From Home Rule to Homeland: Counterterrorism as a Way of Life

Abstract

From Home Rule to Homeland:Counterterrorism as a Way of Life Alex Lubin (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution US soldier patrols the streets of Baghdad, February 2007. Credit: US Army by Command Sgt. Maj. Anthony Mahoney, 2nd BCT, 10th Mtn. Div. (LI)). [End Page 556] The US War on Terror reached its twentieth anniversary while I was teaching an Introduction to African American Studies course, a coincidence that inspired a historical comparison of racial terror, minority rule, and state violence across time. More specifically, on September 11, 2021, my students and I discussed W. E. B. Du Bois's essay "The Propaganda of History," from his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois discusses how Reconstruction—the unprecedented opportunity for the United States to realize a vision of abolition democracy following enslavement and Civil War—was viewed as a failure by many US historians. A consensus developed—propaganda—within the historical profession that Reconstruction failed because it was imposed against the will of the former Confederate states by carpetbaggers, scalawags, and radical abolitionists and because the freedmen, when they achieved political power, were incompetent and corrupt. This consensus understood Jim Crow segregation, supported in law and by white vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, as restoring order to the nation while enabling continued white supremacist power as a governing rubric. As my students and I considered how the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution helped realize and guarantee abolition democracy, and how Jim Crow limited those possibilities, we noted that the forces of white supremacy, including the Ku Klux Klan and so-called Red Shirts, constituted a sort of insurgency and that terrorism had undermined Reconstruction's promise.1 Viewed in the context of 2021, on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the federal abandonment of Reconstruction and the failure of abolition democracy at the hands of white supremacy and minority rule seem especially uncanny. As the United States commemorated its fight against terrorism, my class and I were studying how white supremacist insurgency—terrorism—established the conditions for US democracy for nearly one hundred years after the Civil War. Furthermore, as we thought about how the United States entered the War on Terror to defend "freedom- loving people," to paraphrase President George W. Bush, we wondered whether, in another one hundred years, students across [End Page 557] the world might ask why one nation, the United States, had the authority to establish a vision for global democracy and governance over the planet. Might the United States' defense of "the homeland" during the War on Terror be part of the same imperial logic as the southern Democratic Party's "redeemers" after the Civil War, who defended "home rule" and white supremacy as a bulwark against the presumed intrusion of the state and the federal government? How might minority rule in global governance, in defense of a "homeland," carry traces of the "home rule" movement of the Reconstruction era? These questions, and others, call for an analysis of the time and place of counterterrorist warfare. Writing about the US War on Terror poses special challenges due to the ways that it describes a discrete historical event—the militarized response to the events of September 11, 2001—as well as a longer way of life that has been a strategy of empire deployed throughout the history of US imperial culture. As my students and I experienced, when cast in the shadow of the insurgency against Reconstruction, the contemporary War on Terror appears connected to deeper histories. Further, the War on Terror not only confounds its temporal boundaries; it also exceeds the cartography of the nation itself. The War on Terror sutures together a range of security infrastructure within the US and abroad that reinforces the geographies of the war as well as the meaning of the war's organizing keywords: home and abroad, or domestic and international. While the Bush administration appealed to the exceptional nature of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks to mark a "post"-9/11 mentality that could justify an undeclared global war, in actuality, the US has waged many wars, within the boundaries of the nation and beyond, in the name of...