Issue 15: Dogmas of War (//)
October 6, 2002 marked the first anniversary of the day when the U.S., responding to an attack by 19 hijackers on their soil, began bombing Afghanistan. October 2002 is also touted as the month when the US will begin a second assault on Iraq, ostensibly for the crime of possessing weapons of "mass destruction."
Along with this cycle of attacking a variety of real and imagined enemies across the world, the US government has also embarked upon a policy of the severe truncation of democratic rights and civil liberties of their citizens and the honest working-folk in the country who are termed "illegal immigrants." As members of the South Asian diaspora, we have watched with increasing frustration as people of South Asian and Arab descent in particular find themselves threatened, incarcerated without trial, deported, and generally bullied by the swiftly changing institutional framework of the USA.
What does it mean to intervene effectively in a situation where even the most basic of human rights are under threat? SAMAR responds to this issue in our current forum, titled "Dogmas of War." Through poetry and analyses, we concentrate on the responses of common citizens and activists to various wars all over the world. Be it the U.S., Sri Lanka or Palestine, the forces of militarism continue to operate with impunity, and we need newer words with which to describe their force, as well as the inchoate and incipient modes of activism that characterize the victims of this new force. Our contributors to the forum try to frame a new politics and aesthetics of intervening in the nervous condition of the immigrant, where "it has been decreed that none will walk with their heads held high."
October 6, 2002 marked the first anniversary of the day when the U.S., responding to an attack by 19 hijackers on their soil, began bombing Afghanistan. October 2002 is also touted as the month when the US will begin a second assault on Iraq, ostensibly for the crime of possessing weapons of "mass destruction."
Along with this cycle of attacking a variety of real and imagined enemies across the world, the US government has also embarked upon a policy of the severe truncation of democratic rights and civil liberties of their citizens and the honest working-folk in the country who are termed "illegal immigrants." As members of the South Asian diaspora, we have watched with increasing frustration as people of South Asian and Arab descent in particular find themselves threatened, incarcerated without trial, deported, and generally bullied by the swiftly changing institutional framework of the USA.
What does it mean to intervene effectively in a situation where even the most basic of human rights are under threat? SAMAR responds to this issue in our current forum, titled "Dogmas of War." Through poetry and analyses, we concentrate on the responses of common citizens and activists to various wars all over the world. Be it the U.S., Sri Lanka or Palestine, the forces of militarism continue to operate with impunity, and we need newer words with which to describe their force, as well as the inchoate and incipient modes of activism that characterize the victims of this new force. Our contributors to the forum try to frame a new politics and aesthetics of intervening in the nervous condition of the immigrant, where "it has been decreed that none will walk with their heads held high."