LAUSR

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the subsequent American “War on Terror,” now in its sixteenth year, and the extraordinary expansion of U.S. military power throughout theMiddle East and Africa, U.S. and European governments have become increasingly concerned with the violent and predictable blowback against what can only be described as a new chapter in America’s historic imperial fantasy. In response to terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Turkey, and in the United States, such as the December 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California, and in the context of U.S.-sponsored carnage in Yemen, continued violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the descent of Syria into a factional proxy war, the radicalization of Muslim youth has been of particular interest to the West. On the other hand, the June 2015 assassination of nine African American churchgoers at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina by 21-year-old Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist, further focused attention on the radicalization of white youth, particularly young men. Roof’s racist violence occurred amidst ubiquitous videos on social media of the brutalization and murder of African Americans by police, mass government surveillance, the portrayal of any form of dissent as antiAmerican, which Noam Chomsky characterizes as a totalitarian notion, and a presidential campaign largely defined by racism, religious bigotry, homophobia, misogyny, class hatred, and virulent xenophobia.