Holy War

Mark Cronlund Anderson

• Publisher: U of R Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780889774162
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Noam Chomsky and George W. Bush seldom agree, but they both argued that 9/11 stood alone in American history. Although the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction was new, Holy War demonstrates that America's response to the attack followed a legendary pattern as old as the Republic itself. "Holy War is a timely reminder of how Americans, for centuries, have understood their wars of aggression as ultimately justified and fundamentally innocent." Boyd Cothran, author of Remembering the Modoc War"Captivatingly written, highly accessible and engaging, this book makes a major contribution to scholarship on 9/11 by drawing parallels between these events and America's role in previous conflicts. More so, it illuminates the connection between a legacy of racist images of Native Americans in popular culture and the use of that imagery to justify American imperialistic intervention." Matthew Tegelberg, MediaClimate, York University

Chapter 1

Introduction: “A Mission from God”

Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires — or forbidden to him — he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture.

— Sigmund Freud1

I am persuaded no constitution was ever before as well crafted as ours for extensive empire.

— Thomas Jefferson2

Noam Chomsky and George W. Bush seldom find reason to agree, but they both argued that 9/11 stood alone in United States history. Nothing like it had happened before, they said. And to be sure, nobody had earlier crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers. That was new. Both men, deeply committed and well-intentioned ideologues, heroes to their adoring fans, stressed the point. “For the first time, the guns have been trained the other way,” Chomsky said as a part of a series of interviews that were published as a book. He noted emphatically that the continental United States had not been attacked directly on its home turf since the War of 1812.3

Both men also agreed that the United States had been attacked by savages. In his nationally televised address to the nation on September 11, 2001, Bush noted, “thousands of lives [were] ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.…[T]oday our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature.”4 It is hard to argue with such sentiments.

Yet it lies precisely here that Bush and Chomsky neglected something intrinsic to 9/11 because once the United States launched the two ill-fated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the story no longer seems unique. The reason is simple. The 9/11 event and the response to it, collectively the “9/11 story,” are as old as the nation that was born fighting Native Americans. In other words, considered as simulacra, as mythopoesis, such 9/11-like stories have played out again and again in American history. If you consider the 9/11 story from the way the news media cast it,5 you find that it not merely mirrors America’s violent and nurturing mythical frontier conflict, it is the frontier conflict. As John Mead has argued, the cultural response to 9/11 symbolized “the reopening of the American frontier and the collective reinvestment in our Manifest Destiny.”6 In other words, the 9/11 story reprises an old-fashioned, updated Indian7 war.

And so 9/11 was not, and is not, new. Instead, it spins a primal American yarn dating to the earliest days of settlement in the seventeenth century. It is America’s own creation story. In its initial expression, it found Americans or, more accurately, proto-Americans forced to defend themselves against perceived Indian savagery. Early on such sentiments became well established in American popular culture in the form of captivity narratives, which focused imaginatively on the kidnapping of “white” females by “red” savages and the heroic manner in which the white women resisted their captors and were predictably “redeemed” by heroic white males.8 In its infancy, the myth operated on a series of simple binaries. For example, the white Protestant settlers who laid the groundwork for inchoate American core culture were goodness itself, chosen by God, virtuous, decent, abstemious, hard-working, whereas the Indians were bad, Satan’s minions, barbaric, out of control, profligate, and lazy. Interpretation of scripture not merely shaped this construction but breathed life into it. In today’s parlance, we might call those Indians “terrorists,” but initially, and then especially in the centuries that followed (because the Indian wars lasted with few interruptions for nearly 300 years), we have come to know them better as the Sioux, Pawnee, Apache, and so on. In particular, for more than a century, Hollywood westerns have served up a smorgasbord of Indians cast as veritable monsters.

The early Indian wars set the stage and provided a kind of necessary cohesive impetus for early settlement and subsequent expansion across the continent generation by generation. It is difficult to overstress the importance of the early conflicts because they established a cultural framework, a community, an emerging nation, in which America organically embraced its self-sense of divine mission, better known to us nowadays as American exceptionalism. One consequence of the long Indian wars is that those proleptical Indian savages became archetypal. One outcome is that, as portrayed in popular culture, Mexicans, Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino, Saddam Hussein, former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, and so many Central Americans, Vietcong, conflated Arabs/Muslims, and countless other “Others” have subsequently played the role of Indian stand-in(s) in later American conflicts that popular culture presented as structural, spiritual, and emotional heirs of the early Indian wars. Mythical, in other words. These are the subject of this book.

The perpetrators of 9/11 may be considered Indian stand-ins, conveniently cast in the role of “imaginary” Indians, adhering to a settler nation’s shared illusions.9 Americans have also imagined that they are a chosen people, thus exceptional, special, almost virginal. God — the one with the long white beard and the one whom George W. Bush identified as having chosen him to rule — loves America most, after all. God chose America and blessed it. God chose Bush, according to him, to lead in the war on terror that erupted after 9/11. “I am driven with a mission from God,” he said.10 Americans have claimed divine succor and sanction for 400 years. Accordingly, the nation assumes the right to strike at its enemies with extreme force because the right of self-defense is embraced as timeless and universal. By the nineteenth century, writes Anders Stephanson, “Peace and annihilation were seemingly two sides of the same coin.”11 Also, crucially, America draws its right to exist as having been granted to it by God. Righteous payback thus punctuates American history from centuries-long war against Aboriginals, to the Mexican War, war with Spain, interventions in Central America, war against Vietnam, to note just a few examples.

Despite the obvious horrors of 9/11, by engaging and defeating the “new Indians,” the nation thereby affirms its core character as an exceptional people, a freedom-and-democracy-loving-mom-and-apple-pie utopia that, as it happens, also symbolically rebirths itself violently because the nation was born in violence fighting Indians. Herein abides a lusty, onanistic impulse busy at work in the circular and redemptive frontier narrative. As Stacy Takacs has observed about the response to 9/11, “Politicians and pundits alike depicted Americans as innocents besieged by wild savages and desperate for strong men with guns to rescue them. President George W. Bush, in particular, laced his public performances with frontier ‘folkisms’ calculated to reassure the public that he was a strong, capable leader.…[T]he U.S. could do no wrong because its mission was ‘defensive’.”12 So the 9/11 story is not simply about payback for 9/11 but also about payback as a gesture to a life-affirming ritual that birthed the nation in war against Indians. One result is that one might expect to find evidence of such in popular culture.

“Image of Their Communion”

The 9/11 story, then, is not simply as old as the American nation; in a “thick” way,13 it is the nation in its most elemental form: rebirthed and bathed in violence against symbolic Indians. The key idea is that nations constitute “imagined communities,” Benedict Anderson has argued in a widely influential book. The nation, Anderson argues, “is imagined because even the members of the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”14 “Nations, like narratives,” writes Homi Bhabha, “lose their origins in the myths of time, and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.”15 The stories they share, we share, and constitute our national communities, bound by deep feeling, commitment, common purpose, and comity. Anderson shows that the press of necessity plays a key role in promulgating such communities,16 in part functioning as a kind of synecdoche, where the part stands in for the whole. If Anderson and Bhabha are correct, you can anticipate that a nation’s popular culture will express and champion its myths.

The press also importantly wired the nation, drawing together disparate groups and peoples separated by geography and local custom. Additionally, the press provided and maintains a common national language and in this way is traditionally understood as preparing the “rough draft” of history.17 Myth is central, according to Bhabha, because myth provides a warm and reassuring cloak, a gooey, self-fulfilling substance that naturalizes all it touches, the current that runs through media content to grant meaning to the bits of information conveyed (and chosen to convey). Myth offers the narrative shell and the ad...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8