Inside the Current Issue

State-Sponsored Hate Speech in the War on Terror: A Plan to Push Back

Dan Skinner

How fortuitous to be studying language and politics during the War on Terror! Bush has provided so much linguistic fodder that to note his awkward and suspicious tongue has become almost cliché. From slogans such as "compassionate conservatism," to the name games behind the "death tax" and "personal accounts," the Bush administration has established itself as one of the greatest practitioners of the art of linguistic exploitation.

In waging its "War on Terror," however, Bush and his strategists have soared to new rhetorical heights, proving that carefully crafted language can wreak real havoc on a society riddled with fear. This language, as I argue below, is in fact a form of hate speech that provides us not only with a diagnosis of the way the Bush administration's language has shaped and injured American political discourse, but also with a roadmap that can be used to push back and neutralize the language of the War on Terror's injurious capacity.

To better understand the sleight of hand at work in the Bush administration's linguistic strategy, consider J.L. Austin's work on performative speech in his book How to Do Things With Words (1962). Performatives, according to Austin, are speech acts that perform actions, with the act of promising serving as his classic example. As what he calls an "illocutionary" performative, the utterance "I promise" is not dependent upon any subsequent actions for its linguistic force. Promising, according to Austin, occurs at the moment of its utterance; its force is immediate and the words themselves are the action, just as saying "I do," uttered under the right conditions, is engaging in the act of marriage.

A second type of performative is what Austin calls perlocutionary ¨ utterances that force something to happen as a result of their having been uttered. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously distinguished perlocutionary from non-perlocutionary speech acts with his Clear and Present Danger Test in Schenk v. United States (1919): "The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent." Noting that the First Amendment does not afford one the right to "falsely [shout] fire in a theatre and [cause] a panic," Justice Holmes distinguished speech that doesn't endanger others' bodies from that which does. For instance, it's okay to falsely shout "fire" in one's own living room, but not in public.

In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1996), Judith Butler argues that hate speech is perlocutionary ¨ and, as such, the injuries caused by hate speech are connected by conventions of association, often carrying with them an historically-produced power. For example, the injuriousness effect of uttering "nigger" is not inherent to the word itself; instead, the word conjures a history of racially motivated violence, degradation and exclusion, and it has therefore been associated with these significations.

Crucially, Butler argues that hate speech and, in fact, words in general, do not necessarily constitute "Clear and Present Danger" in and of themselves. It follows that, because hate speech's ability to wound ¨ though real ¨ is malleable, the injured are not helpless in the face of hateful perlocutionary speech acts. Instead, the fact of their malleability makes them potential sites of liberation from the injury that they formerly wielded; think, for example, of the reappropriation of "nigger" that has been deployed in rap music and in parts of African American culture. The connection between perlocutionary utterances and their effects can be changed.

These considerations of performative speech expose the logic of the language deployed by the Bush administration in its "War on Terror." The force of performative utterances and their relation to "facts," for example, is behind the now-famous claim made by a high-level Bush administration official in 2003, reported in the New York Times Magazine, that liberals were living in a "reality-based community." The Administration, on the other hand, saw itself as creating its own reality through political power. In step with this claim, official government warnings of danger, and the actions these protestations encourage, has been used to turn speech acts into powerful reality shapers.

By the language of the War on Terror, I refer to the whole range of linguistic devices, phrases and slogans, as well as vehicles of "communication" such as the Office of Homeland Security's Terror Alert Status chart -- all of which the US government claims are intended to keep Americans aware of the degree of threat that "terrorism" poses to their lives. Since the collective practical effect of these devices is to alter the way in which Americans behave, understanding how these perceptions are structured is necessary to assess the state of American democracy.

The Bush administration's language strategy for the War on Terror fits the legal definition of hate speech according to the Supreme Court's most recent findings, most notably on cross burning. According to the Court's decision in R.A.V. v. The City of St. Paul (1992), for example, hate speech is to be understood not on the basis of categories of content such as race, sex, gender or sexual orientation, but on the basis of its ability to be construed as action ¨ what the Court had earlier termed "fighting words" that signify intent to do bodily harm.

In Virginia v. Black (2003) Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority, argued that "a State, consistent with the First Amendment, may ban cross burning carried out with the intent to intimidate," but in doing so did not prohibit forms of cross burning which were not considered preludes to physical harm. These cases, in short, hinged on the illocutionary/perlocutionary divide: the Virginia statute the Court struck down argued that the very appearance of a burning cross carried with it illocutionary force and that, with reference to hate speech, a distinction between an utterance and an action could not be made. Then, in finding that injury is not inherent to uttering hateful language, the Court distinguished utterances from those meanings that are often associated with them. In this, the Court suggested that it is society ¨ and not language as such ¨ that associates these signs with their significations of injury. The First Amendment, the Court found, protects such signs.

Of course, the ideas behind cross burning are clear, but what was at stake in Virginia v. Black was what role, if any, the state should play in restricting speech, and whether space was retained for the re-signification of these acts of hate speech. If the Court had banned all cross burning on the grounds that the speech itself was injurious, it would have ensured the permanent injury of the speech itself by deeming its utterance unspeakable, with no chance for reversing or neutralizing its injurious capacity. Butler argues that legal prohibitions make permanent the wounds of injurious speech by "sedimenting" the connection between words and injury. Rather than eradicating injury, such efforts make it a permanent feature of the utterance by "foreclosing" its meaning and historical resonance. This prohibition, in turn, has the paradoxical effect of affirming the language's injuriousness.

In their practical application, claims made by leaders about a world reshaped by terrorism have had just such an injurious effect on Americans' lives. Like cross burning and other forms of hate speech, these claims seek to pull people into their linguistic web, structuring the discursive environment through which the world is understood and, on occasion, questioned. Given that the US government can project its voice widely through the media, using a protective frame of patriotism and national security to preclude dissent, the language of the War on Terror can only be assumed to be issued with the intention of doing bodily harm. Seen from another perspective, it is clear that the language of terrorism has no communicative value aside from conditioning the behaviors of Americans through fear.

In projecting a pervasive framework of fear, pitting citizens against citizens and encouraging neighbors to inform on neighbors, the US government has created the conditions for social behaviors that would make Pavlov cringe. The effectiveness of this fear was confirmed in a recent national poll indicating that 64% of Americans would "be willing to give up some of [their] personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism" and that 65% of Americans value their "safety" over "civil liberties or privacy." (1) The inexplicability of the terror alert status color chart is an even more glaring example of the inattention paid to the injurious capacity of the US government's significations of terrorism and, hence, if not the intent, the reckless disregard with which these messages are being deployed. Though former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge has acknowledged that the chart is confusing, the best that current Secretary Michael Chertoff can promise is that a review of its effectiveness is ongoing. Meanwhile, the chart continues to do violence to Americans' lives.

The US government has not, as many have suggested it should, encouraged the mobilization of civic action. Instead it has de-mobilized American society itself, with notions of citizenship increasingly limited to a passive cooperation with official acts, while newly unleashed law enforcement agents search bags, tap phones, and take "suspicious" people off New York City tour buses simply because they possess dark complexions and backpacks. Worse still, citizens are not encouraged to engage one another and no new forums for political participation and communication have been established ¨ all absences that have degraded the degree and quality of communication in American political discourse. Even contesting deeply questionable elections is considered within this context to undermine American national security. (It should be noted, however, that Al Gore's "unite the nation" concession speech occurred before Sept. 11, testament to the fact that the conditions of what is commonly called the "post-Sept. 11 world" were in no way ushered in by the attacks themselves.)

Be scared, Americans are told. And, imminently exploitable in their moment of weakness, they heed the force of the state's utterance.

I traveled to Berlin for a month last summer and, as often happens in New York when one blinks, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) implemented a series of new anti-terror advisories and protocols. Upon returning, on my first daily underground commute I was treated to the following announcement, repeated about every five stops: "If you see a suspicious package or activity on the train or platform, do not keep it to yourself. Tell a police officer or MTA employee." With this, the automatic voice system on the fancy new subway trains ¨ the much exalted technologies that the MTA had promised would be used to update New Yorkers about route and schedule changes, and make the MTA more rider-friendly ¨ was transformed into a bullhorn of fear. "If you see something, say something," posters advise. As the announcements roll, New Yorkers look around, for something ¨ for anything ¨ "suspicious." I caught myself thinking that maybe my bag was suspicious, too.

It was on that day that I decided to undertake a quaint experiment in performativity. I placed a hastily constructed "suspicious package" patch on my bag, which, on any given day, contains not bombs or sarin gas, but notebooks and, sometimes, school books. Suspicious indeed.

I soon found that my little tag carried with it a big voice: those two little words, pinned to my bag instead of vomiting from some law enforcement bullhorn, provoked both approving smiles and skeptical sneers that could only be interpreted as an instinctive understanding of the power ¨ but also the fragility ¨ of performative speech. Regardless of the reaction, however, those two words revealed the wisdom of Butler's argument: the language of fear is contestable. Like Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner or his fake Thanksgiving turkey: saying that something is doesn't make it so.

The relationship between appearances and reality is, of course, not something that the average citizen thinks much about explicitly. And, as I'm often reminded by those who are suspicious of my criticisms, Sept. 11 really did happen, as did the post-Sept. 11 Bali, London, Madrid and Sharm-El-Sheik bombings. "People really died, and you're poking fun at a serious problem," they claim.

This, of course, misses the point. Sure, all of that happened. But so did March 23, 2003 ¨ the day the US and Britain unleashed their own "shock and awe" on Iraq. Similarly, what Americans call the "Vietnam War" the Vietnamese call the "American War." Reality is important, but perspective rules.

So what of "suspicious packages" and the perpetual fear which performatives reek on society? To free the injured ¨ Americans, in this case ¨ from this grip of performative violence, it is neither necessary nor wise to try and prevent these contrived speech acts from being uttered. Those announcements and reminders serve as evidence of what the US government would prefer Americans feel on a daily basis. They present not the world, but the way in which the government would prefer that Americans see the world. As significations, these speech acts can be ¨ at least potentially ¨ neutralized, if not turned back on themselves. This is not unlike the reappropriation of "queer" that, while not removing the injury, has, at least in part, redirected the blunt injuriousness that the word once carried for homosexuals.

To attempt to stop hate speech, Butler argues, would only serve to "foreclose" the possibilities that performative language carries with it, placing the determinations of such foreclosure in the hands of the government. Butler suggests instead to "Consider the situation in which racist speech is contested to the point that it does not have the power to effect the subordination that it espouses and recommends; the undetermined relation between saying and doing is successfully exploited in depriving the saying of its projected performative power."

Moreover, Butler argues that "To give the task of adjudicating hate speech to the state is to give that task of misappropriation to the state." Her suspicions in Excitable Speech were confirmed by Justice Clarence Thomas's dissenting opinion in Virginia v. Black, where he equated the necessity of banning cross burning with prohibiting the burning of the American flag. Both acts, Thomas argued, constituted special categories because of their "unique position€in our Nation's 200 years of history." Thomas's willingness to equate criticism of the state with the intimidation of blacks, Jews and other minorities illustrates the slippery continuum on which hate speech slides.

Instead of seeking to prevent its deployment, the language that has framed the War on Terror should be exploited, and with it the ridiculous images that raise the fairly rare occurrence of terrorism to the level of an insidious societal narrative capable of shaping Americans' lives. Austin argued that performatives are dependent upon the context within which they are uttered. With this in mind, efforts to reappropriate and reformulate the language of the War on Terror requires what Jacques Derrida called a "break with context" to free the words that have constituted our understanding of the War from the structures that anchor their meanings. This could be carried out through counter claims of rhetorical ridiculousness like calling ourselves "suspicious" and reminding our friends and family at every turn that they should be scared, too. Far from exacerbating the problem, doing so serves as a form of what Butler calls "insurrectionary speech" that reveals the artificiality of the claim in a way that contesting it through contradiction cannot. Stealing and reappropriating the panoply of frames that constitute the language of the War on Terror could provide new spaces for reconsidering the current state of violence that the current political discourse has supported.

The central dilemma confronting those concerned with the discourse of terrorism is that as communicative beings, we sometimes forget that language (and hence its potential injury) is conventional and, therefore, contestable. This requires nothing less than a state of hyperawareness and a constant critique of the way in which language shapes ¨ and the injured let it shape and hence delimit ¨ possibility and political imagination. This, of course, is to usher in what Foucault called "a politics of discomfort." But this politics, though not comfortable, adds to a pervasive anxiety a hope that comes from the disruption and liberation of language from the state.

As both Austin and Butler acknowledge, speech acts are crucial elements of potential power. In what was formerly said to be a "Global War on Terror" but, according to the Bush administration's most recent frame, is now a "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism," questioning the unquestioned formulation of official language must be part of efforts to challenge them. Resisting the formulations of the language deployed in the War on Terror, and the meanings that the U.S government seeks to impose upon it, makes freedom possible in the face of pervasive violence.

(1) Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. July 26-27, 2005. N=900 registered votes nationwide. MoE ± 3.