Translated from GegenStandpunkt 4-2001

Fighting terrorism domestically

Civil liberties = national security

For their domestic civilian life, the “Western” states – the USA and its democratic allies – have derived a strange definition of the state of affairs from the attacks on New York and Washington. As of now, they are in all seriousness going on the assumption that the enemy is inside the country: an enemy without a state of its own and without regular troops, an underground army of unknown size totaling at least a few hundred strong that is ready to launch a terrorist attack at any time. They have thereby declared the distinction between normal civilian life and a military state of emergency as much as abolished: “External and internal security can no longer be separated,” according to the German Interior Minister. Whether they ever really were separated in recent decades – the main Soviet enemy, in the form of communist parties “loyal to Moscow,” was also combated domestically; after its demise, the fight against “organized crime” couldn’t possibly stop at national borders; America, at any rate, wages its “war” on drugs on a front that extends from the slums of its own cities to exotic mountain regions – that remains to be seen ... In any event, after September 11th and the collective resolution of the democratic powers regarding its inevitable consequences, everyday civilian life in the imperialist metropolises has been redefined from the highest level: as a new kind of state of war. The normal routines of capitalist working life and its leisure activities are not really being overturned by this, as would be the case in a real war and an invasion by foreign soldiers. However, the governments in charge are also setting new priorities internally for their own “civil societies”: everything the inhabitants of their countries do will be subject to the major general reservation that the state must first and foremost be secure in its monopoly on violence against an always and everywhere threatening enemy.

This reaction to the terrorist attacks on America may be generated by some hysteria; it does not result from hysteria. The “Western” state power in its own way, that is, as a supreme power that has had its order challenged, is carrying out nothing more and nothing less than an undesirable side effect of its imperialist world success which, as is usually the case with such side effects, is difficult to separate from the desired main effect. It recognizes that much of the rest of the world is quite hostile to its comprehensive and uncompromising commercial and military dominance and its grip on the world order, and that this hostility can not – any longer – be kept under lid in distant countries and sequestered there with overwhelming deterrent power, i.e. with unilateral military terror. The shape that the “globalized” world has been put in by the imperialist powers not only provides plenty of reasons for political hostility, but it also provides resolute enemies with the means and opportunities to launch terrorist attacks on even major centers of global business and war-making violence, and for terrorist NGOs on a more impressive scale. Its global domination has blown back on the imperialist state power itself: that is what its administrative guardians have concluded from the attacks of September 11, and that’s how they see themselves challenged – abroad to a “new cold war” including a “hot” opening act and domestically to a “constitutional offensive” of a very special kind. In line with their risk assessment, they are subjecting all public and private life in their freedom-based society to the highest security requirements and are getting busy with so much enthusiasm that’s as if they had just been waiting for the right opportunity. Full of zeal, they tackle two tasks: the appropriate build up of domestic national security and the creation of a popular opinion suited to the war-like seriousness of the situation, one that can even be used in election campaigns, so it’s democratic.

1. The democratic monopoly on violence is making itself “terror-proof”

If terrorists can steer commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then basically – according to the official policy position in the nations directly affected and those sharing liability – the entire civilian interior is a single security risk that the politically responsible security engineers do not have under control. For their part, they immediately know what’s missing: their own security policy precautions are completely inadequate. In all seriousness, they accuse themselves of having failed to unmask and neutralize “sleeper cells,” i.e. perfectly adapted, inconspicuous civilians who suddenly took to jihad, before they acted. The impossibility of the task does not lead them to resign, but rather to sharpen their awareness of how much is to be desired in screening their country’s inhabitants, from whose midst the attackers came, and how bad the situation is when it comes to preventively eliminating all sources of danger, even “merely” potential ones, deterring and repressing hostile activities and intentions, and purging suspicious “elements” from their population. In this sense, they are searching for deficits in the national security apparatus.

At the same time, the architects of a new “terror-proof” state security system can’t – on the one hand – come up with any major deficiencies, at least not in terms of a powerful monitoring and repression apparatus that they would still be lacking. For good reason: they already have everything they need. Their police forces, organized into several departments according to the type of legal interests to be protected and the crimes to be combated, in many nations duplicated and triplicated in departments at the city, state, and national levels, sometimes supplemented by special militias, control the entire spectrum of surveillance and repression, from the pursuit of shoplifters to the genetic identification of sex offenders from among thousands of candidates to the secure containment of “civil unrest.” This includes data collection that allows the entire population of a country to be completely screened according to the most sophisticated criteria and thus, by means of dragnet searches, to track down suspicious individuals who never made a negative impression on anybody and who might not even be up to anything bad; if necessary, the private sphere is then explored in detail with cameras, omnidirectional microphones, and judicially warranted wiretaps. In addition, secret services, some even in multiple forms, are active, irrespective of the purpose of fighting crime, informing the authorities about oppositional activities and subversive attitudes, dissenting opinions, and planned or merely possible disruptions to public life; if necessary, they also take the violent suppression of activities detrimental to the state into their own hands. A military stands ready to defend freedom against its abuse in the event of an internal emergency; if notified in time, it is also ready and able to, for example, bring a stray passenger plane down from its domestic airspace without declaring a state of emergency; in addition, it has been trained in an ever increasing number of foreign missions on how to bring order and keep control over entire populations that engage in the slightest terrorist activity. So nothing is missing; it’s just that it’s still not enough; that’s been clear to the responsible commanders since the events of September 11. That’s why they are, first of all, asking for more of all the nice things they already have: more personnel, more material resources, in a word: more money so that their apparatus can do its thing, just as it always has on an even vaster scale, and satisfy the extreme demands of the insecure monopolist of violence. The necessary funding is then promptly provided; several tens of billions of dollars in the USA. And where the current austerity budget isn’t supposed to provide the additional euros, a finance minister gifted with a Hessian sense of humor collects what is needed for the time being from cigarette smokers and property insurance customers.

On the other hand, the heads of national security, which is organized in multiply redundant ways, immediately notice one fundamental qualitative deficiency; and this bothers them far more than any problems with the quantity of what their troops are able to do: Their security services are not allowed to do enough. This finding is quite simple, which is why it was already completely finished on September 12: In light of the attack, which nevertheless succeeded, and the permanent quasi-state of war that was decided upon as a result, all authorizations seem like so many restrictions on the power of order that the agencies authorized to carry out their specific tasks have at their disposal; all special assignments of responsibility look like prohibitions on doing what’s necessary and sometimes more than that; all meaningful delimitations of authority, without which the various chains of command would constantly get tangled up, prove to be a hindrance, if not an impediment, on a successfully productive cooperation. The constitutional custom of prescribing the tasks and powers of the various state agencies in the form of laws and subjecting compliance with these rules to monitoring comes under criticism: as a brake on the state’s power of reach, as a blocking of the monopolist of violence in its efforts to completely monopolize the violence in its society. The entire democratic and constitutional way of organizing state violence is ultimately discredited by the new security policy imperative: by so neatly distinguishing its diverse needs to surveil and purge its own population and defining the corresponding tasks so precisely, political rule is basically constantly bumping up against itself. In reality, the limitation on the state’s omnipotence doesn’t amount to much; and it is quite easy to see that there is not much to be gained from the monopolist of power “limiting” itself. For this reason, however, bourgeois society wants it to be appreciated all the more as a generous renunciation and wise restraint that it forbids its power bodies from acting arbitrarily, connects rule with functions, and institutionalizes the self-control of power in its own stages of appeal – and in doing so, constantly invokes the subjects’ civil liberties, which the sovereign is not allowed to touch. The situation is quite different, however, when the bourgeois sovereign declares its authority is at risk. Then the ruling democrats find nothing wrong with practically denying the otherwise cultivated hoax about the limited nature of state sovereignty and throwing everything overboard that they would otherwise have credited to their form of rule as its civil and restrained nature. Then state “guarantees” of an “inviolable” private sphere are suspended with a stroke of the pen and a vote in parliament, police checks and investigations are freed from ties to a public prosecutor’s order and a judicial authorization, arrests and deportations are facilitated without the possibility of appeal, secret services are empowered to commit acts of violence, and everything else that has been included in the “security packages” that were “put together” in all the model liberal democracies after September 11th – in accordance with the law, as it should be. The ideology that the bourgeois state is anxious to protect its subjects from its own exercise of power is not even neglected: it is taken at face value, as if it were the factual description of the prevailing conditions; not, however, with the intention of praising the democratic state as an idea of freedom come true, but in order to reject its formalities as a self-obstruction of power and to demand a thorough change in the mores of rule if the nation wants to stand a chance against the terrorist threat within. Protection from the state can and must no longer be demanded when and because the protection of the state is at the top of the political agenda: This is the new line.

As previously said, this self-critical rejection aims at a fiction, albeit one that plays a major role in the democratic public sphere – not to mention social studies lessons and political science – and permeates the customs and traditions of the bourgeois constitutional state right down to the wording of laws and higher court rulings. It’s not the case that the organizers of the new security culture would be intoning their sound bites about the untenability and fundamental need to revise all previous national security measures only in order to better organize the exchange of data between their various agencies or to impartially take action against pious brotherhoods with anti-constitutional objectives. They are concerned with more than that. They want to override a standard for judging the state, its government, and the policies pursued, which until now were always supposed to be so important; for decades, this was used mainly for the ideological struggle against the “real socialist” alternative. Their new security policy no longer wants to subject “Western” democracy to a critical appraisal that still pretends there is anything good about formal restrictions on state omnipotence. With a simple reversal of the argument, they are establishing the criterion by which they want to be judged: the quality benchmark for national security under conditions of a state of permanent anti-terrorist war is its offensive ruthlessness against anything that gives the impression, and has until now been intended that way, that democratic rule under the rule of law is primarily concerned with respect for civil liberties. The monopolist on violence wants to be appreciated for not allowing anyone, especially not those under its old legal system, to “tie their hands” when it is taking aim against potential enemies of the state. In this sense, the ruling security policy makers can gain a lot from the idea that the attacks on America belong to the costs of an “open society” and could only have been reliably prevented in a dictatorship: they – so the thought continues – will in any case not allow their “open society” to be destroyed by terrorist “sleeper cells.” What dictators do for their evil purposes, they always do for their good ends; whatever exposes and disqualifies dictators as such, entitles and honors them as saviors of democracy. That’s how the Schilys of the “Western” world want to conduct politics, and that is how they want to be judged.

The fundamentalist self-criticism of democratic national security thus amounts to a compulsory blank check for the comprehensive investigation of the population and repression based on suspicion. And a government does not issue itself such a carte blanche merely for image reasons, but because it wants to fundamentally overhaul its entire security apparatus in one respect. New responsibilities and new duties are being explicitly assigned to the police and secret services, public prosecutors’ offices and immigration authorities, registries, welfare and employment offices, and military airspace surveillance; conditions and time limits for surveillance, eavesdropping and arrest are being lifted; and new customs are being introduced into the state’s apparatus of domination. Because they must be the first to realize and take to heart that “things” can “no longer go on as before.” A culture of mistrust; the detection or creation of suspicious cases in which the suspect must prove his harmlessness; a “sensitization” of the authorities to signs that fit the bill for backing up suspicions; cooperation among security agencies across all delimitations of competence; the complete refutation of the accusation made from above that “data protection” is “protecting perpetrators”; more attention to “anti-Western” attitudes; more “courage” to pursue suspicions outside the legally prescribed duties to investigate – these are a few building blocks of a new democratic security system.

So that’s why the officials in charge are struggling to connect the quantitative upgrading of their democratic national security with its qualitative progress – and, with their anti-terrorist reform initiatives, are already well on the way to solving their second task: newly recruiting and orienting their people.

2. The people are being made reliable for imperialism

The commanders of the domestic front have to teach their citizens that this is – somehow – war, even if it’s imperceptible in their own country, and that the whole operation should therefore be put under a big security reservation. The whole operation – which means: the citizens themselves with all their activities. Because ultimately, from a security policy perspective, they, with their opaque private lives, are the mire from which the terrorists strike. That’s why they are going to have to put up with being critically scrutinized and repeatedly subject to increasingly thorough security checks. The good people should accept this willingly; but that’s the least their democratic state demands of them. As responsible citizens with the right to vote, they should also approve of everything the state does for their security, that is, appreciate the politicians and vote them into power based on how credible they find the candidates’ determination to take action against any open space in which terrorists could be hiding.

For this lesson in civics and voting, it proves highly useful that a lively debate has arisen on the rewarding topic of “freedom and/or/instead of security” between the powerful protagonists of the new security culture and the adherents of the traditional ethos of state self-restraint. There still exists, of course, publicly audible voices who grant “human beings” a right of protection from state “intrusions,” even parties that once recommended themselves to voters with such “values” and do not want to give them up. These parties find themselves challenged to raise all sorts of concerns when the monopolist of violence is lording its totalitarian nature over everyone so aggressively and treating its own mass base as just a security problem. To be sure, in the wake of the collapse of the World Trade Center, even the most liberal critics of totalitarianism no longer dare deny the democratic authorities their duty to comprehensively monitor and flush out the people. All the same, the talk of an “open society” that must not be destroyed by terrorist acts often enough means to say that the “total surveillance state” is, after all, “no solution” either – especially since “the terrorists” are up to precisely one thing: destroying “our freedom”; even if one knows nothing else about them, one definitely knows that much. Especially in the Federal Republic of Germany, the latest experts on “coming to terms with the past” are reminding the citizens that such incredibly revolutionary institutions as the organizational separation of the police and the secret service is the lesson “we” learned from the “crimes of the Gestapo,” and plead not to carelessly throw away this anti-fascist legacy. In general, the state’s need for security is countered by the inviolable civil liberties that humanity is known to be busy exercising from morning till night...

This is exactly how the advocates of a new security policy see the issue, only they want to reach the exact opposite conclusion and, in this sense, use the hesitancy of the notorious worrywarts as a springboard for their agitation. They certainly won’t let themselves be compared with Hitler; the comparison is reserved for the “enemies of the open society”; and even the liberal fossils of anti-fascism agree with the ruling anti-terrorists that democracy can never be guarded sufficiently against them. And with regard to the everyday activities of working people, which have been ennobled into a chain of acts of freedom, the mass murder in New York of thousands of such heroes of freedom is probably the most striking proof that freedom is nothing without security – without precisely the security which, of course, the state grants its citizens when it promises to constantly screen them for subversive elements and smoke them out. After all, the same state is actually concerned first and foremost with enforcing power relations which, as “collateral damage,” so to speak, create a great deal of insecurity: On top of the ruinous use of the globe by their business communities, the “Western” democracies are imposing a deterrence regime of overwhelming brutality; and they are holding their own citizens responsible for the constant reproduction and defense of these idyllic conditions, precisely as troops in a permanent anti-terrorist defensive war. But this is simply taken for granted in the official security analysis; and any investigation of the causes leads to the conclusion that the enemies are obviously to blame for the hostility that the imperialist powers are incurring with their beneficial activities worldwide. They must therefore protect their people from them at all costs. Any notion that citizens might, conversely, need protection from their authorities and their external and internal undertakings is therefore completely out of the question. The equal sign between national security and the well-being of the citizens is not even cast in a bad light when a man like the German Minister of the Interior openly declares: “There is no danger to be seen in Germany, the country is not a target of Islamist perpetrators; however, that could change as soon as the Americans carry out their counter-attack and Germany is involved, possibly in a prominent position.” The idea that the nation would be better off staying out of the foreign carnage if it’s going to result in incalculable “dangers to the life and limb of its citizens” – from which their state is determined to protect them – no longer occurs to anyone in Germany either, even after three years of a red chancellor and a green foreign minister making it clear in words and deeds that the only future they can imagine for their country is as a global economic power actively involved in all issues of violence around the world. In red-green metaphorical terms, this means: “Grow up!” – and who could resist the charm of this imperative? But then it is also clear that the responsible citizen shares the risks of his community, which has come of age – and conversely sees himself protected when his state protects itself; even if every measure announces that his state deems it necessary to protect itself from him.

National security is therefore the true civil liberty – and in some ways this is also true: what is opened up to people as their personal freedom is in fact nothing other than the ensemble of living conditions that the state, with its sovereign power, presents to them as “reality” and secures against any questioning, both from outside and from within. What is meant, of course, is exactly the opposite, namely that state power, with all the legal and institutional conditions of existence it imposes on its citizens, offers a social space that no terrorist may take away from them. And this is how the national clarification about security policy reaches its target audience. Citizens who would never, ever accept the criticism of all their wonderful freedom that its content is nothing but the beautiful appearance of the state’s monopoly on violence and that the terrorist threat to their existence is therefore a side effect of the imperialism practiced by their authorities in their name, understand this quote well, conversely, as soon as an external or internal enemy that threatens public order is pointed out to them. They let themselves be told that freedom is worth nothing if there is no security, that freedom is above all freedom from terror, therefore security, therefore surveillance. Even if the new security laws, once they are passed, apply to everyone, the citizens do not see themselves as being monitored and oppressed. In the hour of potential danger, they welcome “Big Brother,” who spies on everything and has it under control, because he promises to expose and suppress fundamentalist foreigners. And anything is ok against foreigners. They should be quietly deported before they can commit their crimes. They should be tested by the FBI for their loyalty to the constitution. They should be snooped on while praying and their permission to worship should be withdrawn if they engage in the wrong politics. Good patriots have no objection to their own convictions being investigated – after all, they have the right ones! Only those who have something to hide need fear surveillance by the state. And honest citizens do not see their freedom threatened by the new dimension of the surveillance state because, in truth, they do not have an unrealistic conception of what they call their freedom: It’s nothing but their normal everyday lives, filled with work, shopping, and “stress” – and they rightly assume that no one wants to take this freedom away from them. They have never used their freedom to criticize the state, form opposition parties, or hold protests, and the right to “personal data privacy” is something they never gave much thought to.

On balance, in the liberal democracies of the “West” there isn’t much to criticize about the public’s willingness to put up with a kind of permanent state of war and a corresponding new culture of surveillance and purges, and they even base their political sympathies on the harshness of a security policy that no longer recognizes any programmatic distinction between internal and external forces. The governments of the “Western” frontline states have more doubts about whether the so emphatically announced seriousness of the situation will really have a deep impact on their people if their everyday lives otherwise continue to function as usual for the time being; or whether the announcement that the unconditional loyalty to the state and its leadership which is being required of them through all the stages of military escalation will even be wisely heeded.

These doubts have different weights depending on what the ruling democrats have already accustomed their people to. The remedial action that is necessary varies accordingly – and is particularly drastic in the German case. Here the chancellor of the red-green coalition has made it his mission to thoroughly exorcize from his people any false security, aversion to dangerous state ventures, and a merely touristic relationship with the outside world of states. In step with his new imperialist commitment, the 80 million inhabitants of the country whom he prides himself on having to govern should realize that, as private citizens, they are fundamentally in an imperialist relationship of force with the rest of the world and therefore need a government that will lead them to the right side in this relationship. They must understand that their consent to him – as to any other German head of government – quite literally includes the authorization to involve them in wars and other unpleasantries of this kind – of course, below the threshold of “adventure,” which only the government knows. An important lesson in this sense – beyond all tactical coalition considerations – was the issue of the vote of confidence: The chancellor has forced the clarification on his coalition partner with its reluctant minority, and by extension the entire nation with its far too many skeptical voices and attitudes, that the political “trust” that the voter deposits in the ballot box includes the freedom of the elected leader to impose a security problem on his people and a war deployment on his soldiers purely out of imperialistic calculation, and that without this ultimate consequence it would be worth absolutely nothing. A people who has become disaccustomed to war ought to be given a future-oriented reminder and is reminded of the brutal self-evident fact that freedom has a price and the privilege of being a citizen of an imperialist nation comes with a good chance of being used for its ambitions in acts of violence and of being sacrificed oneself.

See also:
America – “Fighting the war on terrorism on the domestic front”