Never-Ending War on Terror

December 1, 2020
A succinct exploration of how, for much of U.S. history, "fighting wars against terrorism has been something of an American pastime." Though many perceive the war on terror as a response to 9/11, Lubin, a professor of African American studies, maintains that this American impulse extends to Colonial times and that demonizing the "other" has consistently presented a threat to civil liberties and undermined the country's democratic ideals. "My students," writes the author, "have been raised in a world where it is a radical act to question the innocence of the United States in its prosecution of the War on Terror." In this well-researched, pointedly argued distillation of the case against that position--the latest entry in the publisher's American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present series--the author shows how American Muslims have found their privacy and religious freedoms compromised in the wake of 9/11 and how this is similar to the way the government has exercised power throughout history, in both domestic and foreign affairs. The U.S., writes Lubin, "has long justified warfare based on the debasement of supposed enemies who, working outside of the state, are viewed as terrorists," a legacy that extends from the so-called "Indian Wars" through the Cold War surveillance of American leftists and the disastrous war on drugs. Turning the "other" into some sort of dehumanized, anti-American enemy has justified the suspension of legal protections, and, in recent decades, the pendulum has swung even more away from civil liberties. Lubin also provides useful cultural analysis of how music, movies, and TV have reinforced such jingoism, and he suggests that many of the neoconservatives who now criticize Donald Trump were complicit in the way "the dark side prevailed." According to the author's history, among the few key heroes were Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, both of whom were excoriated by the public. A sharp book about how America uses the threat of terrorism as an excuse to indulge its own worst impulses.

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