ABSTRACT
In 1962, the German political philosopher Theodor W. Adorno memorably wrote that “[l]ike every philosophical term, ‘progress’ has its equivocations; and as in any such term, these equivocations also register a commonality. What at this time should be understood by the term ‘progress’ one knows vaguely, but precisely: for just this reason one cannot apply the concept roughly enough. To use the term pedantically merely cheats it out of what it promises: an answer to the doubt and the hope that things will finally get better, that people will at last be able to breathe a sigh of relief.”1 Certainly it is impossible to breathe such a sigh of relief in these terrible times. Shortly after September 11, the United States declared that “we” were at war with the “axis of evil,” including but hardly excluded to Al-Qaeda. Since then, “we” have bombed Afghanistan and conquered Iraq. I put “we” in quotation marks because I was one of the hundreds of thousands who marched and protested week after week, month after month, with the hope that war could be avoided. There was reason to hope, after all, because the UN’s weapons inspectors dutifully reported that Iraq did not pose a national security threat to the United States. But facts have not mattered much to the Bush administration. And “we” are not to be bothered by them either. Anyone who boorishly insists on facts is un-American and reminded that “we” are at war. Bush has declared that the war against Iraq is now officially over but not the real war. The other one. The big one. The infinite war on terror. Iraq is just one battlefield, and in that battelfield, the war is clearly not over. How can anyone breathe a sigh of relief when the battles in Iraq continue to intensify and we are told there soon will be other battlefields? It has never been more difficult to believe in the ideal of progress-an ideal whose history is not that pretty, bound up as it is with imperialism and war.
