“So American exceptionalism rewrites history and time lines to make immediacy and punitive reflex action normative and to place the wounded and traumatized American body center while denying the terror it has inflicted and does inflict on other bodies.”
—Joy James1
“Despite the absence of public debate about sexuality and the war on terrorism, the ‘Abu Ghraib prisoner sexual torture/abuse scandal,’ as it is now termed, vividly reveals that sexuality constitutes a central and crucial component of the machinic assemblage that is American patriotism.”
—Jasbir Puar2
Few events in history have affected the American psyche more than what transpired on September 11th, 2001, now known as “9/11.” Nearly 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Towers. The tragedy was exploited mightily by the American power structure, for it raised to the surface the deeply chauvinistic, racist, and imperialist attitudes of many Americans that could be manipulated and directed. Since its inception, the U.S. had enjoyed geographical and political advantages that allowed it to become a powerful aggressor without repercussion. The U.S. committed acts of aggression abroad in the name of freedom and democracy but rarely had to worry about being attacked for its hypocrisy on American soil. To be attacked on the mainland was a direct assault on American superiority and only intensified the desire for many Americans to feel special and powerful again.
So strong was the fear promoted by the American power structure in the aftermath of 9/11 that the mere sight of burning buildings reignited trauma. In a fascinating controversy that erupted more than ten years after 9/11, a movie poster for the 2014 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was redacted after thousands on social media decried the imagery as offensive to the victims of the attack. The poster of the turtles jumping out of a skyscraper with a release date of September 11th evoked such strong feelings that the director yelled at the studio executives for their “mistake.” It was as if buildings had never burned before during the dozens of American wars of aggression against nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was as if Chile didn’t have its own 9/11—September 11th of 1973—when the U.S. government overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende and replaced him with the brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet. No, our 9/11 was different. It involved Americans as the victims of terror, not as perpetrators. This narcissism led many Americans to think that any picture of a burning building anywhere in the world next to the date of September 11th, even with animated turtles jumping out of it, was an insult to the trauma of the World Trade Center getting hit. It didn’t matter that this poster came out thirteen years after the attack. And apparently it didn’t matter that the poster was promoting the film’s release in Australia.
The imagery of buildings burning was nothing more than a metaphor for the inherently special quality of the American nation-state and the shaky ground from which it stood. September 11th, 2001, was indeed a day that shook the world. On the one hand, the U.S. was rattled by a vulnerability in what had been advertised for decades as the world’s most secure and powerful military. On the other hand, a war was unleashed that forever changed the international polity. Then-President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror.” This new war was a reform of an old one. U.S. imperialism had already laid plenty of blood soaked tracks that could be traced back to major corporations and their quest for profit and dominance. The “War on Terror” laid the blame for 9/11 on whatever people or whichever nation the American military had not yet placed under its submission. An intense military buildup on all fronts was masked by the heavily promoted notion that the American nation-state and everything it represented was under attack from a foreign entity. Yet as Kyoo Lee writes, “We will not forget that we have been attacked, but we have forgotten that we have often been attackers, justly or not.”3
With the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism became the unquestioned hegemon in world politics and economy. This reality created a new set of political challenges as much as it greatly expanded the influence and profits of American enterprise. The American nation-state needed a new enemy to justify the growth of domestic and global exploitation. The events on 9/11 provided this enemy and gave the rulers of U.S. imperialism the political cover necessary to modify American exceptionalism in service of their interests. Such political cover existed during the Cold War, which, as Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana argue,
was no doubt filled with defections from international legality, anti-democratic overthrows, and support for American-aligned dictatorships. Indeed, in many ways the defining feature of American Cold War power was the degree to which the promotion of liberal constitutionalism in actuality produced coercion and widespread violence on the ground.4
And just as the threat of communism was utilized to wage war on dissidents in the American mainland and dissident nations abroad, so too did the War on Terror give the American ruling class an avenue from which to expand its war apparatus. American innocence and exceptionalism not only narrated the expansion of war as an aberration but also intensified the notion that the U.S. only waged war in response to threats to its existence. This is a key component of American exceptionalism and innocence. Not only is the violence inherent to American domestic and foreign policy presented as a deviation from the norm, but also as a tactic wielded only when it is necessary to protect the exceptional character of the “national interest.” As Joy James so aptly notes, 9/11 gave America the chance to paint itself as both “the recognizable victim and inevitable victor.”5
The idea of the United States as a perpetual “victim” of enemy aggression that is compelled to “play defense” on the international stage is a quintessential example of American exceptionalism and American innocence working together. “Exceptionalist states portray themselves as innocent victims. They are never the sources of international insecurity, but only the targets of malign forces,” writes K. J. Holsti. “They do not act so much as react to a hostile world,” he continues. “They are exceptional, in part, because they are morally clean as the objects of others’ hatreds.”6 Of course, it’s not just presidential rhetoric that perpetuates these ideologies. Author Jason Dittmer shows how one of the most popular comic book heroes, Captain America, contributes to political narratives of innocence as well. In contrast to most superheroes that carry around “glamorous offensive weapons,” Dittmer writes, Captain America’s prop is “a rather unglamorous (yet patriotically covered) shield.”7 As consumers of popular culture, we should not underestimate the impact such representations play in how we understand the world. If Captain America is to serve as the embodiment of what values we present and what our country is really about, then “it is important for the narrative of America that he embodies defense rather than offense.”8 Just like the former Texas governor George W. Bush after 9/11, Captain America is placed “in the heroic tradition of the American cowboy killer, the man of purely innocent intention who draws second in the gun battle but shoots more quickly and accurately than the dastardly foe.”9
When the World Trade Center Towers fell, George W. Bush faced political dilemmas that could only be remedied by a full embrace of American exceptionalism. He needed an event that would change the trajectory of his administration, which was hampered by accusations that votes were stolen from Democratic Party candidate Al Gore in the state of Florida during the general election. Bush had yet to give the ruling class anything definitive in terms of policy. The 9/11 attacks provided the newly sworn-in president an opportunity to remake the nation’s most coveted ideologies: American exceptionalism and American innocence. In his response to the attacks, Bush lamented, “Why do they hate us?” His answer: “They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”10
It was in this speech that Bush taught the world an important lesson about the function of American exceptionalist ideology. Donald Pease, author of many books and articles on American exceptionalism, roots the ideology within the context of history. He explains:
Before 9/11, expositors of American exceptionalism represented the unfolding of American history as the progressive development of American principles guided by Manifest Destiny. The triumphalism of the post-Cold War 1990s summoned Americans to envision . . . the evangelical spread of American democracy across the world. But the Global War on Terror the Bush Administration declared after 9/11 shattered the image of a providential future as an expendable delusion.11
Beginning a declaration of war with the question “Why do they hate us?” suggests that the spread of American democracy required war. But as Carrie Tirado Bramen argues, that war was started with a question that operates less as an inquiry and more so as “a way of making sense of a complex incident by personalizing the political.” In her book, American Niceness: A Cultural History, Bramen observes how “[t]he global, structural, and historical dimensions of the event are reduced to an interpersonal matter of envy and hatred. It translates a political crisis into a problem of sociability.” “‘Why do they hate us?’” she writes, “is another way of asking ‘Why don’t they like us?’ [. . .] To know us, the question assumes, is to love us.”12
The assumption that the American nation-state is a loveable representative of the American people reinforces the racialized character of American innocence. It simplifies the “us” and “them” dichotomy. It is conveniently vague. And it leaves no room for either introspection or diplomacy. As K. J. Holsti writes,
Bush’s only public explanation for the al-Qaeda attack was that these evil people hate everything America stands for, particularly its freedom. Framed this way, one is the innocent victim, and one thus does not have to indulge in any self-examination or enter into any dialogue with the enemy. The enemy has no issues to discuss, but is only driven by hatred. All that remains to be done is to root out the evildoers and bring them to justice.13
Thus, rather than explore the roots of U.S. foreign policy in possibly instigating the attack, American exceptionalism defines the enemy as anyone or anything that is presumed to “hate” the American way of life. And those who “hate” the American way of life have no rights that the American nation-state is bound to respect.
American exceptionalism has always presumed national innocence despite imposing centuries of war and plunder. The U.S. has been at war for over ninety percent of its existence. These wars have all been justified as necessary ventures meant to defend or expand America’s so-called founding values and beliefs. A consequence of centuries of endless war has been the historical tendency of the U.S. to erase from consciousness the realities that surround American domestic and international policy, not to mention the system of imperialism that governs both.
The declaration of a War on Terror was (and remains) a defining moment for the legacy of American exceptionalism. It utilized a period of crisis to cement the image that the U.S. and its representative values were in perpetual danger. The threat to American “national security” lay in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. As practitioners of “Jihad,” or holy war, these demonized “others” from foreign lands served as the scapegoat for War on Terror imperial policy. And for the first time, American exceptionalism was promoted not just as a service to humanity, but rather a convenient excuse to expand American power at the expense of the people and planet on every coast.
The erasure of historical memory that has taken place during the War on Terror is a key component to the preservation of American innocence and exceptionalism. Ordinary Americans rarely think about the roots of the American nation-state as being firmly planted in the colonial conquest of Native populations and the enslavement of African populations. Ordinary Americans rarely ponder the consequences of the millions that were murdered during the Korean and Vietnam wars, or any American war abroad for that matter. Even when acknowledged, rarely has the power of American exceptionalism been challenged on a mass basis. Indeed, the War on Terror merely offered the United States another way to apply its colonial logic to a different set of circumstances.
These circumstances were largely a product of the September 11th attacks which led to an intense ideological assault on the part of officials in Washington. This ideological assault sought to bury the masses in hysteria draped in American exceptionalism. The War on Terror, which has been dutifully enforced by three presidential administrations thus far, required an intense demonization of Arab and Muslim peoples to justify domestic and foreign aggression. Policies such as The Patriot Act and new provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act greatly scaled back civil liberties on the American mainland while the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq led to massive amount of civilian casualties abroad. Importantly, the War on Terror also led to mass systems of torture at Abu Ghraib, a scandal that Jasbir Puar argues should not be seen as exceptional to the U.S. war machine. Rather, it “needs to be contextualized within a range of practices and discourses . . . that lasso sexuality in the deployment of U.S. nationalism, patriotism, and, increasingly, empire.”14
The construction of what Puar calls the “monstrous terrorist” involves the interconnection of multiple ideologies and forms of domination. This process, which Puar and Amit Rai explain, is worth quoting in full:
First, the monster is not merely an other; it is one category through which a multiform power operates. As such, discourses that would mobilize monstrosity as a screen for otherness are always also involved in circuits of normalizing power as well: the monster and the person to be corrected are close cousins. Second, if the monster is part of the West’s family of abnormals, questions of race and sexuality will have always haunted its figuration. The category of monstrosity is also an implicit index of civilizational development and cultural adaptability. As the machines of war begin to narrow the choices and life chances people have here in America and in decidedly more bloody ways abroad, it seems a certain grid of civilizational progress organized by such keywords as “democracy,” “freedom,” and “humanity” have come to superintend the figure of the monster.15
The War on Terror was therefore, in large part, a psychological assault that justified military expansion and further distorted the economic realities that undergirded such expansion. As Puar and Rai argue, the study of counterterrorism was immediately undertaken not just by the media but also by academic universities across the country. Counterterrorism became a “civilizational” knowledge.16 It drew new contours in the racial, class, and gender hierarchies that exist in American society. The terrorist became the object of scorn and the target of war, with a flexible definition that served a variety of purposes.
That the War on Terror meant the creation of new enemies (i.e., monsters) and greater military spending and buildup at the expense of poor, exploited, and oppressed people everywhere meant that the project for a “New American Century” had to rely on an altered form of American exceptionalism for legitimacy. No longer could the American ruling circles point to an alternative, evil system as it did in the Cold War period as the main threat to the American way of life. This time the threat had to extend beyond borders and economic arrangements. American dominance had been achieved, and the “end of history” declared after the fall of the Soviet Union. Terrorism was an action that could be carried out by whoever the U.S. deemed to threaten its “security.” Its definition could be easily adjusted to fit the needs of power and profit at any point and time.
The premise that the American way of life was under attack by a foreign yet stateless threat provided exactly what was needed to fuel the spread of U.S. empire. U.S. imperialism, or the system of social relations governed by monopoly corporations and financial firms, received a facelift amid a sharp decline in living standards and conditions both in the American mainland and around the world. U.S. imperialism’s social relations have been marked by constant military and economic expansion worldwide, a process that precipitates an even higher degree of concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few corporations and nation-states. The last vestiges of 20th-century socialism had been attacked by the Clinton Administration in its NATO-backed bombing of Yugoslavia. China stood alone as the last major power to be governed by a communist state. American cartels and monopolies found ample room around the world to rake in record profits yet the living standards of the industrialized capitalist world continued to plummet, especially for the Black poor. Something had to be done to maintain the illusion of American invincibility.
The politics of the War on Terror have attempted to stabilize U.S. imperialism by reinforcing the white supremacist, imperialist, and militaristic interests which shape American exceptionalist ideology. This has led to an intense psychological assault characterized by a fear of “the other.” The assault isn’t new, as U.S. imperialism has indeed used fear of the “other” to enrich the ruling class since its inception. In fact, this history has its roots in anti-Black racism. As Nikhil Pal Singh argues, the fear of slave rebellions required the colonial elite to frame Africans as inherent “thieves”:
The slave was “by nature a thief,” Benjamin Franklin argued, later amending this assertion to argue that a propensity for thieving was a consequence of slavery as an institution. Thomas Jefferson claimed that the emancipation of slaves would threaten U.S. society itself [. . .] Blacks being unable to forget the terrible wrongs done to them would nurse murderous wishes . . . while whites would live in a state of anticipatory fear that urged preemptive violence.17
In other words, fear of the “other” has been a staple of American exceptionalism since the very founding of the nation. The War on Terror provides a contemporary example of how American exceptionalism is utilized in service of the profit, power, and pleasure of a few. Militarism is the primary means by which the few—better described as capitalists and the state functionaries who do their bidding—enforce the interests of imperialism beyond the borders of the nation-state. The military and the police act as the armed body of the state. Their function has always been to enforce the rule of a minority at the expense of genuine peace and justice of the majority.
Narratives of American innocence and exceptionalism preserve this arrangement by effectively placing the U.S. as the most advanced and progressive arrangement known in the history of humanity. “Terrorism” thus possesses only one definition, the definition derived from the political class that occupies the American nation-state. According to their definition, “terrorism” finds definition in portrayals of radical “Islamic” fundamentalists one day and undocumented migrants the next. Black American mass movements have been called “Black Identity Extremists” by the FBI, a slight variant of the label “terrorist.” “What is called ‘terrorism’ is often the uprising of defenseless, subjugated people fighting against state-sanctioned violence,” writes Lisa Lowe. “[T]hey are named ‘terrorists’ not only to delegitimize their actions and to justify ‘war’ against them, but also to gain popular support for the exercise of state and military violence as a means for dominating regions, populations, and resources.”18 The NSA has continuously cited the threat of terrorism to justify the mass surveillance of the entire population’s digital communications. And of course, military ventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the oil and mineral rich Middle East region were explained away as necessary preconditions for the defense of “national interests” from terrorism.
Terrorism has thus served as a convenient political project of U.S. imperialism. This project took full advantage of the 9/11 attacks to create what Junaid Rana terms “the terror industrial complex.”19 The terror industrial complex, as an outgrowth of American militarism, found its foundations in the racialization of Muslims. As Rana explains, “the figure of the Muslim enables the policing of people of color at an ever expanding level” and “continuously operates from within the figures of criminality and social death that depend on the racialization of Black and brown bodies.”20 These alterations in the infrastructure of American white supremacy led not only to the police and FBI surveillance of Arab and Muslim populations in New York City and across the country, but also a steep decline in civil liberties for the population at large.21
The white supremacist logic of the War on Terror has become accepted fact. When former NATO commander Wesley Clark revealed that the plan to overthrow the governments of seven nations in the Middle East and North Africa after 9/11 had been realized in 2007, it was met with little opposition from ordinary Americans. Mass surveillance and police militarization has produced a semblance of resistance but none with the power to influence official policy. Too many Americans still search for rationalizations for the domestic and international wars wrought by the U.S. As Neferti X. M. Tadiar reminds us, “a general embrace of empire as status quo, whatever its valence as a positive or a negative reality, marks this dire political, historical hour.”22
The embrace of empire has been a general condition in American society since the War on Terror began almost twenty years ago. A Democratic Party Administration under Barack Obama quieted the War on Terror’s message but intensified each and every policy of the war. White supremacy and militarism have been the driving forces of this project. American exceptionalism is the anchor. This anchor has been distorting and erasing our memories of U.S. imperialism’s wretched conditions since the conquest of the colonies. “They” do not hate us, they hate our anchor.