J oseph D arda . Empire of Defense

From the emergence of the national security state under President Truman through the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf Wars, Cold War, the war on terror, and the dronewar of Obama, Joseph Darda’s Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War demonstrates how war and combat have been transformed from the violent formation and maintenance of empire to the more benign and comfortable concept of defense—defense of the homeland, defense of the free world, defense of freedom-loving people. To make sense of this shift, the reader must appreciate the central articulating claim of the book—namely, that “narrative structures the meaning and making of war” (32). War as defense has facilitated the embedding of violence into the very fabric of daily life in the United States. Accordingly, the United States, for several decades now, has been in a condition of “permanent war.” A good deal of the critical literature...

Art · Asymmetric warfare · Empire · Homeland · Just war theory · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Gender Studies · History · Law · Military History and Strategy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · War, Ethics, and Justification