War on terror

The process of militarisation has a long history in the United States and is varied rather than static, changing under different historical conditions. Catherine Lutz defines it as ‘an intensification of the labor and resources allocated to military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals. Militarization is simultaneously a discursive process, involving a shift in general societal beliefs and values in ways necessary to legitimate the use of force, the organization of large standing armies and their leaders, and the higher taxes or tribute used to pay for them. Militarization is intimately connected not only to the obvious increase in the size of armies and resurgence of militant nationalisms and militant fundamentalisms but also to the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action.’1 Unlike the old style of militarisation in which civil authority is made subordinate to military authority, the new ethos of militarisation is organised to engulf the entire social order, legitimising its values as a central rather than peripheral aspect of American public life. Moreover, the values of militarism no longer reside in a single group, nor are they limited to a particular sphere of society, as Jorge Mariscal points out: