Millennials and the ‘War on Terror’

On the evening of May 2, 2011, President Obama appeared on television to announce, with barely restrained delight, that Osama bin Laden had been assassinated by U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan. Across the United States, this news was met with public celebrations. Some of the most ecstatic took place on college campuses, where crowds of students took to the streets in full voice, chanting “U.S.A.” and singing patriotic songs.

The majority of these students were between 8 and 12 when the “war on terror” began, with a heady admixture of rhetoric and bombs, in Afghanistan and Iraq. As they passed through secondary school, abstract phrases such as “united we stand” and “shock and awe” were displaced, in the public imagination, by proper nouns like Abu Ghraib and Fallujah — signifiers of a tragedy that only deepened with time. As they went off to college, they watched friends deploy to Helmand Province to join the counterinsurgency. Their euphoria at bin Laden’s death was a reflection of the jingoistic culture within which they came of age; but it also expressed, one sensed, fatigue with the war on terror, and a longing for its end.

What good is the concept of a “generation”? The French lexicographer Émile Littré defined the notion, in 1863, as “all men living more or less at the same time.” In the century and a half since, social scientists have refined the idea — broadening it to include women, and narrowing it to refer to specific birth cohorts in specific regional or national contexts — but the nebulousness and dubious utility of Littré’s definition remains. To attribute a unitary “outlook” or political sensibility to a vaguely defined birth cohort — to suggest, for example, that baby boomers are, on the whole, optimistic and irreverent — is absurd.

But the concept acquires a certain analytic efficacy in a new book, The War of My Generation, which inquires how race, class, gender, citizenship status, and so on affect how people read and act upon the world in divergent ways. This welcome collection of essays by scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, edited by the historian David Kieran, explores the varied relationships of those of us in the so-called millennial generation to the “war on terror” that has so marked our political lives.

As an ideology, the “war on terror” posits an interminable struggle between Western civilization and Muslim barbarism. It depicts a world pervaded by insecurity, the threat of which requires sustained and unrepressed military intervention. But it also summons a more idealist tradition — a synthesis of Kantian, Wilsonian, and Clintonian globalism that imagines the United States as the source and guarantor of frictionless development and liberal democracy. This double-barreled narrative of perpetual, ubiquitous war and imminent, planetary peace coheres nicely — as Laura Browder’s and David Kieran’s essays convey — with classic tropes of children’s and young-adult literature. The world is a dangerous and fractured place, we tell our children, but it will be made safe and whole. In the ideology of the “war on terror,” the vision of a future peace is joined to the notion of a lost security. This security will be recovered just as it was originally won — through violence.

The War of My Generation demonstrates that the narrative of the “war on terror” is legitimated through the construction of historical analogy — the equation, in particular, of the mid-20th-century struggle against Nazism and the 21st-century struggle against Islamic extremism. In World War II-combat video games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, Jeremy K. Saucier’s essay observes, players are encouraged to imagine themselves as inheritors of the valor and moral clarity of the “greatest generation” — indeed as the privileged exponents of the “next great generation,” who will enact their inheritance in the real (and not simply virtual) theaters of the war on terror. Through such games, a new generation is assimilated to the mythology of an essential and enduring intimacy between “freedom” and “sacrifice.”

The War of My Generation is pre-eminently concerned with how the ideology of the war on terror is encoded in various media. In moments, this focus encourages the identification of the millennial generation with a common political consciousness; because they underwent X ideological conditioning — in school, at the dinner table, in the movie theater — millennials think Y.

The fact of heterogeneity is revealed, though, by two essays that examine how war-on-terror narratives are actively decoded — not passively absorbed — by their young consumers. Rebecca A. Adelman’s discussion of the politics of “spectatorship” considers how we, as teachers, can help students recognize and reckon with the ideological labor performed by images of violence. Sunaina Maira’s ethnographic piece examines how activist networks of Muslim youth in Northern California translate the war on terror’s rhetoric of “democracy” and “human rights” into an anti-imperial vocabulary.

One wishes the collection contained more essays such as those, which clarify the deep connection between the imaginative decoding of the imperial state’s ideological framework and the building of oppositional narratives and movements. Enlightened members of my own early-millennial cohort, having cut our teeth on the anti-World Trade Organization barricades in Seattle, learned to regard Clintonian phrases like “global cooperation” as euphemisms for the NATO-enabled ascendance of a rapacious neoliberal capitalism. But the phrase that came to define the antiglobalization movement, “another world is possible,” revised rather than refused the idea of a global community.

The radical political movements that have emerged in the past decade enact a similar process of transmutation — rejecting the xenophobic and martial substance of the war on terror’s “us against them” narrative but echoing something of its lexicon and form. The powerful idea of the 99 percent (vs. the 1 percent) employs a stark binary logic. And the command “Occupy Wall Street” appropriates the language of empire while evoking the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The War of My Generation evinces the historian William Appleman Williams’s pithy observation that in the United States empire is, and has long been, “a way of life.” The particular ideological framing of U.S. global power and the particular media through which it is transmitted may change, but this truism endures. The millennial generation, though, is not defined simply by the wars it has fought and consumed. This is also the generation of the Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter movements. Perhaps the more optimistic and irreverent among us can derive some solace from the fact that there were more millennials resident at Occupy encampments across the land, and fighting police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore, than there were rejoicing in the streets at Osama bin Laden’s passing.