White Man's Burden Take 2

Neo-orientalism based foreign policy combined with paranoid-insular border policy seems to me to be morally questionable and practically unsustainable.

It has occurred to me that the way the "war on terror" is being languaged and socialized into us via political speeches, mainstream international relations, and (most) media sources, smacks of the very same rationalization and monster-constructs that inspired and sustained colonialism....

Also, war as a strategy for defeating terrorism seems like blowing up a house to kill the hornets nest in the attic. Seems to me that police and inteligence work is what dismantels and outs terrist cells which are small stateless ideological entities not uniformed state militaries. It didn't take a sustaine occupation and bombing campaign to root out the likes of Al Capone ... And what is terrorism if not politicized organized crime circuits???

Consider this quote from L.H.M. Ling "What some in Bush's Whitehouse or Blair's Parliament or even Burlusconi's Rome pass as "new"" and "emancipatory" [or post 9/11 thinking], many in New Dehli, Cairo, and Jakarta recognize as too familiar, nineteenth century, and colonial."

People really need to look both back and forward now when thinking about how best to act nationally and internationally.....

For more contemporary postcolonial analysis of international relations see the works of L.H.M Ling, Geeta Chowdry, Sheila Nair, Shampa Biswas, and/or Anna M. Agathangelou.

For staples of classic postcolonial thought please see the works Orientalism or Culture and Imperialsim by Edward Said and/or Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.