The afterlife of fascism

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 105, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 71-93

  Singh, Nikhil ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 50949102463     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-105-1-71     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. Michael Ignatieff, "The Burden," New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 41.
2. John O'Sullivan quoted in Tomas Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 193.
3. Woodrow Wilson is quoted in Mary Renda, Taking Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002);
4. Johnson is quoted in Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 119.
5. Andrew Jackson quoted in Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 123.
6. Quoted in Renato Redentor Constantino, "The Shocking (and Relevant) Truth about Our Occupation of the Philippines," February 4, 2004, available online at http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/3675.html.
7. See also Reynaldo Illeto, "The Philippine-American War: Friendship and Forgetting," in Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999, ed. Angel Shaw and Lewis Francia (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 2-21.
8. The idea of the "waiting-room of history" is from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
9. Dexter Filkins, "Tough New Tactics by US Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns," New York Times, December 7, 2003.
10. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004).
11. Étienne Balibar, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), 23;
12. see also Seymour Hersh, "Chain of Command," New Yorker, May 17, 2004, 38-43;
13. Emram Qureshi, "Misreading the Arab Mind," Boston Globe, May 30, 2004;
14. Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," Atlantic Monthly, September 1990;
15. Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Hatherleigh Press, 2002).
16. This conflation is three decades in the making. See Melani McCalister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
17. Thomas Friedman, "Because We Could," New York Times, June 4, 2003.
18. George W. Bush, inaugural address quoted in New York Times, January 6, 2005.
19. David Rose, "The Real Truth about Camp Delta" and "The Rule of Violence," London Observer, October 3, 2004;
20. James Meek, "The People That Law Forgot," The Guardian, December 3, 2003;
21. Jonathan Steele, "Bush Is Now Thinking of Building Jails Abroad to Hold Suspects for Life," Guardian, January 14, 2005.
22. Quoted in Tom Englehardt, "American Gothic: Self-Portrait with Shackles for the Year 2005," www.tomdispatch.com (accessed February 12, 2005).
23. Lisa Hajjar, paper presented at annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Atlanta, Ga., November 13, 2004. The Tom Englehardt quote is from "George Orwell Meet Franz Kafka, Part 2," June 15, 2004, www.tomdispatch.com. Documented examples of U.S. torture practices in the so-called global war on terror include: being chained in so-called stress positions; being left in extreme cold or hot; being deprived of sleep and subjected to bright lights and loud music; having fingernails torn out; being burned with lit cigarettes; partial strangulation; death threats; mock drowning or "waterboarding"; being hooded, beaten, and kicked; being subjected to electric shocks or to simulated acts of sexual assault and humiliation. Hajjar notes that despite their distaste for post-World War II international law, British and Israeli precedents for using torture in Northern Ireland and the occupied territories became useful in the absence of U.S. case law on the subject. Even here, they cherry-picked supporting evidence, ignoring, for example, that Britain as early as 1977 renounced as inhumane various torture techniques, including beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, and sexual abuse. See Lisa Hajjar, "In the Penal Colony," The Nation, February 7, 2005, 23-26.
24. Englehardt, "George Orwell Meet Franz Kafka."
25. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).
26. It was the urgency for so-called actionable intelligence on the growing insurgency in Iraq that led to the transfer of General Geoffrey Miller from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, and the formal introduction of the aggressive torture regime into the Iraq war. See Hersh, "Chain of Command."
27. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
28. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 183.
29. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997), 254.
30. I am indebted here to Joan Dayan's brilliant essay "Cruel and Unusual: The End of the Eighth Amendment," Boston Review, October/November 2004, www.bostonreview.net/BR29.5/Dayan.html (accessed January 15, 2005).
31. Since Robert Byrd's courageous stand against the Iraq War, invoking Goering's famous declaration of how easy it was to manipulate masses into supporting war, many have noted the Bush administration's fascist tendencies. Sheldon Wolin, for example, describes the Bush regime as a form of "inverted fascism." See Sheldon Wolin, "A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy," Newsday, July 18, 2003.
32. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004);
33. Tom Friedman, "Divided We Stand," New York Times, January 23, 2005;
34. Michael Ignatieff, "Iraqis Fight a Lonely Battle for Democracy," London Observer, January 30, 2005.
35. John Stuart Mill, "A Few Words on Non-intervention" (1859), in Essays on Politics and Culture (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 377.
36. John Gaddis, Security. Surprise, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 16,107.
37. Robert Kaplan, "Supremacy by Stealth," Atlantic Monthly, July 2003.
38. Numbers of Philippine dead have been estimated from 100,000 to 1 million. See Oscar Camponanes, "Body Count: The War and Its Consequences," in Shaw and Francia, Vestiges of War, i}8.
39. Michael Rogin, "Liberal Society and the Indian Question," in Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
40. Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Also see Agamben, Homo Sacer, 10.
41. Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-1962, ed. Christopher C. De Santis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
42. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003), 2. This was acutely noted during and after World War II by a wide range of black radicals, and never more eloquently than by Aimé Césaire. See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002); see also Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
43. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 120.
44. Quoted in Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: Free Press, 1996), 157.
45. Hannah Arendt, "New Preface to Part II" (1967), The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), xviii.
46. Michael Burawoy, "For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi," Politics and Society 31.2 (June 2003): 240.
47. Arendt, "New Preface to Part II," 183.
48. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 41.
49. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 123-25.
50. Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960);
51. Westmoreland is quoted in Peter Davis, director, Hearts and Minds (1974);
52. LeMay is quoted in Young, The Vietnam Wars, 113.
53. See Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 104-5.
54. I am broadly indebted to Joan Dayan for this argument. See Dayan, "Cruel and Unusual," 3. I am also indebted to Kim Gilmore's brilliant "States of Incarceration: Prisoner's Rights and U.S. Prison Expansion after WWII" (PhD diss., New York University, 2005).
55. Dayan, "Cruel and Unusual," 6.
56. Loīc Wacquant, "Slavery to Mass Incarceration," New Left Review, January/February 2002, 41-60.
57. Jacques Rancière, "Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man," South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2-3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 306. The major still-unrealized ambition of proponents of the anti-politics of rights is the overturning of a decision that was coterminus with Furman, namely Roe v. Wade (1973). The effort to advance the personhood of the fetus almost perfectly mirrors the effort to strip rights from actually existing political subjects. For what is sought is the transmutation of an individual woman's private rights to bodily integrity into sovereign power over life before birth. Although anti-abortion discourse often appropriates the rhetoric of abolitionism, it actually represents an effort to extend the frontiers of the biopolitical state, or to further the identification of sovereign power with life itself. This is one reason why the contradiction between opposition to abortion and the defense of capital punishment rarely troubles right-wing judicial activists. The issue is not so much life and death, but whose life, whose death, and whose power of decision.
58. quoting from Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (1793).
59. Thomas Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2004).
60. One of the many sources for the Kristol quote is Michael Kinsey, "The Evolution of the Neocons," April 17, 2005, www.latimes.com.
61. Carl Schmitt, "Definition of Sovereignty," in Political Theology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5, 11, 13;
62. Schmitt, "Preface to the Second Edition (1926): On the Contradiction between Parliamentarianism and Democracy," in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 12.
63. Quoted in Traverse The Political Origins of Nazi Violence, 140, 70.
64. Gaddis, Security, Surprise, and the American Experience, 4.
65. Seymour Hersh, "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret," New Yorker, 24-31 January 2005, 40.
66. Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 93.
67. "Moment of opportunity" is the Bush administration's own language. See The National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: White House, 2002), available from the White House.