Savagery in democracy's empire

Abstract

The language of savagery is indigenous to US political culture as the trope that legitimises war and empire. This article traces its recurrence and development throughout US history, from America's 18th century revolution to the post-World War II American century and from Cold War to the present open-ended war on terror—a continuing quest for empire under the sign of civilisation and democracy. The three main dimensions of the image of savagery and multiple sets of decivilising vehicles are identified as an initial step towards language critique.

Notes

For examples of how various regimes have visually caricatured their enemies as barbarians, see S Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections on the Hostile Imagination, San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1986, esp pp 43 – 47.

A substantial body of scholarship and commentary on American empire has been developing in recent years. Examples include, Anon, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2004; J Garrison, America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power?, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2004; M Mann, Incoherent Empire, London: Verso, 2003; AJ Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002; C Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004; C Boggs (ed), Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire, New York: Routledge, 2003; and J Newhouse, Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order, New York: Knopf, 2003.

I discuss these points in RL Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

KW Ritter & JR Andrews, The American Ideology: Reflections on the Revolution in American Rhetoric, Falls Church, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1978, pp 7 – 10.

RL Hatzenbuehler & RL Ivie, Congress Declares War: Rhetoric, Leadership, and Partisanship in the Early Republic, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983; and RL Ivie, ‘The metaphor of force in prowar discourse: the case of 1812’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 68 (3), 1982, pp 240 – 253.

RL Ivie, ‘Progressive form and Mexican culpability in Polk's justification for war’, Central States Speech Journal, 30 (4), 1979, pp 311 – 320.

McKinley, quoted in RL Ivie, ‘William McKinley: advocate of imperialism’, Western Journal of Communication, 36 (1), 1972, pp 15 – 23.

D Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993, pp 3, 11, 16, 49, 100 – 102, 106, 108 – 114, 153 – 155, 186 – 188, 203, 227.

W Wilson, ‘War message’, quoted in RL Ivie, ‘Images of savagery in American justifications for war’, Communication Monographs, 47 (4), 1980, p 287.

MS Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, pp 14, 38, 45, 83 – 85.

RL Ivie, ‘Franklin Roosevelt's crusade against evil: rhetorical legacy of a war message’, in L Rohler & R Cook (eds), Great Speeches for Criticism and Analysis, Greenwood, IN: Alistair Press, 2001, pp 98 – 105.

Sherry, In the Shadow of War, pp 96 – 98, 114 – 115.

RJ Lifton & G Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial, New York: Avon Books, 1995, p xiv; and Truman, quoted in ibid, pp 4 – 6.

JW Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, pp x, 9.

Roosevelt, quoted in Ivie, ‘Images of savagery’, pp 287, 289.

RL Ivie, ‘Fire, flood, and Red fever: motivating metaphors of global emergency in the Truman Doctrine speech’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 29 (3), 1999, pp 570 – 591.

Eisenhower, quoted in RL Ivie, ‘Eisenhower as cold warrior’, in MJ Medhurst (ed), Eisenhower's War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1994, pp 14 – 15.

Sherry, In the Shadow of War, pp 132 – 34, 139.

See Ivie, ‘Images of savagery’, for a fuller account of these discursive dimensions.

RL Ivie, ‘Speaking “common sense” about the Soviet threat: Reagan's rhetorical stance’, Western Journal of Speech Communication, 48 (1), 1984, pp 39 – 50.

See, for instance, Ivie, ‘Metaphor of force’, and RL Ivie, ‘Literalizing the metaphor of Soviet savagery: President Truman's plain style’, Southern Speech Communication Journal, 51 (2), 1986, pp 91 – 105.

RL Ivie, ‘The ideology of freedom's “fragility” in American foreign policy argument’, Journal of the American Forensic Association, 24 (1), 1987, pp 27 – 36.

Sherry, In the Shadow of War, pp 431 – 432, 441 – 442, 445 – 446, 461, 464, 467, 497.

See, for instance, Q Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp 320 – 321.

I Kant, ‘To perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch’, in Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, ed and trans Ted Humphrey, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983, pp 107 – 139.

Ibid, p 117.

There is a substantial literature on the current appropriation of the idea of a democratic peace, much of which is critically reviewed in RL Ivie, ‘Democratizing for peace’, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 4 (2), 2001, pp 309 – 322.

D Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, p 2.

JD Simon, The Terrorist Trap: America's Experience with Terrorism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001, pp xx, 8, 167, 178 – 179, 185, 195.

GW Bush delivering the commencement address at the US Air Force Academy, ‘Transcript: Bush casts war on terrorism in historic terms’, Washingtonpost.com, 2 June 2004, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9946-2004Jun2?language = printer, accessed 3 June 2004.

RL Ivie, ‘The rhetoric of Bush's “war” on evil’, KB Journal, 1 (1), 2004, online at http://www.kbjournal.org.

NA Lewis, ‘Ashcroft defends antiterror plan and says criticism may aid foes’, New York Times on the Web, 7 December 2001, at http://www.nytimes.com, accessed 7 December 2001.

‘Remarks made by Senator Zell Miller’, New York Times, 1 September 2004, at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/politics/campaign/01TEXT-MILLER.html?adxnnl = adxnnlx = 1094098085-v57iOoSoRBwndE6f9OMrQ, accessed 1 September 2004.

See, for example, Mann, Incoherent Empire, pp 159 – 163, 185 – 190; and S Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, London: Verso, 2003, pp 2 – 3, 10 – 12, 15, 27, 42, 65, 106.

‘Rumsfeld says terror outweighs jail abuse’, Washingtonpost.com, 11 September 2004, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11930-2004Sep10?language = printer, accessed 11 September 2004.

See, for example, an argument for agonistic pluralism in C Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000.

On this point, see RL Ivie, ‘Prologue to democratic dissent in America’, Javnost/The Public, 11 (2), 2004, pp 19 – 35.

J Dawes, The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the US from the Civil War through World War II, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p 21.

M de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans S Rendall, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984, pp xvii – xx.

R Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.