Foreword, when is a homeland not a homeland?

[Paul Nightingale]

Extracts from a speech made by President Bush when signing the Homeland
Security Act, 2002:

"Setting up of Homeland Security will involve the most extensive
reorganisation of the federal government since Harry Truman signed the
National Security Act."

Hence a reference back to the post-45 paranoia that gave us the Cold War
(when Truman, of course, was aided and abetted by Churchill in his
Government's wishes to keep the wartime economy going).

And then:

"Our objective is to spend less on administration in offices and more on
work in the field - less on overhead and more on protecting our
neighbourhoods and borders and skies from terrorists."

Hence the juxtaposition I referred to previously, between
"neighbourhoods" (the localities that give us an identity in our
everyday lives) and "borders", the artificial construct of the nation
state that gives us a different, more abstract, kind of identity - the
imagined community (see for example Benedict Anderson's book of the same
title). In this speech Bush invokes the imagined community to persuade
his listeners that "federal employees" should be empowered to act on
their behalf. It is this connection between the here-&-now of what's
happening in my street and the rather more abstract notion of what
They're doing 'on my behalf' that P is discussing - I stand by my view
that the juxtaposition of the two parts of the "fascistic disposition"
passage is what matters, not whether Churchill can/should be compared to
Hitler.

Finally Bush does remind us:

"We're fighting a new kind of war against determined enemies ..."

The landscape that has been transformed is New York - the twin
towers/Ground Zero) had/have an iconic status. Yet of course the
landscape transformed is also internal, the way in which people's
perceptions shape the way they think about, eg, the threat to the
homeland.

Of course P. might be alluding to Goebbels: his rhetoric is not
dissimilar to Bush's here, even if you insist that the situations are
quite different. However, Bush's use of the term "homeland" might, as I
suggested before, have more resonance with contemporary readers. And
then again, maybe not.