2002. Violence and Politics: Globalization's Paradox., ed. Sally Avery Bermanzohn, and Mark Ungar, and Kenton Worcester London: Routledge.
- Chapter 8. 1974–2007: After History
- » Explosive Genealogies
The liberal Enlightenment state, having abandoned the mandate on which it was formed—namely, universal education, health care, liberty, and justice (we won't even touch upon the proverbial “pursuit of happiness”)—needs to justify its continued existence at the level of protecting its citizens from “danger.” Sometimes this danger is construed as external, other times as internal, yet other times as both.
What are the parameters that make a state categorize a portion of its citizens as “dangerous and suspicious,” and what are the long-term effects of this categorization in the ways that a specific society comes to understand itself as a cultural and political entity? An examination of the role of history in the organization of everyday lived experience will point us toward a possible response to this question and will help us to elucidate the intimate but nebulous relationship between political action, political ideology, and social memory as they affect the everyday lives of citizens. Through such an examination, we can understand schematically the ways in which the experience of history, even when seemingly forgotten, organizes the ways people respond to their current lived realities, as these register “on their very bodies,” as the example of the publisher Karabeliás shows. Thus, it also means to recognize and acknowledge the modes in which the experience of the body becomes translated into the experience of history through the collectivization of the memory of persecution (of going underground, of torture, of exile).
Medical metaphors have been in use since the 1930s to convey the notion that political dissidence is a (social) disease and political dissidents are infected with it, so that the intervention of a physician (a noninfected politician) capable of curing the disease becomes imperative. They were extensively employed during the civil war and the dictatorship (when the whole country was deemed in dire need of being placed in a cast). Even recently, ex–prime minister Kostas Simitis declared that the country was ill and that he was the physician willing to provide a cure. All this, of course, presupposes and demands that citizens will entrust themselves to their state as one trusts one's physician. This provides us with a wider dimension for understanding the management of what Poulantzas has called “antinational” elements: the intimate relationship between political and medical discourses, whereby medical metaphors legitimate political intervention by the state under the premise of safeguarding the political body from elements that are foreign and extraneous to it and dangerous for its existence.
What is the role of violence in this? To remember Huey P. Newton, “existence is violent,” so even the mere presence of citizens can be extrapolated into a violent act. But before we start addressing the question of violence, it might be instructive to think about the various discourses of “peaceful resistance.” Martin Luther King and Gandhi come to mind, of course, although the pacifism of both has been questioned, and, as Sally Bermanzohn et al. (2002) have shown, it has colonized Martin Luther King's image, whitewashing (so to speak) his more activist and violent past.
This becomes clear not only in the speeches delivered by Metaxas but also later, during the period when the camps were in full operation, in the speeches delivered by the military commanders of the camps and the politicians who supported them.
Gandhi, for instance, had requested that the Indians in South Africa be allowed to enlist and fight on the side of the British during the Boer War, a request that was summarily dismissed by the British.