Inviolability

In the ’90s, Americans had a feeling of inviolability. The threat from the USSR had passed, and if anyone was to be afraid, it was America’s enemies. This era is usually considered to have ended on Sept. 11, 2001. However, the Boston bombings raise the question of whether the impression of inviolability has really left Americans.

Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a “war on terrorism” was declared. Huge financial, technical and symbolical resources were mobilized in order to deal with the terrorists and any countries supporting them, all so that the feeling of safety would return. In order to achieve this goal, two wars were unleashed that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, far-reaching limitations on freedom were introduced in the U.S. and the security services were given more freedom in their actions.

During the “war on terrorism,” the boundaries of what is an acceptable practice in a liberal democracy were systematically pushed.

More and more taboos were broken: imprisoning people without trial and without charges, torture, killing people thought to be terrorists using drones. In 2011, the ultimate boundary was breached. The U.S., directing a missile toward a jeep driven by Anwar al-Awlaki, decided to kill its own citizen without guaranteeing him a fair trial.

After 12 years of the “war on terrorism,” talk of Western liberal democracies as systems that embody human rights now amounts to mere empty slogans. The old — always limited — politics of values has been replaced by politics of survival, which is becoming more and more inhuman, despite, or maybe because of, its increasing sterility based on “surgical strikes” and minimalized loss.

The Boston bombing is considered by some as a success of the U.S. strategy of dealing with terrorism. Its scale is, after all, incomparable to the attack which took place a decade ago. The number of casualties is a thousand times smaller. But the significance of the Boston bombing is inversely proportional to its scale, and this is regardless of whether the attack was committed by an internal or external “enemy,” as it shows that it is impossible to create a safe reality, even at the price of sacrificing values central to democracy.

Looking at the way the attack was reported, it is difficult to imagine a change in security politics. An explosion in which people from a wealthy first-world country are killed and seriously injured is heavily and emotionally described in Western media. The victims from Boston are some of “us,” possessing the right to live and celebrate. We know what little Martin looked like and that he wanted to hug his father at the finish line. The killed and injured civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan cannot hope for the same treatment. We will never know their faces, names or life stories. For us, they are people who died because that’s the kind of conditions they live in.

As long as we treat the deaths of others as circumstances that are part of justified actions aimed at assuring our inviolability, there is no point hoping for either a change in security politics or inviolability.