the politics of fear

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Another pseudo intellectual debate you just can't win
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'HACK THE PLANET'

[andymackem]

Arguably they have over-stated the immediate risk to you and I as individuals. I can't be bothered to work out the odds, but I can think of several things more likely to kill me than a suicide bomber at Lakeside. I can honestly say that living in the post 9-11 world hasn't changed my day-to-day life at all, nor has it had a meaningful impact on anyone else I know. Complacency or a realistic assessment of risk?

i made a similar point earlier. the odds of any of us dying at the hands of a suicide bomber are tiny and do tend to be over-stated by both politicians and the media. but i think it's difficult to argue that there is no threat at all in which case surely government must act?

I'd rather they acted on climate change, personally. That strikes as a more grave risk, and a more inevitable one. But our government seems lukewarm on upsetting big business by promoting environmental concerns while the Americans are actively ripping up Kyoto. I'd push road safety and better quality housing further up the priority list as well.

Since the government's major actions, as we have agreed, are enhancing the risks of terrorism, maybe they should leave well alone? Any internal policies might usefully be made proportional to the real threat, rather than the perceived "Korans-under-the-bed" bogeymen of tabloid mythology.

But the legal basis for war was never ratified by the UN,

well that's where it gets tricky isn't it? resolution 1441 warned iraq that it would "face serious consequences" if it failed to comply so it all depends on how you interpret "serious consequences".

True enough, but the UN security council, which as I understand it is the arbiter of these matters, never concluded that Iraq had failed to comply. The "coalition of the willing" reached that conclusion despite the UN view that Blix and co should be given more time to establish facts. Thus my point stands.

I don't have any examples of UN-sponsored "serious consequences" from past disputes .... perhaps you could enlighten me as to whether there is any "case law"?

[randdebiel²]

ok, I don't agree with all these politics of fear thingies, I'd agree on most points raised, but the UN ? :shock
pllllease! the UN has failed in almost all its tasks all the time, the best we could do with it is euthanasy....
that would be the most humane thing...
the UN as arbiter? you mean the organisation that let the most money "disappear" by lack of decent control?
the UN who completely failed in ex-yugoslavia for example?
the UN that deliberately biases in favor of the arab states against israel?(I know the general view on this board is that it's ok to blame the Israeli on evrything and paint the palestinians as poor martyrs, but the reality is a bit more compex than that....)
the UN that cost each and everyone of us lots of money with nothing in return except peace of mind by being "one of the good countries"?
nah....

[Dan]

the house of lords do an excellent job most of the time in examining and amending proposed legislation but must not be allowed to block legislation indefinitely when it is clearly the will of our elected representatives.

That's not democracy.

...and meanwhile the UK and America trying to beat democracy into the Iraqis.

That's not democracy either.

bet you wish you hadn't now...

Nope.

[andymackem]

ok, I don't agree with all these politics of fear thingies, I'd agree on most points raised, but the UN ? :shock
pllllease! the UN has failed in almost all its tasks all the time, the best we could do with it is euthanasy....
that would be the most humane thing...
the UN as arbiter? you mean the organisation that let the most money "disappear" by lack of decent control?
the UN who completely failed in ex-yugoslavia for example?
the UN that deliberately biases in favor of the arab states against israel?(I know the general view on this board is that it's ok to blame the Israeli on evrything and paint the palestinians as poor martyrs, but the reality is a bit more compex than that....)
the UN that cost each and everyone of us lots of money with nothing in return except peace of mind by being "one of the good countries"?
nah....

Never said the UN was flawless - far from it - but it's arguably an improvement on the League of Nations.

Without the UN, what would we have by way of an international forum for diplomacy and mediation? What kind of brake, however theoretical, would we have against a US-led hegemony?

I'd love to see a more effective UN, but I fail to see how removing it would help. Reform would be a good start, though.

[RicheyJames]

the house of lords do an excellent job most of the time in examining and amending proposed legislation but must not be allowed to block legislation indefinitely when it is clearly the will of our elected representatives.

That's not democracy.

why isn't it? what's democratic about the lords blocking a bill that has been passed twice by an overwhelming majority in the commons? a bill which also has massive popular support (anywhere from 70%-80% depending on which poll you read).

[Dan]

The Lords are in place to stop the Government pushing through anything too silly. They obviously think it's silly.

Sort ya country out Blair you tosser!

[RicheyJames]

The Lords are in place to stop the Government pushing through anything too silly.

no they're not. the (legislative) role of the house of lords is to revise legislation not block it. and since labour proposed a hunting ban in their manifesto the lords had no business opposing the bill anyway as per the salisbury convention.

[Mrs RicheyJames]

Have you lot not learned that debating anything with my dear RicheyJames is futile?? Blimey, I learned that about a week after moving in

[Rivers]

The Lords stopped the hunting bill because the majority of them liked to hunt. Now there's democracy in action

[randdebiel²]

[quote="andymackem"Never said the UN was flawless - far from it - but it's arguably an improvement on the League of Nations.

Without the UN, what would we have by way of an international forum for diplomacy and mediation? What kind of brake, however theoretical, would we have against a US-led hegemony?

I'd love to see a more effective UN, but I fail to see how removing it would help. Reform would be a good start, though.[/quote]I'd agree with that if I'd see a way to reform it....but anyway I look at it, the sysem will still be flawed...

[MAtT]

If you walk into a restaurant and get a menu where the only choices are red smarties or blue smarties, are you being presented with a choice?

Democracy died long ago. What we have now is a world controlled by corporations - via the puppetry of politics and the hypnotism of a corporate-controlled media.

War in iraq is morally wrong. It is being waged not because of WMDs, or even some righteous fight of the secular west against the evil empire of islam - that is just another illusion to cover the eyes of those with a little more intelligence. It is being fought - as are all American-led wars around the world because of one thing - money.

Money. Profit. The life-food of the morally-redundant system of laissez-faire capitalism they have created.

If you put money - which is an illusionary invention - above human life - then you are ALWAYS morally wrong.

[markfiend]

I actually think that Bush believes that he is fighting a holy war against Islam; a large proportion of his votes came from right-wing Christian fundamentalists who believe that we are living in the "End Times" and that the Rapture is coming soon. Unfortunately, with people like this in charge of the most powerful military machine the world has ever known, Armageddon tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[MAtT]

Bush and those behind him pulling the strings are aware of the support they will get by using that as a reason, and may even believe in it themselves... but it is secondary to their goal of "protecting the american way of life" by controlling their "intestests abroad" - by which they mean making sure that profits continue to rise.

"MEDIA ALERT: THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES AND THE REAL POLITICS OF FEAR - PART 2


Manufacturing The Myth Of 'America'

American elites have long sought to manufacture and promote a shared myth of 'America' based on "symbols by which Americans defined their dream and pictured social reality." (Alex Carey, Taking The Risk Out Of Democracy, UNSW Press, 1995, p.75)

Adam Curtis alluded to this myth-making in his BBC series The Power of Nightmares, but he portrayed it as a process initiated and pursued by neoconservatives from the 1940s onwards, inspired by the teachings of Leo Strauss.

There was no hint that these myths were small elements of a vast programme of social engineering carried out by US governments, both Democrat and Republican, and by powerful business associations, from the first days of the 20th century and earlier.

Indeed Curtis had nothing to say about the key issue of business control of American society - the words 'corporate', 'corporation' and 'business' were not mentioned in the series. The neocons were depicted as fanatical ideologues, with literally zero mention of their roots in the business community. In April 2001, the Guardian's Julian Borger reported:

"In the Bush administration, business is the only voice... This is as close as it is possible to get in a democracy to a government of business, by business and for business." (Borger, 'All the president's businessmen', The Guardian, April 27, 2001)

Robert Reich, Clinton's former labour secretary added: "There's no longer any countervailing power in Washington. Business is in complete control of the machinery of government." (Ibid)

The reality that the neocon project is profit-driven rather than ideology-driven makes a nonsense of the idea that it aims to "spread the good of democracy around the world". As the US historian Sidney Lens noted recently:

"Even a cursory look suggests that American policy has been motivated not by lofty regard for the needs of other peoples but by America's own desire for land, commerce, markets, spheres of influence, investments, as well as strategic impregnability to protect such prerogatives. The primary focus has not been moral, but imperial." (Lens, 'The Forging of the American Empire', Pluto Press, London, 2003, p.14)

Curtis, by contrast, uncritically accepted neocon rhetoric. On the election of Reagan as president in 1980, Curtis said:

"The neoconservatives believed that they now had the chance to implement their vision of America's revolutionary destiny, to use the country's power aggressively as a force for good in an epic battle to defeat the Soviet Union. It was a vision that they shared with millions of their new religious allies." ('The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. Part 1: "Baby, it's cold outside"', BBC2, October 20, 2004)

Curtis reiterated the point: "A small group in the Reagan White House saw... a way of achieving their vision of transforming the world." They would "bring down the Soviet Union and help spread democracy around the world. It was called the Reagan Doctrine." (Part 2, 'The Phantom Victory', October 27, 2004)

This is deeply misleading. In her seminal account of the business brainwashing of America from 1945-1960, Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf wrote:

"All this effort helped create a major political shift that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan, the subsequent tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, the elimination of regulation, and the severe cutbacks in social services." (Selling Free Enterprise - The Business Assault on Labour and Liberalism, 1945-60, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.289)

Directly contradicting Curtis' thesis, Fones-Wolf noted that "the business community laid the ideological and institutional foundations for the nation's movement +toward+ a more individualistic ethos." (Ibid, p.289, our emphasis)

But there was nothing new in the neocon propaganda campaign:

"Indeed, perhaps Ronald Reagan best symbolises the continuity. Beginning in 1954, the future president of the United States spent eight years in the employment of General Electric, hosting a television programme and speaking to employee and local civic group audiences as part of the company's public relations and economic education programme. During that time, Reagan fine-tuned a message that he would repeat in the late seventies, warning of the threat that labour and the state pose to our 'free economy'."(Ibid)


Demolishing Democracy

Similarly, the Reaganite neocons (many still in power, now, as part of the Bush cabal) engaged in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and elsewhere. The concern was not to spread but to restrict democracy to protect US control of human and natural resources. Robert Pastor, director of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs on the National Security Council through the Carter years, explained:

"The United States... wanted Nicaraguans to act independently, except when doing so would affect US interests adversely." (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, 'Deterring Democracy', Hill And Wang, 1992, p.261)

The cover story for US intervention throughout the postwar period, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, was indeed the 'Soviet threat'. But as Harvard academic Samuel Huntington advised government planners in 1981:

"You may have to sell [US intervention] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has done ever since the Truman Doctrine [of 1947]". (Ibid, p.90)

The real enemy was independent nationalism, the risk that Third World resources might fall out of US control. To select at random, a US State Department official warned prior to the 1954 US coup in Guatemala:

"Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail." (Quoted, Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, Princeton University Press, 1991, p.365)

The CIA told the White House in April 1964:

"Cuba's experiment with almost total state socialism is being watched closely by other nations in the hemisphere, and any appearance of success there could have an extensive impact on the statist trend elsewhere in the area." (Quoted, Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, New York: Norton, 1993, p.157)

Curtis ignored this documented historical reality. This is particularly significant as we know that Curtis +is+ aware of it. Two years ago, Media Lens challenged him following the broadcast of his BBC TV series, The Century of the Self, which purported to chart the rise of propaganda in the 20th century. In this series Curtis argued:

"Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest that hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had lead to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again, they set out to find ways to control the hidden enemy within the human mind." (The Century of the Self - The Engineering of Consent, BBC2, March 24, 2002)

We suggested to Curtis that the real fear of politicians and planners was the existence of dangerous +rational+ desires and fears - popular desires for equity, justice and functioning democracy; popular fears that unbridled capitalism and militarism would once again lead to horrors on the scale of the two world wars. We asked him: "Do you really believe that big business was fundamentally motivated to avoid a repetition of the barbarism of Nazi Germany?" (Media Lens to Curtis, June 5, 2002)

We also asked Curtis why he had given detailed attention to Guatemalan history in that series, while failing to mention US responsibility for the 150,000 civilians killed as a result of its attack on Guatemala. On June 19, 2002, Curtis responded:

"I never said 'big business was motivated to avoid a repetition of the barbarism of nazi Germany'. I very clearly separated the early, naïve reaction of politicians and social planners to psychological evidence and the lobbying of ambitious psychologists, from the cynical and corrupt use of those ideas by big business and later cold-war politicians which then followed."

Curtis continued: "I explicitly used the Guatemala story as an example of that form of corruption."

Remarkably, of this "cynical and corrupt use" of ideas by big business there was not one word in The Power Of Nightmares.


Understanding Bin Laden - Motives Behind September 11

As part of his idea of parallels linking Islamic jihadists and the US neocons, Curtis argued that both are motivated by a fear and hatred of "selfish individualism":

"The attacks on America had been planned by a small group that had come together around bin Laden in the late 90s. What united them was an idea: an extreme interpretation of Islamism developed by Ayman Zawahiri." (Part 3, 'The Shadows in the Cave', November 3, 2004)

Inspired by Sayyed Qutb, Zawahiri, who was bin Laden's mentor, came to believe that "the infection of [Western] selfish individualism had gone so deep into people's minds that they were now as corrupted as their leaders... It wasn't just leaders like Sadat who were no longer real Muslims, it was the people themselves. And Zawahiri believed that this meant that they too could legitimately be killed. But such killing, Zawahiri believed, would have a noble purpose, because of the fear and the terror that it would create in the minds of ordinary Muslims. It would shock them into seeing reality in a different way. They would then see the truth." (Part 1, 'Baby It's Cold Outside', October 20, 2004)

But in interviews, Osama bin Laden has clearly listed three political grievances as primary motives for the September 11, 2001 attacks: the oppression of Palestinians, the devastating effect of US-UK sanctions and war on Iraqi civilians, and US military bases in Saudi Arabia. The Independent's Robert Fisk wrote in 2001:

"Why do we always play politics on the hoof, making quick-fix promises to vulnerable allies of convenience after years of accepting, even creating, the injustices of the Middle East and South-west Asia? How soon before we decide - and not before time - to lift sanctions against Iraq, and allow tens of thousands of Iraqi children to live instead of die? Or promise (in return for the overthrow of Saddam) to withdraw our forces from the Arabian peninsula? After all - say this not too loudly - if we promised and fulfilled all that, every one of Osama bin Laden's demands will have been met." (Fisk, 'Promises, Promises', The Independent, October 17, 2001)

To ignore these serious political grievances and to focus instead on a fanatical hatred of Western "selfish individualism" is absurd.

In reality, the idea that the neocons and al Qaeda "shared the same fears" is a satisfyingly ironic fiction rooted in selective inattention to the facts. Both, in reality, are highly motivated by pragmatic concerns to do with the wielding and abuse of power.

Curtis's thesis is not entirely without merit. As he says, "much of this threat [of Islamic terrorism] is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media."

The 'threat' of al Qaeda clearly has been overblown by western politicians and a compliant media.

But the manufactured 'threat' of international terrorism is a fiction that distracts from a far more important truth: that Western governments are by far the most powerful and, in terms of numbers killed, most deadly agents of terrorism. This unpalatable truth was not even acknowledged by Curtis. Indeed it is hard to imagine that such a genuinely heretical and honest point could ever be made in a major BBC series.


In Hope Of Another "Crisis Of Democracy"

Curtis also claimed that, like the jihadists, the neocons despised the "selfish individualism" of the 1960s, and the 'threat' to American morals it represented. But in reality this was a rhetorical cover for an attack on a different, very real enemy - the rise of civil rights, anti-war, environmental, feminist and other grassroots movements.

A 1975 study on the "governability of democracies" by the influential Trilateral Commission warned of an "excess of democracy" in the United States that was contributing to "the reduction of governmental authority" at home and a consequent "decline in the influence of democracy abroad." This general "crisis of democracy" resulted from the efforts of previously marginalised sectors of the population attempting to involve themselves in the political process. The study urged more "moderation in democracy" to overcome the crisis. (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, Pluto Press, 1991, pp.2-3)

A top secret US Defense Department memorandum in March 1968 had earlier warned that escalating the war in Vietnam ran "great risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions", including "increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities". These threats were very much on the minds of military planners as they decided whether to massively escalate the assault on Vietnam, or back off, after the Tet offensive. This naturally represented an intolerable interference in policy from the point of elites. (The Pentagon Papers, Vol. IV, p. 564, Senator Gravel Edition, Beacon, 1972)

The danger for the state is always that the public will see through the Machiavellian intrigues of political power, and refuse to acquiesce any longer in state-sponsored slaughter and corporate exploitation of the planet. Once again, the targeted enemy was not "selfish individualism" but cooperative altruism that threatened to precisely +challenge+ selfish vested interests.

By portraying the manipulation of fear as a recent development of neocon politicians, and by blanking the institutional realities of modern politics, The Power Of Nightmares contributed to the media deluge obstructing the re-emergence of another "crisis of democracy".


Conclusion

In his 2002 series, The Century Of The Self, Curtis claimed that politicians and planners had "set out to find ways to control the hidden enemy within the human mind" to ensure that "the unleashing of these instincts that had lead to the barbarism of Nazi Germany" could never surface again. In The Power Of Nightmares, Curtis spins more tall tales, claiming that the neocons are intent on using America's power aggressively "as a force for good" in order to "help spread democracy around the world."

The well-documented reality, of which Curtis is himself aware - that US leaders have long projected massive economic and military force in a conscious attempt to maximise profits and power, often regardless of the untold cost in human suffering - was nowhere to be seen.

Is it really such a surprise that Curtis's work is so well-received by the elite corporate media?"

http://www.medialens.org/


[/i]

[MAtT]

not to mention the track record of america's closest middle-eastern ally: Saudi Arabia.

http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/mideast/saudi.html

If they're so interested in a "holy war", odd how the US aren't interested in spreading their moral teachings in that direction huh? Strange... not to mention all the other muslim states that are Ok cos they play the game america wants them to play in their "economic interests".....