|
|
|
REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
| Michael Welch, Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press 2006)
|
| FOLLOWING UP on his earlier work on crime, punishment, and human rights in such works as Ironies of Imprisonment (2005), Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding INS Jail Complex (2002), Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest: Punishment in America (1999), Michael Welch offers a powerful indictment of the government's self-proclaimed "holy war" on terror and, moreover, those it would like to muzzle or choke with the stars and stripes. His approach highlights two sides to the war on terror coin, one that exacts revenge for the specific events of 9/11, and the other that follows up on a "more ancient campaign against evil," with the two combining to produce scapegoats for specific actions in a context that permits the government to weaken "key democratic principles developed to protect all people against the abuses of government power." (4) Welch's overall conclusions are that "any comfort that the war on terror delivers is merely illusory" and that support for this war "involves a good amount of wishful – and in some instances magical – thinking, reducing the battle against terrorism to symbolic ritual in lieu of pragmatic policy." (5) |
1
|
|
The examples that Welch provides to support his claims are appropriately harrowing: new airport screening technologies that produce anatomically correct naked images of passengers who, so terrified by the carefully manufactured "fear factor," are actually willing to submit to this scrutiny; or cynical election tactics that allowed Bush to critique John Kerry's proposal to loosen restriction on Canadian prescription drugs by referencing (unsubstantiated) "cues from chatter" by supposed Al Qaeda operatives who planned to poison imported drugs. Perhaps we'll come to realize, as the orange alerts turn to yellow, and then as the coding system itself fades into the distant past, that we have been bamboozled into outrageous military spending and unjustifiable wars and invasions at home and abroad. More likely, though, is that the vagueness of the threat and the constant effort to reiterate potential consequences have shifted our political landscape in favour of fear-mongering, and communications from on high will from this point onwards morph into a ridiculously successful wooden rhetoric that, without any reference to facts, can convince the populace to swallow reductions in their civil liberties and human rights by paradoxically linking them to the growing threat to our ways of life. |
2
|
|
To explain how this whole process works, Welch brings to bear his considerable research and theoretical talents, referencing literally hundreds of works (two pages in the bibliography are dedicated to his own writings) on attitudes, media, propaganda, sociology, political theory, discourse studies, and so forth. For instance, since so much of the work on scapegoating relies upon how ideas are disseminated, he works through an array of discursive practices, contributing to our understanding of informal communication like rumors, "negative emotional language," "empty language," blame, and the logic behind linking concrete acts of violence to mystical or quasi-religious acts to either justify or demonize them, depending upon the outcome sought. He then moves into a more academically informed realm of explanation, referencing moral panic theory and risk society literature as he looks at crucial events which provide a sense of where we've been and, more worrisome still, where we're headed: ethnic profiling, detention, hate crimes, state crimes, torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and falsely reported claims of legitimacy and effectiveness. The powerful side of this book is Welch's linking together of varying government efforts aimed at keeping us in fear, on the one hand, and reassured, on the other, as military spending, scapegoats, imminent threats, and the weakness of other alternatives are brought up simultaneously. The net effect is a thorough and wellinformed work on the growing horrors of contemporary us government practices, and the amazing effectiveness of blatant tactics on a population that is wooed by quasi-mystical rhetoric. Perhaps this phenomenon can be attributed to the growing religious fanaticism at all levels of us society, with one of the vanguards of the movement in the prayer-filled White House? Or is it just that the kinds of irrational fears drummed up by authorities play into areas of weakness in the human psyche, those areas that are targeted by (say) the endless array of horror films we consume in a given year? |
3
|
|
Questions like these can be addressed in a book like Scapegoats of September 11th, because, as the bibliography indicates, there are theories which try to understand complex phenomena relating to how we absorb and process information, and Welch draws from an impressive range of things as he tries to understand the "culture of control" and contemporary crusades. There is also a tremendous amount of information available to those who simply read daily news reports, suggesting that it would be possible to put variant notions together for ourselves, and figure out how this whole game is working, without reference to complex theorization. And indeed this is the area in which I'd have to express some reticence, despite my admiration for the work that Welch undertakes in this book and elsewhere. The 'general reader' would find many reasons to engage a text like this, particularly if she is trying to understand just what is at stake as Americans continue to support indefinite incarceration of "terrorist" suspects, the (limited?) torture for our prisoners, and the apparently God-given right we have to murder millions of people in the name of our own best interests even when totally unconnected to these people; but as a general reader I find myself constantly distracted by the claims of the social sciences theory employed for the task, the endless references to texts which refer us to theories about what is being discussed, and the intrusion of what oftentimes seems like an academic apparatus into discussions which benefit from Welch's commonsense and decent value system rather than his vast erudition in sociological, political, and criminal studies. Many of the events described in this book are outrageous, and that we buy into the cheap trick tactics employed to obfuscate the facts relayed here is worrisome. But most, if not all, of the theory takes on elements of the human mind too little understood for the methods described, leaving us at times with a new level of obscurity rather than the decent values and powerful sentiments Welch himself expresses. |
4
|
| | |
ROBERT F. BARSKY
Vanderbilt University |
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|