The blog of Michael K.
I've finally started my no-doubt slapdash Habermas paper today.
Jurgen Habermas, interviewed in Logos, Summer 2004
Q: In the United States, the “War on Terrorism” has veered off into a “War on Civil Liberties,” poisoning the legal infrastructure that makes a living democratic culture possible. The Orwellian “Patriot Act” is a Pyrrhic victory in which we and our democracy are the vanquished. Has the “War on Terrorism” similarly affected the European Union? Or has its experience with the terrorism of the 70s made it immune to the surrender of civil liberties to the security-state?
A: I don’t actually believe that. In the Bundesrepublik, the reactions in the autumn of ‘77 were hysterical enough. Furthermore, we’re encountering today a different sort of terrorism. I don’t know what would have happened if the twin towers had collapsed in Berlin or Frankfurt. Naturally, we would not, after September 11, have laced up for ourselves “security packets” so suffocatingly tight, nor of such an unconstitutional reach, as the frightening regulations in America, which have been so clearly skewered and dissected by my friend Ronald Dworkin. If, in this regard, distinctions were to be drawn between mentality and practice here and beyond the Atlantic, I would endeavor to place them in the context of historical experience. Maybe the very understandable shock in the USA after September 11 was, in fact, greater than it would have been in a European country accustomed to war. How to prove this?
Certainly, the patriotic upsurge following upon September 11, had an American character. But the key to the curtailment of fundamental law, which you’ve referred to, to the breach of the Geneva Convention in Guantanamo, to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, etc., I would locate elsewhere. The militarization of life domestically and abroad, the bellicose policies which open themselves up to infection by their opponent’s own methods, and which return the Hobbesian state to the world stage where the globalization of markets had seemed to have driven the political into the wings, all this the politically enlightened American populace would have overwhelmingly rejected, if the administration had not, with force, shameless propaganda, and manipulated insecurity, exploited the shock of September 11. For a European observer and a twice-shy child such as I, the systematic intimidation and indoctrination of the population and the restrictions on the scope of permitted opinion in the months of October and November of 2002, (when I was in Chicago), were unnerving. This was not “my” America. From my 16th year onward, my political thinking, thanks to the sensible re-education policy of the Occupation, has been nourished by the American ideals of the late 18th century.
Jurgen Habermas, interviewed in Logos, Summer 2004
Q: In the United States, the “War on Terrorism” has veered off into a “War on Civil Liberties,” poisoning the legal infrastructure that makes a living democratic culture possible. The Orwellian “Patriot Act” is a Pyrrhic victory in which we and our democracy are the vanquished. Has the “War on Terrorism” similarly affected the European Union? Or has its experience with the terrorism of the 70s made it immune to the surrender of civil liberties to the security-state?
A: I don’t actually believe that. In the Bundesrepublik, the reactions in the autumn of ‘77 were hysterical enough. Furthermore, we’re encountering today a different sort of terrorism. I don’t know what would have happened if the twin towers had collapsed in Berlin or Frankfurt. Naturally, we would not, after September 11, have laced up for ourselves “security packets” so suffocatingly tight, nor of such an unconstitutional reach, as the frightening regulations in America, which have been so clearly skewered and dissected by my friend Ronald Dworkin. If, in this regard, distinctions were to be drawn between mentality and practice here and beyond the Atlantic, I would endeavor to place them in the context of historical experience. Maybe the very understandable shock in the USA after September 11 was, in fact, greater than it would have been in a European country accustomed to war. How to prove this?
Certainly, the patriotic upsurge following upon September 11, had an American character. But the key to the curtailment of fundamental law, which you’ve referred to, to the breach of the Geneva Convention in Guantanamo, to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, etc., I would locate elsewhere. The militarization of life domestically and abroad, the bellicose policies which open themselves up to infection by their opponent’s own methods, and which return the Hobbesian state to the world stage where the globalization of markets had seemed to have driven the political into the wings, all this the politically enlightened American populace would have overwhelmingly rejected, if the administration had not, with force, shameless propaganda, and manipulated insecurity, exploited the shock of September 11. For a European observer and a twice-shy child such as I, the systematic intimidation and indoctrination of the population and the restrictions on the scope of permitted opinion in the months of October and November of 2002, (when I was in Chicago), were unnerving. This was not “my” America. From my 16th year onward, my political thinking, thanks to the sensible re-education policy of the Occupation, has been nourished by the American ideals of the late 18th century.
About me
- Michael K.
- Observing the things in my personal cosmos: music of a catchy sort, soccer, hockey and other sports, theories of place, media and culture, academic life, history, nature, politics, the international, the parochial. You never know what you might get. For generosity of the spirit.
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- Straight outta Wilton
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