The French commanders were extraordinarily well-versed in Mao’s writings because they were in Indochina and fighting against Maoist insurrections. In part, Petraeus lifted the writings and words of David Galula, almost to the point of plagiarism.Īnd further back, Galula and his peers were drawing explicitly on Maoist reasoning, specifically on Mao’s vision of society as being divided into three segments-an active minority for a cause, a passive majority, and another active minority against the cause. And he was literally picking up the pieces from the French commanders in Algeria, from the British in Malaya.
#Counter insurgency manual
If you look at the counter-insurgency field manual that was produced in 2006 by General David Petraeus, it is all thought out. These strategies were written down, theorized, practiced. At first, of course, counter-insurgency theory and practices were explicitly and deliberately designed and developed, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. Much of this mode of governing happens now by second hand absorption of the ideas. How are we to understand the power there at work-to what extent are we speaking about explicit decisions, and to what extent about more structural phenomena? You stress that this is a continuous development across different US administrations and presidencies. We are living through what I call the American Counterrevolution, and this new mode of governing uses counter-insurgency strategies despite the fact that there is no real insurrection at home. I chose “The Counterrevolution” as the title of the book, with capitals, to symbolize the point at which counter-insurgency practices become a mode of governing in the absence of any insurgency. How does “the Counterrevolution” relate to counter-insurgency? When those mechanisms begin to be used at home, they constitute a new mode of governing that works on the entire domestic population. Then, second, to target that small minority, in order to eliminate the insurgency – and, third, at the same time, to work on the general population and win their hearts and minds. The idea is to get all the information on the total population so that law enforcement can identify the small active minority and keep them separated from the passive majority. Those principle mechanisms, which were developed in the colonies to suppress anti-colonial revolutions and uprisings, are first to try and get all possible information about the total population, to achieve total information awareness.
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The mechanisms go back to counter-insurgency warfare from the 1950s and 1960s, and they play out clearly today. And they are turned into the internal enemy so that our political leaders can gain the confidence and support of the majority of Americans. In the United States today, these are mostly populations of color: Muslims, African-American protesters, Hispanics, un-documented persons from Latin America. But since there is not really an insurgency in the United States, it relies on the creation of a phantom insurgency, the demonizing of certain populations. It has, at its basis, the fear of an internal enemy-it is the specter of the internal enemy that motivates the entire mode of governing.
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It is relatively new-it is only since 9/11 that it has really come together, although of course it has a much longer history dating back to the anti-colonial wars. It represents a particular way of keeping a population under control. You say that counter-insurgency has become the governing paradigm of US politics both abroad and at home – what is this counter-insurgency paradigm? At the occasion of his visit in Berlin, Bernard Harcourt was willing to give this brief interview and speak about the theses of his book. What we see today, he argues, is a consolidation of these counter-insurgency mechanisms at the heart of politics.
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Harcourt describes how counter-insurgency strategies that were developed in particular during colonial wars became the military paradigm of the United States, and spilled over into the domestic realm. In The Counterrevolution, he explains how the massive collection of data and the increasing militarization of police go together, how the changes in military and foreign policy relate to domestic US politics since 9/11, and where to place President Trump in this picture. Harcourt has written a book that offers such an interpretation. We are constantly struggling to make sense of the politics of our time, to understand what links various developments and phenomena that we witness.