TDR Comment: The Age of Terrorism

Have the events of September 11, 2001 "changed everything"? Certainly the Bush government, wanting to stay in power, is doing all it can to make it so. The plan is to perform a historical reenactment-in postmodern dress-of the Cold War. Remember the Cold War? A world divided roughly in thirds: Us, Them, and the Unaligned (aka the Third World). The Cold War pitted an "empire" made from the geographically contiguous but otherwise diverse entities of the USSR + the "satellite" nations of Eastern Europe against an alliance of Western European nations + the USA, Canada, and Japan. Over time, it was plain that the Cold War was orchestrated primarily by the USA. The American and European homelands were "protected" by means of MAD-the policy of "mutually assured destruction" guaranteed by a surfeit of nuclear weapons. MAD meant that the blood fights of the Cold War were played out in the Third World-Korea, Vietnam, and various locales in Africa and Latin America. Very convenient.

In a weird global dance, the USA's regressive policies made Communism attractive to millions in the Third World. By creating the need for an alternative to American domination, the USA actually made it inevitable that the very enemies it proclaimed it was opposing would thrive, giving the USA a reason to launch attacks. These took the form of covert operations, economic manipulation, training and support of local anti-Communists (often enough, butchers and thugs), and outright American military intervention. All this was done, our leaders told us, in order to "contain" the USSR. But who was containing the USA? There was no dictatorship too brutal, no regime too corrupt for the USA to deny support to as long as its leadership professed allegiance to the anti-Communist movement. The result of this 50-year-long Cold War was to bankrupt the Soviet Union and frustrate even conceptualizing what a truly just, global society of peoples might be.

Think for a moment what the world might be like if the USA: supported the Cuban revolution, opposed the military regimes of Latin America, and embraced the democratic socialism of Salvadore Allende of Chile (instead of arranging Allende's murder); helped Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, worked to overthrow the apartheid tyranny in South Africa, and instituted a continental Marshall Plan so that Africa could recover from the horrors of colonialism; refused to take up the cause of defeated French colonialism in Vietnam, worked for the peaceful reunification of Korea and China, and demanded a just settlement of the Palestine-Israel question; recognized 60 years ago that dependence on Middle East oil was bound to fundamentally distort American foreign policy and therefore launched an all-out effort to develop nonfossil fuels and systems-including continental networks of bullet trains, local mass transit, and serious research and development of solar and other ecologically friendly energy sources.

"What if?" is a game one cannot win. However, I am not dreaming when I write that all of the possibilities I've just listed were on the table in America, supported by a considerable number of people, and debated in more-or-less mainstream media (as well as in the radical press). Why were these alternatives not pursued? Why, often, were those who actively supported progressive policies wire-tapped, hounded, imprisoned, shot to death, and ground to dust? I am not a conspiracy-theory type thinker. I don't believe that American policy makers fully comprehended the world they were shaping when they made the decisions they made. What they wanted to do was to stay in power in Washington, keep America on top globally (we had our own empire to enhance), and make sure that the people and corporations with real money could make more of the same. Ironically, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president and ex-general who got the right-wing ball rolling by selecting tricky Dick Nixon as his vice president, warned in his farewell address of the oncoming "military-industrial complex."

What does this have to do with performance? With the work of performance studies in the third year of the 21st century? It is not...