King Philip’s Shadow: Vietnam, Iraq and the Indian Wars

Abstract

The ‘war on terror’ in the United States is often accompanied by fears and anxieties that come to us from previous disputes. The rhetoric delights in rituals of commemoration — Elaine Showalter calls them ‘infectious stories’, ‘rituals of testimony’1 — the meaning of which reveals the character of a Puritan regime. In the aftermath of September 11, for example, George Bush’s diary entries and policy speeches referred to an historical moment that had placed his country at the epicenter of new world history and made it, what he called, ‘freedoms defender’ in an age-old war against ‘barbarism’. Bush’s tendency to see new war in terms of old, linguistic separations and divisions — righteous purity on the one hand; ‘men without conscience’ on the other — received its initial inspiration from World War II. In a speech he gave on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor on the deck of the US Enterprise, Bush harped back to the fight against ‘tyranny’ in World War II; in particular, the brave pilots in their P-40 fighter planes who, although vastly outnumbered, gave chase and shot down four enemy aircraft. In the modern war against terrorism and the leaders of those who live ‘in caves’ in the United States, he said, would need to deploy ‘new capabilities and technologies’. It would also need to enlist the support of the nation’s ‘military’ (in memory of the pilots of Pearl Harbor and their planes) to achieve ‘decisive and total victory’.2