Changes

In <i>Minority Report,</i> the Steven Spielberg film based on a Philip K. Dick story, three humans, through monstrous scientific experiments, have acquired the capacity to foresee the future. The police employ these clairvoyants to arrest criminals <em>before</em> they commit their crime. (The “minority report” from the title refers to those rare cases where one of these clairvoyants disagrees with the others about a crime to be committed.) If one transposes this premise to international relations, does one not get an accurate picture of the Bush (or, rather, Cheney) doctrine now publicly declared as the official U.S. “philosophy” of international politics?<br><br>

The ultimate irony here is that to restore the innocence of American patriotism, the conservative U.S. establishment mobilized the key ingredient of the politically correct ideology that it officially despises: the logic of victimization. Relying on the idea that authority is conferred (only) on those who speak from the position of the victim, it reasoned: “We are now victims, and it is this fact that legitimizes us to speak and act from the position of authority.” So today, when we hear the refrain that the liberal dream of the ’90s is over, that, with the attacks on New York and Washington, we were violently thrown back into the real world, that the easy intellectual games are over, we should remember that such a call to confront harsh reality is ideology at its purest. Today’s “America, awaken!” is a distant call of Hitler’s “<i>Deutschland, erwache!</i>” which, as Adorno wrote long ago, meant its exact opposite.