A State of Perpetual Suspicion

In December 2001, when President George W. Bush issued the famous “military order” authorizing the indefinite detention of non-U.S. citizens suspected of terrorist activities, some historians questioned whether this order did not have some similarities to the “Law of Suspects” approved by the French Convention of September 17, 1793, which ordered the arrest of those who could have been considered a threat to the revolution. Many of these people, tens of thousands, were then guillotined or executed.

The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote that one of the specific features of revolutionary terror is suspicion. In times of deepening and exacerbating revolution, fears of a growing counter-revolution increase; hence the tendency to see suspects and enemies everywhere, even among the revolutionaries (Danton, Desmoulins and many others were taken to the guillotine by order of Robespierre and Saint Just, although later they met the same fate).

However, the French Revolution was over in a few years, while American democracy has survived for more than two centuries following the line drawn by the “founding fathers” (republic, division of powers, rights and individual rights, universal suffrage). Nevertheless, the reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 2001 seems to have changed that image of the United States. In the past, the U.S. participated in many wars, but once they were over, always returned to normal, and even to prosperous and happy post-war periods. U.S. troops were greeted as liberators by most European peoples during the two world wars of the last century, and as imperialists by some of the Afro-Asian and Latin American populations years later. Still, all these wars ended at some point.

Now, on the other hand, the war against terrorism launched after the 2001 attacks seems to be an endless war. During all these years, a huge machine of national security has been created, which has led to a continued expansion of the powers of the state that now touches virtually every aspect of American life and has changed the classical image of the United States.

In other words, the fight against “invisible terrorism” is causing a weakening of Democratic and Republican values, and the rise of a “state of exception,” which has ceased to be something temporary to become a permanent situation.

James Madison, one of the founding fathers of American democracy, had warned that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” This phrase sounds more realistic and true than that of Saint Just, and certainly more beautiful and great, when from the top of the rostrum of the Convention he said: “The French Republic declares to the whole world that happiness is possible.” Two centuries of history have shown that St. Just’s was a revolutionary dream.