of a political battle or war. The third and final moment in a power struggle/PVR is vicarious victimage. The Nazis had to expiate and atone for the nation’s “war guilt” by publically sacrificing their lives as martyrs in a heroic struggle to destroy the Jewish scapegoat. The Jews had to be perfected in their role as ­p ersonifier of a diabolical evil and racial monster whose destruction would expiate the “guilt” of the German Nation. Power struggles give rise to cycles of reciprocal VR. Every fight in the Nazi campaign was a fight against the Jews. The Allies replied in similar terms. World War II was a great struggle of good (freedom, civilized values) against evil (Nazi tyranny, militarism, racism, and the fanatical desire for world domination). The results of a semiotic analysis employing the Greimas Square approach are presented in Figure 3.1. The horizontal, vertical, and diagonal

58  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism Hero [US]* S2 [good, life]

S1 [powerful]

Villain [terrorists, [traitors]

Victim [civilians]

-S2 [not good] [evil, death]

-S1 [not powerful] [weak] Spectator

* [..] = substitution of signifiers

Figure 3.1  Structural Analysis of Melodramatic Pattern of Meanings Implicit in Political Victimage Ritual. Source: Smith and Riley (2009:100–101), Jameson (2016).

lines represent the system of signifiers and equations and their possible combinations. Each character can be made to personify multiple meanings: Villain = terrorist, powerful, not-good or evil, death, guilty, cowardly and sadistic Victim = powerless, not-life or death, innocent Hero = US or American, powerful, good, life, innocent, courageous and kind Spectator = vicariously, powerful or not-powerful, good or not- good The second part describes the syntagmatic or ritual order of PVR. It follows Greimas’ (1987: 148–64) analysis of the structure of “Anger.” Greimas’ “passional syntagm” is directly applicable PVR analysis. The passional syntagm involves a sequence of ritual acts: frustration à discontent Anger: Sadism: frustration à cause to suffer Justice: frustration à intervention higher power Syntagmatic analysis of PVR:

à aggressiveness à experience pleasure à justice

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  59 à subjection Ritual: subjection à subjectification Villain Hero â à inversion of “power” relation à â Victim Villain Power: villain over victim à leader over spectator à hero over villain || || [innocent, powerless] [guilty, powerless] Experience: suffering à desire for revenge à sadism or Justice

PVR and Manichean struggle of good against evil Political victimage ritual enacts the meaning structure and cultural logic of the Manichean struggle of good against evil. Some have interpreted the sadism in modern warfare, political detention, and Nazi genocide of the Jews as realizations in this world of Christian notions of the damnation of Hell in the next (Steiner 1971). This suggestion and structure of moral meanings, the eternal struggle of good against evil as well as the power to punish and destroy the evil other, is captured perfectly by Ivica Capan’s Drones in Paradise: An Everyday Apocalypse, his representation of the WoT at the 2016 Hieronymus Bosch 500 (see Figure 3.2). Capan superimposes drones OVER paradise depicted in Bosch’s Last Judgement a Triptych, a painting that depicts mankind lost in its manifold sins ignoring the example and judgement of Jesus Christ. The blending of an archaic conception of the universe as a great struggle of good against evil employing a high-tech digital media captures this blend of the cultural background underlying the ultimate moral meaning of the WoT. Bosch was a pessimist on the number of “souls” that would escape the “sadistic” tortures of Hell. As your eyes move across the combined Capan/Bosch representation from left to right across the three panels, the cycle moves from paradise in the first panel to the world of everyday sinfulness in the next, and finally paradise lost to the darkness of “Hell.” The number of Drones increase exponentially as well as the threatening high-tech. Capan’s addition of drones to the The Last Judgement, a human invention, indicates that Hell is not something inflicted by God, but by humans who have arrogated to themselves the right of sovereign death in the name of God. The power and subjection is inflicted on the evil Other employing the high-tech and silent violence, at least on the part of the perpetrators of the violence. The massive high-tech aerial violence captures the sense of moral judgement behind the decision to inflict Hell on millions of powerless people perpetrated by the so-called good “US” against evil “Other.” The structure of meanings in the work of art makes obvious cultural reference to the Holy Land and the Middle East region. The Arab/Israeli conflict comes to mind. The superimposed drones signify a silent, modern (in significant contrast to medieval), progressive, enlightened technological

Figure 3.2  Drones in Paradise. An Everyday Apocalypse, a contribution to 2016 H ­ ieronymus Bosch 500 by Ivica Capan. By permission of Ivica Capan 2018.

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  61 final solution to the problem. The apocalyptic and the sadistic effects of this war are evident in the huge numbers of dispossessed and displaced refugees, causalties, and the systematic and calculated destruction of the resouces necessary to human survival (homes, villages, water and electrical sytems, etc.). One indicator of the overt saddism of this war is the willful and obtuse denial and disregard of the on the part of those who favor the WoT is registered loud and clear by the number of “civilian casualties” caused by the perpetrators of war crimes. AirWars (2016) has published an audit of the Coalition air war against so-called Islamic State. It reports the air war in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) August of 2014 to summer 2016 carried out an estimated 25,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. This group estimates that one civilian is killed per nine so-called “precision” airstrikes. The official death tool from these strikes is 45,000– 50,000 people, 45,000 enemy dead and 1,500 civilians. This genocide is legitimated as a struggle against evil and/or the biopolitics of terrorism, the latter understood as a rational strategy to protect and defend human life. In the fall of 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush declared a global war against Terror. He defined the war as a transcendent struggle of good against evil (Blain 2012). This is a conflict without battlefields or beachheads, a conflict with opponents who believe they are invisible. Yet, they are mistaken. They will be exposed, and they will discover what others in the past have learned: Those who make war against the United States have chosen their own destruction. Victory against terrorism will not take place in a single battle, but in a series of decisive actions against terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them…We are planning a broad and sustained campaign to secure our country and eradicate the evil of terrorism. (Bush Whitehouse Weekly address, September 15, 2001) This identification of the opponent as “evil” is part and parcel of the meaning structure of political victimage ritual as reiterated in a steady drumbeat of victimage ritual in the fall of 2001: We will oppose their evil with firm justice, and we will answer their hatred with compassion for the Afghan people. (Whitehouse Weekly address, October 23, 2001) America has now confirmed several different cases of anthrax exposure in Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.…We do not yet know who sent anthrax to the United States Capitol, or several different media organizations. These attacks once again reveal the evil at the heart of terrorism, the evil we must fight. (Bush Whitehouse Weekly address, October 20, 2001)

62  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism “Thanksgiving this year comes 72 days after a terrible national shock, an act of evil that caused, and continues to cause, so much suffering. Yet, the evil the terrorists intended has resulted in good they never expected. And this holiday season, Americans have much to be thankful for.” (Whitehouse Weekly address, November 24, 2001) In the Bush regime’s ritual rhetoric, the Al Qaeda “terrorists” were perfected as synonyms of pure evil; America and its allies were, by implication, symbols of pure good. Presidential speeches are ritual rhetoric employed to achieve political goals. Therefore, the frequency of speeches delivered on a specific topic in different contexts can be treated as indicators of intensity. Observe the following two indicators: weekly White House addresses, 2001–2009. (White House Weekly Addresses are published at www.whitehouse.gov during each president’s years in office; they are removed after each administration comes to an end. They reappear very soon at the American Presidency Project. The same thing applies to the annual State of the Union Reports to the Congress; they are published at www.presidency.ucsb.edu.) US presidents give brief, weekly White House addresses to influence the news cycle the following week. They are posted on the White House web page at the end of each week. Figure 3.3 depicts the percentage of the 417 speeches in relevant political contexts. Close inspection of the percentages indicates that the increases/decreases in these vilifications were tactical. The percentage of speeches denouncing the evils of terrorism increased at decisive moments: the declaration of the global war in the fall of 2001, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2004 Presidential election, regime change in Iraq, and the 2006 Congressional elections. Comparing the pre-9/11 rate of 3% to the post-9/11 rates (ranging from 30% to 60% of weekly speeches across time periods) is a strong indicator of the extreme intensity of the Bush regime’s PVR against Terror. Overall, in 2001–2009, terrorism is attacked in 42% of the 417 speeches! Evil

Terror

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Figure 3.3  P  ercent President Bush’s Weekly Speeches Invoking “Evil” and “Terror” Terms in Relevant Political Contexts, January 2001–June 2008.

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  63 The cycle of victimage is evident in the variation in frequencies. Bush sets the synonym, terrorism = evil, in the full shock of the spectacular 9/11 attacks. He describes the war as a “crusade” against evil. The terrorist is turned into a synonym of pure evil and perfected in his role as victim-­ scapegoat. The US and allied forces fighting evil in paradigmatic opposition become synonymous to good. In turn, Al Qaeda became the antonym of the US and the security and freedom that it represents. Al Qaeda is the “evil enemy of freedom.” The ultimate sign of US “goodness” is the willingness of its people to sacrifice life in a struggle to destroy the destroyers. All types of in- and out-group victims associated with PVR showed up in these speeches. The GWT was fought to expiate the guilt of the 9/11 perpetrators. America had to destroy these destroyers. The victims of the 9/11 attacks functioned as vilifiers to constitute the evil of Al Qaeda and to personify Osama bin Laden as the ultimate sacrificial lamb. There were two kinds of heroic martyrs. There were the “first responders” who died heroic deaths while trying to rescue the victims of the 9/11 attacks. The second were the “fallen warriors” who had fought and died in the GWT in ­A fghanistan and Iraq. The third was the scapegoat-terrorist, the outsider who must die to expiate the guilt of the social group. Osama bin Laden was the ultimate personifier of “evil” desires and scapegoat par excellence. A video of him gloating about the success of the 9/11 attacks in bringing down the World Trade Centers was widely disseminated in the fall of 2001 and seen as particularly outrageous. The final moment in a victimage ritual is vicarious victimage. The killing of bin Laden expiated the guilt of the nation. This event was turned into a global victimage ritual in a 2012 film by Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, and Joel Edgerton with lots of graphic violence and profanity.

Evil

Terror

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Figure 3.4  P  ercent Annual US Presidential State of the Union Reports to the Congress Invoking Evil and Terror Terms in Political Context, 1790–2016.

64  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism The practice of denouncing “enemies” as “evil” is deeply embedded in US cultural history and political discourse (see Figure 3.4). In the 19th ­century it was frequently used to describe the negative effects of “the free enterprise system” (e.g., the power of the banks, trusts, corporations, etc.). The use of “good vs. evil” to characterize power struggles between groups, empires, states is reserved for the most serious conflicts (e.g., war, Empire, militarism, totalitarianism, terrorism). The number of SOU annual reports deploying the term doubled from 36.6% during the post-revolutionary period (1790–1829) to 79.1% of the annual reports during the period of expansion of the “­Empire of Liberty” (1830–1896). This expansion included the subjugation of the “Indians” and the “white” settlement” of the western frontier, the Mexican ­American war and the annexation of Mexican lands, the Civil War, the colonization of Hawaii and the Philippines. The 1830s, the era of Jacksonian democracy and the “Great Awakening,” changed the rhetorical tone of Presidential discourse. President Andrew Jackson made his reputation as an “Indian Fighter.” His SOU address was full of references to an assortment of evils, including a ­denial of the “evil” involved in the project to remove Indians from their native lands to build an “empire of freeman.” Every major struggle (with the Southern “slave” states, Indians, the Spanish Empire) was formulated in these speeches as an ultimate struggle of good against evil “terrorists.” Presidential discourse linked terrorism to Indian resistance to “white” settlement of the western frontier. After the Civil War, Southern whites are criticized for “terrorizing blacks.” The frequency of uses of “evil” in SOU addresses reaches a crescendo from 1897 to 1914. The indicators are that 83.3% of the presidential addresses deploy “evil.” In the 1890s, the US extended its sovereignty in the name of “liberty” to Hawaii and the remnants of the Spanish Empire, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. And they do so with the highest frequencies in any period of US history. President Teddy Roosevelt employed the term eightynine times in eight speeches! Similar in many ways to Jackson’s defense of the annexation of “Indian” lands by violent means, Roosevelt elaborated a “progressive” denial of the evils of the violence to legitimate VR involved in its colonial wars and Empire. This is beginning of the American century and the emergence of the US as a world Empire. After World War I, presidents were much less likely to use evil in SOU messages. Its use drops precipitously down to 43.3% of the reports from 1915 to 1945. President Wilson associated justified US participation in World War I as in part a response to “German terror.” He attacked the Russian revolution for “its blood and terror.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt used “evil” and “terror” to vilify the Axis powers during World War II. He attacked them for using the “terror of “suicide bombing” to try to create “a world of tyranny, and cruelty and serfdom.” In the early years of the Cold War struggle President Truman extended use of this rhetoric to mount a power struggle and VR against the Soviet Union. They show up most frequently in power struggles associated with the management of the American “Empire of liberty.” In spite of this, the percentage of speeches containing “evil” declined to the next two periods (1946–1974 and

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  65 1975–2010). In parallel structure, the terms communism and communist are equated with the same evil and terror that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had associated with “Nazi Fascist” terror. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson charged the Viet Cong with terrorism and Terror. The resistance to Empire gives rise to an escalation in the discourse focusing national attention on the “terrorist” threat against liberty. As Figure 3.4 indicates, the percentage of SOU reports containing terror rises after 1975. The Reagan administration engaged in more frequent attacks on the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire,” “communist” movements in Central America and state sponsors of terrorism in the Middle East, as well as the “Cold War” policy of “nuclear terrorism.” Both Presidents Bill Clinton (1993–2000) and George W. Bush (2001–2009) engaged in intense PVRs targeting terrorists. Clinton invoked the “terrorist” threat in all of his eight SOU reports. He explicitly linked terrorism to evil in his 1995 report following the first terrorist attack by Islamist inspired terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York City. Bush followed suit after the 9/11 attacks. The frequency of explicit terror-evil associations also indicates the high degree of intensity of the PVR: 2001 = 0, 2002 = 3, 2003 = 2, 2005 = 2, 2006 = 1, 2007 = 3, 2008 = 2. It drops to zero during the Obama years. Trump made this association in his first 2017 address to the congress. This intensity along with the media spectacle of “shock and awe” military campaigns changed American popular discourse and, as we shall see, American social science. Variations in the frequencies of Weekly White House addresses devoted to rhetorical attacks on terrorists constitute an index of PVR intensity (see Figure 3.5). These rhetorical attacks are coordinated with political campaigns to legitimate legislation, military operations and increasing budgets for the departments of Defense (DOD) and the National Security Agency (NSA), and new military adventures and arms sales to allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. 80%

66%

70% 60%

63%

67% 48%

50% 40%

65%

64% 53%

43%

30%

21%

20% 10% 0%

3%

8%

Figure 3.5  Index of PVR Intensity: Percent of Weekly Whitehouse Speeches Attacking Terrorists.

66  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism One of the most striking findings of this analysis is the decline in WoT addresses by the Obama regime. The Democratic Party won control of the Congress in 2007. Obama was elected to end the war. His political strategy was to placate the pro- and anti-war forces by reducing and winding down the Afghan and Iraq wars, while moving the WoT into a covert phase and escalating the use of drone warfare to engage in high-tech homicide bombings of terrorists. When ISIL emerged, Obama recycled Bush rhetoric to legitimate a new PVR campaign against ISIL (or ISIS) as evil “terrorists.” They want us to turn our backs on Muslims victimized by terrorism. But this gang of thugs peddling a warped ideology, they will never prevail. The world is united in our resolve to end their evil. And the only thing ISIL can do is spread terror in hopes that we will in turn, turn on ourselves. We will betray our ideals and take actions, actions motivated by fear that will drive more recruits into the arms of ISIL. That’s how they win. We win by prioritizing our security as we’ve been doing. Refusing to compromise our fundamental American values: freedom, openness, tolerance. That’s who we are. That’s how we win. (Obama Whitehouse Weekly address, November 21, 2015) Obama’s language is quite different and even triumphalist in its e-­vilification of specific individuals and groups. He has been roundly criticized for not attacking “Islamic” terrorism. Trump regime discourse is different in three ways from the previous Obama regimes. First, he has made a point of emphasizing that the “terrorism” problem is a problem for Arab-Muslims countries to solve. This is consistent with his America First orientation. The emphasis is on ArabMuslim involvement in “extremism” who are the evil others the US power elite. He has chastised the Arab world for not dealing with these problems, as they clearly stated in Trump’s 22 May 2017 speech to the “Arab Islamic” world (Trump 2017). In the same speech, it was then announced that the US cut “a really big deal” with Saudi Arabia to sell them $110 worth of new weapons systems. Past deals have provided weapons that the Saudi’s are currently employing to destroy ISIL in Yemen. Second, the Trump regime has personified the evil Other in terms of the Iranian regime. The 2016 speech refers to Iran eleven times; it clearly represents the threat Iran represents in terms of the good against evil meaning structure constitutive of PVRs. All of this is summarized in the 19 May 2017 White House Weekly Address where they described Trump’s agenda in giving a speech in Saudi Arabia: My first stop will be Saudi Arabia – the heart of the Muslim World. There, I will address a historic gathering of the leaders of more than 50 Muslim nations. I will represent the views of the American people frankly and clearly.

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  67 Many of these leaders have expressed growing concern about terrorism, the spread of radicalization, and Iran’s role in funding both. Now it appears Muslim leaders are ready to take more responsibility and a much bigger role in fighting terrorism in their region. It’s about time we do it, we’ll do it together, but it has to be done. America cannot solve all of the world’s problems, but we can – and we must – help any nation willing to join in the common cause of eradicating terrorism from the face of the earth. The most striking contrast between the Bush and Obama regimes’ PVR discourse, and the Trump regime’s rhetorical tactics, concerns the way they link the WoT terrorist threat to the inside of the US domestic scene by attacking immigrants and refugees. As stated in the 10 February 2017 and third Weekly White House address in the context of law enforcement: This week, I also met with Sheriffs and Police Chiefs from across the country. I pledged to them that we would stand with the incredible men and women of law enforcement – and so too will our great new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. My administration is committed to your security, which is why we will continue to fight to take all necessary and legal action to keep terrorists, radical and dangerous extremists from ever entering our country. We will not allow our generous system of immigration to be turned against us as a tool for terrorism and truly bad people. We must take firm steps today to ensure that we are safe tomorrow. This rhetoric has linked immigrants and refugees fleeing their homelands to the evils of terrorism as well as representing a threat to American lives. It has primarily functioned as a legitimation of a policy of exclusion targeting people from Muslim countries. This has unleashed a furious biopolitics of population and security.

Genealogy of terror-evil All human thought is interpretive in character. We use words to articulate our understandings and to think about things. The culture of a society provides each of its members with a repertoire of interpretive practices. Words such as tyranny, revolution, and terrorism can be viewed as a “natural sociology” employed by members of a society to interpret power relations (Rose 1960; Rose et al. 1994). The etymology of words registers changes in society, power relations, and thinking. Nietzsche traced a shift in the genealogy of morals through etymologies of the subjective traits associated with “good and bad” and “good and evil” (Nietzsche 1967: 24–56). Similarly, Foucault traced the self-interpretations associated with “normality and abnormality” and power relations in the areas of insanity, criminality, and sexuality

68  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism (Foucault 1982). Words are tactically polyvalent. The meanings of words have to be contextualized through fine-grained historical analysis. The sense of “revolution” is different when used by an astronomer and a social scientist. Great power struggles like the French Revolution and the GWT have the power to alter the meanings of words. Terrorism and evil are signifiers caught up in a structure of interrelated terms deeply embedded in the P/K dynamics that constituted contemporary society, including the practices of social scientists and sociologists. “Terrorism” is a “biopolitical” object of “positivist” knowledge. It was originally a positive self-concept among French Revolutionaries before it morphed into a negative, politically reactionary concept in English. The social sciences originally sought to objectify the social movements and class conflicts that caused the Terror. Similarly, the post-1960s PVRs against drugs and crime have exercised effects on the order of knowledge, particularly but not uniquely in the social sciences. In short, evil and terrorism are social facts. As such they must be treated as objects of knowledge with a complex and interrelated historical genealogy. The etymology of terror can be roughly divided into three periods: prerevolutionary, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary (Blain 2007). Two types of prerevolutionary terror show up in texts that link power relations to ­terror. One is articulated in theological sources as the terror of God (Note: Death is personified as “the king of terrors” at Job 18:14, OED 2012). A second sense links terror to the Divine Right of Kings and the prince’s Right of Death and absolute Sovereignty over the Law. This is the sense captured by Foucault’s famous description of “The Spectacle of the Scaffold” in his history of the prison (Foucault 1975: 32–72). Revolutionary terror is personified by Maximillian Robespierre, the French Revolution, and “the Reign of Terror.” The table is turned in a great democratic reversal of power relations. Terror ascends rather than descends the hierarchy. The guillotine no longer comes crashing down by order of God and King. The People exercise their right to engage in revolutionary terror. The risks posed by the dangerous classes and the possibilities of civil war pose a constant emergency that may only be contained by a new mode of power and subjection in the form of a biopolitics of population. The postrevolutionary discourse is biopolitical in the sense that it is viewed as a “system of terror” called “terrorism” practiced by governments and social movements. Terrorism is the name applied to illegitimate and criminal, political violence by liberal governmental regimes in societies originally constituted by revolutionary violence.

Sadism and the pleasures of PVR Very little attention has been paid to the association between liberalism, terrorism, and political cruelty or sadism. Consider the following example from Obama’s “Remarks by the President in Commencement Address to the United States Air Force Academy,” 2 June 2016:

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  69 At times, ensuring our security requires the use of military force. That’s the third lesson I want to discuss. As Commander-in-Chief, I have not hesitated to use force, unilaterally where necessary, to protect the American people. Thanks to our military, intelligence and counterterrorism professionals, bin Laden is gone. (Applause.) Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader of the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, is gone. (Applause.) Ahmed Abdi Godane, the al Qaeda leader in Somalia—he’s gone. (Applause.) Ahmed Abu Khattala, accused in the attacks in Benghazi—captured. Mohammad Mansur, the leader of the Taliban—gone. (Applause.) Leader after leader in ISIL—Haji Mutazz, their number two; Mohamed Emwazi, who brutally murdered Americans; Abu Nabil, the ISIL leader in Libya—all gone. Abu Dawud, a leader of their chemical weapons program—captured. (Obama 2016) Since the Obama regime took command of the WoT, as we know the Air Force and Special Forces have played central roles in the WoT by means of aerial bombardments, drone warfare, and targeted assassinations. The so-called “intention” is to kill “terrorists.” Many of these acts have also involved so-called collateral damage and have been condemned as warcrimes. The cruelty and sadism of these acts is not an issue. It is the abstractness that allows perpetrators to engage in these acts (Collins 2008: 25–29). Apparently, the gruesome details of killing people this way is not cruel or sadistic. When “terrorists” televise their executions, these acts are denounced as savage and cruel, sadistic and barbaric. Effective PVRs must involve the vicarious participation of spectators in the pleasurable identification with the violation of the innocent victim as well as the destruction of the villainous scapegoat. This can be accomplished through mass media representations in newspapers, on TV, or in films that recapitulate the crime and the punishment. The following newspaper article is illustrative: “U.S. Drone Attacks Targets Taliban Leader,” appeared in the Sunday New York Times (Cooper 2016, 26 May). Mansour was killed because he had been “actively involved” in planning attacks in Kabul and had been “opposed to peace talks.” These articles almost always include a photograph of the villain. The constant publication of these articles with photographs is that it fulfills the vicarious need generated by VR to witness the killing of the scapegoat—the denouement of the VR. The link between empire, liberalism, and the so-called terrorist threat is dramatized in the act of killing this Taliban leader. The Taliban provides the pretext for US-led empire to be in Afghanistan in strategic proximity to the Islamic state of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country. There are no “morbid” details provided that might scandalize the readers of the New York Times.

70  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism Were there others killed; if so, who were they and how did they die. However, the implication is clear. The ritual destruction of the victim is essential to the fulfillment of the desire to kill the enemies of freedom. The genealogy of the concept of political violence and sadism derives from the French revolutionary period, the Great Terror, and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. As regards the significance of Sade to terrorism and evil, Beauvoir’s (1966) states, “The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention; it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself” (p. 4). Furthermore, “He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature” (p. 6). Sade repeatedly states his ultimate attitude is rooted in “resentment” (p. 10). Beauvoir makes a specific historical and sociological point about Sade’s resentment: And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of the time. Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber, the status for which they were nostalgic: that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot. The orgies of the Duke of Charolais, among others, were bloody and famous. Sade too, thirsted for this illusion of power. ‘What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you… every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.’ The intoxification of tyranny leads directly to cruelty. in hurting the object that serves him, ‘tastes all the pleasures which a vigorous individual feels in making full use of his strength; he dominates, he is a tyrant.’ (p. 8) One of Beauvoir’s most important points concerns Sade’s literary practice. He strove to justify his eroticism and cruelty by creating an elaborate philosophical system. “Sade’s favorite form was parody” (p. 35); he employed this tactic to explain, justify, and excuse his perversity. He parodies conventional understandings by using “reason” and contemporary philosophical ideas to rationalize his unconventional or deviant practices. More recently, Darnton (1982, 1995, 2010) has traced this literary practice to the use of forbidden literature to ridicule and mock and scandalize the religious and aristocratic elites. The Great Terror enacted the implications of these crimes in rituals of victimage ritual such as public executions of the Monarch and members of his family. Beauvoir also discusses the link between Sade’s deification of Nature and his disappointment with the Terror. He had studied Hobbes and Swift carefully. Nature = evil. He was unique in seeing the selfishness, tyranny, and crime in sexuality and revolutionary terror. Sade articulated his disappointment with the Terror by refusing to participate in the revolutionary

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  71 courts set up to judge the counterrevolutionaries. Violence has become too abstract and distant from the emotion. Since Freud, psychoanalysts have also focused on political violence and the dynamics of sadism (Fanon 1963; Weiss 1966; Cohn 1967, 1975; Blain 1976; Saint-Amand 1996). Storr (1972) employed Beauvoir’s ideas to bolster his claim that sadism is not primarily about sexuality. Sade’s problem was incarceration, narcissism, and the desire for emotional intoxication. According to Storr, the desire for dominance/submission can be entangled with sexuality, manifested in S/M practices, but the desire for power is a more primary process than eroticism. PVRs culminate in the practices of political torture and warfare. Danner (2004) reviews the government report that documents the graphic details. The report includes the torture photographs in color and the full texts of the secret administration memos on torture and the investigative reports on the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. These photographs did in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the “War on Terror.” These documents include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the US could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by US Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guantánamo “migrated” to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted. Yet as Danner argues, the real scandal here is political: it “is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing is disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and, ultimately, citizens to act.” In PVR perspective, the publication of these findings provides the images necessary to vicarious victimage ritual. They allow us to participate vicariously in the political sadism. The same analysis can be made of films and documentaries made about bin Laden’s assassination (see Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for an Academy Award).

Changing definitions of terrorism The PVR associated with the Wot has altered the American understanding of terrorism in the time period 2000–2011. At the same time, the terms used to articulate its definition have been in flux. The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) is a scholarly source of etymologies of American English terms (Pinker 2011). AHD registers two recent changes in the senses of “terror.”

72  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism A new sixth sense was added in 2011 to the list of five and the political sense of terror as a tactic is altered. Senses 1–3, 5 do not change: (1) “Intense, overpowering fear” and (2) “One that instills fear” (e.g. “a rabid dog that became the terror of the neighborhood”). The third sense is “The ability to instill fear” (e.g. “the terror of jackboots pounding down the street”). The fifth sense in AHD 2001 is an informal reference to “an annoying person or thing.” This informal usage of terror is unchanged and moved from the fifth to the sixth position in the AHD 2011 list of senses. Changes to sense #4 are the most significant (2000–2011) in thinking about the tactics and targets of political terror. These changes seem designed to align thinking with the new circumstances produced by the involvement of the Pentagon and NATO in the US orchestrated WoT. The crucial signifiers are italicized: 4. AHD 2001 terror = Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes. 4. AHD 2011 terror = Violence committed or threatened by a group, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals. Population is dropped from AHD 2011. So is “military…purpose.” “Civilians” stand in paradigmatic contrast to “military.” The AHD 2001 sense specifically is not so specific. It clearly covers states or governments as groups who might use the military to terrorize a population. There is no mention other than an oblique reference to a military in the gloss provided for sense #3, “the terror of Jackboots pounding on the street.” AHD 2011 is more specific and excludes that possibility. As the US military has assumed an explicitly biopolitical mission as “world policeman” in a WoT in service to liberal Empire, military violence must be clearly differentiated from “terrorist” violence. The idea that the political goal of the WoT might be the power and subjection of Empire is not covered. There is no possibility that violent resistance might be a legitimate response in an asymmetric war fought against Empire. A separate sense of terror is differentiated in the AHD 2011 list: “5. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.” The significance of the clear differentiation of #4 and #5 senses is explained in a special “Usage Note” attached to the etymology of terror. The note draws a subtle contrast that directly links the contemporary understanding of terrorism to the discourse of evil. It contrasts the uses of “the war on terrorism” vs. “the war on terror”: “The war on terrorism” = “a reprehensible method of conducting a violent conflict” “The war on Terror” = “a moral abstraction…[or] the universal conflict between good and evil” There was no reference to evil in the AHD 2001 entry on terror.

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  73 The AHD 2001 definition of terrorism is much more specific about its illegality and the character of the perpetrators. The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.” AHD apparently adopted the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s definition of terrorism some time before 1992. This definition has also been adopted by social scientists working in the policy network linked to research on terrorism (LaFree and Ackerman, 2009: 347–74). Terrorism is illegal violence perpetrated for ideological or political reasons. The definition is also quite specific about the perpetrators of terrorism. They can be a “person or an organized group.” Although there is some ambiguity about this, the use of legal force or violence by a state or government to terrorize a population is not covered by this definition. This is clearly a definition tailored to the interests of the US power elite in dealing with resistance from “non-state” actors. If states and governments employ terror tactics to achieve their goals, it is an arbitrary operational definition, NOT terrorism. This narrowing of the definition creates problems. Political leaders frequently want to attack their international opponents as well as domestic opponents and enemies as terrorists. This is particularly true of government authorities engaged in Empire and the management of colonies. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2012) etymology of terrorism clearly records these shifting uses of the term. The original English use of the word terrorism was taken from the French and first articulated in 1795 as “1. “Government by intimidation as directed and carried out by the party in power in France during the Revolution of 1789–1794; the system of the ‘terror’ (1793–1794).”” This sense was duplicated in Italian terrorismo (1794), German Terrorismus (1796), and Spanish terrorismo (1799) as well as English. This usage of terrorism quickly began to function as a mass noun signifying the “unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Originally, this use of the term referred to “practices” used by governments or ruling groups to maintain control over a population. Gradually, this usage was generalized to such practices used by a clandestine or expatriate organization as a means of furthering its aims. The original sense of terrorism as “the practices of governments and ruling groups” did not disappear. These senses accumulate like tools in a tool kit. The term terrorism is tactically polyvalent in the sense that it functions differently in domestic and foreign power struggles. During World War II, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman attacked the “evils” of Germany and Japan as “terror states” that practiced terrorism. The link between terrorism and Empire is not clearly differentiated in the OED or AHD etymologies. But it is clearly implied. The OED (2012) sources

74  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism cited to illustrate the different uses of terrorism frequently refer to Ireland, a British colony, and the Irish Republican struggle for independence. As an American English adjective, evil signifies something that is “morally bad or wrong” (AHD 2001). It can be anything including a person or a social group. The number of these senses of “evil” related to politics is striking. George Bush frequently referred to Saddam Hussein as an “evil tyrant.” Bush also categorized three countries known to be state sponsors of terrorism into an “Axis of Evil.” Anything that causes harm or injury can be described as evil. Used as a noun, evil refers to the “quality” of being “morally bad or wrong”—e.g. a leader’s power (AHD 2006). Wicked, angry, spiteful, malicious, destructive are the terms frequently employed to describe the subjective characteristics of evil persons or social groups, as in that “wicked man Hitler” full of “soul destroying hatred (Winston Churchill).” The WoT has provoked a revival of the problem of evil in contemporary philosophical thought. Anglo-American discourse is roughly divided into two camps: evil-skeptics and evil-revivalists (Calder 2013). Contemporary skepticism about evil owes much to Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals and his project to move evaluative thinking beyond good and evil. The dangers of this kind of thinking are captured in Nietzsche’s admonition: “Whoever fights monsters [evil] should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster [evil]…If you look too deeply into the abyss, the abyss will look into you” (Blain 1988). Skeptics want to jettison the term for three reasons: (1) its association with supernatural beliefs, (2) its lack of explanatory value, and (3) its harmful social abuse. Cole denounces the concept as a form of mythological thinking that has been abused to demonize and dominate minority groups and to legitimate unjust wars against domestic and foreign enemies (Cole 2006). The story of Satin’s rebellion against God is one example of this archaic myth. Cole seeks to demythologizes the use of evil by detailed criticism of many examples of its abuse and social harm, including the Bush regime’s war against terror, the unwarranted invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the use of torture to interrogate “terrorists.” Cole adopts a psychoanalytic perspective on the practice of denouncing individuals/ groups as evil. It can involve the unconscious projection of unacceptable desires onto out-groups that can lead to horrible destructiveness, cruelty, and legitimate social domination. It is also a thought stopper that explains nothing and creates gapping black holes in our thinking that prevent true understanding. Revivalists argue that we should preserve the use of the term but only in a narrowly circumscribed, secular sense. Call makes four arguments in support of the evil-revivalist position: (1) only the word evil captures the full moral significance of certain acts (e.g. sadism, torture, Hitler and the Holocaust, 9/11), (2) only by facing evil can we live good lives and prevent future evils, (3) only this word can focus our limited time and energy on the worst moral wrongs, and (4) it can helps us guard against responding to evil

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  75 with further evils. Claudia Card argues for a narrow and secular concept of evil (Card 2010). She encapsulates this concept in an “atrocity paradigm.” The use of evil should be restricted to institutions and social practices that are “inexcusably wrong.” She acknowledges the valid points made by the skeptics and supports Cole’s project to abolish the use of the mythology of evil. She incorporates Arendt “banality of evil” concept through a detailed consideration of a well-known series of social psychology experiments on obedience and domination by Milgram and Zimbardo. Stanley Milgram described his research in his (1974) Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Philip Zimbardo makes the link to evil explicit in his (2007) book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Still, Card argues that we need a carefully delimited “secular” concept of evil to categorize certain institutions and social practices. She argues that understanding the evils of clear-cut atrocities—9/11, the Holocaust, and torture and genocide— can help us see the banal evils in everyday life in existing societies and oppressive regimes, racism, patriarchy, violence and executions in prisons, hate crimes, and violence against animals.

Dangers of evilification The recycling of the power-PVR-terrorism cycle is readily apparent in the dynamic of the 2013/2014 Russian/Ukrainian struggle. Vladimir Putin is represented as desiring to dominate Ukraine as part of his Euro-Asian Empire. There is a long campaign of vilification against Putin for his political desires and activities. He represents the wicked and diabolic forces at play in Russia and Moscow to reconstitute Russia as an Empire. This struggle and its implication for Empire have been hotly contested by members of the US power elite’s policy planning network (see Cohen Stephen 2014, Timothy Snyder 2014). T1 Fall 2013: Pro-European Protesters = “evil” American Terrorists. Allegedly, the Americans desire to extend its dominance by means of NATO over Eastern Europe. Ukrainian President, Victor F. Yanukovych, is Putin’s puppet. Putin orders his puppet to reject a plan to integrate with the European community in December 2013. Thousands of pro-European protesters seize the opportunity and go to Kiev to protest against Putin’s puppet and occupy Kiev, the capital city (Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer, “Kiev Protesters Set Square Ablaze to Thwart Police,” New York Times Europe, 18 February 2014). Putin orders his Ukrainian puppet to “crack down” on “American backed terrorists” challenging his puppet regime in Kiev. T2 Spring 2014: Pro-Russian Protesters = “evil,” Russian terrorists. President Yanukovych is driven from power in Kiev and scapegoated for “hundreds” of protesters killed and wounded by the security and police forces (Andrew Kramer and Andrew Higgins, “Ukraine’s Forces Escalate Attacks Against Protesters,” New York Times 20 Feb 2014: Europe, 26 May 2014). Acting President Oleksandr V Turchynov (appointed by Ukraine parliament

76  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism after February coup) calls on the “security agencies” to relaunch “counterterrorism” measures. Turchynov told local news media that Kiev’s military campaign against the rebel groups was entering its “final phase” and vowed to “cleanse the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of terrorists” (Andrew Roth and David Herszenhorm, “Solidarity Eludes Ukraine Separatist Groups as Presidential Election Nears,” New York Times Europe, 21 May 2014). Putin’s PVR against American “terrorists” is ultimately triumphant. He annexes Crimea, March 19, 2014. In response, the Americans and Europeans articulate the following synonyms: Putin = Hitler = Holocaust = evil, ergo Putin = evil. The struggle continues to move Empire to contain and/ or penetrate Russia (Higgins, Andrew, and Andrew Roth. “Biden Offers Strong Support to Ukraine and Issues a Sharp Rebuke to Russia.” New York Times 22 April 2014). The US power elite and its political representatives employ PVR to achieve their goals. It is the root cultural cause of much contemporary political violence. Is this practice evil? The evidence suggests that the practice is producing a dangerous global situation of intensified sovereign violence and biopolitics of security. The US global victimage ritual against Terror has victimized millions of people and destabilized a number of societies, provoking many brutal civil wars. The Americans have killed thousands of “terrorists” with drones in the name of “liberal” Empire. These sovereign terminations are legitimated by a war against Terror. The war has intensified biopolitics of populations through a swarming of new “security systems” designed to detect and deter terrorism. These sovereign detentions and tortures are legitimated by the WoT. Insofar as we approach the study of terrorism and evil as social scientists, we must be self-reflexive in our approach and proceed as much as possible in an objective theoretical and methodological manner. As a sociologist, it would be unethical to approach the study of “terrorism” or “evil” in any other fashion. This means that sociologists in their capacity as social scientists should not engage in the practice of castigating individuals or groups as “evil” or “terrorists.” Rather, we are obligated to explain and understand why some actors classify and define others as evil or terrorists. This means treating “terrorism” and “evil” with a certain degree of objectivity and historical and cultural relativity. Terrorism is a word; terrorism is a social or political phenomenon. The problem of “political violence” as a general social phenomenon has always been difficult. Social scientists continue to have had problems with thinking about violence. As a result of the PVR against terrorists produced by the global WoT, the multiform complex of activities classified as “political violence” has been displaced by the problem of terrorism. How about state-sponsored violence and nuclear “terrorism”? A more inclusive idea of political violence does not narrow the focus to one form of political violence. Many more people have been destroyed by politicians engaged in “warfare” in the name of progress than so-called “terrorists” engaged in “terror.” The

Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  77 impact of the WoT on the field of knowledge devoted to the study of political violence is detailed in Chapter 4 on the biopolitics of terrorism.

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Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism  79 Higgins, Andrew, and Andrew Roth. “Biden Offers Strong Support to Ukraine and Issues a Sharp Rebuke to Russia.” New York Times 22 April 2014: Europe. www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/world/europe/biden-ukraine.html. Accessed 26 May 2014. Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 1984. Jameson, Fredric. “Foreword.” In Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, vi–xxii. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 38. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. New York: Verso, 2016. Joas, Hans, and Wolfgang Knöbl. War in Social Thought. Translated by Alex S ­ kinner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Judt, Tony. “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe.” New York Review of Books 55, no. 2 14 February 2008. www.nybooks.com/issues/2008/feb/14/. Accessed 26 May 2014. Kramer, Andrew, and Andrew Higgins. “Ukraine’s Forces Escalate Attacks against Protesters.” New York Times 20 Feb 2014: Europe. www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/ world/europe/ukraine.html. Accessed 26 May 2014. Kruglanski, Arie W., and Shira Fishman. “The Psychology of Terrorism: “Syndrome” Versus “Tool” Perspectives.” Terrorism and Political Violence 18, no. 2 (Jul 2006): 193–215. LaFree, Gary, and Gary Ackerman. “The Empirical Study of Terrorism: Social and Legal Research.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 5(2009): 347–74. Lester, David, Bijou Yang, and Mark Lindsay. “Suicide Bombers: Are Psychological Profiles Possible?” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 27, no. 4 (Jul 2004): 283–95.Maistre, Joseph de. Excerpts in English Translation from Considerations on France. 1796. http:// maistre.uni.cx:8000/considerations_on_france.html. Accessed 2 June 2014. Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo. Translated by ­Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967 [1887]. Obama, Barach. Remarks by the President at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony, West Point, New York. 28 May 2014. www.whitehouse. gov/briefing-room/speeches-and-remarks. Accessed 1 June 2014. Obama, Barack. Remarks by the President in Commencement Address to the United States Air Force Academy. 2 June 2016. Whitehouse. www.whitehouse.gov/. Accessed 5 June 2016. Oxford English Dictionary Online Version, Third Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011 [2012]. Pinker, Steven. “Usage in The American Heritage Dictionary.” In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2011. President. Whitehouse Weekly Address. 2001–2017. Press Office. www.whitehouse.gov. Rose, Edward. “The English Record of a Natural Sociology.” American Sociological Review 25 (April 1960): 193–208. Rose, Edward, Laurel Richardson, and George Psathas. “The Theoric Construction in the Ethno-Inquiries: Selections from Theory in the World, from Chapter Nine in the Worulde.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 16(1994): 37–62. Roth, Andrew, and David Herszenhorm. “Solidarity Eludes Ukraine Separatist Groups as Presidential Election Nears.” New York Times 21 May 2014: Europe.

80  Political victimage ritual, evil, and the problem of sadism www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/world/europe/solidarity-eludes-ukraine-separatistgroups-as-presidential-election-nears.html. Accessed 26 May 2014. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Saint-Amand, Pierre. The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, & the Enlightenment. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. Smith, Philip, and Alexander Riley. Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Snyder, Timothy. “Don’t Let Putin Grab Ukraine.” New York Times 3 February 2014: Opinion. www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/opinion/dont-let-putin-grab-ukraine.html. Accessed 27 May 2014. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of ­C ulture. T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, 1970. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971. Storr, Anthony. Human Destructiveness. New York: Basic Books, 1972. Trump, Donald. “President Trump’s Speech to the Arab Islamic American Summit.” 21 May 2017. The Whitehouse. www.whitehouse.gov/ Accessed 22 May 2017. Tiryakian, Edward. “War: The Covered Side of Modernity.” International Sociology 14, no. 4 (December 1999): 473–89. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica. The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, Vol. IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. Weiss, Peter. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade; (a Play) [Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean-Paul Marats Dargestelit Durch die Schauspiegruppe Des Hospices zu Charenton Under Anleitung Des Herrn de Sade]. Translated by Geoffrey Skelton from the German. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1966 [1965]. Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.

4 Biopolitics of terrorism

This chapter theorizes the War on Terror by advancing a long-term project to weave a genealogy of social science knowledge in relation to the war on terror (WoT). The biopolitics of terrorism must be understood in relation to imperial power struggles and power elite orchestrated victimage rituals, which, in turn, generated the subjects and objects of social science knowledge. The power struggles associated with the US-led war on global terrorism has contributed to the genesis of many new objects of knowledge and possible lines of research on terrorists (e.g., Islamic terrorists, Axis of Evil, jihadists, suicide bombers, experts on terrorism, counterterrorism, ISIS, etc.). This process involves a repetitive cycle of geostrategic moves and countermoves by the US power elite. These moves include orchestration of political victimage rituals targeting state and non-state terrorists, and a correlated biopolitics of terrorism provided by the policy-planning network. Past research on political victimage rituals are highlighted, along with the way this dynamic generates new possible object/subjects of social scientific knowledge. This power/knowledge dynamic is described in terms of the theories and concepts appearing in Anglo-American social science in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The limits of current theorizing in “counterterrorism,” particularly the shift in emphasis from political to religious theories of fanaticism, are highlighted as well as the possibilities of future research. The results of a discourse analysis are presented that tracks trends in social science discourse in the field of “terrorism” since the 1970s. It confirms the thesis that social science discourse has mainly followed the geostrategic interests of the US-led empire. It documents the shift from “political violence” to “terrorism” as the main theoretical and empirical object as well as the shift from a focus on political extremism (Cold War, political ideology and progressive desires, and terrorism) to the religious motives behind terrorism (Islamism, desire to create an Islamic state). Past research shows that the discourse of terrorism is deeply embedded in the power/knowledge dynamic of Empire (Said 1978, 1993: 309–10; Hardt and Negri 2000: 37). Power struggles provoke cycles of subjection by means of victimage rituals that have profoundly altered the order of knowledge as well as popular culture and political discourse. The French revolutionary

82  Biopolitics of terrorism specter of democratic Terror gave direct impetus to the rise of “centrist liberalism” and the “positivist” social sciences in the 19th century (Wallerstein 2011: 219–74, on Comte’s reaction to the revolution spirit, see Meaney 2012). It continued to incite their further development in the 20th century response to Communist terror (Chomsky 1969, 2006; Chomsky and Herman 1979). The WoT continues to incite this power/knowledge dynamic, the genesis of new objects of knowledge, and the intensification of surveillance. Political victimage rituals generate new categories of villainous scapegoats to destroy and objects of knowledge to research (see Chapter 2, ­Figure 2.1). This cycle can be modeled as a ritual sequence: power/­political victimage ritual/knowledge (Blain 2012: Diagram 1.3). As Foucault (1976) hypothesized, power relations are “productive” as well as “repressive.” Once constituted, knowledge exerts power effects. A generation of research by Foucault’s disciples confirms this P/K hypothesis in regard to a whole range of fields (Rose 1999). At the same time, they have played down the crucial role of victimage ritual in this dynamic. Foucault’s criticism of the “repressive hypothesis” is partly responsible. The repressive exercise of power in political victimage rituals (violent and bloody spectacles of torture and warfare) did not come to a halt after biopower developed in “liberal” n ­ ation-states (see Giddens 1985; Saint-Amand 1996). Wars of sovereignty have continued to be frequent and intense. The ­British fought fifty major colonial wars (1803–1903) to extend and maintain its Empire (Giddens 1985: 223). They were publicized in mass media spectacles (increasingly in real time), memorialized in periodic rituals, and documented in histories, literature, and film. The US has engaged in eighteen armed conflicts (1950–2010); some of them have been protracted, intense, and highly contentious (Blain 2012: 74). Foucault did not think that spectacular violence disappeared from social life (1976, 136). State-sponsored victimage rituals continue to play visible roles in modern politics (Castells 2013). The link between “terrorism” and “media effects” has been made from the early 1970s, a sign of its spectacular character (Karber 1971; Martin 1985; Farnen 1990; Ross 1994). In this chapter we identify several lines of emergent research on the ­biopolitics of counterterrorism. It begins with a discussion of the power/­ victimage ritual/knowledge dynamic. This is followed up by a conceptualization of terrorists as scapegoats, the biopolitics of terrorism, recent changes in social science discourse, and the limits of counterterrorism discourse. One of the most important changes is the shift from discourses emphasizing revolutionary political movements (left and right) to religious extremism as a cause of terrorism. A second change concerns a new focus on non-state actors. As we shall see, one of the main problems is the theoretical status of “terrorism” as an object of knowledge (Miller 1988; Douglass and Zulaika 1990; Crenshaw 1992; Halkides 1995; Borradori 2003; Boyns and Ballard 2004; Tilly 2004; Turk 2004; Kruglanski and Fishman 2006; Schinkel 2009; Post et al. 2009; Godwin

Biopolitics of terrorism  83 2010; Oksala 2010; de Goede 2012; Stump and Dixit 2013). Critical discourse includes an account of the underlying power struggles involved in terrorism. We conclude that there needs to be more research linking the power dynamics of contemporary imperialism, the activities and geostrategic interests of the US power elite, and the WoT (Domhoff 1990, 2014; Cox 2017). Three issues are linked to a biopolitics of counterterrorism. The first concerns the reduction of the problem of political violence to the violence of those resisting US-led empire. The second concerns how it contributes to the scapegoating of Islamic people. Third, the WoT as a manifestation of Empire is contributing to the reduction of knowledge to its auxiliary function in the project to produce more powerful regimes of government control. This situation poses a number of problems for knowledge and scientists’ commitment to an ethic of truth. The WoT reduces the problem to Islamic terrorism, masking the huge amount of “legitimate” political violence perpetrated by the US-led coalition. Another concern is the way the power/ knowledge dynamic in Empire is contributing to the reduction of knowledge to its auxiliary function as an adjunct to powerful regimes of governmentality, including intensified surveillance, incarceration, and internment of individuals and populations associated with the risk of terrorism. The knowledge produced by researchers affiliated with the policy-planning network has contributed to the subjection by means of ritual victimage of ­Islamic religious groups. On the other hand, there are also grounds for hope. A substantial amount of critical research has been done more recently on the WoT and its social effects, particularly the role of liberalism and biopolitics in counterterrorism.

Power/PVR/Knowledge As described in Chapter 2, there are two stages in the cycle of imperial power struggles, political victimage rituals (PVR), and biopolitics. Power struggles provoke PVRs. Biopolitics is an opportunistic response to elite-­ organized PVRs. Once again, victimage ritual is the practice of seeking out a victim to scapegoat in order to expiate communal guilt. A political victimage ritual involves the spectacular use of victimage ritual as a calculated means to achieve political goals. The tactical use of this device is a key ­feature of modern politics. The Nazi campaign against the Jews constitutes a ­cultural paradigm of this political practice (Burke 1941: 191–220; Duncan 1962: 238–52; Edelman 1971: 155–71; Ivie 1980, 2005; Wagner-Pacifici 1986; Blain 1988, 1994, 1995; Cuzzort 1989; Ivie and Giner 2007). Blain (2012) concluded that these struggles against terrorists (i.e., Indian Wars. WWII/ Nazis, Cold War/Communists) has played a constitutive role in American nationalism and US-led Empire (also Slotkin 1973, 1992; Rogin 1987). Research on the genesis of the concept of a terrorist as a political type is quite advanced. The scapegoating of oppositional groups as terrorists by Anglo-American elites has a long history. The French Revolution forged

84  Biopolitics of terrorism positive and negative concepts of “terrorism.” Negative “terrorism” emerged from a politically reactionary discourse that added an “evil” connotation to it (Hunt 1984, 2003; Berlin 1990). In Robespierre’s (1794) discourse, terror = justice: “…terror is nothing more nor less than swift, severe and indomitable justice…” In conservative thought, Terror = Evil: “Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists…are let loose on the people” (Edmund Burke 1795, “terrorist,” sense A.n.1.,quoted in OED 2011); “What distinguishes the French Revolution and what makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically evil; …it reaches the highest point of corruption ever known; it is pure impurity…Only the evil genius of Robespierre could achieve this miracle” (Maistre 1796). The negative sense emerged during the revolution. It did not take hold in France and the US until the 1830s. Americans fought wars against the British and politics like Franklin and Jefferson openly supported Robespierre and the Terror. It was only later as US presidents faced resistance to Empire did they deploy its critical sense. PVRs against terrorists have a specific genealogy in relation to the dynamic of US-led Empire (Blain 2007, 2012). British imperialists generalized the practice of categorizing as terrorist any organized resistance to British rule (on British colonial rule, see Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005a, 2005b; on French colonial rule, see Fanon 1963; Lazreg 2007). The first documented reference to terrorists other than the French was to the Irish in 1806; an Anglo-Irish historian refers to the appointment of an English “viceroy” to govern Ireland to deal with the “sanguinary ferociousness of Irish terrorists” (“terrorist, n. and adj. sense 2.b., OED 2011). As Anglo-American elites defended or extended their sovereignty over territories to defend or extend their Empires, resistance was inevitably provoked. “Terrorism” was the label most frequently applied to the activities of leaders and groups involved in resistance. Henceforth, they would be branded as terrorists. Given the “liberal” value orientation of these imperial elites, terrorists were portrayed as threats to security, life, and liberty. Policy networks composed of experts provided the knowledge to further the political elite’s aims and agendas. The leaders and groups labelled terrorists were scapegoated in moral, liberal, and biopolitical terms. They were vilified as evil, uncivilized tyrants and racial monsters—the ultimate “outsiders.” The global WoT is only the latest manifestation of this mode of Empire and subjection by means of victimage ritual.

Social science discourses The Federal Bureau of Investigation changed its operational definition of terrorism some time before 1992 (see Chapter 3). This definition has also been adopted by social scientists working in the policy network linked to research on terrorism (e.g., LaFree and Ackerman 2009; Hamm 2014). T ­ errorism is illegal violence perpetrated for ideological or political r­ easons. The definition is also quite specific about the perpetrators of terrorism. They can be a “person or an organized group.” Although there is some ­ambiguity about this, the use of violence by a state or government to terrorize a population is not

Biopolitics of terrorism  85 covered by the new definition. This narrowing can be politically problematic for agents of Empire. Political leaders frequently want to vilify states/governments (Iraq, Syria, North Korea) as well as non-state actors. Social scientists frequently adopt the definitions of terrorism first ­developed by state authorities (e.g., Federal Bureau of Investigation or Department of Homeland Security, Israeli Intelligence). Researchers claim they are constrained to accept these definitions for practical reasons. Government and private contractors make these decisions to create databases. Iraq is a prime example. The problems include biased and truncated samples based on arbitrary definitions of “terrorism,” confusing the boundaries between terrorist campaigns and civil wars, including or not including combatants as well as civilians in civil wars to deflate or inflate the extent of the terrorist threat (see Human Security Research Project 2007; Sanchez-Cuenca and de la Calle 2009). Lafree and Ackerman (2009: 347) define terrorism “…as the threatened or actual use of illegal force directed against civilian targets by non-state actors in order to attain a political goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.” In addition to the methodological problems with this practice, there are theoretical issues too. This definition is tailored to the interests of government officials at the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency, or private firms who do contract work with government agencies, like the Rand Corporation or Pinkerton (e.g. on failed states and terrorism association, LaFree et al. 2008; Blain 2009). As Figure 2.1 shows, the biopolitics of terrorism is the last stage in the cycle of power/PVR/knowledge. Foucault introduced the concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics” to designate what had made “life and its mechanisms” a matter of explicit political calculation and “knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault 1976: 143, 2003). Rabinow and Rose (2006: 196–97) have been clearest about it: “…biopower serves to bring into view a field comprised of more or less rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence.” This field includes the vital characteristics of living beings and the vital characteristics of groups or populations composed of such living beings. Biopolitics refers to the debates surrounding the problems of social life and knowledge, and the best regimes of authority and modes of intervention to deal with these problems. Durkheim’s Le Suicide (1897) is a paradigm case of the PVR/ biopolitics dynamic. The problem of differential suicide rates in European populations had been the subject of intense political controversy in the 19th century (Hacking 1990: 64–72, 170–73). We follow Rabinow and Rose (2006) in conceptualizing biopolitics in terms of the following specific features: 1 One or more truth discourses about the character of living human beings; causes/dynamics/effects of terrorism. 2 An array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; psychologists, social scientists.

86  Biopolitics of terrorism 3 Intervention strategies in the name of the life and health of populations; counterterrorism, mental health services. 4 Modes of subjectification in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life; political or professional ethics regarding participation in the WoT. The emergence of a discursive regime of “terrorism” is indexed by the enormous increase in journal articles on the topic and the appearance of a whole series of new “Terrorism” Journals provides evidence of the way the power/ knowledge has played out since the late 1970s. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 present the results of an analysis of Sociology Abstracts articles appearing in these journals (Data: 410 Hi. Cit. [>5 cit] J. Articles. Sociology Abstracts, 1952– 2016 [May], Proquest, access: 9 June 2016). The number of articles coded “Subject terrorism” almost doubled between 1980s (122) and 1990s (209). It exploded by over 800%, pre- and post-9/11. Figure 4.3 depicts how “Terrorism” eclipses “Political Violence” as the dominant object of knowledge in research on violence. The first change is the displacement of “political violence” by “terrorism” as object of knowledge (a statistically significant decline from 22.2% to 5.8% of the articles) by “terrorism.” A second important change is a shift from an almost exclusive concern with the political to religious subjectivity and motivation. This is especially true of articles that deal with Islam or Muslims. There was a statistically significant increase in the proportion of articles pre9/11 to WoT: 6.3% to 19.3% of the most influential articles (>5). A third

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122 1980-89

209

1990-99

2000-09

2010-16

Figure 4.1  F  requency of Peer Reviewed, Scholarly Articles in Sociological Abstracts Subject “terrorism,” 1960–May 2016 (n = 3565–May 2016).

50 45

44.4

40 35

33.3

30

29

25 20 15

12.9

10

8

5 0

1977-79

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010-16

Figure 4.2  P  ercent Total High Citation Journal Articles (>5) in Sociology Abstracts Published in ‘Terrorism’ Journals 1977–2016 (May) (Terrorism 1977–1991, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 1992, Terrorism and Political Violence 1988).

2500 2000 1500 Terrorism

1000

PV

500 0 Terrorism PV

1950s 0 3

1960s 3 11

1970s 30 54

1980s 122 111

1990s 208 556

2000s 1940 1355

Figure 4.3  S  ubject Categories, “Political Violence” and “Terrorism,” Sociology Abstracts, 1952–2016 (May), ProQuest, Accessed 8 June 2016.

88  Biopolitics of terrorism Table 4.1  Percent Articles Linking Subjects and Discourses to “Terrorism” in Influential Articles Indexed in Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012) Pre-9/11

WoT

Subjects nation religiona [] [Islam/Muslim] gender race classb

19.0 6.3 0.0 7.9 6.3 1.6

30.3 19.5* 11.6* 6.1 8.7 6.9

Discourses political violence c biopowerd[] [security] criticale mediaf Totals

22.2 9.5 1.6 9.5 22.2 n = 63

5.8* 24.2* 12.3* 16.3 19.1 n = 277

* a b c d

Z test for column proportions, p < .05. Keyword: Religion + Muslim/Islam + Suicide. Keyword: Economy. Keyword: Politics & Violence. Keyword: Security + Government + Counterterrorism + Intelligence + Surveillance + Criminology. e Keyword: Power + Ideology + Inequality + Hegemony + Domination + Empire + Globalization. f Keyword: Media + Communication + Culture. Source: Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WOT (2002–2012).

striking change is the rise of a critical analysis of the biopolitics of security and terrorism (statistically significant difference in the proportion of articles from 9.5% to 24.2% of total articles). There were also a few continuities. Nationalism continues to be an important issue related to terrorism (increase in proportion of total articles to 30.3%), particularly ­ ender, race, and class media analysis are roughly proportional the WoT. G before and after 9/11. The power struggles and PVRs associated with US wars have generated a whole series of new object-subjects of knowledge—Palestinian terrorists, narco-terrorists, Islamic-terrorists, Jihadists. Table 4.1 summarizes the results of a general analysis of the journal articles indexed in Sociology Abstracts pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012). These discourses can be divided in two ways. They can be divided by journal type: terrorism vs. other journals, or by type of biopolitical discourse, those that individualize the terrorist as a type of body or personality, and those that totalize the terrorist as a member of a group or population. Table 4.2 summarizes the discourses in the two types of journals changed in a number of significant ways. The first difference is in the way the “nation”

Biopolitics of terrorism  89 Table 4.2  Percent Articles Linking Subjects and Discourses to “Terrorism” in Influential Articles (>5) by Journal Type Indexed in Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012) Pre-9/11 Journal Subjects nation religiona[] [Islam] gender race classb Discourses PVc biopowerd[] [security] criticale mediaf Totals

WoT Terror

Other

Terror

Other

31.8* 18.2#

12.2* 0.0*#

5.6*# 38.9

32.0*# 18.1*

33.3*# 5.6 0.0

4.2# 8.9 7.3

4.5* 4.5 4.5 13.6 9.1 9.1 22.7 n = 22

9.8 7.3 0.0 26.8* 9.8* 1.6 9.8 22.2 n = 41

11.1 16.7 0.0 11.1 n = 18

5.4* 24.7* 12.3* 7.3 19.7 n = 259

* # a b c d

Z test for pre-9/11 and WoT column proportions, p < .05. Z test for Journal Type column proportions, p < .05. Keyword: Religion + Muslim/Islam + Suicide. Keyword: Economy. Keyword: Politics & Violence. Keyword: Security + Government + Counterterrorism + Intelligence + Surveillance + Criminology. e Keyword: Power + Ideology + Inequality + Hegemony + Domination + Empire + Globalization. f Keyword: Media + Communication + Culture. Source: Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WOT (2002–2012).

or “national” figures into the changes in discourse. There was a statistically significant decrease from pre-9/11 to WoT articles (31.8% to 5.6%), while the proportion of articles addressing the national has increased in the other journals (12.2% increase to 32%). The difference in journals during the WoT is also statistically significant. The issue of nationalism and terrorism is no longer the central concern. There has been a shift to the religious with an emphasis on irrationalism. The proportion of articles linking religiosity (particularly Islamic/Muslim subjectivity) to terrorism increased from 18.2% to 38.9% of the total terror journal articles! At the same time, the proportion of articles dealing with gender and terrorism increased statistically significantly in the terror journal (up from 4.5% to 33.3%). The difference between two types of journals during the WoT is also statistically significant (33.3% versus 4.2%). Gender is linked to terrorism in two ways: terrorist attacks by male perpetrators in support of patriarchy and women involved in perpetrating terrorist acts (especially female suicide bombers).

90  Biopolitics of terrorism The decline in articles addressing PV in the context of terrorism is most radical in the other journals (statistically significant decrease from 26.8% to 5.4%). At the same time, interest articles dealing with biopolitical themes (Security + Government + Counterterrorism + Intelligence + Surveillance + Criminology) have increased in both types of journals, but the increase is statistically significant in other journals pre-911 and WoT (9.8% to 24.7%). The number of articles explicitly concerned with biopolitics and governmentality increased. This is also true of articles dealing with terrorism appearing in Criminology journals.

Individualizing and totalizing discourses The journal articles can also can be divided into those that individualize the terrorist as a type of body or personality, and those that totalize the terrorist as a member of a group or population. The individualizing pole of a biopolitics of terrorism generates psychological and psychiatric discourses focused on the body, acquired personality characteristics, dispositions or syndromes, and trauma and PTSD effects (Fanon 1963; Blain 1976; G ­ euter 1985; Oots and Wiegele 1985; Stern 1985; Miller 1988; Ross 1994; Lester et al. 2004; Kruglanski and Fishman 2006; McCoy 2006; Post et al. 2009; ­Lambert et al. 2010). An influential review of the literature on the psychological causes of terrorism by Ross (1994) identifies a number of problems: (1) unclear relevance of psychological causes; (2) the distinction of terrorism from other types of criminal or violent political behavior; (3) limited utility of psychological explanations; (4) the psychological health of terrorists; (5) inadequacy of the clinical interview method; (6) the contribution of nonpsychological factors to terrorism; and (7) overgeneralization and reductionism. Ross proposes a developmental framework to overcome these obstacles. Research should focus on the acquisition of psychological traits such as antiauthoritarianism or need for high risks that predispose someone to commit terrorist acts, and how someone with these dispositions can be influenced to commit terrorist acts by group structure and dynamics, the power of audiences, the behavior of victims, government activities, and rational choice decision-making. The totalizing pole of biopolitics is concerned with group membership, the construction of databases, and the profiling of high-risk groups. One way to track these discourses is through literature reviews appearing in academic journals. There are two types of academic journals. The first type specializes in terrorism research; the second is discipline specific. One sign of the emergence of terrorism as an object of knowledge was the appearance in 1977 of Terrorism: An International Journal (retitled Studies in Conflict and Terrorism in 1989; a second journal was established in 1989, Political Violence and Terrorism). These authors are more likely to be in government or attached to think tanks (e.g., Rand Corporation, American Enterprise

Biopolitics of terrorism  91 Institute) and university research institutes (e.g., Georgetown University, University of Maryland) that have close ties to US policy-planning network (Domhoff 2014: 85–114). Publication is a way to establish one’s authority as an expert in the field. The second type of journal is more discipline specific (e.g., Annual Reviews of Sociology or Political Science, the American Sociological Review or Political Science Review). Another sign of the P/K dynamic and PVR effects is that articles focusing on terrorism do not begin appearing in discipline specific journals until after 2001 (e.g., McCormick 2003; Boyns & Ballard 2004; Deflem 2004; Turk 2004; Lauderdale 2006; Powell 2007; LaFree and Ackerman 2009; Sanchez-Cuenca and de la Callez 2009; Spilerman and Stecklov 2009; Dugan & Chenoweth 2012; Gorski and Türkmen-Dervisoglu 2013; but see Nagengast 1994). The editors at Sociological Theory (2004) devoted a whole edition to a symposium on terrorism (e.g., Collins 2004; Tilly 2004). A good example of the first type is a literature review by Miller (1988) in Terrorism. Miller argued that in the previous twenty years the subject of terrorism had emerged from a broader literature on “conflict” but lacked clear conceptual boundaries. Miller divided the literature on terrorism into two main types: traditional (i.e., historical, normative/legal, and judicial works) and behaviorist (i.e., psychological, socioeconomic, and public policy studies). Two things stand out. As Miller observed, a huge analytic disconnect existed between the historical discourse on state terrorism that emerged during the Cold War—on Nazi Germany and Stalinism in particular. State terror was a defining characteristic of dictatorships and totalitarian systems, and as Miller also notes, many repressive and authoritarian regimes. And yet the direct relevance of this to the study of terrorism per se had been ignored. A second point is that Miller’s division of the behaviorist literature into psychological, socioeconomic, and policy discourses corresponds exactly to the individualizing/totalizing structure of a biopolitical discourse. Recent reviews are more specialized. Two reviews by Crenshaw and Hoffman appeared in a special edition of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (V. 15, 1992). This edition was a response to the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Empire, the end of the Cold War, and the need for Kremlinologists. These two reviews extended “terrorism” research in two directions. The lead article by Crenshaw (1992) observed the gap between terrorism research and the academic community, its intellectual poverty, and advocated closer ties with the academic community. Crenshaw claimed that most researchers agree that terrorism is a form of political violence, but few had systematically integrated research on terrorism into the study of political violence. This criticism is similar to the one made by Miller (1988). Integration with the academic community will rescue the subject from its intellectual impoverishment by extending its theoretical scope, precision, and findings, and thereby promote more research relevant to a larger community of scholars. Terrorism research could be used to test general theories of societal violence.

92  Biopolitics of terrorism Hoffman (1992) reviewed research linking terrorism and low intensity conflicts (LIC) to assess the role that future research could play in identifying new adversaries and emerging challenges. Hoffman concluded that policy-relevant research on both terrorism and LIC will be more in demand than ever before as US security concerns after the end of the Cold War would shift to the increasing frequency of LICs around the globe. An aggressive research agenda was needed to help US policy makers to clarify the national interests and security concerns involved and the ways in which those interests can best be served. Hoffman (1995) followed up by publishing one of the most frequently cited and influential articles in the terrorism literature. The “future adversaries” and “interests” had shifted in the previous fifteen years from political terrorism—“ethnic-, nationalist-separatist, and ideologically motivated”—to “Holy Terror.” During the Cold War most terrorists had been inspired to fight and die for political reasons. Many had been ethnic or nationalist-separatist, or ideologically motivated Marxists. “Holy Terror” had dominated until the 19th century. Modern terrorism had been motivated by secular motives based on “nationalism, anarchism, and Marxist ideology.” None of the eleven identifiable terrorist groups active in 1968 (the year marking the advent of modern, international terrorism) could be classified as religious. “Today,” Hoffman claimed, “…20% of the approximately 50 known terrorist groups active throughout the world can be described as having a dominant religious component or motivation” (1995: 272). They had three characteristics that made them more dangerous and lethal than the secular terrorist groups. Members of these groups were socially isolated and extremely alienated. Divinely inspired, they legitimated their acts by appeal to millennial and apocalyptic ideas and were consumed by the desire to eliminate some broadly defined “enemy.” Hoffman identified four movements as examples: Islamic groups in the Middle East, Christian “white” supremacists in the US, radical Jewish messianic movements in Israel, and radical Sikh movements in India. Hoffman predicted that the apocalyptic beliefs of these groups in combination with the approaching millennial year 2000 might produce more terrorism. After 2001 the causal association between Islamic subjectivity and terrorism has been rearticulated in articles by Jenkins (2001), Johnson (2001), Haddad and Khashan (2002), Tilly (2004), Levin et al. (2003), Lester et al. (2004), Alexander (2004), Gupta and Mundra (2005), Enders and Sandler (2006), Fair and Shephard (2006), and Wade and Reiter (2007). This causal association has been further elaborated in terms of gender (Lorber 2002; Turshen 2002; Kimmel 2003; Cook 2005; Ness 2005) and the practice of “suicide bombing” (Strenski 2003; Haddad 2004). The “profiling” literature reflects the same transformation. Russell and Miller (1977) argued there was a need for a socioeconomic profile of the individual terrorist rather than merely descriptive accounts of the mechanics of terrorism alone. A profile was generated by analyzing sociological data from material published on 350 terrorist groups from eighteen Middle Eastern, Latin American, West

Biopolitics of terrorism  93 European, and Japanese organizations. They concluded that while no common profile was internationally applicable, urban terrorists tended to be 22–24 years of age, to have at least some university training, and be from affluent, urban, middle-class families. They were frequently inspired by Marxist perspectives they had acquired at university. Their choice of university major tended to be in fields useful to terrorist activities (e.g. electrical, mechanical, or printing). The current profile is very different. Said (1993, 309, elaborated by Tuastad 2003 on neo-orientalism) was among the first to notice the shift in discourses of terrorism from a political to a religious account based on Islamic “fundamentalism.” Profiling studies of the group characteristics of terrorists were still primarily focused on the political motives and orientations of terrorists until the 1990s (Russell and Miller 1977; Weinberg and Eubank 1987; Handler 1990; Smith and Morgan 1994; for an exception, see Reinares 2004). Currently, the most frequent categories in the literature are religious and geostrategic (Kim 2004). Bergen et al. (2011) profile “Al Qaeda” and “Jihadist” groups who specifically threaten “the US and its interests” (Bergen et al. 2011). It should be noted that none of these profilers operationally define US “interests.” The descriptions are geostrategic. A key change in terrorist profile since 2001 is the increasing role played by US citizens and residents in the leadership of Al Qaeda and jihadist groups, and the higher numbers of Americans attaching themselves to these groups. Bergen et al. claim these terrorists “do not fit any particular ethnic, economic, educational, or social profile.” They argue that jihadist groups are on the rise in South Asia, Yemen and Somalia, and Pakistan.

Limits of biopolitics Mark Hamm (2013) and Dugan and Chenoweth (2012) are examples of a biopolitics of terrorism and its limits. Hamm links thinking in criminology to research on the imminent threat of terrorism in Western prisons and aims to counter prisoner’s use of “criminal cunning, collective resistance, and nihilism to incite terrorism against Western targets.” Hamm’s “alternative criminology” enlists mainstream social science in the service of fighting the global WoT. He couples this “biopolitical” project with a “progressive” critical intention to reform penology. The thesis that runs through his ethnography is the idea that prisons have the power to de-radicalize potential terrorists by altering their subjective orientation. The prison experience can be beneficial when it produces a Gandhi or Mandela; it is bad if it produces a Hitler or al-Zawahiri! Hamm’s ultimate goal is to elaborate a new narrative of “the power to punish” that would be powerful enough to change public discourse. The new regime would recycle the “social gospel” of religious self-reformation. Prisons should produce self-disciplined, de-radicalized individuals who eschew political violence. He assumes that their radicalized views of the existing systems of political power are illegitimate, irrational,

94  Biopolitics of terrorism and extremist. In fact, he argues they are dangerous because they might motivate some prisoners to organized violence against “Western Targets.” The deeper issue here is Hamm’s refusal to acknowledge that he is deeply embedded in the assemblage of practices that incite political violence. One important determinant of the emergence and continued functioning of a biopolitical object of knowledge like “criminality” or “terrorism” is its strategic mobility and tactical polyvalence (Foucault 1975: 228, 1976: 98– 102). Criminals and terrorists had to be incarcerated, records kept, and access to inmates obtained to make Hamm’s research possible. The discourse of terrorism is clearly polyvalent, and its meaning has shifted along with the changing geostrategic theater of power struggles (recently, resistance to Empire in the Middle East and central Asia; Narcoterrorism in Latin America, etc.). This understanding also sheds light on Hamm’s use of the FBI’s definition of terrorism. It is tailor-made for a reduction of the problem of political violence to criminality. Hamm’s analysis is well within the parameters of thought outlined by the architects of the WoT. Since 9/11 the US power elite and its allies have worked hard to link the current terrorist threat to religious identity, fanaticism, and hostility to liberal conceptions of freedom (Blain 2013). Hamm is well-connected with the policy planning network that articulates conventional “wisdom” in the field of counterterrorism. The empirical basis for this book was a two-year study he conducted for the US Department of Justice, focusing on trends in prisoner radicalization in US correctional institutions, including both Folsom Prison and New Folsom Prison. He interviewed prisoners who had converted to Islam during their incarceration, including members of “Al-Qaeda of California.” These are failed prisons. “And,” he argues, “within that failure is the greater story of how America is creating terrorists within its own borders.” The assemblage driving the WoT is evident in Hamm’s decision to accept without question the urgency of the “terrorist” threat, the nature of “terrorists,” and the need to intensify surveillance and intelligence. Hamm assembled a database that includes a sample of fifty-one “terrorists” (70% Muslim and black, 20% White Supremacists) linked to the prison system and case studies of individual prison “terrorists” and their management by US, British, and Israeli prisons. He uses Howard Becker’s sociology and methodology to collect and analyze the data. There are subcultures of inmate radicalization in US prisons that can lead to terrorism. He adopts a “life course” perspective to identify the critical incidents influencing the evolution of these subcultures (e.g., mass incarceration and its effects inside prisons; the US going to war against Iraq). Hamm’s project is biopolitical in that he defines his project as one involving the use of social science to augment the “security” goals of the US federal government in its fight against Al Qaeda. He is most concerned with “how prisoners use criminal cunning, collective resistance, and nihilism to incite terrorism against Western targets.” He identifies several conditions that contribute to

Biopolitics of terrorism  95 a successful terrorist operation inside a prison: mass incarceration, failed prisons, the power dynamics inside prisons, clandestine prisoner communication systems, emergence of charismatic leaders and a subculture of resistance socially organized around some “collective identity” (i.e., white, black, Muslim, Islam), and an effective narrative of radicalization that includes the desire to engage in violence to achieve a political goal. It is here that we arrive at the critical limit of Hamm’s indifference to the power relations that produce terrorism and mass incarceration. These events do not occur in a vacuum. Hamm fails to theorize the deep dynamics of the power relations underlying the so-called “terrorist threat.” He does not take seriously the criticisms of existing power relations in the discourses of the terrorists he objectifies. Terrorism is decontextualized. Nowhere in Hamm’s discourse is there any recognition of the subjectivity and desires of those who govern the US, UK, or Israeli prison systems or prosecute the WoT. They are simply taken for granted. There are no war criminals behind the WoT. The idea that the existing power structure is producing “terrorism” is anathema. Discussions of power in Hamm’s analysis are confined to the “narratives of radicalization” elaborated by charismatic “Terrorist Kingpins” that Hamm describes as one of the most important conditions leading to terrorism. These ideas are dangerous. They incite illegitimate violence against “Western Targets.” The most likely outcome of the new narrative of “the power to punish” would be a top-down elite orchestrated “De-Radicalization Movement” inside the prisons. Dugan and Chenoweth (2012) illustrate the limits of counterterrorism in another way. They aim to test the validity of rational choice theories of deterrence derived from criminology and behaviorist psychology by applying them to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Rational choice approaches advocate raising the costs of terrorism through punishment and reducing the expected utility of terrorism. Dugan and Chenoweth argue that states should also raise the expected utility of abstaining from terrorism through rewards. They compare the effects of state repression (punishment) and conciliatory (reward) actions on terrorist behavior using the GATE-Israel dataset. This dataset identifies events by Israeli state actors toward Palestinian targets on a full range of counterterrorism tactics (1987–2004). The results show that repression is either unrelated to terror or related to subsequent increases in terror. Conciliatory actions by the Israeli state, on the other hand, are generally related to decreases in terror. In conclusion, they assume the standpoint of advisors. On the one hand, Israeli policy makers should deploy “conciliatory tactics” to target the terrorist’s constituencies (i.e., collective reward rather than collective punishment). This policy would reduce terrorism by disempowering the extremists in the Palestinian territories. On the other hand, scholars would be well advised to study more carefully the conditions under which conciliatory policies may reduce terrorism. In spite of the sophistication of Dugan and Chenoweth’s study—the theory and math modeling, and state-of-the-art methodological design and

96  Biopolitics of terrorism database—this project is biopolitical in the strict sense. It assumes the legitimacy and standpoint of the Israeli state and the illegitimacy of Palestinian resistance. The Israeli state is assumed to be defending its legitimate authority. Israeli authorities engage in acts of legitimate acts of “repression” in retaliation to Palestinian acts of “terrorism.” Palestinians engage in terrorist atrocities and suicide bombings. The issue of state terrorism is not raised. Consider the list of repressive acts perpetrated by the Israeli state to reduce terrorist behavior: apprehension and extended prison sentencing, passage of anti-terrorism laws, assassination, curfews and containment strategies, deportation, home demolitions, violent repression and military retaliation, indiscriminate repression, and mass surveillance. Dugan and Chenoweth (2012: 600–601) corroborate the fact that state “repression” provokes resistance and increases in violence. Is it a calculated political tactic? Is it “productive” of certain useful effects? Is it a part of the cycle of P/PVR/K effects? Palestinian resistance is provoked by acts of state repression. Palestinian resistance legitimates a state-orchestrated PVR against terrorists. The table could be turned. This hypothesis could be easily tested with Dugan’s (2012) GATE-Israeli dataset. Dugan (2012) would have to consider a power struggle standpoint. Instead of seeing the Israeli state responding to criminal or terrorist acts, see the Israeli state as agent provocateur implementing a policy of deliberately provoking Palestinian violence. If the Israeli political elite’s goal is not to reduce “terrorism” but to expand Israeli sovereignty over new territories by implanting more settlers in Palestinian territories, then the concept of a terrorist act is altered. It is an act of resistance provoked by the underlying power struggle that constitutes an opportunity to expand Israeli sovereignty. Data on the expansion of Israeli settlements could be introduced as a dependent variable. It could be measured geographically by the steady encroachment and securitization by Israel of Palestinian lands.

Critical discourses Two types of critical discourses can be differentiated: post-structuralist and critical theory. Post-structuralists highlight the “productive” effects of liberal practices of biopolitics, governmentality, and security (George 1994; Deflem 2004; Lyon 2003, 2007; Welch 2003; Rai 2004; Lentzos 2006; Mathur 2006; O’Malley 2006; de Goede 2012). Critical theorists reveal the covert power relations and agents behind the ideology of the WoT—racial, ethnic, class, gender, national, and imperial (Blain 2013). Marieke de Goede’s (2012) study focuses on one crucial facet of the war on terrorism, the financing of terrorist operations. It is a testament to the continuing, heuristic value of Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge analytic and style of research. This study extends prior research on the genealogy of finance to the WoT and “the speculative nature of means and ends of pursuing suspect monies…” (p. xx). Speculative security involves vigilance

Biopolitics of terrorism  97 and the capacity to “connect the-dots” to detect incipient conspiracies. This study describes the subtler forms of collateral damage it produces (e.g., on Muslims, immigrants and international kinship networks, Islamic charitable organizations, and gift-giving). De Goede argues that the emergence of a new “politics of preemption” signifies a historic shift in strategy. She shows how the practices developed to fight the war on drugs, detect money laundering, and employ “mobile norms” that were adapted to the WoT. The Bush regime institutionalized this new logic for fighting an “endless” preemptive WoT. To wit: invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, droning suspected terrorists, indefinite detention. De Goede traces these new practices back to the Clinton regime and a 1997 book by Senator John Kerry as sources articulating this new “politics of preemption.” The 9/11 attacks and subsequent WoT created the opportunity to implement this new politics. The response to this emergency forged a new “finance-­ security assemblage” aimed at terrorism financing. The new techniques involve word-crunching telecommunications and doing social network ­analysis, data mining bank records, and profiling “suspicious” patterns of financial transactions. Most importantly, speculative security entails a change in temporal orientation from past crimes to “premeditations” of ­future terrorist attacks. Since WMDs are so terrifying, the aim is to detect and prevent the attacks before the event. These new “security practices” have had subjective effects leading to the emergence of a new “neurotic citizen” who actively embraces the securitizing of everything (e.g., heightened vigilance, eager ­willingness to submit SARs). As de Goede points out, for all this new vigilance no one detected the activities leading to the financial crisis of 2008. Poststructuralists seek the complete integration of theory and research practice. De Goede devotes a chapter to the concept of “mediation” and how it informs her methodology. Mediation refers to cultural practices and “the ways in which processes of meaning making exceed articulation in language and exist in a complex interaction with ‘other media, other technologies, and other cultural artifacts,’ including films and television as well as technical artifacts like statistics and graphs” (p. 5). These multiple practices help explain the public embrace of “speculative security.” The result is a political collage of outtakes of films such as the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale and Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film noir adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story, “The Minority Report,” statistical tables of “contested” estimates of amounts involved in world terrorism financing ($91.5 million–$1.5 trillion!), diagrams of social networks and financial transaction profiles, novels (Don Delillo’s 2003 Cosmopolis), and art (Mark Lombardi’s drawing of a social network linking Bush/Bin Laden). De Goede adopts Bruno Latour’s notion of “circulating reference” to escape the limits imposed on thinking about these materials in terms of the discourse/practice divide. De Goede’s theoretical apparatus is derived from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler (2003, 2004), and Gorgio Agamben (1998, 2005). The first idea is that

98  Biopolitics of terrorism power relations in modern society are not primarily repressive (sovereign torture and warfare), but productive (disciplinary techniques and governmentality). De Goede describes how the WoT has constituted new subjects and objects, “spaces of deviance,” and devotes three chapters to detailed case studies: banks and money flows (risk, preemption, mobile norms), cash and transnational kinship (hawala), and securitization of charitable donation (zakat). De Goede “decenters” her analysis by adopting the assemblage as a unit of analysis rather than social structure. The F-SA refers to a transnational apparatus of laws, institutions, treaties, and private initiatives designed to govern finance while fighting terrorism financing. The practices associated with this assemblage operate at multiple sites. An F-SA is a strategy without a strategist. She studiously avoids the idea of a “ruling class.” She notes that the WoT targets “political elites” as well as “terrorists.” The assemblage must allow the free flow of “legal” monies, the same system enabling Al Qaeda to accomplish 9/11. She argues that the F-SA has constituted anonymous “petty sovereigns” in government agencies and private firms who can inflict violence on the politically suspicious. She resolves the agency problem by adopting the theory of “global governmentality” developed by international relations theorists. De Goede’s second idea is Agamben’s theory of exclusionary practices such as the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Guantanámo Bay, Cuba, Bagram, Afghanistan. Quoting Agamben, “In Western politics bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men,” she extends this idea to blacklisting and modern exile. Foucault’s discipline/prison account does not apply. Freezing a person or groups finances is a profound exclusionary practice. Blacklisting reduces the victim to the status of a “creature.” The use of money is the foundation of a liberal society. Consuming and investing are essential to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “Go shopping” was the Bush regime’s patriotic prescription after 9/11. De Goede’s study provokes a question. Why didn’t the author conceptualize the WoT as an assemblage? Maybe she thinks it is a whole bunch of loosely coordinated assemblages that have emerged in a haphazard way. There is a real confusion regarding the status of the concepts of sovereignty/governmentality. De Goede and Butler resist acknowledging the sovereign agency of the US power elite and its allies who play a leadership role in Empire. Surely, they must be aware that the bureaucrats empowered by the security apparatus operate in contexts produced by exercises of sovereign power—the declaration of a WoT, Presidential Executive Orders. What role do the spectacular and visible victimage rituals like “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the killing of OBL, drone attacks, and targeted assassinations play in the WoT? The absence of “sovereign agency” is also evident in Stampnitzky’s (2013) study, Disciplining Terrorism. The author traces changes in the political discourse caused by the activities of experts. She claims that political violence was theorized as action taken by rational strategic actors. Hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call “terrorism” were considered the

Biopolitics of terrorism  99 work of rational strategic actors. Terrorism was one form of political violence, and terrorists (e.g., IRA, ETA, PLO) were rational strategic actors. Experts began to change their conception of terrorists and terrorism in the 1980s. Terrorists were transformed into irrational, pathological, evildoers (this is not a new idea; see Said 1978, 1993). What is original in Stampnitsky’s work is that it draws upon archival research and interviews with so-called “terrorism experts,” the biopolitics of the political and academic struggles through which experts replaced the focus on political violence, and rational actor models with an exclusive focus on “terrorism” as a sui generis object of knowledge and how this transformation ultimately led to the current “war on terror.” She argues that this discourse operates at the boundary between science and politics, academic expertise and the state. In spite of this biopolitical struggle over the concepts of terrorists and terrorism, it has become central to contemporary political discourse. Our research findings confirm the main outline of Stampnitzky’s study. We focused on changes in social science discourses as indexed by Sociology Abstracts pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012). The index is the percent of high-citation (>5) articles linking “Subjects” to “terrorism” (Table 4.3). Table 4.3  Percent Articles Linking Subjects and Discourses to “Terrorism” in Influential Articles Indexed in Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WoT (2002–2012) Pre-9/11

WoT

Subjects nation religiona [] [Islam/Muslim] gender race classb

19.0 6.3 0.0 7.9 6.3 1.6

30.3 19.5* 11.6* 6.1 8.7 6.9

Discourses political violence c biopowerd[] [security] criticale mediaf Totals

22.2 9.5 1.6 9.5 22.2 n = 63

5.8* 24.2* 12.3* 16.3 19.1 n = 277

* a b c d

Z test for column proportions, p < .05. Keyword: Religion + Muslim/Islam + Suicide. Keyword: Economy. Keyword: Politics & Violence. Keyword: Security + Government + Counterterrorism + Intelligence + Surveillance + Criminology. e Keyword: Power + Ideology + Inequality + Hegemony + Domination + Empire + Globalization. f Keyword: Media + Communication + Culture. Source: Sociology Abstracts Pre-9/11 (1960–2001) and WOT (2002–2012).

100  Biopolitics of terrorism

Empire, power elite, and the WoT Critical theorists deconstruct categories like “terrorist” by situating them in the strategic context of power struggles (Graham et al. 2004; Erjavec and Volcic 2007). The assemblage of global networks and practices linking ­Empire, US power elite, and “terrorism” is complex (Blain 2012: 63, 2013). Theorists of “Empire” such as Hardt and Negri (2000) and Go (2011) also do not conceptualize the agent of Empire with any degree of specificity. The following quote regarding military intervention and terrorism is typical: …Today military intervention is progressively less a product of ­decisions that arise out of the old international order or even U.N. structures. More often it is dictated unilaterally by the US [emphasis added], which charges itself with the primary task and then subsequently asks its a­ llies to set in motion a process of armed containment and/or ­repression of the current enemy of Empire. These enemies are most often called ­Terrorist, a rude conceptual and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality. (Hardt and Negri, Empire 2000: 37) There is no mention here of who in the US is making the decision to intervene. This omission is due to Hardt and Negri’s desire to differentiate their view of Empire from previous views. Postmodern Empire is radically decentered in terms of space and time. It is an Empire based on biopower and biopolitics. It rules over “human nature” by producing productive liberal agents who desire a well-disciplined and secure normality. The aim of rule is the managed regularity of “social life” in its totality. Go’s (2011) account also glosses over this issue by categorizing the British or American “states” as imperial actors and agents. He does allow for the possibility that a dominant ethnic or national group in the core state is dominant over the subjected populations in the imperial system. But he avoids specifying who those groups have been in the British or American Empires by focusing on their policies and practices. He is most concerned to confront the idea of American “exceptionalism” in thinking about US imperialism. However, there is no way around the problem of agency in depictions of the leading role of political representatives of the US power elite in Empire, the WoT, and political violence. The US is not just a personified “state actor.” Post-structuralists in the field of International Relations have deconstructed and debunked reified concepts like “state actor” (see George 1994). The “US” that decides to prosecute a global WoT is in reality a complex social network that can best be described by Domhoff’s (2010: 115–18) class dominance theory of the US power elite. The power elite, as he describes it, is located at the intersection of three interlocking social networks: the social upper class, the corporate community, and the policy-planning network. Although he does not deal directly with Empire, his theory clearly implies

Biopolitics of terrorism  101 that the representatives of the US power elite are directly represented in the activities of the US President and his foreign policy team. The interests of the social upper class dominate the corporate community and the policyplanning network. In turn, the corporate community’s global economic interests and agendas are translated into foreign policy by political economy and security “experts” in the planning network. US Presidents and their foreign policy teams implement those agendas. The idea that the US power elite plays a decisive role in Empire is also warranted by Domhoff’s (1990) research on how the policy planning network articulated the US “National Interest” during WWII and how it affected the Cold War agenda. He critiques the theory dominant in political science that the impetus driving US imperialism was the elite’s ideological aim to impose “Lockean liberalism” on the world. He rejects this theory on empirical grounds. In a detailed case study of the Council on Foreign Relations, he demonstrated how the “national interest” was defined in terms favoring the interests of global corporate capitalism. The documents he uses as evidence underscore the important but subordinate role that “experts” played in the policy-planning process. The role of the President and foreign policy elite was primarily to implement policies favoring the interests of US corporate capitalists through Presidential edict and Congressional legislation. The policy-planning network links power to knowledge in Domhoff’s analysis. Expert power supplements but does not trump the structural power and authority of the US power elite. They face complex and difficult issues in the policy-planning process and need experts to fashion specific foreign policies. These experts are trained by the universities in foreign policy relevant research, but are not directly employed by universities. They are more likely to be employed by think tanks located near Washington, DC or university institutes financed by soft money in the form of grants, and invited to consult with government Commissions, government agencies such as the Department of Defense, or testify to congressional committees. They also play a role in the mass media by providing expert authority to back up the rationality of the President’s foreign policy decisions. The knowledge industry must certainly include the War colleges and system of universities that train the cadre of professional military officers. Training in the social sciences is required. Bruce Hoffman is a paradigm case of the power/knowledge dynamic at work in the biopolitics of terrorism (Hoffman 2013). Hoffman has been associated with the RAND Corporation since the 1980s. In the 1990s he was the President for External Affairs and Director of The RAND ­Corporation Washington, DC. Hoffman’s books include The Failure of ­Britain’s Military Strategy in Palestine, 1939–1947 (1983) and Inside Terrorism (1998; 2nd expanded and revised edition 2006). Professor Hoffman was Scholar-in-­Residence for Counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency, 2004–2006. He was an adviser on counterterrorism to the Office of ­National Security Affairs, Coalition Provisional Authority, and adviser on

102  Biopolitics of terrorism counterinsurgency to the Strategy, Plans, and Analysis Office at Multi-­ National Forces-Iraq Headquarters, Baghdad (2004–2006). Hoffman is the current Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies Georgetown University (Hoffman 2013). The “knowledge” of the social sciences play a central role in the “intelligence” that officers tasked with counterinsurgency (COIN) missions must consider (To wit: the reference list includes ­Hoffman’s RAND report on the failures of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” in Field Manual 3–24, 2006). Field Manual 3–24 (2006) Counterinsurgency is a prime example of biopolitics at the point of contact. David Petraeus wrote the preface to the manual (Lieutenant General US Army and Ph.D. in Political Science, Princeton University). Chapter 1 articulates an elaborate analysis of the elements and dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Boxes with descriptions of classic and current examples are presented to illustrate the main points. Intelligence is the key to successful COIN. Though insurgencies take many forms, most consist of five elements: movement leaders, combatants (main, regional, and local forces [including militias]), political cadre (also called militants or the party), auxiliaries (active followers who provide important support services), mass base (the bulk of the membership). Chapter 3 describes the role of intelligence in COIN. The analysis of the effects of the terrain on COIN operations must include the “sociocultural” as well as the physical geography and meteorological conditions. The sociocultural analysis must address six factors: society, social structure, culture, language, power and authority, and interests. Each of these factors is described and related to relevant issues bearing on COIN. The reader is referred to appendices at the end of the manual that present detailed expositions of “Social Network” and “Language” analysis. Go’s (2011) analysis of the dynamics of Empire can also be useful in thinking about why the US power elite decided to declare a global war on terrorism. Go differentiates liberal forms of Empire from previous forms founded on a repressive and tyrannical use of violence. Again, he glosses over the agency of the US power elite in arguing that its use of violence or liberal governmentally in defense of Empire is tactical. Go argues that since 1973 the “US” has entered a period of decline, the final stage of the cyclical pattern of Empire, ascent (1803–1945), hegemony (1946–1972), decline (1973–present). The events that underscore this period of decline are the Arab Oil Embargo (1973), the defeat and withdrawal of the US military from Vietnam (1974), and the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. The response of the US power elite has been increased military expenditures and aggression, and a discourse regarding the status of the US as the “indispensable nation.” The link between the Middle East and “terror” and the eternal Israeli/Palestinian conflict set the stage for a global WoT. Both Hardt and Negri’s (2000) and Go (2011) adopt Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to differentiate the two modes of sovereignty depicted in ­Figure 2.1. Traditional imperialism is based on a repressive politics of death and the logic of spectacular and overt forms of repression and violence.

Biopolitics of terrorism  103 Modern modes of sovereignty, as practiced by the British and the Americans under conditions of Empire, implement a politics of life. This implies an important relation to knowledge. The practices of biopolitics complicates as well as masks over the relations involved in contemporary Empire. In many respects, the repressive mode of sovereign violence is at odds with the practices and discourses of biopower (Oksala 2010). Foucault recognized this problem. He did not argue that the practices of “liberal governmentality” had replaced the practices of repression. Torture and overt displays of spectacular violence did not disappear. They had simply gone through a complex realignment in terms of the biopolitics of liberal governmentality. The Bush and Obama regimes claim to be “saving American lives” by torturing and droning the “enemies of freedom.”

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Biopolitics of terrorism  111 Stern, Fritz. “‘Fink Shrinks,’ a Review of Die Professionalisierung der Deutschen Psychologie Im Nationalsozialismus.” New York Review of Books 32, no. 20 (1985): 48–53. Strenski, Ivan. “Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim ‘Human Bombers’.” Terrorism and Political Violence 15, no. 3 (Oct 2003): 1–34. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (Terrorism, 1977–1991). 1977-present. Taylor & Francis, Inc. www.tandfonline.com/action/aboutThisJournal?show=aimsScope& journalCode=uter20. Accessed 23 July 2013. Stump, Jacog and Priya Dixit. Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods. London: Routledge, 2013. Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, Second Edition. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Terrorism and Political Violence. 1989-present. Taylor & Francis, Inc. www.tandf online.com/action/aboutThisJournal?show=aimsScope&journalCode=ftpv20. Accessed 23 July 2013. Tilly, Charles. “Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists.” Sociological Theory. Theories of Terrorism: A Symposium 22, no. 1 (Mar 2004): 5–13. Tuastad, Dag. “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s).” Third World Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Aug 2003): 591–99. Turk, Austin. “Sociology of Terrorism.” Annual Review of Sociology 30, no. 1 (2004): 271–86. Turshen, M. “Algerian Women in the Liberation Struggle and the Civil War: From Active Participants to Passive Victims?” Social Research 69, no. 3 (Oct 2002): 889–911. Vasi, Ion, Bogdan N.B., and David. Strang. “Civil Liberty in America: The Diffusion of Municipal Bill of Rights Resolutions After the Passage of the USA Patriot Act.” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 6 (May 2009): 1716–64. Wade, Sara Jackson, and Dan Reiter. “Does Democracy Matter? Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 2 (Apr 2007): 329–48. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica. The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, Vol. IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ———, Editor. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Weinberg, Leonard and William Lee Eubank. “Italian Women Terrorists.” Terrorism 9, no. 3 (1987): 241–62. Welch, Michael. “Ironies of Social Control and the Criminalization of Immigrants.” Crime, Law and Social Change 39, no. 4 (Jun 2003): 319–37.

5 Ethics of truth

In this final chapter we turn to a consideration of the Ethics of Truth in relation to the problem of political violence. It is directly concerned with the difficulty that sociologists and social theorists have in dealing with hostility in human society. Enlightenment philosophers created universal theories of human nature and sociability—premised on the mechanism of imitation, to legitimate the State and the Law (Saint-Amand 1996). Human beings, they argued, are by nature social, cooperative, and peaceful. Socialization and positive modeling would be the solution to the problem of violence. They played down the possibility that society and imitation was ambivalent and a source of envy and dangerous rivalries that can cause political violence and victimage ritual. In the process, they idealized human sociability and played down the problem of violence. Violence was a regression, a thing of the barbaric past, and would have no place in civilized society. Reason and knowledge would produce a peaceful future. Of course, there were those who rightfully mocked the naiveté of Enlightenment theories of society. This chapter owes a great deal to the late Michel Foucault’s (2011) published lectures on the genealogy of ethics and the “Courage of Truth.” Nietzsche had first posed this question in statements regarding the radically modern scientific ethic and the willingness to sacrifice for the truth. The questions posed by this will to truth, particularly the nuclear scientists involved in nuclear weapons programs—Robert Oppenheimer opposition vs. Edward Teller’s advocacy—had inspired Foucault to focus on the power/ knowledge dynamic. As we know, Oppenheimer resisted development of more powerful nuclear weapons. As a consequence, he was attacked as a communist and ostracized, while Edward Teller, a virulent anti-communist, was valorized as the father of the “super” Bomb. Telling the truth to others, particularly to those who have power over your life and can exercise the sovereign right to inflict death, involves the dangerous practice of “fearless speech.” Foucault’s lectures focused on several aspects of the relation to the truth, overcoming cowardice, and the willingness to risk sovereign death to speak to power. As a result of the central role of the power/knowledge dynamic in modern society, these issues of truth had taken on special significance in relation to the scientific practices. Foucault also emphasized

Ethics of truth  113 that this way of relating to the self and others had implications for how we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge. As an ethical matter we should not ignore the knowledge we have of Empire, power struggles, violence, and the pleasures and sadism involved in political violence and specifically the US-led WoT. The American Sociological Association’s code of ethics clearly articulates this principle. This means acknowledging the tradition of imperial practices, the will to dominate, and agency inspired by those practices, the pleasures of satisfying those desires. Hence, we need to focus on the biopolitics and power/knowledge dynamics of the WoT, including the role of the social sciences in the war. This situation raises a number of ethical and epistemological issues for social scientists. There are the well-publicized problems with some social scientists in the practices of torture, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism programs in the WoT. Social science does not deal with political violence, the role of the military in that violence, or its social consequences. One searches in vain for a chapter on violence, warfare, and the military in social science textbooks, particularly in sociology. This seems obtuse given the reality that the societies that produce much of the most influential sociological theorizing in the world today are the same nations involved either directly or as enablers of much of the political violence in the world today. It does seem relevant to this discussion that the nations in the US-led WoT contain in their borders the most influential sociological establishments in some of the most prestigious universities in the world. In the US, for example, military institutions are deeply embedded in everyday cultural life, national holidays, ROTC in schools and universities, and communities. The global reach of the US military also means that this is true of many other nation-states in the world. We argue that the lack of interest in war and military violence in sociological theorizing seems obtuse; sometimes we think it might be a result of a deliberate operational decision. Warfare and violence could be brought up in many different contexts. As far as we know there is no theory of warfare presented in sociological theory texts. As far as we can tell, sociologists do not think that war is an institution in modern culture and society. There is no list of social functions. Here we propose some possible reasons why “sociological theorizing” does not deal with political violence more directly, particularly the problems of state terrorism. The most obvious reason for this situation is that the power elite that rules US society and manages the US Department of Defense (DOD) and its military institutions do not financially support this kind of research and in some cases will actively oppose, attack, and marginalize researchers who do study these issues. Social scientists get blowback when they seek to know what is going on with the military and war, or when they link these practices to power and domination. Researchers can be stigmatized by their involvement in critical research that targets “counterterrorism” programs and research. They can be defamed by public authorities

114  Ethics of truth as threats to national security or anathematized as unpatriotic traitors to the cause. These researchers can be excluded from professional communities on grounds they constitute a threat to the legitimacy and scientific authority of the discipline (e.g., C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff, and Noam Chomsky). The main ethical as well as epistemological issue, as we see it, is the incapacity of sociologists to face directly the practices of violence in war and military. There is no denying the empirical truth of the deliberate and rationalized agency involved in the power elite’s manipulation of public opinion and civil society into supporting political violence and sadism to achieve their goals. There is so much empirical evidence that the elites are “rationally” knowledgeable of the role of civil society and the nonrational aspects of war and organizing campaigns of military violence, and effectively use it to manipulate the public, that it seems naive to insist that these ideas can be mobilized to build a new cultural sociology of the military and war. Counterterrorism practices have seriously problematized the power/knowledge dynamics of the WoT. Some social scientists and criminologists specifically are in fact directly involved in the National Security Agency (NSA) sponsored research in support of the WoT. We need to theorize the terrible truth that knowledgeable elites orchestrate victimage rituals as a calculated means of politics. Victimage ritual, we argue, is a rationalized and refined political strategy employed by power elites to achieve their agendas. Social scientists need to face the problem posed by Sade’s early critique of liberalism, Enlightenment philosophy, and its role in motivating and ­legitimating revolutionary terrorism (Beauvoir 1966; also Saint-Amand 1996). One does not need to endorse Sadism as a philosophy to agree that he had recognized a legitimate problem. The philosophes justified counterterror against Sovereign terrorists. Sade issued his critique in response to the Great Terror. We should recall Beauvoir issued her critique after World War II in response to Nazi terror and massive terror-bombings of German and Japanese cities and violence perpetrated during World War II. Perversely, Sade approves of the vendetta, but not the courts. “We may kill but not judge…The pretensions of the judge are more arrogant than those of the tyrant; for the tyrant confines himself to being himself, whereas the judge tries to erect his opinions into universal laws…His effort is based upon a lie” (Beauvoir 1966: 61). Sade, she claims, also concluded that individual rebellion was the only way to respond to society. There were only two possibilities: abstract morality or crime. Denying all transcendence to the individual, he sanctioned crime and violence. Sade embodied in his own way his disappointment with the Terror. He was an individual who was unwilling to deny his particularity. Beauvoir (1966: 63) takes a more nuanced view: But if we choose to recognize in each subject only the transcendence which unites him concretely with his fellows, we are leading him only

Ethics of truth  115 to new idols, and their particular insignificance will appear all the more obvious. We shall be sacrificing today to tomorrow, minority to the majority, the freedom of each to the achievements of the community. Prison and the guillotine will be the logical consequences of this denial. The illusory brotherhood ends in crimes, wherein virtue recognizes her abstract features. ‘Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime,’ stated Saint-Just. Is it not better to assume the burden of evil than to subscribe to this abstract good which drags in its wake abstract slaughters?… Sade’s merit lies not only in his having proclaimed what everyone admits with shame to himself, but in the fact that he did not simply resign himself. He chose cruelty rather than indifference. This is probably why he finds so many echoes today, when the individual knows that he is more the victim of men’s good consciences that of their wickedness. We have argued in this book that political violence is a relatively neglected field within sociological theory. As some have argued, sociological theory and sociology in general is largely “a demilitarized zone” (West and ­Matthewman 2016). The military does not appear in the list of chapters on social “Institutions.” It does seem relevant to this discussion that some of the most influential sociological establishments in some of the most prestigious universities in the world are deeply embedded in many of the nations involved in perpetrating the WoT that harbor huge military and security establishments (e.g., University of Maryland, US). In the US, for example, military institutions are deeply embedded in our everyday cultural life, ROTC in schools and universities, and communities. The global reach of the US military also means that this is true of many other nation-states in the world. This seems problematic given the US and its allies enable much of the political violence, warfare, and state-sponsored terrorism happening in the world today. We think that the lack of interest in war and the military in sociological theorizing might be the result of a deliberate and therefore unethical decision. Warfare and violence could be brought up in many different contexts. As far as we know there is no theory of warfare presented in sociological theory texts; those that do critique sociology for its failure to deal with ­m ilitarism and political violence as institutions that constitute modern society (one exception to prove the rule, Giddens 1985). We have theories of ­political-economy, capitalism, and a whole list of social institutions (i.e., economy, family, education, religion) and identities (i.e., gender, race, ethnicity, and class). Where is national identity in this mix? Significantly, the nation and nationalism rarely get into this list except as the negative other of social solidarity; apparently that topic has been ceded to the political scientists. As far as we can tell, war is not an institution in our culture. It has no list of functions. As far as introductory sociological textbooks are concerned, it could be brought up along with the industrial-capitalist revolution as a major influence on the historical emergence of sociology. Very few sociologists acknowledge the decisive influence the specter of French

116  Ethics of truth revolutionary liberalism in legitimating the “Great Terror” and its great influence on the 19th century and social science (again the exception proves the rule, see Wallerstein (2011) on the triumph of centrist liberalism in response to French revolutionary terrorism, and the power-knowledge dynamic that lead to the constitution of the social sciences [economics, political science, and sociology] in response. The theory sections of sociology textbooks usually do not mention the threat of civil war as a theoretical problem. It is something sociologists are probably against. Society is based on cooperation and in-group solidarity, not the Hobbesian sanction of terror and the violence of victimage rituals perpetrated on deviants and enemies. Sociology is the knowledge generated in defense of society. Violence is the excluded other of sociological theory; this applies to presentations of power conflict theory that emphasize class warfare and “repression.” One can find Sociology textbooks with chapters on political sociology and “political” institutions that devote a few paragraphs to the topics relevant to war and the military. Discussions of military violence may also be a tangential aspect of the section on social movements. This is no accident. A whole generation of social movement theorists devoted themselves to delinking social movements from the “spectre of ‘terror,’ fascist violence and revolutionary warfare to fashion a more ‘positive’ view (Blain 1994). The chapters in sociology texts that deal with “Deviance and Crime” do deal with “criminal” violence and homicide. There is no discussion of war crimes. The emergence of contemporary American criminology in response to the Wars on Crime and Drugs illustrates the problem. It is also historically relevant to the emergence of the US as world police force and WoT in the 1990s. Insofar as we approach the study of terrorism and evil as social scientists, we must be self-reflexive in our approach and proceed as much as possible in an objective theoretical and methodological manner. As a sociologist, it would be unethical to approach the study of “terrorism” or “evil” in any other fashion. This means that sociologists in their capacity as social scientists should not engage in the practice of castigating individuals or groups as “evil” or “terrorists.” Rather, we are obligated to explain and understand why some actors classify and define others as evil or terrorists. This means treating “terrorism” and “evil” with a certain degree of objectivity and historical and cultural relativity. Terrorism is a word; terrorism is a social or political phenomenon. These issues can be highlighted by recent changes in the order of social scientific knowledge in relation to criminology. Emile Durkheim founded modern sociology as the science of social facts and contributed substantially to the constitution of the field of deviant behavior with the publication of Le Suicide, 1897. Since that time, the study of deviance and crime as social problems has been one of the central missions of the field. In a 2004 article addressing this issue, the sociologist Erich Goode (2004) asks “Is the Sociology of Deviance Still Relevant?” This article was part of a highly visible debate on the changes going on in criminological thought. The discourse of

Ethics of truth  117 evil plays a key role in the controversy that provoked that question. Goode’s primary concern is the decline of the sociology of deviance. He introduces the problem with a discussion of a sociologist who has attacked labeling theory (Goode’s perspective). That sociologist argues that the founding fathers such as Emile Durkheim had a firm moral foundation. Labeling theorists like Goode do not. But the 1960s, this critic argues, marked a radical break with this traditional idea. Practitioners of the sociology of deviance, such as Howard Becker, argued for a kind of moral relativism that recognized no intrinsically evil deeds, only a marketplace of competing claims, each jostling for acceptance. Critics argued that the moral relativism of the labeling perspective (drawing attention to the power to label) deviance should not apply to “terrorists.” They should be publicly condemned and stigmatized. Before Howard Becker and the labeling theorists appeared, sociologists and criminologists had focused on what was tragically, perniciously harmful behavior, behavior that tore at the fabric of society, undermining social order, wreaking havoc on the community. Becker and his disciples have warped, distorted, and poisoned the deviance notion; they took the moral taint out of it, removed it from the negative valuation it so richly deserves, relativized it, and made it impossible for us to say that deviance really means bad, evil, morally wrong. Sociologists should have the right and, indeed, the obligation to condemn deviance and encourage their students and the general public to do so, too. It was Becker’s relativity that had killed off the concept that had previously led ordinary people to see that it was immoral, harmful, and contrary to natural law and common sense. In opposition to the thesis of the moral relativists, Goode’s critic argues, we must “draw from nature, reason and common sense to define what is deviant and reaffirm the moral ties that bind us together” (Goode 2004, p. 11). Goode’s article is in part a response to declarations of the death of the sociology of deviance and the “deviance” related outcomes of the 2004 vote for Bush by moral conservatives. He thinks the sociology of deviance has best chance of surviving if it links up with social movements, media studies, and political sociology. He thinks Becker’s (1963) research on the emergence of marijuana laws and Gusfield’s (1996) study of the prohibition of alcohol offer the best models. Goode quotes Stephen Pfohl’s (1994: 3) proposition: The story of deviance and social control is a battle story. It is a story of the battle to control the ways people think, feel, and behave. It is a story of winners and losers and of the strategies people use in struggles with one another. Winners in the battle to control ‘deviant acts’ are crowned with a halo of goodness, acceptability, normality. Losers are viewed as living outside the boundaries of social life as it ought to be, outside the ‘common sense’ of society itself. Since the 1960s the sociological study of deviance and crime has been transformed by the power elite’s policy of fighting a gigantic global war on drugs,

118  Ethics of truth the growth of huge system of mass incarceration and detention, and a revival of sovereign forms of torture and capital punishment (Garland 2002, 2010). These changes have exercised effects in the order of knowledge. Criminology has displaced the sociology of deviance. The decline of the sociology of deviance has also been associated with an attack on the ethnological theory and methodological practice of cultural relativism. Howard Becker’s labeling theory approach to deviance used to be one of the most influential theoretical traditions in sociology. Recently, the labeling theory approach to the study of deviance has been attacked and marginalized. This development has resulted from the power/knowledge dynamic in American society of the war on drugs and crime, and the increasing institutional differentiation of sociology and criminal justice programs as departments and disciplines in American universities. New forms of criminology such as biosociology have displaced the labeling theory approach to the study of deviance. This approach defines categories like “terrorist” and “terrorism” as labels. It also links the labeling process to the power relations between labelers and those they label. The police, judges, and social workers apply the labels to delinquents and offenders. The power elite’s policy-­ planning network has legitimated these labels by passing laws. According to this theory, it takes “moral entrepreneurs” with the power and authority to create a label in the first place and then make it stick. Of course, deviants are active agents who can accept, resist, or reject the labeling process. The exclusion of labeling theory or the societal reaction perspective in criminology has been associated with a revival of the moral discourse of evil as well as more “punitive” modes of punishment. Some critics of the labeling theory perspective argue that it has contributed to a “moral relativism that recognizes no intrinsically evil deeds.” These critics argue that “deviants” should be condemned and stigmatized. Social scientists should voluntarily enlist in the wars on crime, drugs, and terror and forget the inherently asymmetric power relations involved. Epistemologically speaking, the moralization of deviance has also been associated with a one-sided, anti-structuralist view of the deviant. The critics are right in one sense. The labeling perspective problematized their position on theoretical and methodological grounds. On the other hand, their moralizing position on deviance is in clear violation of the norms of scientific objectivity as enunciated by the American Sociological Association (See American Sociological Association, “Code of Ethics,” Principles A: Professional Competence, B. Integrity, and C. Professional and Scientific Responsibility, http://www.asanet.org/about/ethics.cfm. accessed 6 June 2016). The labeling theory of deviance was a part of the established cannon of social scientific knowledge and interpretive social science. Moral absolutism undermines the project of interpretive social science by creating gaping black holes in the understanding of the causes of deviance and crime in society. This is in clear violation of the methodological norms of social science. Cultural relativity is a matter of professional competence and scientific

Ethics of truth  119 responsibility. Endorsing ethnocentricity is bogus social science. The critics of labeling theory conveniently forget the problem of PVR at the center of the P/K dynamic of “liberal” societies. “Deviants” are frequent scapegoats in modern, intensively policed “biopolitical” societies. “Moral entrepreneurs,” especially those involved in the US power elite’s policy network and emerging “homeland security apparatus, have interests and agendas too.” The social scientist’s task is to get at the scientific truth, not to enlist in power elite orchestrated wars against domestic and foreign enemies. Labeling theory was a forerunner to the constitution of a mature, power/ reflexive theory in the social scientific study of deviance and crime (Pfohl 1994). This theory applies to the study of terrorism and terrorists, and the problem of evil. The logic of this kind of social science is destabilizing. Carried to its logical conclusion, it leads to a critique of the role of social science knowledge in labeling deviance and crime. Social scientists must acknowledge this role and their involvement in the power/knowledge dynamic in modern society. Again, the effects of power struggles such as the US wars on crime, drugs, and terrorism are paramount. Erich Goode’s critical response to “conservative” criticisms of the negative effects of the sociology of deviance problematizes this way of thinking by relating it to the political policy outcomes of the 2004 vote for President George W. Bush (Goode and Yuhuda 1994) According to the “conservative” critique of labeling theory, deviants and criminals such as “terrorists” and “terrorism” should not be interpreted as social facts in labeling theory perspective. They should be viewed as essentially and absolutely evil. Before Howard Becker and the labeling theorists came along in the 1960s, deviant behavior like “terrorism” was viewed as a tragically and perniciously harmful behavior, behavior that tore at the fabric of the society. Becker and his colleagues, the critics claimed, warped and distorted that view of deviance. They argue that labeling theory took the moral taint out of deviance by relativizing it and making it impossible for us to say that deviant behavior is really bad, morally wrong, and evil! Sociologists, they argue, have the right and the duty to condemn all forms of deviant behavior. Labeling theory undermined the concept of deviance that had previously led ordinary people to see that it was immoral, harmful, and contrary to natural law and common sense. These critics claim that sociologists must go with the moral order, as defined by the power elite, and accept that “terrorism” is a crime and “terrorists” are “evil.” This view seems ­tailor-made to the interests of social scientists who want to advance their status and careers by enlisting in the global war against Terror. The imperial WoT and its global “security” has seriously problematized the old differentiation frequently made between criminal violence and political violence. The DOD has increasingly adopted the discourses and practices of the police to legitimate its use of military violence. This has the effect of providing patriotic (victimage ritual) and biopolitical discourses to “cover” its imperial violence. In fact, the homicidal violence and terror

120  Ethics of truth of the WoT is elided from view. It is a defensive response to their violence against the so-called free world, the weak, and the oppressed. The idea that it might be a part of an imperial project to extend the hegemony of centrist liberalism is anathema to the guardians of the social science order of knowledge. The US-led WoT and its promotion for power and profits of counterterrorism in the name of national and international security have seriously problematized the old differentiation between criminal and political violence. Social scientists and criminologists specifically are in fact directly involved in the National Security Agency (NSA) sponsored research in support of the WoT (see Lafree and Dugan 2007; Dugan 2012). Dugan and Chenoweth’s (2012) article on Palestinian terrorism was published in the American Sociological Review, funded by the National Security Agency, and enabled by data sets provided by Israeli intelligence. Its aim was to generate knowledge that elites might employ to deal with terrorism. LaFree, Dugan, and Fahey (2008) elaborates the “failed states” as cause of terrorism theory employing the global terrorism database that he and Dugan helped to build. Dugan and LaFree were major contributors to the creation of a Global Terrorism Database located at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism (START), University of Maryland. The failed states theory has functioned as a legitimation of US-led imperialism in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Power/Knowledge dynamic There is a complex power/knowledge dynamic linking social scientists to the WoT. We do not think the ethical issue of the involvement of social scientists’ involvement in this incredibly destructive and violent war can be resolved by avoiding or denying or simply not thinking about the problematic linkages we have established in this book connecting the US power elite and their imperial orientation to the world, their calculated use of well-orchestrated political victimage rituals, the rampant use of high-tech homicide bombers, drones as well as nuclear weapons, the military, and warfare. There are number of reasons why sociological theory avoids the problem of war and political violence, particularly the violence perpetrated by the power elite. There is a well-known and publically acknowledged lack of research on the military by outside observers, period. The elites that rule American society and set the goals of the DOD and its military institutions do not financially support this kind of research and in some cases will actively oppose and attack researchers who do (see Blain 2012, 2015). Social scientists get blowback when they seek to know what is going on with the military and war, or when they link these practices to power and domination. Researchers are stigmatized by their involvement in research, critical or not, that targets “counterterrorism” programs and research. They can be defamed by public authorities as threats to national security or anathematized as unpatriotic traitors to the cause. These researchers can be excluded

Ethics of truth  121 from professional communities on the grounds that they constitute a threat to the legitimacy and authority of the discipline (e.g., Mills and Noam Chomsky). The second reason is epistemological. It is no more reductive to link war and the military to power relations than too link it to race, class, or gender. War is a social power relation and a social mode of domination. We need to think of history, culture, and power in the same theory. First, we need to acknowledge that “sociological theorizing” is part and parcel of the “reflexive modernization” that constitutes modernity. As a result of the overemphasis on political-economy and industrialism, the Classic theorists ignored the constitutive role of political violence in modernization (see Giddens 1985). Modernization involved the willful genocide of indigenous people. As such, we need to be very skeptical of insider accounts of “Wartime Sociology” provided by insiders in the “sociological establishment,” largely dominated by Americans in the post-WWII period and deeply embedded in the power structure of the “warfare” state. Many sociologists ignore Mills’ account of the role of the US military in global politics. They fail to recall or mention his trenchant critique of popular culture, social scientists and professors, and their role in the “Cold War” (Mills 1959; also Horowitz 1965; Chomsky 1969). Many sociologists assume that research on the power elite and its foreign policy stopped after Mills died (see Domhoff 1990, 2014, 2017). It is true that most of this research focused on the power elite’s definition of the national interest, and the Cold War. They are wrong to claim that research in this tradition came to an end. It is only when Mills’ power elite began to inform anti-war and peace movement activism that it become anathema to theorize the military and war in sociological theorizing (Blain 1989, 1991). It is also untrue to assert that research on the WoT in this tradition is undeveloped and too programmatic (see Cox 2017). In addition to Joas’ account of sociology’s troubled relationship to war and the military, Saint-Amand’s (1996) critique of the way that Enlightenment social theorists’ suppression of the truth that society is constituted by violence and hostility is right on target. However, even Saint-Amand refuses to face the terrible truth that knowledgeable elites orchestrate violent victimage rituals as a calculated means of politics—that victimage ritual has been rationalized and refined as a tactic. It is, in other words, an established form of political rationality. We argued in Chapter 3 that it is a rationalized and refined biopolitical tactic employed by power elites to achieve their goals. However, we reject Saint-Amand’s use of Rene Girard’s functionalist explanation of ritual victimage. They think it is a mechanistic response that functions to resolve potentially disruptive social conflicts and tensions generated by clashing mimetic desires. Girard refuses to face the terrible truth that knowledgeable elites stage victimage rituals as a calculated means of politics. Amand is more trenchant than Joas (1999) on the conscious agency involved in the active suppression of the problematic of hostility sociological

122  Ethics of truth theory. He argues that Enlightenment social theories were tailored to the interests of progressive movements and revolutionary liberalism and that that functioned to legitimate the violence of the modern nation-state as “progressive” mode of power and domination. The philosophes assumed things about “human nature” that entailed the “laws of hostility.” These theorists emphasized the positive and played down the negative. Some of theorists were revolutionaries who supported “terror” as a legitimate means to achieve the democratic goal of building a liberal, egalitarian society. The assumptions they made (and many sociologists still make) were tailored to their utopian desires to engineer the good society—a laudable goal. The knowledge of the laws of society would serve to legitimate the use of political power and policing projects to ensure domestic security and imperial sovereignty entailed by these projects. The active and willful suppression of the problem of violent conflict entailed by their theories of human nature and society were immediately and justly mocked by Diderot, de Sade, and Nietzsche. This linkage to the terror generated a series of reactionary discourses linking the French revolution to “evil” and the social pathologies of modern “liberal” societies (Blain 2015) The emergence of the social sciences in the 19th century and their continued functioning right up to the present have to be approached in a much more complex way in a historical genealogy of imperial “liberalism,” the social sciences, and “political violence.” We have tried in this book to push that genealogy forward, extending past research by Blain (2007; 2009). We also think Domhoff’s (2014, 2017) power elite account of the “policy-­ planning network” in the US, and its links to the elite universities, is directly relevant to an analysis of social scientists’ involvement in the current wars. This line of research shows how social science knowledge functions in the history of the present and the WoT. The charge that this knowledge of the power elite does not relate to the everyday life, military, and warfare in our societies is empirically false. It continues to inform political activism and resistance right now and in the present. Sociologists’ view of the war-military nexus is questionable at many levels. It also illustrates one of the most enduring and vexing problems in sociological theorizing—the inability of theorists to face the omnipresence of sadism in society (another exception to prove the rule, Storr 1972). We have proposed a cultural analysis of the WoT in the form of a genealogy of ­Western imperial practices. In this perspective, how would you conceptualize the practices of warfare? The high-tech homicide bombings, the policy of kinetic aerial warfare, involving thousands of bombings and civilian deaths, flattening whole cities and destroying vital human infrastructures, destroying the lives of millions of people in the territories affected, requires some kind of cultural analysis. These massive power plays by the perpetrators of the WoT need to be understood against the background of Western culture. Warfare in this perspective is continuous with the long history of our imperial culture (i.e., Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, Spenser’s Faerie Queen, and

Ethics of truth  123 ritual practices of Savage Warfare in the American Mythology of the New Frontier, articulated in films like the Birth of a Nation or Star Wars). The skewing of definitions of terrorism by social scientists raises profound epistemological and ethical problems. By defining terrorism in a way that blocks out the use of terrorism employed by states, providing cover for its use by the US power elite, has produced profound changes in the order of social scientific knowledge (as demonstrated in Chapter 4). It seems particularly arbitrary to rule out the idea that terror or terrorism is a tactic employed by a range of political actors, including state and government actors, and not just so-called “non-state actors.” Why should we arbitrarily rule state actors out of the picture when we study terrorism? It is one of the main tactics employed by states. Social scientists who accept the narrow operational definition of terrorism need to explain the rationale behind this decision. It can’t be social scientific. There is a huge literature on warfare and revolutionary movements being excluded from consideration. We do not think you can study political violence or terrorism and not note that (legitimate or illegitimate) uses of political violence constitute terrorism. In fact most of the perpetrators of terror are so-called state actors. Just because the perpetrators of the violence convince some constituency, often through coercion and other threats, that their acts of terror (-bombing, -droning, starving, detaining, etc.) are legitimate shouldn’t be grounds for ruling it out of the study of terrorism. We believe it violates the fundamental ethics of the social sciences and renders our research incoherent to exclude the acts of state orchestrated terror campaigns because you might not obtain a grant from a government agency (NSA; DOD, etc.). In other words, this is a scientific as well as ethical issue. Finally, these diversionary tactics also function to legitimate the horrific and terrifying use of military violence in power elite orchestrated political victimage rituals targeting masses of civilians. We think there is a simple solution. As an alternative, we propose that social scientists use a standard dictionary definitions of terror and terrorism. The American Heritage Dictionary is as good as they get. We offer relevant definitions from the 2014 edition: terror n., Sense 4 Violence committed or threatened by a group, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals; terrorism, n.: The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals. Notice two things: 1) the emphasis is on the tactical use of terror and terrorism by a range of actors as a means to achieve their goals; 2) these definitions definitely do not exclude state terrorism.

Victimage ritual Sociologists have idealized sociality to legitimate their role as “positivist” social scientists in the policy network of the US power elite and their desires for progressive social change. They have ignored or played down the intense solidarity generated by hatred of deviants and political enemies. It

124  Ethics of truth is anathema to many social scientists that human beings and groups can fall into hate as well as love, that we get intense pleasure from vicarious participation in victimage rituals, and that the ritual domination and destruction of the villain produces intense pleasure as well as moral outrage. Theorists need to deal more directly with the actual geopolitical practices of political and military violence. The power/terror dynamic was central to the emergence of the liberal nation-states, empires, and the settler colonialism, and it continues to be central to a theory of the US-led WoT. That imperial tradition survives in the contemporary strategic practices of the national security state. We need to face the truth that geopolitical power dynamics of empire provoke and produce cycles of resistance and political violence. We have conceptualized the WoT as a mode of empire by means of global victimage ritual, involving the practices of vilification of terrorists as threats to “innocent lives” and glorifying the heroic struggles to destroy those villains as a “life and death” struggle to defend innocent civilians. These acts of heroic sacrifice have been elaborated in mass media spectacles broadcast to a global audience—for example, the “man-hunt” and “assassination” of Osama bin Laden and its reflection in contemporary films. We have offered a perspective on how to rectify this situation by theorizing political violence as victimage ritual employing the case of the WoT. We have argued for a deeper understanding of the historical “genealogy of terrorism” in relation to the practices, institutions, and techniques of power politics, liberalism, and imperialism. We have linked it to the problematics of political violence, evil, and sadism, arguing that the liberal nation-state presupposes and produces the “terrorist” as its discursive correlate. We have argued that social and sociological theorists need to pay more attention to the practices involved in convincing enough of the public of the biopolitical motive: fighting “the fight so that others might live.” We have called attention to the relevance and value of Kenneth Burke’s thinking to critical discourse theory, the tactical operations of Empire, and how the Manichean narrative of the war on terror shifts in order to advance the strategic current interests of the US power elite. The concept of victimage ritual can focus attention on the link between this narrative and the actual practices of political violence, the public spectacle of military violence, and war as well as police state torture. We have fused concepts of “victimage ritual” and theories of power and knowledge regimes, then tied these concepts together to produce a powerful and influential perspective on how to analyze the dynamics of political violence. Our aim is to reengage with the problem of theorizing political violence by reactivating the Weberian tradition of historical sociology and its elaboration in terms of research in political sociology derived from C. Wright Mills’ (1956) theory of the US power elite (extensively elaborated by G. ­William Domhoff 2017). Along with a few other critics, we argue that sociologists have a problem theorizing phenomena like political violence, warfare,

Ethics of truth  125 victimage ritual, and victimage ritual plays in society (Hugh D. Duncan 1962, 1968). So far as we know Randal Collin’s (2008) is the only sociologist to deal directly with the phenomenology of acts of violence. These problems with theorizing violence are deeply embedded in the regime of truth that constituted social and sociological theory and social research. The 18th-century Enlightenment philosophes idealized sociality to legitimate their desires for progressive social change. They ignored or played down the powerful and intense in-group solidarity generated by collective acts of victimage ritual in the form of warfare, public torture, and acts of political violence. Previous research by the authors traced the Anglo-­ American concept of terrorism to the power struggles of the great terror of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. These events also contributed to the emergence and legitimation of positivist sociology and functionalism. Conservatives like Burke and Maistre depicted the French revolutionary terrorists as “hounds from hell,” linking democratic violence to the perspective of “good and evil” (Blain 2015). This political discourse has reappeared in contemporary political discourse. Comte’s positivism, empirical sociology, and functionalism were strategies to provide a rational means to counter the prospect of revolutionary violence and civil war and institute a society founded on a universal love of humanity. These ideas continued to influence how sociologists and social scientists more generally think about violence and terrorism. It is a social pathology that can be cured by the intervention of positivist sociologists. This book has theorized the WoT as a mode of imperial power and subjection by means of victimage ritual. The power/terror dynamic is central to the Anglo-American tradition of imperialism and the US-led WoT. This thesis was advanced through a genealogy of Anglo-American Empire and how that cultural tradition survives in the contemporary practices of geopolitics. The WoT is a mode of empire by means of global victimage ritual— e.g., the use of well-publicized “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “torture,” or the “man-hunt” and “assassination” of Osama bin Laden detailed in the news and reflected in contemporary films and television programs. It is anathema to many social scientists that human beings’ “society” can be constituted through hate as well as love, the desire for revenge and justice, and that we can obtain pleasure from vicarious participation in sadistic victimage rituals. The ritual domination and destruction of the villain produces intense pleasure as well as moral outrage. This problem is also reflected in the difficulty that social scientists have with the role of agency in human society. We addressed this theoretical problem through an elaboration of Mills’ power elite theory of the US power structure and the participation of the economic, political, and policy networks that produce the foreign policies and geopolitical strategies implemented in the global WoT. The WoT, for example, is not simply a reaction to the threat of Islamic terror. The desire for full-spectrum dominance is articulated in US geostrategic doctrine. The military is oriented to that

126  Ethics of truth totalizing goal. The idea that the WoT is simply a response to the geostrategic aims of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIL is a one-sided view of a power struggle involving multiple actors. The power/knowledge dynamic as it relates the WoT illustrates the problem sociologists have with power as well as violence and terror. Terrorism has often been understood in terms of good and evil. The condemnation of terrorism as evil has surfaced again in political discourse. Ironically, these ideas have been elaborated inside social science knowledge in terms of the biopolitics of terrorism. Islamic terrorists are “religious fanatics” and “extremists” inspired by notions of good and evil—a regression to the past, barbarism, etc. They desire to create a new Caliphate in the Middle East. Politicians representing the geopolitical interests of the power elite condemn terrorism as evil, as motivated by minds that hate, who justify the murder of innocents. At the same time, social scientists explain terrorists’ political violence as motivated by Islamic notions of good and evil. Our recent work on social science discourse and the biopolitics of terrorism documents the shift from “political” ideology explanations to “religious” explanations of terrorism. Of course, this has the effect of reinforcing the idea that terrorism is essentially a regression to the dark ages of barbarism and ignorance. The ethics of social science are directly implicated in idealizing the nonviolent character of human beings and society in service to various interventionist programs leading to progressive social reform. This book argues that the WoT has mainly been justified on grounds of advancing a global agenda based on the progressive values of liberalism. We must face squarely the huge amount of “progressive” violence involved in advancing the cause of freedom. The wars against so-called totalitarianism states cost millions of lives. Modernization has come with a very high price; there have been millions of victims of progress.

Ethic of truth Weber and Mills faced the problematic of political violence fairly and squarely; the sociological establishment at the time marginalized and vilified Mills for doing so. Sociological theorists were shaken out of their “dogmatic slumber” by the shocking war crimes perpetrated by the US during the Vietnam War. This colonial war was fought in the name of liberal democracy. Most sociologists avoid knowing the mass violence perpetrated by the US-led coalition fighting the WoT. The enemy is anti-modern, fascist, and patriarchal. There is a double standard. Our terror is good; their terror is evil. When the Islamic State (IS) executes people, it is terrorism; when we flatten whole cities with high-tech bombs, that is understood as a reasonable and rational response to a terrorist threat. Sociologists turn away from the mass violence and repression legitimated by the terrorist threat. The main ethical as well as epistemological issue, as we see it, is the incapacity of sociologists to face directly the practices of violence in war and

Ethics of truth  127 military. Sociologists want to disengage from the problematic of agency in creating and maintaining a massive military establishment devoted to high-tech homicide by retreating to the nonviolent everyday world of civil society. Sociologists should also be thinking about the mass extermination programs perpetrated against indigenous people around the world in the name of freedom; they need to consider the strategies of “chemical warfare” and “terror bombings” perpetrated by the belligerents involved in the Great wars as well as the Holocaust and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they should think of the terrible destruction of the Middle East wars, refugee crises, and increased terrorist attacks in response to US-led coalition military interventions. These histories and their articulations in art, poetry, and film constitute the deep cultural background influencing the agency of the political and military elites orchestrating these wars. We don’t believe that ignoring this reality is justified or ethical in the name of promoting a decentered cultural analysis that merely focuses on civil society. Civil society is certainly important in resistance to these activities. But civil society is not the whole story. Elites in interaction with civil society and social movements know very well that the management of narrative is a tactical problem (Smith 2005). It is an old problem addressed by Machiavelli and many generations of tutors and advisors to monarchs, emperors, and presidents. Elite’s already know about these problems. They have generated “insider” discourses cloaked in secrecy, employing the latest social science knowledge, to manage the narrative attacks of opponents of their war policies, pacifists, and peace activists. These discourses constitute the decisions to go to war—invade ­Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria—and to justify fighting them to their homicidal and bitter end. In the midst of the Iraq War, President George W. Bush countered a growing public narrative against that war by adopting a new “social science” informed counterinsurgency strategy and doubling down on the war (See Counterinsurgency: Field Manual 3–24 [COIN], Department of the Army, 2013; Foreword by General David H. Petraeus, Ph.D., Princeton University). Some theorists (e.g., Alexander 2011: 2) accuse those working in the Weberian/Mills’ tradition, those who think culture, power, and violence in the same perspective, of putting forward a reductive theorizing of the problem of war and the military in terms of power relations. This is simply not true. Weber’s verstehen sociology and Mills’ works placed “cultural” questions at the center of their analysis of military violence and warfare—Mills’ trenchant rhetorical analysis of the “military metaphysic” legitimating the US power elite’s policies is a perfect example. It was this legitimating rhetorical discourse that justified the MAD policy of nuclear deterrence. We agree with Alexander’s proposal that we focus on power as a performance (shades of Duncan 1962). Political and military performances are part and parcel of victimage ritual; they are the practices of power that are constitutive of the imperial WoT.

128  Ethics of truth In the meantime, the terrorist threat provides cover for the militarism so evident in contemporary American life. The military has colonized many of the most important national holidays, inserting the military and veterans into every aspect of our national cultural lives. Glorifying the sacrifices of the war dead—from the Civil War to the WoT—is a national obsession. Flag-waving is an everyday practice. Flags appear everywhere on homes, automobiles, and the marketplace. The local university publicizes the role of its social scientists involved in research sponsored by Homeland Security and the DOD. The issues are the militarization of the police and public relations for the DOD. As the Provost promoting research at the university stated in an article in the Idaho Statesman, the state’s leading newspaper of record located in the state’s capital, university faculty in Idaho’s universities “play a pivotal role in military and defense research.” “Their research,” according to the Provost for research, “helps ensure the safety of roughly 1.4 million active duty military personnel stationed across the globe.” As an example, he touts a university social science professor and… …lead researcher on a new $1.2 million grant from the DOD to study the positive and negative affects of having US troops stationed in other countries…the Professor and his team will be using GIS to map all US troop-based criminal activity that has been reported to the military as well as all of the protest that have happened. (Rudin 2017: 5a) The lead professor is reported in the article as stating that the primary goal of this project is “to improve its [military’s] international reputation, and further ensure the safety of its troops, in countries that harbor negative feelings about a US presence.” As the Provost states in the final paragraph, “The US remains the strongest in the world.” We are a long way from the ethic of truth advanced in this book in regard to the role of sociologists in theorizing the political violence perpetrated by actors involved in the USled WoT. This book has been concerned with the difficulty that sociologists and social theorists have in dealing with violence and terror in society. Enlightenment philosophers created universal theories of human nature and ­sociability—premised on the mechanism of imitation, to legitimate the State and the Law. Human beings, they argued, are by nature social, cooperative, and peaceful. Socialization and positive modeling would be the solution to the problem of violence. They played down the possibility that society and imitation were ambivalent and a source of envy and dangerous rivalries that can cause political violence and victimage ritual. In the process, they idealized human sociability and played down the problem of violence. Violence was a regression, a thing of the barbaric past, and would have no place in civilized society. Reason and knowledge would produce a

Ethics of truth  129 peaceful future. Of course, there were those (Diderot, Sade, Nietzsche) who mocked the naiveté of Enlightenment social theorists. This final chapter will review that critical literature. As far as the issue of power relations is concerned, theorists need to conceptualize political violence in social terms as actors struggling for dominance. We must resist the political and theoretical discourses of the WoT and counterterrorism that ignore the US/THEM power dynamic involved. Empire and nation-states are founded on “monopolies on the legitimate use of violence.” A one-sided focus on THEM in the study of political violence reduces social science to its auxiliary function as an instrument of domination. At its worse, it leads to a one-sided focus on THEM that covers up and distracts attention from the massive amount of “legitimate” violence perpetrated by US to destroy THEM. As an ethical matter, we must not ignore the power struggles, violence, and the pleasures and sadism involved in political violence and specifically the US-led WoT. This means acknowledging the tradition of imperial practices, the will to dominate and agency inspired by those practices, and the pleasures of satisfying those desires. Hence, we need to focus on the biopolitics and power/knowledge dynamics of the WoT, including the role of the social sciences in the war. This situation raises ethical issues at stake for social scientists. We add some additional reasons to the author’s explanation of why “sociological theorizing” does not deal with political violence more directly, particularly the problems of state terrorism. The reasons are complex. It requires a direct examination of the problematic linkages connecting power elites, political violence, the military and warfare, and the biopolitics of knowledge. The most obvious reason for this situation is that agents of the power elite will attack researchers who do study these issues. It takes courage to practice the ethics of truth. The second reason is epistemological. War is a social power relation and a social mode of domination. Theorists need to think of history, culture, and power in the same theory. First, we need to acknowledge that “sociological theorizing” as well as political violence are part and parcel of the “reflexive modernization” that constituted modern liberal societies. Modernization involved the active destruction of traditional societies and in some cases the genocide of indigenous people. The emergence of the social sciences in the 19th century and their continued functioning right up to the present have to be approached in a much more complex way in a historical genealogy of “liberalism,” the social sciences, and “political violence” than we have time to address in this brief response (see Blain 2007, 2009; also Wallerstein 2011). Needless to say, we think sociological thought has been and continues to be in the verifiable history of the present deeply embedded in the power structures that shape the everyday life practices of modern society. We also think Domhoff’s (2017) power elite account of the “policy planning network” in the US, and its links

130  Ethics of truth to the elite universities, is directly relevant to an analysis of social scientists’ involvement in the current wars. This line of research shows how social science knowledge functions in the history of the present and the WoT. The charge that this knowledge of the power elite does not relate to the everyday life, military, and warfare in our societies is empirically false. It continues to inform political activism and resistance right now and in the present. We think that political violence is one of the most vexing ethical problems in sociological theorizing—the inability of theorists to face the problematic of violence and sadism in human social life, particularly massive military violence. The massive amount of political violence perpetrated in the WoT needs to be understood against the background of Western culture. The WoT in this perspective is continuous with the imperialism celebrated in our history and political philosophies. It is especially striking in the arts (i.e. Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, Spenser’s Faerie Queen, and ritual practices of Savage Warfare in the American Mythology of the New Frontier, articulated in films like the Birth of a Nation or Star Wars). There is a modern countertradition in the arts as well: Goya’s Disasters of War, Picasso’s ­G uernica, and Ivica Capan’s Drones in Paradise; in anti-war literatures provoked by World War I; in movies, such as Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Doctor Strangelove, Oliver Stones’s Born on the Fourth of July, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. This fact has implications for our self-understanding as social scientists, or what we call truth ethics. Fortunately, there are a few exemplary practitioners of that ethic in the sociological tradition. Weber and Mills faced all of this fairly and squarely; the sociological establishment at the time marginalized and vilified Mills for doing so. Sociological theorists were shaken out of their dogmatic slumber by the shocking war crimes perpetrated by the US and its allies during the Vietnam War, all in the name of liberal democracy. Some social scientists want to disengage from the problematic of agency in creating and maintaining a massive military establishment devoted to violence and homicide by retreating to the nonviolent everyday world of “peace” and civil society. Sociologists need to think of the mass extermination programs perpetrated against indigenous people around the world in the name of Empire and Western civilization; the strategies of “chemical warfare” and “terror bombings” perpetrated by the belligerents involved in the Great wars as well as the Holocaust; the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the terrible destruction of the Middle East wars, refugee crises, and increased terrorist attacks in response to US-led coalition military interventions. There is no denying the empirical truth of the deliberate and rationalized agency involved in manipulating public opinion and civil society into supporting political violence and sadism to achieve their goals. There is so much empirical evidence that the elites are “rationally” knowledgeable of the role of civil society and the nonrational aspects of war and organizing

Ethics of truth  131 campaigns of military violence, and effectively use it to manipulate the public, that it seems naive to insist that these ideas can be mobilized to build a new cultural sociology of the military and war. Counterterrorism practices have seriously problematized the power/knowledge dynamics of the WoT. Some social scientists and criminologists specifically are in fact directly involved in the National Security Agency (NSA) sponsored research in support of the WoT. We need to theorize the terrible truth that knowledgeable elites, aided and abetted by scientific authorities in the social and psyche sciences, orchestrate victimage rituals as a calculated means of politics. Victimage ritual, we argue, is a rationalized and refined political strategy employed by power elites to achieve their agendas.

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Appendix George “Lord” Bennett (1827–1900) founder of bandon, oregon

According to George Bennett (1827–1900), Pope Adrian IV handed Irish Lands and Irish People over to King Henry of England with his Papal Bull. Adrian’s Bull fondly addressed King Henry in glowing terms, ­a lmost Saintly, as if pleading for Henry to take on the responsibility to invade and control Ireland. Adrian IV held the chair of St. Peter’s, whose pontifical authority no member of the Western Church ever disputed (Bennett 1862). In correspondence with the King of England, the Pontiff writes: … “Dear son of Christ, the noble King of England your magnificence hath been ever anxious to enlarge God’s church on earth, and increase the number of his saints in heaven.” Adrian assumes He and Henry share similar points of view regarding the inhabitants of Ireland. The Pontiff also includes the handover of another country…A handsome present from the Pope to his Most Dear Son in Christ, the Nobel King of England. (quote derived from Bennett 1862: 3) The voice of authority and infallibility had spoken to grant Henry the divine right to take over Ireland and extirpate the vices of the Irish people. Pope Adrian IV also commands Henry to make sure every household in (Ireland) pay a penny yearly to the Pope assuring the king “All of the people of the Land (Ireland) would accept him as their liege lord and sovereign.” The Pope assures Henry all the people of the land [Ireland] would accept him as their liege lord and sovereign. Therefore, in George Bennett’s estimation, it’s the pope who the Irish should be mad at, not King Henry of England. Adrian is the one who first establishes the first link in the sacred chain binding Erin to her sister England (Bennett 1862: 4). Nicholas P. Canny (1973), in his Article on “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” argues that attempts to reassert English authority over Ireland under Elizabeth I set a pattern of conquest, bolstered by attempts at colonization that were contemporaneous with and parallel to the first effective contacts of Englishmen with North America,

136  Appendix to plans for conquest and settlement there, and to the earliest encounters with its native American inhabitants. The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland should therefore be viewed in the wider context of European expansion (Canny 1973: 575).

Munster frenzy and half-breeds The British takeover of the enormous estate of the Earl of Desmond’s lands, estimated at 574,628 English acres, was based on slim charges that the ­Desmond’s were fermenting a rebellion against the British crown. The confiscation of such landholdings owned by the Earl, who resisted the English invaders’ pillage and plunder of his lands, paid with his life, as did other lords and properties landed in the lap of the Virgin Queen (1555–1603), who set her sight on the Protestant colonization of Munster and the banishment of Catholics. The Queen’s desire to colonize the 547,628 acres of Irish lands and turn it into a settlement would require the import of 20,000 English Protestants. In September 1588, at the start of the Plantation of Munster, Phane Beecher of London acquired the land as Undertaker of Castle-Mahon under Elizabeth’s plan. He is considered to be the Founder of the colony at Bandon-bridge. In 1604 Beecher’s son and heir established the Town of Bandon. Elizabeth’s appeal to the country gentlemen in England to send over their younger sons to settle in Ireland fit in with the British practice of progenitor in which the firstborn son inherits the family fortune and young sons must seek their own fortunes elsewhere. The invasion of another country and its takeover provided opportunity to adventurers who accepted Elizabeth’s appeal to settle in Munster, Ireland. George Bennett understood the benefits for younger members of the Gentry under Elizabeth’s plan. Members of his from the male side would gain Irish lands and Estates if they left England and resettle in Munster, Cork, Ireland. Elizabeth itemized a set of rigid rules to all who accepted her offer to leave their homes in England to settle in Ireland. Her grantee of 12,000 acres should settle thereon, at his own expense. She offered eighty-six Protestant Family leases at low rents (Bennett 1862: 5). The Queen insisted the settlement be completed within seven years from the date of patent. If her expectations were not met, there would be no less a penalty than the forfeiture of the lease. Among the grantees were Sir Walter Raleigh, who Bennett notes had interest enough to procure three signatories and a half, by warrant of privy seal February 1586. In September 1588, at the start of the Plantation of Munster, Phane Beecher of London acquired, as “Undertaker,” the signori of Castle Mahon. In 1604 Fane Beecher’s son and heir, Henry Beecher, established the town of Bandon. Not all of the settlers brought over settled in Bandon. Some procured lands from Henry Beecher to establish their own budding settlements

Appendix  137 for commerce. On the whole, according to the noted Historian R.F. Foster (1988: 70), the more typical type of settlers were the needy gentry bent on making fortunes—if not necessarily the debtors and bigamists of tradition who exaggerated their social pretensions and viewed Munster as an avenue for upward social mobility. Bennett history includes the list of names of the “Undertakers” who established plantation; foremost is Fane Beecher, Esq. The seigniors of Phane Beecher included the site of the southern portion of the town of Bandon, Castle Mahon, and the adjacent lands, stretching as far west as the western boundaries of Kilcoleman; whilst on the eastern side, it was terminated by the stream running into the Bandon river, not far from the Messrs. Allman’s distillery. On the northern side, a seigniory was shortly afterward granted to Sir Bernard Grenfille, who soon after disposed of it to Sir William Nuce. This extended from the rivulet near the Provincial Bank, as far west as the stream that forms the eastern boundary of the village of Ballineen. Beecher set to work at once to fulfill the condition of his grant. He brought over a great number of settlers including a Thomas Bennett who became Governor of Baltimore Castle (Bennett 1862: 6). The English settlers were within a mile eastward of Castle-Mahon that was a strip of flat land called Inis-fraoc (the heather rich). The Bandon River flowed in front of it while the Bridewell River flowed on its eastern side; a stream of water formed its western boundary. On this strip of land upwards of twenty-five acres in extent, Beecher built the nucleus of a town. Bandon-Bridge is an English name given to the area by Beecher that the Irish would not accept. The area had been known as Drohid-Mahon (O’Mahon’s-Bridge). The Irish continued to use the old name in remembrance of the area’s longdead Irish proprietors. Bandon became a “walled town” to keep Catholics out. Only Protestants were allowed to live in the town. A mile-long wall was built around Bandon to keep Catholics out. Bylaws were made to keep them from entering the town or residing within Bandon. George Bennett understood the Queen’s plan for Munster would offer opportunities for the younger members of the sons of English Gentry who would gain Irish Lands and Estates if they accepted Elizabeth I’s offer to resettle in Munster, Ireland. George Bennett’s forbearers seized her offer by resettling in Cork, Ireland and seemingly made out like bandits. Bennett teases, “The tide which is taken at the flood leads on to fortune …Among the grantees were the most restless of adventurers; Sir Walter Raleigh had interest enough to procure three signatories and a half, by a warrant of privy seal, February 3, 1586” (Bennett 1862: 5). Irish resistance to England’s takeover of their lands never let up. What to do about the Irish who will not accept annexation under the English Crown became the big “Irish Question” for the English colonizers. Sir William Perry (1623–1687) thought he had come up with the perfect solution to the “Irish Problem.”

138  Appendix E. Estyn Evans in his 1988 “Irish Folk Ways” notes Perry’s bizarre social experiment and that the Irish resisted every imperial experiment contemplated…. It was left to Sir William Perry (1623–87) to make the most celebrated and most exhaustive study of the Island [Ireland]. His political Anatomy of Ireland, in reality is a human and economic geography…Perry aimed a comprehensive survey that would form the basis of a reconstructed Ireland. One of his proposals, perhaps his most original of all varied suggestions for solving “The Irish Problem”, was to import a further 2,000,000 English settlers so as to bring the total English population to half a million, and then to remove the 20,000 unmarried Irish girls and marry them off ‘one on every English parish,’ replacing them by 20,000 English girls to be married to Irishmen. In this way the Irish language, food, clothing and customs would be replaced by English modes. Evans claims “Perry’s scientific approach was devoid of sentiments and left him without sympathy for the Irish Past” (Evans 1988: 4–5).

Landed estates The Bennetts were established in Cork by the middle of the 17th century and were settled at Ballymore by the mid 18th century. They were always on the lookout to purchase Irish land and held it for generations. Francis Bennett, of Classes, Coachford and Greganes Manor, Roscarbery, owned over 28,000 acres in County Cork in the 1870s. Joseph Bennett held several townlands in the parish of Lisle, Baronet of Ibane & Barryroe. Listed also are 1,000 acres of Joseph Bennett’s estate, held in perpetuity for the Archbishop of Dublin and the ecclesiastical Commissioners. George Bennett was born in Bandon, Cork, Ireland, in 1827, attended a local grammar school in Bandon, Cork, along with his adventurer friend Henry Hewitt Baldwin, who influenced Bennett to emigrate from Ireland to resettle along the Oregon Coast of North America. Bennett attended Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, established by Elizabeth I as a bastion of learning for the sons of the British gentry living in Ireland. Bennett earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Law and a Bachelor’s Degree in Art. After graduating from the university, he returned to Bandon and went to work for the Third Earl of Bandon’s political campaigns. At age thirty-five George Bennett married Ann Scott Harrison in 1852. They became the parents of three sons. In 1870 Bennett is credited in helping found a second Masonic Lodge in his hometown of Bandon, referred to as number 13. Bennett also became a barrister-at-law but never practiced. He had considerable wealth and was also a land proprietor who took deep interest in civic affairs. His History of Bandon was first published in 1862; a new and extended edition appeared in

Appendix  139 1869. He also wrote articles for the “Eagle” a newspaper located in Skibbereen, Cork. This pattern would persist in the founding and development of Bandon, Oregon.

Bitter truth Regardless of his busy life, Bennett must have been aware of the horrific events of British cruelty and indifference imposed on the helpless people starving in the thousands before his eyes in his native Cork. Cork became one of the worse affected areas in the Great Famine 1845–1847, 150,000 people perished and 50,000 people emigrated. The Great Hunger intensified among thousands of poor, landless Irish Catholics throughout County Cork and the rest of Ireland. The Town of Skibbereen, in County Cork, Ireland, suffered mass starvation and disease as a consequence of the Famine. It was the greatest disaster to happen in Europe until that time. The horrific events of British cruelty towards the Irish people remain in the memory of survivors. It is estimated that 8,000–10,000 victims of “The Great Famine” are buried in the Famine Pits of Abbeystrewery Cemetery. Stories and songs are the ways ordinary Irish people learn their history. The name Skibbereen became a folksong about the Famine and the impact it and the British Government had on the people of Ireland. The song “Dear Old Skibbereen” takes the form of a conversation between a father and son. The son asks his father why he fled the land he loved so well. The father relates to his son how the famine ruined his farm in Skibbeern and killed his wife, as the father could not pay his taxes, The landlord and the bailiff came to drive us all away. They set the roof on fire with their cursed English flame, And that’s another reason why I left old Skibbereen. In the final verse the son swears he will return to Skibbereen to take vengeance on the British colonial government responsible for the outrage. Historian Kerby A. Miller (1985: 284–85) quotes a horrendous 1946 account by absentee landlord Nicholas Cummings of what he discovered going on in the cabins of his West Cork estate near Skibereen, Cork: “famished and ghastly skeletons…such frightful specters as no words can describe… Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible image fixed upon my brain.” Miller also notes that in 1847 and 1848 the Quaker philanthropists Jonathan Pim, William Bennett, and Richard Webber reported similar horrors in west Connaught. In northwest Mayo, Bennett wrote “The scene was one and invariable, differing in little but numbers of the sufferers…It was my impression that one-fourth of those we saw were in the dying state, beyond the reach of any relief that could be afforded, and many more would follow.” In Queen’s county as elsewhere, “many familyes…[lived] on the wild caribs of the fields; others fed on grass, seaweed and

140  Appendix shellfish, rotten potatoes, dead animals, even human corpses. Weakened by malnutrition, thousands fell victim to typhus or ‘black fever’” (Miller: 285). Millar also offers an example of the religious duplicity occurring amid such social distress: Another example of colonial society’s weakness in dealing with crisis was the distracting and depilating controversy between Irish Protestants and Catholic clergymen over allotment of famine relief. Protestant philanthropists charged that some priests, especially in the western dioceses, were, “plundering avaricious Wretches” who misappropriated relied funds or ran away from their stricken parishioners. Catholics countered that Protestant missionaries were proselytizing the starving poor, giving free should only in return for recantation of “popery.” Although some conversion did occur, as might be expected in time of profound social trauma, the virulent controversy over proselytism or “souperism” largely reflect the ongoing contest for religious and political supremacy over a famished people who could scarcely afford such divisionary strife. Kirby asserts that, “Ireland’s colonialisms’ most lethal legacy was a predominantly alien landlord class which, despite individual instances of benevolence, did little to alleviate and much to exacerbate the crisis.” Roy Foster’s (1988: 284) History of Modern Ireland 1600–1972 claims that one historian estimated that between 1.1 and 1.5 million persons died of starvation or famine-related disease, and contemporary observers were horrified by scenes of suffering unparalleled in recent European experience. Foster also includes the Diary Records of a Mrs. Smith’s Diary that show records of stock cattle being slaughtered and distributed, and soup kitchens operating from the end of 1846. She also makes clear that the landlords who exerted themselves were not typical: “it’s nonsense to talk of good landlords as a rule, they are no such things, and they are only in the exception.” Foster points out that “by and large the class who possessed the most did the least” (1988: 330). Foster singles out Quaker relief workers, praising their role in Famine relief (1988: 329). Foster’s use of the term “Holocaust” to describe the event encapsulates the savagery imposed upon the Famine victims by British Policy, while “The Great Irish Famine” or “Great Hunger” does not.

Seizure of Native American lands In 1852 in the vicinity of what later would become the Town of Bandon, Colonel Casey advanced up the Oregon coast with a detachment of the First Dragoons. The “Indians” were now fairly aroused and were hostile all along the line. When they arrived that day, they perceived many “Indians” noiselessly moving about and trying to conceal themselves in the brush, and one fellow, who was evidently a scout, was stretched on Wesley’s rock where he hide under the impression that he wasn’t seen, watching with a scrutinizing gaze the US military’s every move. Here the Colonel called a halt and was undecided as to whether he should go around the beach or cut a

Appendix  141 road through the bush. Whilst, yet uncertain as to what should be done, a big Irishman-private named Jim Gore offered to creep around and “put the damned son-of-a-bitch out of the cold anyhow.” The colonel gave permission to Jim Gore, an Irishman, to sneak around covertly and unperceived until he got the “Indian’s” flank, and then when he got a fair chance he slowly raised his rifle, took deliberate aim, and sent a bullet whizzing through his skull. The skeleton of the unfortunate “Indian” remained exposed on the rock for many years afterwards. Seeing the troopers were around and prepared for any emergency, the “Indians” withdrew and didn’t attempt to molest them. Casey’s command camped that night on Prospect Hill, and early the next morning, having placed the howitzers in a position completely commanding the “Indian” village, they opened fire on them unsparingly (Bennett 1927: 303) Sad to say there were other Irish immigrants like Jim Gore who, when the bugle sounded, did not hesitate to kill Native Americans commanded by the US Military acting on behalf of United States Government. George Bennett (1927) records the following account in his “History of Bandon” Oregon: …Indeed we cared nothing, said one informant, an old settler (Hewlett?) about killing one of them (Natives) as we did killing a wild cat or a bear, in fact, even less, for their skin of either of these is worth something and therefore we didn’t wish to see them exterminated, but the skin of the other fellow is worthless. They ranked them with the worse kind of “varmints” and thought that the sooner they got rid of them, the better: Haven’t any souls? I couldn’t tell, and it never entered my head to inquire. When the white man locates in a country where the Indian is, one or the other of them is bound to leave, and it is not the white man. No! I never shot a squaw. That’s unmanly, but I killed all the bucks I could. Every other old settler will just say the same …The Indian stole everything he could from them whenever he could safely do so, and it was a fight for life between both. The bucks are lazy, indolent, useless set of fellows. (1927: 322) Bennett tells the story of the “Half Breeds” that lived along Whiskey Beach, north of the Coquille River, who got hoodwinked by two Irishmen into selling them their land holdings, where gold got discovered soon after. The US Government had organized a plan to rid the Coastal Area of its Native Coastal Tribes and drive them from their ancestral land with the force of the US Military. Captain E. O. C. Ord, while rounding up Oregon’s Native Americans, wrote, “It almost makes me shed tears to listen to them wailing as they totter

142  Appendix along.” Some “Indians” hid in the mountains, but the soldiers hunted and killed or captured most of them. The removals also included the “Indians” of the Coquille watershed. The rounding up of these “Indians” caused considerable grief and led to many deaths. On July 3, 1856 at Port Orford Superintendent Palmer wrote: A considerable number of the Lower Coquille bands had been once induced to come in, but by the meddlesome interference of a few squaw men and reckless disturbers of the peace, they were frightened and fled the encampment. A party of miners and others, who had collected at Port Orford, volunteered, pursued, and attacked those Indians near the mouth of the Coquille, killing four men and one woman, and taking few prisoners. This was claimed by them as a battle, notwithstanding no resistance was made by Indians. (Beckham: 1997: 9) Beckham also describes the incident of the hostilities imposed upon the “Indians” in the canyon of the Rouge and on the Chetco until June. The Army then rounded up most of the “Indians” and took them to the Port Orford. The steamer Columbia took 600 “Indians” up the coast to the Columbia River, then up the Willamette River and to the Yamhill. There they boarded barges for the short passage towards the Coast Mountains. At the head of the navigation they made a forced march through the hills to their new home on the “Siletz Indian Reservation.” The refugees suffered severely on the long march and faced the winter of starvation in their new home. Captain E.O.C Ord later became a famous Civil War general, while rounding up the “Indians” he noted, “It almost makes me shed tears to listen to them wailing as they totter along. Some Indians hid in the mountains but the soldiers hunted and killed or captured most of them. The removals also included the Indians of the Coquille watershed. The rounding up of the Indians caused considerable grief and led to many deaths.” On July 3, 1865, while at Port Orford Superintendent Palmer describes what took place: A considerable number of the Lower Coquille bands had been once induced to come in, but the meddlesome interference of a few squaw men and reckless disturbers of the peace, they were frightened, an fled the encampment. A party of miners an others, who had collect at Port Orford, volunteered, persuaded, and attacked those Indians near the mouth of the Coquille, killing fourteen men and one woman, and taking a few prisoners. This was claimed by them as a battle, notwithstanding no resistance was made by the Indians.

Appendix  143 After the removal of the “Coos Indian Tribe” and the “Coquille Indian Tribe” (considered “treacherous Indians”) the settlers turned their attention to peaceful pursuits, and a new impetus seized every enterprise built on the destruction and culture of the Native tribes in the area Beckham 1997: 10). This detest for Native Americans is the same kind of attitude shown towards the colonized Irish by the English settlers. When Native American resistance to white settlement upon their lands got defeated by militarized US force, a wide land grab opened for the “white” settlement of Coastal Oregon. George Bennett jumped into the Oregon fray like a raging bull and writes in melodramatic terms of his experiences, unabashedly setting himself up as a Heroic Figure venturing into the unknown: We left Bandon, Cork County, in Ireland on may, 24, 1873, per City of Baltimore, and arrived in San Francisco: thence as formerly stated, Emerald City. We were induced to come here from what we read of the climate and resources of this part of Oregon…We left in a day or two for the Coquille/Beaver Slough, and there we waited for several hours for a boat. I was a lonely place surrounded by hills, was heavily timbered to their very summit with gigantic spruce and fir. There wasn’t even the twitter on a bird. Or even a breeze, however light or soft ruffle the foliage…This was the place now know as Coledo. At last the boat came, and we journey down to the Coquille (River)…we asked our boatmen several question but he seldom answered us when he did in monosyllables… We became bereft of all hope and every look he gave us told us plainly that we were drawing nearer t our untimely end…At last we resolved to give him a Masonic sigh, which we were agreeably surprised the see that he recognize…We stayed the night at pate Lowe’s, where we were kindly and hospitable received and left next day for our destination. We got into a good size boat flat–bottomed boat called a skiff, and we were on the waters of the Coquille at last. We arrived in due time, at the mouth of the Coquille We arrived in due time, at the mouth of Bear Creek and from thence to Harry Baldwin’s place…We made our way to Thompson Lowe’s. He was the first settler here and took up the first donation claim…Here was the ocean, the great commercial highway of the world before us by day and its fort gentle murmurs to soothe us to sleep at night…We bought Thompson Lowe and others and also bought out the beach fronting on the lands of T. Lowe’s donation claim from the government, …our purchase extended on the north up the line incorporating the town of Bandon and in the south beyond the only road leading to the beach”…

Ties that bind George Bennett’s childhood friend, Henry Hewitt Baldwin, is credited with Bennett’s decision to leave Bandon, Ireland and immigrate to Oregon

144  Appendix (Beckham 1997). Baldwin grew up in Bandon, Cork and attended Grammar school in Bandon at the same time as Bennett. Baldwin, in 1825, went to sea at age sixteen and later immigrated to the United States in 1846 and joined the US Army as a soldier. In 1849, the army assigned Baldwin and others to reinforce the garrison at Port Orford, Oregon to help quell “Indian” uprisings. The attacking Native Tribes were defending their Ancestral homeland from the US government’s illegal seizure of Native American Lands for new white settlers (Peterson and Powers 1952: 512). In early 1846, contemporaries observed, “Comfortable Farmers, not the destitute were leaving Ireland. Well dressed countrymen…with baggage and sea store crowded the Dublin Docks…” (Miller 1985: 293). Even in Black 47 “The obvious strength of the country is departing…it is the enterprising and industrious who are leaving us…in many cases taking with them considerable money…Indeed between 1846–1851…the Irish withdrew from banks over 1.2 million in Gold…To amass such sums farmers sold their interests in their holdings and often absconded without paying debts or taxes” (Miller 1985: 294). Beckham’s history provides a detailed historical account of Bennett’s friend Henry Baldwin. Baldwin in his role of soldering for the United States expanding Empire (1997: 9–10). In January, 1852, the Captain Lincoln, carrying US Army troopers and supplies, missed Port Orford in a storm and wrecked on the North Spit of Coos Bay. The Captain selected four dragoons, one being Henry Baldwin, to travel south to Fort Orford to get help. The soldiers had to swim the mouth of the Coquille River, future location of Bandon, just north of Coos Bay to get to Fort Orford. Baldwin surveyed the scene and decided to settle at the location that later became Bandon. Baldwin had been a close friend of George Bennett in Ireland. He is recognized as the one who influenced Bennett to pick up stakes in Ireland and move to the Oregon Coast. Bennett considered Henry Baldwin’s proposal to move to Oregon. He apparently saw an opportunity in Oregon for increasing his fortune and that of his two grown sons outside of Ireland ravished by Famine and its consequences. As an opportunist, he had described in his history of Bandon, Ireland the fortunes of the sons of the gentry who acquired wealth, landholding, and upper mobility by leaving England to settle in Munster, Ireland, under Queen Elizabeth’s plan for the Plantation of Munster, Ireland. Upon arriving in Oregon, George Bennett represented himself as an aristocrat and a “Lord,” unlike the masses of impoverished Irish immigrants who arrived penniless from Ireland to the United States referred to as the “dregs of society.” Bennett was induced to come here from what he had read and heard of the climate and recourses of this part of Oregon, and after an experience of many years, he believes that there is no more equable climate to be found anywhere and that its agricultural, mineral, and other resources are all that could be reasonably desired (Bennett 1927: 345; also Bennett 1898).

Appendix  145 In 1873 George Bennett and two of his three grown sons, Joseph W. and George A. Bennett, left Cork, Ireland, and arrived in Oregon in 1875 along with fellow Bandonian G.H. Sealy. Bennett, with two university degrees under his belt and possessing significant wealth, went on a buying spree. Later, he describes his ardent task to purchase land and recourses as if there were no tomorrow. He describes his buying frenzy in tracking down US government claims: The first donation claim taken south of the Coquille River was taken in the year 1853, by Thomas Lowe, and second by Chris Long…After these and towards the end of the same year, the site of the town of Bandon was taken up, not for the gold that glittered in the front of it…but because of a convenient place for a ferry, and from its admirable position for commercial purposes. Bennett and other capitalists believed that the best prospects for the future of Bandon resided on the development and improvements of the harbor and the means of a safer passage across the bar of the Coquille River. (Beckham 1997: 33) In 1878, Captain Judah Parker invested his own money and effort in trying to force the mouth of the Coquille River South towards the bluff at its entrance to the Pacific Ocean. His efforts were futile until he and others decided to hold a celebration in Bandon to raise funds to further his harbor project. Fred Bennett, a grandson of George Bennett, editor of the “Coos Bay News,” working with J.M. Siglin, first Senator from Coos Bay and Curry Counties, went along with the project in Bandon to promote a plan to expand the harbor. At Bandon, the group formed the Harbor Committee. A contingent from Coos Bay found several hundred people ready to party in a hastily erected building for the purpose of fundraising. The Citizen’s celebration brought in $4,000 dollars to move the harbor project forward. The influential Senator Siglin stayed with George Bennett in Bandon who described how he had cleared 400 acres of land for grazing animals as an indicator of how profitable the development of the harbor could be for extending commerce of beef or other available recourses. George Bennett had extensive background in the art of political campaigning developed in Ireland. As a young lawyer he took over the political campaigns to the get the Earl of Bandon elected and reelected. He adhered to the ideology of liberal capitalism; plus, he had extensive personal experience as a land proprietor. Bennett demonstrated his leadership skill in organizing voters of Coos Bay and Curry Counties into a committee to promote the single issue for improving what became the Bandon Harbor. He wrote to Lafayette Grover, James Harvey Slatter, and John Witaker, aggressively indicating that these committee members, including him, were bound to vote for whomever did the most improves the Harbor. Apparently, John Whitaker made the best pitch and got reelected, and construction began on the work began on Bandon Harbor (Beckham 1997: 38).

146  Appendix Bennett, as primary landholder, organized a voting place, established south of the river and named Bandon Precinct. Although the precinct had been called Bandon since 1874, the congregation of houses and other buildings that constituted the town were officially called Averhill until 1889. In 1891 George Bennett’s Bandon, Oregon was incorporated as a town. The New Bandon, Oregon colony was named after the Anglo-Irish Colony in Bandon, Cork, Ireland. The 1900 census showed a population of 645. In 1908 the first direct steamer line between Bandon and Portland was established. In 1913 Bandon began to draw many tourists with its picturesque scenery and outstanding panoramic view of the harbor, river, beach, bar, and ocean, and hunting and fishing attracted vacationers and sportsman. Over the years Bandon had three weekly newspapers: The Bandon Recorder, The Western World, and The Surf. Some European settlers farmed along the coast, but farming remained secondary to the role of timber getting extracted from the lush coastal virgin Old Growth Forests. Before leaving Bandon, Cork, Ireland George Bennett sold his property to Mr. C. McCarty, JP, of Clonakility. He left his wife and one son behind in Ireland. George Bennett never returned to Ireland. His wife sold their big house and moved into a smaller home with her remaining younger son nearby. George Bennett’s granddaughter Kathleen (Bennett) Booth later wrote that her grandfather left Ireland due to marital problems. Booth’s grandfather had to be aware of the dramatic change in Irish political activism against the British Government after the Great Famine and ponder the consequences for him an Angelo-Irish Proprietor of Irish Landholding. Farmers and laborers throughout Ireland became politically organized. They were represented by a national alliance, the Land League, led by Charles Steward Parnell. The Land League, funded by donations from America, organized boycotts against notorious landlords, encouraged the defiant burning of leases, and had its members physically block evictions. Parnell’s “Land War” agitations brought British political reform helping Ireland’s small farmers and tenants. Parnell had agreed to end the land war in return for the government’s elimination of old unpaid rents. As a result of standing up to the British government, eventually the centuries-old landlords system finally ended. George Bennett and his two grown sons Joseph and George and a friend George Sealey also of Bandon, Ireland sailed on the Schooner the “City of Baltimore” to New York. From there the foursome crossed the United States to San Francisco, California. From there they boarded the steamship Eastport for the Coos region. After a brief stay over in Empire City, they continued the difficult journey overland at the Isthmus Slough and onto the mouth of the Coquille River. They arrived at their destination in Oregon, US, in 1875. One of Bennett’s sons made the observation: “land in Oregon was cheap, gold was for panning, and the climate was better than at home.”

Appendix  147 Bennett recalled that by the time of his arrival in Oregon, several new Colonies were already planted in the vicinity, among who were Joseph Williams and his three sons, Tom Popham, James Ellis, R.E. Shine, Mrs. E. M. Joyce, Miss K. Abbott and subsequently Dr. Vance, and George Lombard. The well-heeled Bennett had enough funds to immediately purchase land he wanted on the plain of the Coquille River, ancestral home to the indigenous Coquille Tribes. “We thought it was just the very place for a town,” he recalled later. “And that is was only a question of time when thee would be a very thriving one there.” The highly educated Bennett had no problem figuring the shenanigans of capitalism. Having an aristocrat background, economic means, and two Bachelor’s Degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, and being a published author to boot ensured the South Coast of Oregon would be his oyster. He soon became a prominent and influential citizen of the area and used his insights on colonial implantations to advance his interests. The original residents of the region were called the “Coquille Indians.” In 1852 Henry Baldwin wound up shipwrecked on Coos Bay Bar and wandered into the region. His exploration led to the arrival of the first white settlers, who established the town site originally named Averill, which changed in 1873 with the arrival of George Bennett, his two grown sons, and George Sealey, who all came from Bandon, Ireland. They inspired the name change just one year later after they moved into the area. George Bennett invested in an enormous track of country in the land of his adoption. He bought Thompson Lowe’s US government’s claim and additional beachfront property and adjacent timberlands. On April 8, 1874, he presented a petition to judge Lowe in Empire City, the county seat, requesting that part of the Randolph precinct south of the Coquille River be made into a separate precinct for the convenience those settlers living there. The people voted to incorporate the surrounding areas including the town of “Averill” founded by the Averill family renamed “Bandon Beach” on the request of George Bennett, elected Justice of the Peace. “As we were from the old county where great importance is attached to the ceremony, we always read most of the solemnization of matrimony according to the ritual of the Church of England, and particularly that portion of it where the woman promises to obey, him, love, honor and keep him in sickness and health” (Bennett 1898). In 1889 Bennett and an engineer from the federal government who worked on the Jetty construction platted the new town “Bandon Beach” on the high ground near Coquille Point. He called the promontory Neptune’s point. He and an engineer from the federal government platted the new town that featured three principal streets called Bennett, Mary, and Matilda running north and south. Other streets east and west were called George, Helena, and Henry (Beckham 1997: 27). George Bennett cleared over 400 acres of land for grazing his animals. He moved to his oceanfront Estate and with like-minded entrepreneurs

148  Appendix influenced the US legislatures to provide $10,000 for harbor improvements to expand commerce. George Bennett’s two sons who accompanied him to Oregon also became prosperous. One became an eminent lawyer and the other a prominent journalist. It was in the summer of the year 1859 that the Twin Sisters sailed into Coquille. She was received all along the line with vociferous applause everyone living on the bank, together with wives and children cheered until hoarse. They all naturally looked upon her as the forerunner of a big and prosperous future. She was like the gate of a great canal that was now open for the first time to let in the floor… Hurrah! Now there was an outlet for their agricultural produce, their coal, iron, copper, platinum, and other minerals, and for an almost inexhaustible supply of the tallest and best firs, the largest most beautiful myrtle, and the choicest white cedar in the world. George Bennett, in his book on the History of Bandon, acknowledged that W. H. Averill and Judge Dyer owned the town site known as Averill, which would become Bandon Beach. In 1891 the citizens incorporated the area, including both towns that became known as Bandon because of George Bennett’s urging. He renamed the town of Averill to Bandon Beach, Oregon. As a result of his victory, the townspeople began to call him “Lord Bennett,” either as an honor or as a joke. Bennett’s two sons who immigrated with him became professional men. Joseph E. Bennett became a lawyer and banker in Marshfield, Oregon. The second son George A. Bennett became a newspaper editor in Marshfield. Alfred Bennett, George Bennett’s third son who remained in Bandon, Cork Ireland with his mother, became a Surgeon in the British army in Africa during the Boer War.

Bennett’s demise Bennett obituary appeared in the “Bandon Recorder” on October 18th, 1900, published in Bandon, Oregon, containing the heading of “Gone to Rest.” Apparently on Monday morning, October 15th, George Bennett left his home with the intention of walking into town, and shortly afterwards he was found lying dead in the middle of the road. He died of heart failure, according to the local newspaper. The people who operate the Bandon Museum were gracious in providing the information they put together for interested visitors: http://bandon historicalmuseum.org. The information contains a map of The Averill P ­ ioneer Cemetery where Bennett is buried along with a copy of a print photograph of him. He is attired in the style of a pokerfaced Anglo-Irish Protestant venture capitalist who felt at home lording it over others. Odd to discover that after his death George Bennett’s remains are buried in the “Averill Pioneer Cemetery,” a part of the original town of “Averill.” There is a restaurant overlooking Sunset Beach titled “‘Lord’ Bennett.”

Appendix  149 Before going to the Cemetery, we wondered what happened to the Protestant population in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland during the Irish War of Independence where George Bennett once held sway with others of his class. The Protestant population in Bandon, Ireland during that time were “Unionists” who suffered from Irish Republican Army (IRA) reprisals. Between 1911–1926, the non-Catholic population of Bandon, Ireland declined by 45.5%. The truth was that, as British intelligence officers recognized in the south, the Protestants and those who supported the government rarely gave much information because they had none to give. An exception to this was in the Bandon area where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information. Although the Intelligence Officer of the area was exceptionally experienced and although the troops were most active, it proved almost impossible to protect those brave men, many of whom were murdered while almost all the remainder suffered grave material loss. The IRA killings in the Bandon area were motivated by political and not sectarian considerations. Possibly military considerations, rather than political, would have been a more fitting way to describe the reason for the IRA response to those who informed. Castle Bernard, the seat of Lord Bandon, was burned down during the Irish War for Independence. In his History of Bandon, Oregon George Bennett shows or states any compassion for what happened to the decimated ­Bandon Tribes and their suffering at the hands of the US government who were determined to eradicate the Native Tribes if necessary down to one individual. After the death of George Bennett, Founder of Bandon Town, Oregon, the new kids on the block set about transforming Bandon from a sedate coastal town into a more lively place. George Bennett is credited with naming Bandon after his hometown in Ireland. Henry Baldwin was the first native of Bandon, Ireland to visit the Coquille River. And Baldwin, unlike George Bennett, at age eighty-two years old made a return visit to his hometown in Ireland. Obviously, conditions in his old hometown had not improved. Upon returning to Bandon, Oregon Baldwin advised, “To those thinking of or intending to return here, I will say as a friend, stay where you are.” He returned to his home on ­Bandon, Oregon. He is buried in the Averill Pioneer Cemetery (Bandon Western World, August 16, 2012 7:00AM.). The period between 1900–1936 is considered to be Bandon, Oregon’s halcyon days as a resort town. A current tourist brochure features an image of an attractive “Flapper” Girl ready for fun advertising Bandon as the “Playground the Pacific” where visitors to the Beach Town have the convenience of auto parks, beaches and beach, and beach amusement.

`Tis flammable George Bennett made another great contribution to the colonization of Oregon. He is credited as the Irishman who brought clippings of Gorse to

150  Appendix Oregon to remind him of the Gorse bushes that grew like hedges in areas around Bandon, in West Cork, Ireland. After Bandon got established under the hammer of George Bennett, he planted Gorse Hedges about areas of Bandon and the Coos Bay areas. The wild Golden-colored Gorse flourished and spread abundantly in its new environment. The plant Gorse contains oils that combust like a bomb when exposed to any flame or spark. The sight of bushed “Irish Fuzz” (Gorse) going up in flames lingers in the memory. Thomas McClintock recalled his childhood visit to Bandon Oregon in the early 1930s. He describes how the Gorse filled the spaces between the town’s scattered buildings and that during one vacation in Bandon, a fire started in the Gorse, which was rather frightening because of the intense heat and the flames which rose 100 feet into the air. Fortunately, on that occasion, the fire was eventually brought under control with no loss of property. Not so in 1936, when the Bandon Fire occurred. In 1936 the town’s abundant Gorse exploded into an inferno. A Bandon resident at the time, to a Coo’s Bay Times reporter: That Irish hedge was the worst thing-when the fire hit it straight across fro my house, the flames shout up high into the air. It was just as thought here had been gasoline poured on the fire…that stuff seemed just full of oil. Only a handful of structures in Bandon remained standing by the time the fire went out. Most of the town’s 1,800 residents managed to reach safety, ten died in the flames. Bennett’s Gorse burned down his dream city. Bandon Firemen had never faced a fire so hot as those flaming clumps of gorse. “They cursed the memory of Lord George Bennett. Had Bennett ever noticed the way poor Irish peasant women used brambles of Gorse as kindling to start a fire in the grate, he might have second thought about creating a small forest of Gorse around Bandon and Coos Bay. After The Great Bandon Fire of 1936, the townspeople rallied together to build a better Bandon, now called “Bandon-by-the-Sea.” It’s an ongoing lovely, seaside city luring thousands yearly. Irish Gorse (“obnoxious weed”) continues to thrive among the indigenous greenery in Southwest Oregon, bright as “Kerry gold Butter.” Current Tourist advertising names “Bandon Beach” “Bandon-By-the-Sea.”

The Averill Pioneer Cemetery The Averill Pioneer Cemetery is surrounded by suburbia. The small graveyard is a day patch of heather/green scrubland with some aged Cypress Trees growing hither and thither around the area. Most of the granite or marble tombstones are falling apart from age, being a century old. Lord George Bennett’s grave resides upwards at the top of a sloping hillside, commanding an entire view of the graveyard. He is interned in a very large and prominent marble crypt.

Appendix  151 The crypt is composed of two layers like a sandwich. The length of gravestone extends to cover his achievements enumerated in cursive script. The Motto, “With the help of God small things grow,” relates to the original phrase composed by the original English colonizers in Bandon, ­Ireland. A heraldic Bandon Crest is at the top of the grave. Bennett’s place of birth in Bandon, Cork, Ireland is also noted, as well as his degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Also noted on the grave is that he was the Founder of Bandon, Oregon. Henry Hewitt Baldwin, had he desired, could have claimed himself cofounder of Bandon, Oregon. Bennett’s 1869 History of Bandon, County Cork, Ireland is inscribed along with his in progress at the time of his death, “The History of Bandon, Oregon and Coos County.” The left side of the grave is aligned with a view of the beautiful Coquille River and onward towards the Pacific Ocean in the distance. We streaked our fingertips on the edge of his tomb flaking into talcum powder. Angeline Kearns Blain could not overlook the fact that she and Bennett had emigrated from beautiful Ireland to find a better life in America (Blain 2000, 2009). The famous afternoon fog from Pacific Ocean nearby began to settle over the Averill Pioneer Cemetery. I bid an adieu to George Bennett, battened down in his hatch for over a century. At the bottom of the hill, we paused at the grave of “Pioneer” (Baby) Button buried September 1905 and Angeline Kearns Blain cried. Bennett’s “The History of Bandon and the Principal Towns of West ­Riding of County Cork” (1869) was reissued in 2012, and a review of the book appears in the Irish Times (“An Irishman’s Diary,” 5 January 2012). And according to the writer, Bennett’s book “is arguably the best Irish local history book ever published.” Bennett’s history is a history of how the West of Ireland was won, a story played out in the 19th Century Oregon Territory, a story of the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of imperialism in ­Ireland-and America, which is to say it is undiluted, “Protestant triumphalism.” It was written in the heyday of British world power, a time when the WASP world view was becoming dominant-globally. As such the book is inevitable triumph list: “Look on our glorious achievements, ye Papists,” it says, “and despair.”

Bibliography Beckham, Dow. Bandon By-The-Sea: Hope and Perseverance in a Southwestern Oregon Town. Coos Bay, OR: Arago Books, Bandon Historical Society, 1997. Bennett, George. “Bandon and the Coquille River.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 28 & 29, no. 4 & 1 (Mar 1927): 311–57, 20–50. ———. “Bandon Beach.” In Pioneer History of Coos and Curry Counties, edited by Orville Dodge, 138–45. Salem, OR: Capital Printing, 1898. ———. History of Bandon. Cork, Ireland: Henry and Coghlan, Printers and Publishers. Google Books, 1862. Accessed 29 August 2013.

152  Appendix ———. The History of Bandon and the Other Principal Towns in the West Riding of Cork, Enlarged Edition. Cork, Ireland: Henry and Coghlan, Printers and Publishers, 1869. Google Books, 1862. Accessed 29 August 2013. Blain, Angeline Kearns. I Used to Be Irish: Leaving Ireland, Becoming American. Dublin, Ireland: A. & A. Farmar, 2009. ———. Stealing Sunlight: Growing up in Irishtown. Dublin, Ireland: A.& A. Farmar, 2000. Canny, Nicholas. “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America.” William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 4 (October 1973): 575–98. Evans, E. Estyn. Irish Folkways. New York: Routledge, 1988 [1957]. Foster, Roy. Modern Ireland: 1600–1972. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Group, 1988. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985. Peterson, Emile and Alfred Powers. A Century of Coos and Curry: A History of Southwest Oregon. Portland, OR: Binsfords & Mort, Publishers, Coos-Curry ­Pioneer and Historical Association, Coquille, 1952.

Index

9/11 see September 11, 2001 Abbeystrewery Cemetery 139–40 Abbott, K. 147 abstract morality 114 Abu Ghraib 71 Ackerman, Gary 73, 84–5, 91 “Act for Convicting, Discovering, and Repressing of Popish Recusants” 30 “Act for the Settling of Ireland” 30 Adrian IV (Pope) 135 Aeneid 6, 130 Afghanistan 46, 57, 62–3, 65, 69, 71, 74, 97–8, 127 Agamben, Giorgio 26, 54, 97–8 agent provocateur 96 Ahmed, Akbar 39–40 AirWars 61 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 6, 10–11, 92, 127 Al Qaeda 9, 42, 56–7, 62–3, 69, 71, 93–4, 98, 126 al-Zawahiri 93 America, God’s gift 32 America First orientation 66 American Enterprise Institute 90–1 American “exceptionalism” 32, 42, 100; see also state of exception American Heritage Dictionary (AHD)of the English Language 71–4, 123 American lives, saving 44, 103 American Presidency Project: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States 62 American Sociological Association 113, 118 American Sociological Review journal 91 Anderson, David 84 “Anger” 58 Annual Reviews of Sociology/Political Science 91

Anthropology of Native American people 38 anti-imperial tradition 39–47 Apocalypse Now 130 Arab/Israeli conflict 59 Arab Oil Embargo 102 Archbishop of Dublin 138 Arendt, Hannah 54, 75 Aristotle 26 arms exports recipients 45–6 “Arrangements for Transplantation Act of Satisfaction” 30 arts countertradition 130 Asia 55, 93–4, 120 Asia-Pacific wars 39–40 assassinations 98 “atrocity paradigm” 75 Auden 27 Augustus Caesar 23, 27 Auschwitz concentration camp 98 Australia 45 Averhill (town) 146, 147 Averill, W.H. 148 Averill Pioneer Cemetery 148, 149–51 “Axis of Evil” 13, 74 Bagram 98 Baldwin, Henry Hewitt 36, 138, 143–4, 147, 149, 151 Ballard, James 91 Baltimore Castle 35, 137, 143, 146 “banality of evil” 54, 75 Bandon Beach 147–8, 150 Bandon-by-the-Sea 150 Bandon (Oregon) 136–7, 145–6, 148; see also Bennett, George Barbadoes 36 Barkawi, Tarak 40–1 Barlow, Joel 33

154 Index “Battle Rock” 37 Beauvoir, Simone de 70–1, 114–15 Becker, Howard 94, 117–19 Beckham, Dow 36–8, 142–5, 147 Beecher, Fane 136–7 Beecher, Henry 136 Beecher, Phane 35, 136–7 Bennett, Alfred (third son) 148 Bennett, Francis 138 Bennett, Fred 145 Bennett, George: arrival in America 34–5, 144–8; background 11–12, 18–19, 25, 34–9, 135–6, 138–9; biopolitics 38–9; birth 138; children 36, 144–8; family remaining in Ireland 148; famine 139–40; friendship ties 143–8; Gorse flammable bushes 149–50; landed estates 138–9; marriage 138; Munster frenzy and half breeds 136–8; obituary and burial 148–51; political campaigning 145; presentation of self 144; resistance victimage ritual 37–8; seizure, Native American lands 32, 140–3; “settler colonialism” 34; voting place 146; see also imperial agency and power elite Bennett, George A. 36, 145–8 Bennett, Joseph 138 Bennett, Joseph E. 148 Bennett, Joseph W. 36, 145–8 Bennett, Thomas 137 Bennett Street 147 Bergen, Peter 93 Berlin, Isaiah 53, 84 Bernard, April 27 biblical references 68; see also God “Biden Offers Strong Support to Ukraine and Issues a Sharp Rebuke to Russia” 76 Bigelow, Kathryn 63, 71 bin Laden, Osama 7–8, 63, 69, 71, 97–8, 124–5 biopolitical discourse 26, 88, 91, 119 biopolitics-governmentality 30–1, 34 bioterrorism 56 Birth of a Nation 6, 123, 130 “black fever” 82, 140 blacklisting 98 Blain, Angeline Kearns 1–2, 35, 151 Blain, Michael 1, 3–5, 8, 11, 20, 35, 41, 54, 56, 62, 68, 71, 74, 82–5, 90, 94, 96, 100, 116, 120–2, 125, 129 Boer War 148

bombings 6, 10, 53–4, 66, 96, 114, 122, 127, 130 Booth, Kathleen (Bennett) 146 Born on the Fourth of July 130 Borradori, Giovanna 82 Boyle, Robert 27–9, 36 Boyns, David 82, 91 Bridewell River 137 British imperialism, break from 18, 32, 40 “Bureau of Indian Affairs” 34 Burke, Edmund 53, 84 Burke, Kenneth 7–8, 21, 56, 83, 124–5 Bush, George W. and administration 10, 12, 44, 46–7, 51, 56–7, 61–3, 65–7, 71, 74, 98, 103, 119, 127 Butler, Judith 97–8 Button, “Pioneer” (Baby) 151 Calder, Todd 74 California Gold Rush 33 Cambridge School 24 Canada 45 Canny, Nicholas P. 135–6 Capan, Ivica 59, 130 Card, Claudia 75 Carey, Daniel 27 Casey (First Colonel) 140 Casino Royale 97 Castells, Manuel 82 Castle Bernard 149 Castle Mahon 136–7 Catholicism 5, 27–9, 31, 136–7, 139–40 Charlemagne (Frankish king) 23 Charolais, Duke of 70 Chastain, Jessica 63 chemical warfare 10, 127, 130 Chenoweth, Erica 91, 93, 95–6, 120 Chinese cities, bombings of 54 Chomsky, Noam 4, 82, 114, 121 Christian “white” supremacists 92, 94 Churchill, Winston 13, 52, 73–4 “circulating reference” 97 Citizen’s celebration 145 “City of Baltimore” Schooner 146 civilians 7, 53, 58, 61, 72, 85, 123–4 Clarke, Jason 63 class dominance theory 12, 19, 42, 100 Clinton, Bill (President) 65, 97 Coast Reservation 38 Cohen Stephen 75 Cohn, Norman 71 Cold War 4, 12–13, 18–20, 41–2, 45, 47, 54–6, 64–5, 81, 83, 91–2, 100–1, 121

Index  155 Cole, Phillip 74–5 collateral damage 97–9 Collins, Randall 8, 52, 56, 69, 91, 124 colonization of North America, 1800s 26, 31–4 “Commission to Survey Six Ulster Counties” 26 “Committee on the Present Danger” 47 communism 55, 65, 83 concentration camps 54, 98; see also Holocaust; specific camp Connecticut Wits 33 consuming, essential activity 98 Cook, D. 92 Cooper, Helen 69 Coos Bay 143–5, 147, 150 Coos Bay Bar 147 Coo’s Bay Times reporter 150 “Coos Indian Tribe” 143 Coppola, Francis Ford 130 “Coquille Indian Tribe” 143, 147 Coquille River 36–8, 144, 147 corporate community 100–1 Cosmopolis 97 cost of war 45, 95 Council on Foreign Relations 42–3, 48, 101 counterinsurgency (COIN) 10, 14, 102, 113, 127 Counterinsurgency (Field Manual) 102 counterterrorism 13, 76, 82 countertradition 130 Cox, Amanda 45 Cox, Ronald W. 45–7, 83, 121 Crawford, Neta 45 Crenshaw, Martha 82, 91 Crimea 76 Criminology journals 90 Cromwell, Oliver 25, 29–31, 36 “Cromwellian Ireland” 25 Cuba 98 Cummings, Nicholas 139 Curry, Goerge 37 Cuzzort, Raymond 56, 83 Danner, Mark 71 Darnton, Robert 70 Death, personification of 68 death camps 54 see also Holocaust; specific camp Deflem, Mathieu 91, 96 De Goede, Marieke 11, 83, 96–8 de la Calle, Luis 85, 91 Delillo, Don 97

Democratic Party 66 Department of Defense (DOD) 3, 65, 101 Department of Homeland Security 85 “De-Radicalization Movement” 95 Desmond, Earl of 136 deviance 116–19 Dick, Philip K. 97 Diderot, Denis 5, 122, 129 Disasters of War 130 Disciplining Terrorism 98 Dixit, Priya 83 Doctor Strangelove 130 Domhoff, G. William 4, 5, 7, 12, 15, 19, 40–1, 43, 83, 91, 101, 114, 121–2, 124, 129 donations 98, 143, 145–6 double standard of terror 126 Douglass, William 82 Dowd, Anne-Maree see Graham, Phil “Down Survey” 26, 30–1 “dregs of society” 144 Dreyfus, Hubert 21 Drogheda 29, 36 Drohid-Mahon 137 drones 40, 59–60, 66, 69, 76, 98, 120, 130 Drones in Paradise: An Everyday Apocalypse 59, 130 Dugan, Laura 85, 91, 93, 95–6, 120 Duncan, Hugh D. 7–8, 56, 83, 125, 127 Dundalk 36 Dunmire, Patricia L. 45–6 Durkheim, Emile 85, 116–17 Dwight, Timothy 33 Dyer (Judge) 148 “Eagle” newspaper 139 ecclesiastical Commissioners 138 Edelman, Murray 83 Edgerton, Joel 63 Egypt 45 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil 54 elites see power elites Elizabeth I (Queen) 26–7, 136–7, 144 Elkins, Caroline 18, 84 Ellis, James 147 Ellsberg, Daniel 51 Empire: emergence, U.S. 64; “Great Game” of power 13; of Liberty 64, 76; modern modes of sovereignty 44, 103; resistance 84 Empire 100 Enders, Walter 92

156 Index English colonization of Ireland 26–31 Enlightment theories and philosophy 8, 14, 112, 114, 121–2, 125 Erjavec, Karmen 100 ethics of truth: background 9, 14, 112–20; ethic of truth 126–31; power/ knowledge dynamic 120–3; victimage ritual 123–6 “ethnic cleansing” 29 ethnocentricity 119 Eubank, William Lee 93 Evans, E. Estyn 138 “evil” 13, 51–76; see also good against evil evil-skeptics/evil-revivalists 74 exclusionary practices 98 experts 13, 43, 47, 101 Faerie Queen, The 6, 27, 130 Fahey, Susan 85, 120 Failure of Britain’s Military Strategy in Palestine, The 101 Fair, C. Christine 92 “fallen warriors” 63 “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid” 27 famine 139–40 Famine Pits 139–40 Fanon, Frantz 71, 84, 90 Farnen, Russell F. 82 Federal Bureau of Investigation 73, 84–5 finances, freezing 98 First Dragoons 140 “first responders,” 9/11 63 Fishman, Shira 55, 82, 90 Fleurant, Aude 45 Folsom Prison 94 Fort Orford 144 Foster, R.F. 25–30, 137, 140 Foucault, Michel 3, 21, 44, 67–8, 82, 85, 94, 96–7, 102–3, 112 “Fourth of July” celebrations 40 France 45 freedom, enemies of 1, 44, 51, 70, 103 freezing finances 98 French Revolution 13, 52–4, 68, 70, 72–3, 83 Freudian concepts 71 F-SA 98 Gandhi, Mahatma 93 Garland, David 118 GATE-Israel dataset 95 gender 89, 92

Geneva Convention 71 genocide 4, 18, 29, 35, 37–9, 59, 61, 75, 121, 129; see also mass extermination and massacres George, Jim 42, 96, 100 George Street 147 Georgetown University 91 “German terror” 64 Germany 45, 73 Geuter, Ulfried 90 Giddens, Anthony 2, 4, 6, 52, 82, 115, 121 Giner, Oscar 83 Girard, Rene 4–5, 121 Global Terrorism Database 120 Global War on Terror (GWT) 20, 44, 53, 56, 61–2, 68, 102, 119 “Gloriana, Queen of Fairy Land” 27 Go, Julian 18, 26, 32–3, 41, 44, 100, 102 God 59, 68, 74 Godwin, Jeff 82–3 gold discovery 141 good against evil 8, 20, 32, 59–67 Goode, Erich 116–17, 119 Gore, Jim 141 Gorse flammable bushes 149–50 Gorski, Philip 91 Goya 130 Graham, Phil 100 Grand Ronde Reservation 38 Grant, Michael 27 “Great Awakening” 64 Great Bandon Fire (1936) 150 “Great Hunger” 140 “The Great Irish Famine” 140 Great Terror, The 13, 52, 54, 70, 72–3, 114, 116 Greimas Square approach 57–8 Grenfille, Sir Bernard 137 Grover, Lafayette 145 Guantanámo Bay 98 Guernica 130 guilt and redemption 56–9 Gulags (Soviet) 54 Gupta, D. K. 92 Gusfield, Joseph 117 Hachey, Thomas 53 Hacking, Ian 85 Haddad, Simon 92 “Half Breeds” 141 Halkides, Mihalis 82 Hamilton, Edith 27 Hamm, Mark S. 3, 84, 93–5

Index  157 Handler, Jeffrey S. 93 Hardt, Michael 41–2, 44, 81, 100, 102 Harrison, Ann Scott 138 Haselby, Sam 31, 33 Helena Street 147 Hell 8, 53, 59, 84, 125 Henry, King 135 Henry, P. J. 92 Henry Street 147 Henry VII, King 26 Herman, Edward 82 Herszenhorm, David 76 Hieronymus Bosch 500 59 Higgins, Andrew 75–6 hijackings 98 Hilter, Adolph 55, 74 Hiroshima 10, 127, 130 History of Bandon 138, 148, 151 “History of Bandon and the Principal Towns of West Riding of County Cork, The” 151 History of Modern Ireland 1600–1972 140 Hitler, Adolph 27, 55, 74, 76, 93 Hobbes 70 Hobbs, Thomas 10, 30 Hoffman, Bruce 9, 91, 93, 101–2 “Holocaust” 13, 52, 54, 74–6, 127, 130, 140 Holy Land 59 “Holy Terror” 92 Homer 6, 27, 122, 130 Horowitz, Irving Louis 121 Hudson Bay Company 37 Human Security Research Project 85 Humphreys, David 33 Hunt, Lynn 53, 84 Hussein, Saddam 74

ritual 28–30, 33–4, 37–8; sovereign biopower 26, 32–3; war on terror 39–47; see also Bennett, George Indian Wars 20, 32, 37, 83 indigenous peoples 4, 10, 25, 29–30, 35–9, 53, 121, 127, 130; see also Ireland; Native Americans Inside Terrorism 101 insurgency 102 International Committee of the Red Cross 71 investing, essential activity 98 Iran 44–5, 66–7, 102 Iraq 10, 45–6, 57, 61–3, 65–6, 71, 74, 85, 94, 97–8, 102, 127 Ireland 11–12, 18, 20, 22–36, 39, 53, 74, 84, 135–51; see also indigenous peoples “Irish Folk Ways” 138 “Irish Fuzz” (Gorse) 150 “Irishman’s Diary, An” 151 “Irish Problem” 137–8 Irish Rebellion, The 29 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 149 Irish Times 151 Islamic groups 86–9 Islamic revolution 102 Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) 9, 13, 57, 61, 66, 126 Islamic terrorists 13 Islamist-inspired terrorists 65 Islamofascists 56 Israel 45 Israeli Intelligence 85 Israeli/Palestinian conflict 102 “Is the Sociology of Deviance Still Relevant?” 116–17 Italy 45 Ivie, Robert 7, 83

“Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America, The” 135 Iliad 6, 27, 130 immigrants linked to terrorism 67 imperial agency and power elite: background 11–12; base of 10–103; Bennett, George 34–9; biopolitics 38–9; biopolitics-governmentality 30–1, 34; colonization of North America, 1800s 31–4; English colonization of Ireland 25–31; epic mythologies 27–8; imperial background 20–5; overview 18–20; power elite 39–47; resistance victimage

Jackson, Andrew 32–3 Jacksonian democracy 64 James Bond films 97 James I (King) 26, 30 Jameson, Fredric 58 Japan 40, 54, 73 Jefferson, Thomas 84 Jenkins, Brian Michael 92 Jesus Christ 59 Jews 57, 59, 83, 92 jihadist groups 12–13, 52, 81, 88, 93 Joas, Hans 1, 2, 4, 52, 121 Johnson, Chalmers 40 Johnson, L. C. 92

158 Index Joyce, F.M. 147 judges 114 Judt, Tony 54 Julius Caesar 23

low intensity conflicts (LIC) 92 Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, The 75 Lyon, David 96

Kakel III, Carroll 26, 32–3 Karber, Phillip A. 82 Keenan, Thomas see Graham, Phil Kennedy administration 51, 65 Kent State University 40 Kerry, John (Senator) 97 Khashan, Hilal 92 “Kiev Protesters Set Square Ablaze to Thwart Police” 75 Kim, Phillip H. 93 Kimmel, M. 92 King, Edith 56 Klamath River 37 Knöbl, Wolfgang 1, 52 knowledge see power/knowledge dynamic Kramer, Andrew 75 Kremlinologists 91 Kruglanski, Arie W. 55, 82, 90 Kubrick, Stanley 130

Machiavelli 10, 127 Madley, Benjamin 38 Maistre, Joseph de 8, 54, 84, 125 Mandela, Nelson 93 Manichean struggle 59–67 Mansour (Taliban leader) 69 marriage 31, 138 Martin, L. John 82 Marx, Karl and Marxism 2, 26, 31 Mary Street 147 Masonic Lodge 138, 143 mass extermination and massacres 10, 25, 29–30, 35–6, 38, 40, 127, 130; see also genocide Mathur, Shubh 96 Matilda Street 147 Matthewman, Steve 1, 4 Mayflower 35 McCarty (JP), C. 146 McCormick, Gordon 25–6, 29–31, 91 McCoy, Alfred W. 90 McKee, Redick 38 Meaney, Thomas 82 mediation 97 Middle East region and organizations 10, 59, 92–3, 102 Milgram, Stanley 75 military purposes 72 military violence, lack of interest in 14–15 Miller, Bowman H. 92–3 Miller, Kerby A. 139–40, 144 Miller, Reuben 82, 90–1 Mills, C. Wright 4, 6–8, 10, 12, 15, 19, 40–1, 114, 121, 124, 126 “Minority Report, The” 97 modern exile 98 modern modes, sovereignty 44, 103 moral judgment 74 Morgan, Kathryn D. 93 Morrill, John 29 Mundra, K. 92 Munster, Ireland 136–8, 144 Muslims 86–9 mythologies 6, 20, 24, 27–8, 32, 40, 74–5, 123, 130

labeling theory 116–19 Laffey, Mark 40–1 LaFree, Gary 73, 84–5, 91, 120 Lambert, Alan J. et al. 90 Land League 146 “Land War” 146 Last Judgement a Triptych 59 Latin American organizations 92–3 Latour, Bruno 97 Lauderdale, Diane 91 Lazreg, Marnia 84 Lemay, Curtis (General) 51 Lentzos, Filippa 96 Lester, David 55, 90, 92 Levin, S. 92 Lewis and Clark expedition 34 Lincoln (Captain) 144 Lindsay, Mark 55, 90, 92 “Lockean liberalism” 43, 101 Lombard, George 147 Lombardi, Mark 97 Long, Chris 145 Lorber, J. 92 Lowe, Thomas 145 Lowe, Thompson 36, 143, 147 Lowell, Robert 27 Lower Coquille Indians 38

Nagasaki 10, 127, 130 Nagengast, Carole 91

Index  159 narcoterrorism 56 Nas-o-Mah Band peoples 37–8 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism (START) 120 nationalism 40 National Security Agency (NSA) 3, 15, 65, 85, 114, 120, 131 National Security Council Report 47 Native Americans: biopolitics 38; detest for 143; earliest encounters with 136; genocide of 35; land seizure 140–4; power dynamics 39; suffering from U.S. government 149; view toward 32–4; see also indigenous peoples NATO involvement 45, 72, 75 Nazi regime: campaign 56, 83; death camps 54; fascist terror 65; genocide 59; Germany 91; imperialism 40; imperial project 33; individuals 27, 83; political rituals 57; terror 13, 52, 114 negative terrorism 53, 84 Negri, Antonio 41–2, 44, 81, 100, 102 neocon discourse 44–5, 47 Neptune’s point 147 Ness, C.D. 92 New Bandon 144–5 New England 33–5 New Folsom Prison 94 New York Times 69, 75–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 5, 21, 67, 74, 112, 122, 129 Nine Years War 28 non-state actors 85 North America, colonization of 26, 31–4 North Korea 85 Nuce, Sir William 137 nuclear terrorism 76 numbers as measurement 31 Obama, Barach and administration 12, 44, 51, 54, 57, 65–9, 103 Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View 75 Odyssey 27 Oksala, Johanna 44, 103 O’Mahon’s Bridge 137 O’Malley, Pat 96 Oots, Kent Layne 90 “Operation Iraqi Freedom” 98, 102 Oppenheimer, Robert 3, 112 Ord, E.O.C. 141–2 Oregon Act 33

“Others” 2, 10, 21, 25, 33, 40, 52, 57, 59, 66, 76, 97, 113, 115–16, 141 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 21–4, 53, 68, 73, 84 Pakistan 42, 69, 93 Palestinian/Israeli conflict 102 Palestinian resistance 95–6 Palmer (Port Orford Superintendent) 142 Parenti, Michael 15 Parker, Judah (Captain) 145 Parnell, Charles Steward 146 Parrish, Josiah L. 37–8 passional syntagm 58–9 Pearl Harbor 54, 57 Pedersen, Susan 18 Pentagon involvement 12, 19, 72 Perry, Sir William 137–8 personification of evil 55 Peterson, Emile 144 Petraeus, David H. 10, 127 Petty, William 26, 30–1 Pfohl, Stephen 117, 119 Philippines 40 Picasso, Pablo 130 Pim, Jonathan 139 Pinker, Steven 71 Pinkerton 85 “Plantation: Theory and Practice” 25 Plantation of James I Foster 26 Plantation of Munster 26–8, 32, 35, 136, 144 Plantation of Ulster 25–6, 28, 30, 32 “Playground of the Pacific” 149 “The Pleasures of Imperialism” 52 Plowden, F. 53 police mentality 100 policy-planning network 43–4, 100–1 Political Anatomy of Ireland 31 “political arithmetic” 30 Political Arithmetick 31 political elite 11, 20, 32–3, 39, 51, 53, 84, 96, 98 Political Science Review journal 91 political victimage ritual (PVR) 7, 10, 13, 18–20, 81–3, 120, 123; background 12–13, 47, 51–6; changing definitions of terrorism 71–5; evilification dangers 75–6; genealogy of terror-evil 67–8; good against evil 59–67; guilt and redemption 56–9; sadism and pleasures of 68–71 Political Violence and Terrorism 90

160 Index Popham, Tom 147 population 72 Portland 146 Port Orford 144 positive terrorism 53 positivism 2, 8, 125 Post, Jerrold 82, 90 postmodern Empire 41, 100 postrevolutionary discourse 68 Powell, Robert 91 power elites 8, 10, 39–47, 125 power/knowledge dynamic 3–6, 52, 120–3 Powers, Alfred 144 Pratto, F. 92 preemptive war 45–6, 97 ‘pretensions of the judge’ 114 Primerose 35 prisons and prisoners 3, 68, 71, 75, 93–5, 98, 115, 142 Project for a New American Century 46–7 “Protestant Ascendency” 27, 30–1, 35 Protestantism 20, 23–4, 26–36, 136–7, 140, 148–9, 151 “protestant triumphalism” 35 Psathas, George 67 publication, authority as expert 91 Putin, Vladimir 75–6 Quakers 139–40 Rabinow, Paul 21, 85 “race” 33, 88, 115, 121 Rai, Amit S. 96 Raleigh, Sir Walter 137 RAND Corporation 44, 85, 90, 101–2 Randolph precinct 37 rational strategic actors 98, 99 recycling, personification as a reincarnation 55 “Red Cross Knight” 27 redemption and guilt 56–9 refugees 10, 61, 67, 127, 130, 142 “Reign of Terror” 68, 72 Reinares, Fernando 93 Reiter, Dan 92 religious duplicity 140 religious extremism 82 “Remarks by the President in Commencement Address to the United States Air Force Academy” 68–9 “Remarks to the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony, West Point, New York” 54–5

“reservations” 29, 34, 37–8, 142 resistance victimage ritual 28–30, 33–4, 37–8 “Retrieving the Imperial” 40 Richardson, Laurel 67 Riley, Alexander 58 Robespierre, Maximilien 53–4, 68, 84 Rogin, Michael 83 Rogue River Indian wars 37 “rollback policy” 47 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (President) 64–5, 73, 84 Roosevelt, Teddy (President) 64–5 Rose, Edward 67 Rose, Nikolas 82, 85 Ross, Jeffrey Ian 82, 90 Roth, Andrew 76 Rudin, Mark 128 Russell, Charles A. 92–3 Russia 64, 75–6 Sade, Marquis de 5, 70–1, 114–15, 122, 129 sadism 51–76 Said, Edward 12, 52, 81, 93, 99 Saint-Amand, Pierre 4, 52, 71, 82, 112, 114, 121 Sánchez-Cuenca, Ignacio 85, 91 Saudi Arabia 45 Savage Warfare in the American Mythology of the New Frontier 6, 122, 130 scapegoat 20, 32, 52–3, 56–7, 63, 69, 75, 82–4, 119 Schinkel, Willem 82 Schlesinger, James R. 71 Schwartz, E.A. 37–8 scorched earth tatics 29 Scott, Peter Dale 47 Sealy, George 146–7 Sealy, G.H. 145 “Secondary Epic” 27 September 11, 2001 45–7, 56, 61, 63, 75, 86–90, 97–8 “serial contextualism” 24 Sessions, Jeff (Attorney General) 67 “Settlement Act for the Assuming, Confirming and Settling of lands and Estates in Ireland” 30 “settler colonialism” 7, 11, 18, 25, 28, 34, 37, 39, 124 Shepherd, Bryan 92 “The Shield of Achilles” 27 Shine, R.E. 147 “shock and awe” campaigns 65 Shoup, Lawrence H. 42–3

Index  161 Sidanius, J. 92 Siglin, J.M. 145 Siletz Reservation 38, 142 Simpson, Christopher 6 Skibbereen 139 Slatter, James Harvey 145 Slotkin, Richard 20, 32, 83 Smith, Brent L 93 Smith, Phillip 10–11, 58, 127 Smith Diary 140 Snyder, Timothy 75 social life 1, 5, 26, 41, 82, 85, 100, 117, 130 social sciences training 101 social upper class 12, 19, 42–3, 100–1 sociocultural analysis factors 102 “sociological theorizing” 113 Sociological Theory 91 sociologists, disengagement from facts 9–10 Sociology Abstracts index 99 “Solidarity Eludes Ukraine Separatist Groups as Presidential Election Nears” 76 Somalia 69, 93 South Asia 39, 93 “sovereign agency” 98 sovereign biopower 26, 32–3 sovereignty, modern modes 44, 103 Soviet Union and empire 40–1, 47, 51, 54, 64–5, 91 “Spectacle of the Scaffold, The” 68 speculative security 11, 96–7 Spenser, Edmund 6, 25, 27, 130 Spielberg, Steven 97 Spilerman, Seymour 91 Stalinism 54–5, 91 Stampnitzky, Lisa 98–9 Star Wars 6, 123, 130 “state actor” concept 52, 73, 82, 85, 95, 100, 123 state of exception 47; see also American “exceptionalism” State of the Union (SOU) reports 65 state-sponsored violence 76 Stecklov, Guy 91 Steiner, George 59 Stern, Fritz 90 Stiglitz, Joseph 45 Stockholm International Institute of Peace Research (SIPRI) 45 Stone, Oliver 130 Storr, Anthony 71, 122 Strategic Air Command 51

Strenski, Ivan 92 Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 90–1 Stump, Jacog 83 Su, Xuejuan 92 suicide bombers 13, 55, 64, 81, 85, 89, 92, 96, 116 Suicide, Le 85, 116 Sunset Beach 148 supernatural association of evil 74 supremacists 92, 94 Surf newspaper 146 Swift 70 syntagmatic analysis 58–9 Syria 61, 85, 127 Taliban prisoners 71 Teller, Edward 3, 112 Temple, Sir John 29 terror: changes in definition 71–3; defined 68; double standard 126; genealogy of terror-evil 67; see also good against evil terrorism: changes in definition 71–3; definition issues 85; financing 97; journal type 88; social/political phenomena 76; vs. political violence 86 Terrorism 91 Terrorism: An International Journal 90 terrorism, biopolitics of: background 9, 13, 47, 81–3; critical discourses 96–9; Empire, power elite, and WoT 100–3; Imperial background 19–20; individualizing and totalizing courses 90–3; limits of biopolitics 93–6; policy-planning network 43–4; power/ PVR/knowledge 83–4; social sciences discourses 84–90 terrorismo (Italian; Spanish) 73 Terrorismus (German) 73 think tanks 42, 44–6, 90, 101 Tiedemann, Katherine 93 Tilly, Charles 82, 91–2 Tiryakian, Edward 2, 5, 52 Tonkin, Humphrey 27 “tool” view 55 torture 7–8, 12, 14, 29, 44, 52–3, 59, 71, 74–6, 82, 98, 103, 113, 118, 124–5 transnational kinship 98 Trinity College 138 Truball, John 33 Truman (President) 64–5, 73 Trump, Donald and administration 12, 51, 65–6

162 Index Tuastad, Dag 93 Turchynov, Oleksandr V. 75–6 Turk, Austin 82, 91 Turkey 45 Türkmen-Dervisoglu, Güulay 91 Turshen, M. 92 Tveskov, Mark 38–9 Twin Sisters 148 typhus 140 Ukraine 55, 75–6 “Ukraine Forces Escalate Attacks Against Protestors” 75 United Kingdom (UK) 45, 95 United States (US): global “superpower” 40; indispensable nation 55; killing Native Americana 141; making war against 61; sadism, pleasures of PVR 68 University of Maryland 91 unmarried Irish girls 138 “U.S. Drone Attacks Targets Taliban Leader” 69 Vance (Dr.) 147 Veracini, Lorenzo 18 victimage ritual (VR) 2–15, 18–20, 24–5, 28–9, 33–7, 39, 47, 51–76, 81–4, 98, 112, 114, 116, 119–27, 129, 131 Viet Cong terror 65 Vietnam 9, 40, 42, 44, 47, 102, 126, 130 View of the Present State of Ireland, A 25 vilification 13, 28, 52, 57, 62, 66, 75–6, 85, 124 Virgil 6, 27, 130 Virginia 24, 30, 33–4 Volcic, Zala 100 Wade, Sara Jackson 92 Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica 56, 83 Wallerstein, Immanuel 2, 5, 54, 82, 116, 129 walls around towns 19, 34–5, 137 War colleges/universities 101 warfare vs. terror 76 war on terrorism: study of 76; subtle contrast 72 war on terror (WoT): articles about 86–90; background 1, 98–9, 102; biopolitics of terrorism 81; declaration of 98; impact on field of knowledge

76–7; imperial agency and power elite 39–47; results 76; subtle contrast 72; terrorism financing 97 wars: Asia-Pacific wars 39–40; authorizing new 47; Boer War 148; crimes by US/alllies 9; Indian Wars 20, 32, 37, 83; lack of interest 14–15; “nationalism” 40; War of 1812 33; War of Independence 32, 40; War with Britain 40; War with Mexico 40 WASP world view 151 Webber, Richard 139 Weber, Max 9, 25, 126 Weber, Ralph 53 Weberian tradition 7, 10, 124, 127 Webster, Noah 33 Weinberg, Leonard 93 Weiss, Peter 71 Welch, Michael 96 Weldes, Jutta 40 West, Brad 1, 4, 115 Western World newspaper 146; see also Bandon Western World newspaper West European organizations 92–3 Wexford massacre 29 Whisky Run 37 Whitehouse Weekly Addresses 61–2, 65–7 “white” plantation 34 Wiegele, Thomas C. 90 Williams, Joseph 147 Williams, William Appleman 40 Willinsky, John 22 Wilson (President) 64 Winchester, Simon 22 Witaker, John 145 Wohlstetter, Albert 47 Wolfowitz, Paul 47 “world police” 72, 116 World Trade Center 63, 65 World War I 10, 64, 130 World War II 10, 57, 73, 83, 101, 114 Yakima Wars 37 Yang, Bijou 55, 90, 92 Yanukovych, Victor F. 75 Yemen 65–6, 69, 93 Yuhudo, Nachman Ben-119 Zero Dark Thirty 63, 71 Zimbardo, Philip 75 Zulaika, Joseba 82