The Take Away

The Take Away

As I near the end of four months spent in Europe, and working for the European parliament, I have become a “Euroskeptic.” And it gets a little worse than that...I have become a “governments can exist in forms which fully serve the people-skeptic.”

A large part of the IDS course we have been taking on this trip has looked at the circumstances and rhetoric that allowed for atrocities and dictatorships to take place in the twentieth century. During blights on a human history, we come to find, people or “the public” is often complacent or worse, active in propagating the suffering of their fellow man. During the early 1930s German people were quickly convinced that Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals were the cause of their defeat in WWI and were directly responsible for the economic crisis in the country. We as a class stood in the Riechstag which Hitler likely had burned to create a culture of fear towards the communist party. We walked the very halls that thousands of Jews were crammed through at a forced labor camp. We stood where they stood as their noses were broken against the walls of Breendonk Prison. What was the cause of all of this destruction? Not rhetorically how was it accomplished, but what was the impetus? I believe it was fear.

Fear of losing power hard won by soviet communists from the Tsar during WWI led to a similar culture across the USSR. Fear was used by the government to make some East German citizens believe it truly was their duty to their community to turn in their neighbors to the Stasi for crimes which were never committed. Further, fear was used to demoralize anyone who did not buy into the Stasi propaganda.

The USSR leads me to my further disturbing realization as a history major: Governments have been doing this for a very very long time. The Bolshevik revolution took power from the Tzar who had been oppressing his people by squeezing labor and resources out of them for his own gain, and to protect the country during a time of war. The Tzar feared loosing and empire and was willing to kill his own people to do so. This was the same mentality that gave birth to the gulags, the concentration camps and Guantanamo Bay.

I had the fortune, or misfortune depending on how paranoid I will be by the time I return to the states, to have Giorgio Agamben as a presentation topic earlier this semester. Agamben is an Italian philosopher feels that the US government has instituted what he describes as, “a state of exception.” A state of exception arises when a government is able to convince its people that the times are so different and so much more dangerous than we have seen before, that the rules and norms which formally governed how we operate as a nation, are temporarily void. Our guest lecturer, Dr. Hayes, made an incredibly revealing point about our current state of exception. We are not awaiting a "final solution" to culminate as the German's were, nor are we operating in a state of war against another state which will conclude with a peace treaty and armistice. We are in a  “war on terror” which means our government gets to hold us in a post-911 state of heightened security and surveillance for as long as the US government feels there threats to our security.

That night in class, Jordan Sanders said "honestly, I don't care if they tracking me, I'm not a terrorist." Somewhere in the world that night an NSA analyst got his wings... But Jordan is right, until you look at who the terrorist have been, and who they are now. We as American citizens according to the Constitution are obligated to armed insurrection if we feel our government is not serving “we the people,” that's why NRA lobbyist let us keep our shotguns. But when has the US government allowed a group of people to operate in a state of revolution in this country? Not the whiskey rebellion or the civil rights movement or the civil war.

Now its different, those are historical instances and we know looking back that “in the context those governmental actions and decisions made sense.” “We don't do that sort of thing now...we fight terrorists.”

As an Asian Studies major, a question that comes up a lot is, who are the terrorists? Edward Said would say, they are anyone who is not “us,” they are anyone who we can fear. The US government now fears anyone with ties to the Arab speaking countries of the world. Dr. Hayes spoke of being held in interrogation at various airports because she has visited Arabic speaking countries and done research in conflict zones; and she herself speaks Arabic. Okay, perhaps she is foolish for choosing study the people America does not like. Where it gets more sinister is...what happens when the US changes who it doesn't like, and provides a new people for us fear. Say the other most powerful country in the world, China.

If we decide China is the bad guy who will be getting stopped in airports? Probably the graduate student who speaks Chinese, has spent time in China, and wont quit writing blogs about how the American government has become a dictatorship. A dictatorship which like so many before it, is built on fear.

But, THERE'S HOPE.