The New World of Terror

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?

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?

Building a new world can only be a sacred call against which, therefore, there is no legitimate opposition. A new world is meant to be because the old one is defective and endangers the march toward civilization. The obvious weakness of this new world phantasmagoria is, of course, that it defines “civilization” only negatively, in opposition to its supposed contrary. The other—the savage, the terrorist—is what makes us the civilized party. The “New World” is a mental image (which is the original meaning of the word “phantasm” in ancient Greek) that makes those who fall for its appeal reason in reverse. Instead of primarily relying on the principle that civilization is an open and constructive path toward the betterment of humanity at large, they sacrifice cultures—and thus civilization itself—on the altar of what is supposed to be unilaterally best for all. Those who do not acknowledge the exclusiveness of the way forward are simply wrong. And bad.

What is at stake with the new world mythology is indeed our common humanity as well as the flourishing plurality of civilizations stemming from it. On the one hand, threatening to obliterate people here and there simply shows that there is no reality behind the word “humans” for the righteous ones ready to use this option. On the other, native Americans, Palestinians, and other Tibetans have long suffered the consequences of being denied their cultural and thus human dignity. At the end of the day, it is simply easier for the conquerors’ minds to deny that they exist at all, either culturally or physically. A mere nuisance, natives shouldn’t be here anyway and, by the same token, their claim to cultural and territorial ancestry should simply be ignored. If these kinds of mental associations make no rational sense, they are nevertheless psychologically powerful since the alternative—embracing our responsibilities toward each other universally—implies being deprived of the right to colonize or impose a “New World” vision on others.

As with the new world mythology in earlier times, the war on terror used to express the United States’ single, all-encompassing purpose. George W. Bush said that the nation had found “its mission and its moment” in retaliating against terrorists, and insisted that “We will never forget the servants of evil who plotted the attacks and will never forget those who rejoice at our grief.”³ He also reminded the public that the United States is the “greatest force for good on the earth” and that fighting terrorism is “a calling from beyond the stars.”⁴ Bruce Bartlett, a previous domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official for the first President Bush, was quoted saying, “This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them because he’s just like them.”⁵

In this narrative, we are the pure ones. Our call is from heaven since, otherwise, it would be from hell. Who could confuse the two? And given that hell and heaven are the only fundamental things to consider, you are on one side or the other. We, the United States, want to be on the right side. This implies that other nations may not want to, making them stand with the forces of evil. It is not worth reflecting on the fact that we personally and collectively create various forms of hell regularly, or that heaven is in the smile of every child in the world. The war on terror relates to the heavy stuff only—the transcendent one.

As Sheldon Wolin reminds us, “At the same time, the character of absolute evil assigned to terrorism—of a murderous act without reasonable or just provocation—works toward the same end by allowing the state to cloak its power in innocence. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Americans asked, “What have we done to deserve this?” The official silence that met the question made plain the obvious answer: Nothing.” Terrorism was thus made to appear as irrational violence and the action in response to it as necessarily pure, without ulterior or mixed motives. An innocence, says Sheldon Wolin, “that under normal circumstances might raise suspicions about motives served to justify extensions of power at home and abroad.”

1. NSS, Introduction, p.2
2. In “Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2000, 53.
3. New York Times, September 11, 2003, A-1.
4. Cited by Roger Cohen, “A Global War: Many Fronts, Little Unity,” New York Times, September 5, 2004, sec. 4, p. 1.
5. Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” NYT October 17, 2004.