The Gift of Freedom

WAR, DEBT, AND OTHER REFUGEE PASSAGESBy MIMI THI NGUYEN

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780-8223-5222-8

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………..ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………xiiiIntroduction. The Empire of Freedom…………………………….11. The Refugee Condition………………………………………332. Grace, the Gift of the Girl in the Photograph…………………833. Race Wars, Patriot Acts…………………………………….133Epilogue. Refugee Returns……………………………………..179Notes……………………………………………………….191Bibliography…………………………………………………239Index……………………………………………………….267

Chapter One

The Refugee Condition

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. —HARRY TRUMAN, “Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine”

Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free. —MICHEL FOUCAULT, The Birth of Biopolitics

This book begins its inquiry into the genealogies of the gift of freedom with the continuities of powers between war and refuge. I foreground the refugee passage to look closely at the dual character of freedom—the development of capacities and the intensification of power—as it is bound to the passage of time. In particular, I wish to consider further and somewhat unfaithfully Derrida’s provocation that “what it gives, the gift, is time, but this gift is also a demand of time,” to fathom the time consciousness of the gift of freedom. What have time and freedom to do with the other, and what is the significance in their giving? Most obviously, perhaps, the liberal conception of freedom is constitutive of both the narration and the notion of linear, evolutionary time wrought through indices of race and coloniality. In this familiar strategy, the temporal distancing of some peoples as anachronistic, irrational, captive to superstitious or atavistic faith, and otherwise outside—in Walter Benjamin’s words—the secular, empty, and homogeneous time of history counterposes the autonomous individual as the end of “natural” human consciousness, endowed with those capabilities to inhabit and act within modernity’s now. But inasmuch as world-historical homogeneous time and its core concept of progress emerge from the crucible of empire, these stories of human ontology are bound anew to liberalist alibi for the intensification of global power. That is, the gift of freedom also names those forms of liberal government that produce the measures and means by which the racial, colonial other be given to diminish—but never to close—the distance between anachronism and history proper. Brought together to narrate the refugee passage, these modes of given time speak to the conceptual commitments and structural investments that reconcile war and refuge as they meet over the figure of the benighted other, which becomes the troubling story of the subjection to freedom.

Timothy Linh Bui’s Green Dragon, an independent film thematizing such refugee passage, tells one story of this movement and supplies a schematic map of this chapter’s concerns about these conjoined scenes of power. The film opens with a complex sequence of image, sound, memory, and event, rapid-fire cuts syncopating cause and effect, chaos and command. Green Dragon begins as so many films about this war do, with historical footage of warplanes releasing their fatal cargo over dense jungle. In the next set of frames, stitched together by sounds of exploding munitions and indistinct cries over an instrumental track, Saigon’s would-be evacuees flood airfields and collapse fences with the bludgeon of their desperation, hoping to escape the coming regime. These archival sequences are succeeded by choreographed scenes of marines digging trenches and erecting tents under the Californian sun. Purposeful and efficient, these soldiers brace for the thousands of refugees to come. The screen goes black before it abruptly is illuminated by an intense flashbulb, throwing into sharp relief the fatigue and sorrow creasing an aged refugee’s face. The scene shifts inside a nondescript building filled with desks and stations where soldiers and social workers shoot photographs, ink fingers, and administer oaths to new arrivals. From this well-organized chaos, the film plunges us once more into silence and shadow, as a young boy wakes amid other sleepers in a seemingly windowless barrack. Choosing a cautious path to the far side, the boy opens a door onto a blinding light. It is “April 1975,” and the young boy is the promise of a new life, seeded in sorrow.

With these opening scenes of the film as a guide, this chapter is divided into several sections. I begin with war, not just as a necessary starting point for refugee passage but also to outline an initial schematic for the rhetorics and pragmatics of liberal war as a gift of freedom. How might we begin to understand the gift of freedom as liberal war? How might we imagine war as continuous with refuge? What are the intuitive and institutional structures that constellate imminent freedom with occupation, strategic hamlets with hospitality? While the conduct of this war, the war in Southeast Asia, has come under scrutiny for its terrible violence (we know that in those warplanes were devastating weapons that would continuously commit ruinous harm into the present), I am interested in war as the calculation of freedom’s continuation, the futural projection that goes by the name security, and of the capacities of the new friend of freedom—in this instance, to overcome anachronism or alien dominion. Here I linger on the tropes of transition and timetable, naming those powers that sequence the before and after of the gift of freedom, and that animate the characteristic claims of liberalism’s empire. The argument of the first part of this chapter is therefore more than an attempt to think the contexts for the gift of freedom as fictive—because the extent of violence is both dehumanizing and devastating—and constantly changing. Instead, this brief history considers the empirical claims that measure and manufacture freedom as making and unmaking the subject of this freedom in relation to these claims.

The second section of this chapter returns to the passage between war and refuge and to the conception of the particular pessimism of the refugee figure—stuck, stalled, and otherwise detained (by law but also in heart, in mind) for an unforeseeable duration. In doing so, I look closely at how the racialized story of anachronism reenters through the diagnosis of abnormality, in which the refugee condition, described as a state of arrested development or traumatic compulsion, is a target of disciplinary knowledge and power. These layered histories of transition and condition coalesce in the case study that closes this chapter, Timothy Linh Bui’s refugee melodrama Green Dragon (for which he shares story credit with his filmmaker brother Tony Bui), a work that both envisages the refugee condition as held captive to an interior, idiosyncratic tempo and lauds the freedom granted through the external, regularized time of liberal capital. To consider refugee encampment, I turn to another of Derrida’s aporias, hospitality, to grasp something of the structures of feeling and social forms through which encampment, appearing precisely at a moment of emergency, receives and rescues the ontologically destitute other with violence and power. As borne out in the opening montage, and indeed in its very making, the film commemorates the freedoms found in acceding to the demand of time, both in the plot’s unfolding and the story of its creation, which avows the achievement of new life (to call to mind the military operation) as a historical reality.

By orchestrating a conversation between these ways of giving freedom to others—war and refuge—which is also giving the demand of time, this chapter interweaves brute force, epistemic violence, stories of development, pro tem hospitality, and conditional freedom to elaborate on some of the powers of liberalism’s empire for the rest of this book.

Transitional Times

In the first half of the twentieth century, the freedom-loving peoples of the world determined that their own self-interest and security were best served by distant others’ having the benefit of freedom. Calling for the United States to aid these others against the danger of communist dominion, in March 1947 President Harry Truman, addressing a joint session of Congress, set the stage for the ensuing Cold War and its theaters of operation: “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.” This request for aid to Greece and Turkey to prosecute insurgency was no departure from U.S. foreign policy. What was “radically new” (as Walter LeFeber puts it) in Truman’s address was the argument that civil unrest in those countries indicated that a global war between the forces of freedom and captivity had been joined. The United States—as the global guardian of freedom, especially as world wars and anticolonial struggles collapsed European claims to the same—bore a singular obligation to give what it could of itself. This stratagem, through which Greece and Turkey were subsequently delivered from communism—as was Korea, in part—forecast the open U.S. intercession in Indochina, especially after the so-called loss of China in 1949. In 1954, with the Geneva Accords recognizing the territoriality and sovereignty of Indochina and drawing a provisional military demarcation line between North and South Viet Nam, the French accepted defeat as colonists, and the Americans (who, with the new South Vietnamese, refused to sign the accords) assumed their place as nation builders.

Conceived in the mid-twentieth century, the gift of freedom hypothesized a departure from the colonial order of things. After the Second World War, the United States christened Asia—first Korea and then Viet Nam (with, as we know, Cambodia and Laos, too)—as the key theater for the global conflict with communism, a conflict that also presumed the mantle of anti-imperialism, and vowed its policies be understood as begetting not a people’s wretched dependency, but instead enlightened self-government. An early U.S. advisor to the new Republic of Vietnam, in particular to Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, and a Central Intelligence Agency operative, Edward G. Lansdale stressed the importance of the so-called South Vietnamese experiment in a 1955 memo to a U.S. Army general: “Certainly the responsible Americans here would like to see the Vietnamese capably assuming an increasing share of their own burdens in all fields of national life. Thus, I would like to see our efforts here geared as completely as possible to the operating philosophy of helping the Vietnamese to help themselves.” And, inaugurating his new presidency in 1961 with pronouncements of U.S. ideals in a time of escalating war, John F. Kennedy declared, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Recalling the American Revolution, Kennedy continued his pledge to the decolonizing world: “To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom.”

These pledges of support both repeat and renounce the expectations of empire. Because this historical moment found colonialism under fire, the gift of freedom presumed to distinguish between forms of encounter and obligation—esteeming those born of generosity and friendship, rather than dependency and fealty—which subjectivize others, and ourselves. Thus liberalism proclaimed its antagonism to colonialism, naming colonialism a tyranny, a violation of the universal nature of human freedom.

Of course, there are hugely serious continuities between liberalism and colonialism as global forms, including the persistence of reason as the central feature of self-government, or, to put this in terms of freedom’s dual character, what we might call the historical consciousness capable of apprehending and acting on the world, and liberal government as its means of exterior existence, with all the colonial cartographies and racial classifications these capacities and powers imply. But even as the gift of freedom is in many ways contiguous with colonialism, and may exist with it simultaneously, it is not just as a consequence of the delegitimation of colonialism that the gift of freedom is distinct as a liberal narration for human enlightenment. Liberalism’s regime not only proposes to produce freedom continuously, but it also importantly resolves that distant others’ having the benefit of such freedom is to “our” advantage; “freedom is never anything other—but this is already a great deal—than an actual relation between governors and governed,” to recall Foucault’s caution. I suggest that a figuration of freedom especially as a relation, doubling as a property, that can be produced continuously and gifted provisionally grants us critical purchase on the protracted nature of liberal imperial formations as well as their assemblages of knowledge and power.

I begin with a brief review of the conduct of war so that we might come to recognize the details through which the measure and the manufacture of human freedom become the promise of both liberal war and liberal peace. In this book’s introduction, I described the gift of freedom as existentially established through the links between evolutionary time, in its temporal and spatial dimensions, and a given time. In this double movement, to be gifted freedom, which is also the demand of time, is to be beholden to an unfolding of human sovereignty that has already happened elsewhere, that has yet to happen here, and, crucially, that may yet fail to do so. Helping us attend to these distinctive conceptual commitments and political investments, the trope of transition as the occasional name for the knowledges and capacities that help others to help themselves is key to the innovations of power that underwrite liberal empire. Though every empire, as Edward Said observed so well, claims exception to enlighten and civilize, I suggest that liberalism privileges transition as an accelerated timetable for the directional advance of distant peoples and, in doing so, anticipates and proposes to hasten the termination of its mandate. Foucault suggests something of the trouble with transition, however, in outlining the passage of life into the regime of biopower: “The fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.” Where human history is determined to unfold in ostensibly universal and successive stages, then, the concept of transition demonstrates the premise of given time as a force, one that governs over the capabilities of the subject of freedom and constructs a liberalist alibi for the intensification of imperial powers.

In this historical moment, freedom emerges as a a paradigm for liberal government and empire, codified in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights preamble. Throughout this declaration, we find the human defined through sovereignty and self-determination, and freedom determined as abstract, objectified, calculable, and exchangeable—or, to use Foucault’s phrasing, “as a universal gradually realized over time,” one undergoing “quantitative variations, greater or lesser drastic reductions, or more or less important periods of eclipse.” By defining freedom as a relation and as a property that is converted into measurable and comparable articles, the declaration—although an object of contestation and controversy—elides its creation story to universalize the asymmetry of liberal political and economic thought in relation to illiberal others. Writing about the global preserve of modern liberalism, Vivienne Jabri observes thusly: “Of crucial significance here is that ‘peace’ is at once rendered political, is, in other words, a product of distinctly political arrangements and not simply a produce of moral judgment.” Especially via perpetual peace, following Immanuel Kant, this state of being is conditional on a constitution based on such articles as the “civil right of individuals within a nation,” the “international right of states,” and “cosmopolitan right” applicable to both individuals and states “regarded as citizens of a universal state of mankind.” The declaration also proclaims these rights and freedoms regularized in its articles to be subject to maximization and securitization by free peoples. We discover here that questions of peace and freedom center not just the conditions for human self-possession and the governance that the human deserves, but also the calculation of possible or probable danger that threatens their actualization in the here and now, and in the future. That is, the document assumes universal value but also imperfect presence. Hence it refers, if somewhat obliquely, to structures of enforcement directed at the protection and production of human freedom: “Every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.” Thus did Truman pose his case before Congress. The attachment to freedom, he claimed, must continually recommit free peoples to support the recognition and observance of rights and freedoms in an increasingly unstable global order. From such concerns, the category of totalitarianism—and most of all communism—became known as freedom’s opposite (occluding individual rights as well as constitutional and contractual forms of collectivity), which is to say totalitarianism incarnates the premise of a mounting danger to humanity, subsuming complicated social and political forms under its lengthening shadow. Here we discern two sides of the same coin: the infamous domino theory, based on the speculation that contiguous intimacies between subjugated peoples might smooth the passage of virulent misery to communism, also proposed that such peril be countered by its antithesis, the dissemination of freedom and democracy through other intimacies.

(Continues…)

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