Perpetual War and Human Rights in the United States

Abstract

Despite the birth of human rights in violent revolutionary processes, literal war is never conducive to respect for human rights. It means doing deliberate violence against the bodies of people designated as “others”; it means deliberately destroying the resources that they need to develop themselves; and it means dehumanizing them in the minds of one’s own public. But if literal war poses threats to human rights, so does its figurative form, war as a trope. Since World War II, the United States has been intermittently at literal war a number of times (Korea, Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan—and by proxy Central America and Columbia). But it has been consistently in a state of figurative war. The internal anticommunist crusade in the United States in the United States from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, which went by the name of McCarthyism, was part of the U.S.’s “War on Communism.” In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson took the trope in a more constructive direction when he declared a “War on Poverty,” which was aimed at improving the social and economic human rights of those at the bottom of American society. But that was not to last. Beginning in 1980 with the victory of Ronald Reagan and a string of administrations that saw poverty as an individual failing rather than a human rights issue, the trope of war was returned to the more literally violent enterprises of the “wars” on crime, drugs, and terrorism.