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could not just innocents, but even a community of historic victims who inhabit the African continent, lay claim to a protective immunity.
    Just as there has been gloating on that continent over the predicament of white settler farmers in Zimbabwe, and a history of colonial injustice is held by some to justify current injustices even against former victims of that same injustice, while a suffocating climate of fear envelops the entire land and its citizens, black and white, even so was there gloating in places, including open festivities, over September 11, as the world was sentenced to life imprisonment behind the bars of fear. And the judges? Are they identified and/or justified by history? By geography? Race? Ideology? Or religion? That emotive last especially, religion—and, unquestionably, the occupation of world center stage by Islam during this epoch of global fear is a phenomenon that has provoked extreme reactions, from the attribution of collective responsibility on the one hand, to the guilt-ridden avoidance language of political correctness on the other. We shall explore some of these viewpoints in succeeding lectures.
    Let it suffice for now to acknowledge that responses to any challenge to the security of human society and indeed survival are bound to be varied, some shaped by the history of unjust global relationships, others by instinctive partisanship—ideological, religious, racial, and so on—in a world that has become truly polarized. Any course of action, or inaction, that appears to encourage impunity implicates, however, the submission of the world to a regimen of fear. Yet that very recognition makes it possible to propose that it is within collective, not unilateral, action—a theme to which we shall return in this series—that we can sustain the hopes of humanity’s survival. Terror against terror may be emotionally satisfying in the immediate, but who really wants to live under the permanent shadow of a new variant of the world’s . . . Mutual Assured Destruction?

Two
    Of Power and Freedom
    The totalitarian state is easy to define, easy to identify, and thus offers a recognizable target at which the archers of human freedom can direct their darts. Not so obliging is what I have referred to as the quasi-state, that elusive entity that may cover the full gamut of ideologies and religions, contends for power, but is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state. Especially frustrating is the fact that the quasi-state often commences with a position whose basic aim—a challenge to an unjust status quo—makes it difficult to separate from progressive movements of dissent, with which, too, it sometimes forms alliances of common purpose. At the same time, however, there lurks within its social intent an equally deep contempt for those virtues that constitute the goals of other lovers of freedom. Thus, to grasp fully the essence of power, we must look beyond the open “show of force,” the demonstration of overt power whose purpose is to instruct a people just who is master. We are obliged to include—indeed, to regard as an equal partner in the project of power—the elusive entity that is conveniently described here as the quasi-state. We shall return to that mimic but potent entity in a few moments.
    The formal state, in its dictatorial or belligerent mutation, represents power at its crudest—African nations, caught in an unending spiral of dictatorships and civil wars, are only too familiar with this exegesis of power. Equally familiar, to many, are the daylight or nighttime shock troops of state, storming the homes and offices of dissidents of a political order, carting away their victims in total contempt of open or hidden resentment. The saturation of society by near-invisible secret agents, the co-option of friends and family members—as has been notoriously documented in Ethiopia of the Dergue, former East