A.J. Yumi Lee and Karen R. Miller. 2024. Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy is an interrogative and absorbing collection that examines the architecture of US empire, both on Turtle Island as well as in Asia and the South Pacific. In eight carefully constructed chapters offered by scholars in different fields and framed by a foreword and an introduction, editors A.J. Yumi Lee and Karen R. Miller’s book explores sites of imperial violence as a “political, ideological, and material project” (4). The resulting collaboration is organised into three sections: Settler Colonialism and Counterinsurgency on the US Frontier, US Colonial Legacies and State Violence in the Philippines, and, finally, Freedom, Terror, and the Ongoing Korean War. While this collection could not have come at a more prescient moment, Prehistories of the War on Terror reminds us that the project of US empire has always been built upon capitalism, incarceration, destabilisation, domination, surveillance, invasion, and genocide.
Following Moustafa Bayoumi’s foreword which inaugurates the book with a searing reflection historicising George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” by “revealing the long arc of imperial ambitions held by the United States” (xi), the first two chapters illuminate the prehistory of the book’s title. Tim Roberts opens the section “The French Influence on American Counterinsurgency Warfare”, introducing US General David Petraeus’s version of counterinsurgency warfare (COIN) through his review of French Algerian War of Independence veteran David Galula’s writings. Roberts builds out the first case study to show that US imperialism and military force do not deploy only one way of war, but often draw strategies from their European predecessors. Equally as impactful, he argues, brutal practices of both modern and traditional COIN warfare justify the use of force “on behalf of a liberal, civilized state against nonstate insurgents” (20). He points towards the US Civil War (1861-65) as an example of this pattern of punitive barbarism from the US government that demonstrates how ingrained these military tactics have been since the country’s formation. Starting with the US Indian Removal Act of 1830, which coincided with the French invasion of Algiers, Roberts highlights the ways that both US and French media reported on “native peoples’ guerrilla warfare” and its effect on “white audiences”, ascribing an otherness to Indigenous people (23). Borrowing from the French General Thomas Bugeaud’s invasion in North Africa, Union Army General Ulysses Grant ordered General Philip Sheridan to “turn the region into a ‘barren waste’” (29). Grant said that “poverty, not death, was war’s greatest punishment” (29). Sheridan would go on to do just that, committing horrific acts in the name of warfare. But it was Union General William Sherman, who adopted COIN tactics as he marched from Mississippi through the Deep South to the Carolinas, that ordered his troops to “treat all southerners not aiding Union troops… as the enemy” (29). His troops complied by destroying farms, lands, and towns. Roberts concludes his chapter by stating that it is no surprise that the US and French military forces borrowed from one another, relying on a transnational history of brutality and barbarism to force their opponents into compliance, rather than Petraeus’ argument for nation-building. Again, this proves there is no singular ruthless way of the US military empire.
While this collection could not have come at a more prescient moment, Prehistories of the War on Terror reminds us that the project of US empire has always been built upon capitalism, incarceration, destabilisation, domination, surveillance, invasion, and genocide.
In the second chapter, “Borderlands of Terror: The US Apache Wars”, Janne Lahti covers the Chiricahua Apaches’ long battle against settlers’ attempts to conquer the US Southwest, which she suggests revealed “vulnerabilities of the ever-growing US empire against an unconventional enemy, showed the limitations of the US troops’ power in guerrilla warfare, and exposed xenophobic US attitudes and uses of extreme violence in all their ugliness” (41). Exploring genealogies from the US-Apache wars to other invasions in US history is atypical, which is why Lahti’s chapter considers four aspects, including the ways that settlers othered and labeled the Apaches as terrorists, separating them from whiteness, the justification for brutality against nonwhite people, and the celebration and performance of white settlers killing Indigenous people. Lahti points out how identifying an Indigenous people as terrorists “served the purposes of the white colonizers. Whiteness equaled innocence and justness” (47). Lahti’s chapter feels like a familiar map, as both Israel and the US deploy similar tactics against Palestinians.
The book’s second section, “US Colonial Legacies and State Violence in the Philippines”, opens with editor Karen R. Miller’s chapter, “Terrains of Dissent: Muslim Land Dispossession, Coloniality, and Terror in the 1930s and the Contemporary Philippines”. In it, she argues that to understand tensions in the Philippines between the government and the elite and Muslim communities, it is imperative to look at how a lineage of colonial capitalism by the Philippine government led to struggles over land dispossession. Examining the period from the 1930s to 2017, Miller contributes a historical perspective on the growing conflict between Maranao Muslims who were protesting the National Defense Act, which aimed to build an independent Philippine military.
The fourth chapter, “Lessons in Counterinsurgency: The Huk Campaign and the Global Cold War” by Colleen Woods circles back to how General David Petraeus “and his allies promoted the idea that the adjective ‘global’ in the Global War on Terror was not a simple geographical description” (85). Rather, it reflected their view that actors in conflict were either “good subjects, aligned with the United States,” or “they were bad subjects, maniacal terrorists working to undermine legitimate governments” (85). These entanglements of good versus evil are derivatives of the genealogy the book traces. Woods’s contribution explores the 1946-1953 Huk campaign in the Philippines, which Woods calls “extensions of colonial-era battles over political, social, and economic inequality in the Philippines and the unequal relationship between the Philippines and the United States” (85). After the Filipino and US forces suppressed the Huks uprising, they painted it as a victory for the “free world” and a win against communism, resulting in US policymakers universalizing “complex histories, peoples, and places” (100).
In the fifth chapter, we switch from military campaigns to a different scale of warfare. Editor A.J. Yumi Lee’s chapter “‘Freedom is Not Free,’ From the Korean War to the War on Terror” offers a genealogy of the origins and uses of the popular US refrain “Freedom is Not Free,” which appears on a mural wall for the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Lee notes that the slogan exemplifies US rhetoric “that straddles the Cold War fight against communism and the contemporary War on Terror” (107). Moreover, the declarative statement reveals an aspect of the empire’s psyche, as “it posited that the [Korean] war had been a success” by winning “freedom” and secondly, that freedom had a cost – “the cost of lives and labor of tens of thousands of American and allied soldiers” (106). From both public and print culture, Lee uses a close reading and interdisciplinary methods to demonstrate how the phrase functions linguistically, culturally, historically, and politically, and links the Korean War to the invasion of Iraq. Lee’s essay deftly deconstructs the power of patriotism, connects its roots in capitalism, and unearths another apparatus of imperialism.
Inviting us to consider how the Cold War’s managed knowledge related to the prehistories of terror to hide dissent, Kim proves the necessity of linking seemingly disparate subjects as well as the need for open access to knowledge production.
Joo Ok Kim’s “A Problem of Knowledge: Epistemologies of Terror in North Korea and US Print Cultures and US Global Statecraft” builds off Lee’s chapter to introduce this section on how examining the discursive move from anti-communism to anti-terrorism can be useful in revealing the ongoing obfuscation of violent US governance (134). Kim weaves the work of other scholars together with the War on Terror’s prehistories, examining grammars of xenophobia and racism through an example of an introductory college English textbook. Kim points out how the English lesson “teaches the literal vocabulary of organized white supremacy” (139) through a sample excerpt that negatively (and racially) positions a group of Black protestors who marched against the murder of a Black youth committed by a racist white man, a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan. Whereas the US reading does not define the KKK as white supremacist and strips it of its violence, Kim identifies how “North Korean English lesson defines the [Ku Klux] Klan as a domestic terrorist organization in the United States” (141). Inviting us to consider how the Cold War’s managed knowledge related to the prehistories of terror to hide dissent, Kim proves the necessity of linking seemingly disparate subjects as well as the need for open access to knowledge production.
In chapters seven and eight, the book wraps up with “Unruly Historicism: Post 9/11 Anti-Imperial Style in the South Asian Anglophone Novel” by Kalyan Nadiminti and “Hostage to Crisis: The Specter of the Permanent Threat in the Era of Live Television” by Naveed Mansoori. Nadiminti argues that the contemporary postcolonial historic novel grapples with 9/11 and its weaponisation and a “liberal world” model that “universalizes a singular US modernity as the only available geopolitical ideology” (151). History is not linear, they write, and “unruliness shapes an ethos of historicizing a traumatic past that resists ideological projects of historical forgetting or instrumentalization” (151). We know literature can also be a tool of propaganda and reshape historical events in ways that they did not happen, and Nadiminti’s essay explores the “compromised position of South Asian writers within a global literary market” (166).
We might ask ourselves – how did we get here? By here, I mean this entire genocidal nation that polices and terrorises every land it touches.
The final concluding chapter from Mansoori advances the overall arc of the collection by laying out how “terror” or “permanent threat” became an opportunity for creating spectatorship and that the media redefined the relationship between “race and place” (169). Mansoori also notes that a similar architecture of coverage was applied to the LA riots, which formulated broader reactions that reverberated into our modern era. These kinds of productions were anti-Muslim (and anti-Black) and engaged US audiences long before 9/11, specifically during mainstream media’s coverage of the Gulf War, escalating ideas of crisis in the US public, and inducing anxiety over a place for which most people had no historical context. Mansoori says that the Gulf War (broadcast live via a 24-hour news cycle) was “the real drama made for TV” (175). The global and domestic crisis became a regular part of media consumers’ lives. Thinking of 9/11 through the lens of a collective viewing experience, Mansoori reiterates that “live television has played an active role in currying favor for the expansion of policing by virtue of the material basis of television… and the specter of a ‘permanent threat’”(182).
We might ask ourselves – how did we get here? By here, I mean this entire genocidal nation that polices and terrorises every land it touches. In Prehistories of the War on Terror, editors A.J. Yumi Lee and Karen R. Miller have assembled a rigorous, interdisciplinary genealogy of that history and the ways that the US empire has inflicted, created, reproduced, and repackaged brutality and terror, both at home and abroad. The book is a must-read for understanding the multiplicity of roads connecting us to the past, challenging and reframing these paths to the War on Terror.
Featured Image: War IS Terror. Source: Flickr.
