The war on terror was supposed to sign the dawn of a new world era. What does its “New-World” mythology rest upon, and how do we, the people, come to accept fear as the principle of political power?
| This post is part of a reading series on Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin. To quickly access all chapters, please click here. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the author’s ideas. |
The myth of a “new world” has been widely used in the United States, seen as the promise of a fresh beginning on a vast land open to a nation of pioneers. An image noticeably oblivious that there were already several old nations occupying the land. Operating as the implicit justification of a willful act of power, the new-world mythology has obliterated natives from the collective consciousness of European immigrants and their descendants. Today, the same type of self-serving certainty is superimposed not on unchartered lands but the world at large by a “new world order” and its subsequent “war on terror.” The same old phantasm is at play.
Sheldon Wolin argues that the most complete U.S. official statement of what he calls “will-to-power” was, in recent history, the National Security Strategy of the United States issued in 2002. “In that document, the administration declared its intention to reshape the current world and define the new one. ‘In the new world we have entered,’ it declared grandly, ‘the only path to safety is the path of action.'”1 Declaring the emergence of a new world is also declaring the disappearance of an old one, along with the necessity of discarding its old ways and constraints in the use of power. This self-legitimizing drive was so powerful in the case of the “new world order” that Condoleezza Rice could declare “If they [Iraq and North Korea] do acquire WMD [weapons of mass destruction] their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.”2 A new world order indeed, poised to annihilate innumerable human beings deemed as the new savages. What is the inner reason for such a martial stance?