Homeland

Starred review from July 15, 2024
The racism, anxiety, tolerance for violence, and government unaccountability normalized by the “war on terror” led to the populist disaffection that brought Donald Trump to power, according to this sprawling study. Beck (We Believe the Children), a staff writer at n+1, recaps the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. government’s bellicose response to them, including bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; torture of prisoners by the Bush administration; killings of civilians in drone strikes by the Obama administration; deportations of immigrants on trumped-up terrorism charges; ubiquitous surveillance by the National Security Agency; and “security theater” at airports and other public spaces that Becks asserts spreads fear more than it provides safety. Beck also explores subtler effects on attitudes, manners, and morals, including the growing permissibility of “torture porn,” justified by terrorist plots in movies and television shows; the dereliction of duty on the part of Congress and the press in accepting the Bush administration’s false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; and a subsequent “culture of impunity” that let government officials get away with more misdeeds. Beck’s capacious investigation rests on an anti-capitalist interpretive framework that raises provocative points (he characterizes 9/11 as an expression of rage on the part of a global “surplus” workforce, and the war on terror as “a tool for managing” such “surplus populations”). The result is an exhilaratingly fresh take on what ails America.

August 1, 2024
The war on terror comes home to roost. Beck was 14 when the Twin Towers collapsed in 2001, an event that his Philadelphia school's administrators overlooked in the interest of pursuing a regular learning day of quizzes and lectures. Once home, he was bombarded, like everyone else, with images of "the most visually spectacular attack in the history of armed conflict." Soon enough, the country mostly united in its resolve to hunt down the terrorists, the images would grow more obscure, and "the war grew difficult to see." By Beck's account, the global war on terror has proven at every point an unwinnable boondoggle with numerous ill effects, not least the rise of the security state in the U.S. A case in point, Beck writes, is the new World Trade Center, built atop the ashes of the old one, "a dead zone" of "bollards, surveillance booths, and sally ports" that, while impeding the heavy foot traffic of the old WTC, does nothing to protect the place against a committed suicide bomber. The post-9/11 militarism that swept America, Beck conjectures, "did nothing to make people safer, and it didn't make peoplefeel safer, either." Indeed, the gloomy pallor of paranoia was perfectly in keeping with an ever more unequal economy and the renewal of the 1960s-era culture wars, with anyone who dared question American policy canceled, from Susan Sontag to Bill Maher to the Dixie Chicks. Beck makes some long reaches that turn out to be quite reasonable, upon further reflection. For one, is it any surprise that social media corporations should join the security state in furthering technologies meant to aid in "knowing as much as possible about as many people as possible following September 11"? A well-reasoned, evenhanded account of the cost we've paid at home for chasing terrorists abroad.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2024
In this history of the two decades of war, surveillance, drone strikes, failed nation-building, and insecurity following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Beck comprehensively examines the resulting changes to the U.S. Homeland covers four main topics, militarism as a response to the national shock and humiliation of 9/11, the resurgence of racism and xenophobia, the economic rationale for the wars that followed, and the rise of impunity culture, in which leaders are not held accountable for their crimes. Beck considers the founding myths of the American colonists who seized the homelands of Indigenous peoples as expressed in fiction, superheroes comics and movies, and TV shows such as 24--all dramatizing the drive to conquer the wilderness and tame alleged barbarians. The economic rationale for the war on terror extended far beyond control of oil, Beck argues, writing that it has been an attempt to enforce hegemony for capitalism through coercion and violence. Homeland is an in-depth examination and analysis of the forces leading to Trump's rise to power and many concurrent assaults on our freedoms.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.