- By now, even the most chuckleheaded journalist must sense
the meaning of Randolph Bourne's classic comment "war is the health
of the state." Political systems depend upon the mobilization of fear
if men and women are to subject themselves to being ruled by others. It
is for this reason that the state requires enemies, be they foreign or
domestic, with which to terrorize us into accepting its authority over
our lives. As post-9/11 events demonstrate, the greater the fear the state
is able to engender in our minds, the more power most of us are prepared
to give to it in order to "protect" us! That so few people have
seen the symbiotic relationship between the terrorists who smash planes
into buildings, and the state's need for such terrorists, is a remarkable
reflection on our ignorance of both history and the nature of politics.
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- Look at how the Bush administration has been able to
parlay the dreadful attacks on New York City office buildings into a demand
for greatly expanded police and military powers at home, as well as a presidential
power to engage in wars at any time or place as suits his personal, momentary
disposition! All that Mr. Bush needs to do is concoct another bogeyman
story - "the Iraqis have weapons of mass destruction" - and many
Americans run out and buy more flags to place on their cars!
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- Perhaps there is a genetic explanation for the willingness
of so many of us to grovel before those who most threaten our lives. This
tendency is not confined to women who continue to embrace vicious, brutal
husbands or boyfriends. A number of interesting experiments - e.g., the
"prisoners" and "guards" study conducted a number of
years ago - reflect the tendency of most of us to become submissive in
the face of threats from others.
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- When we are motivated by fear we become herd-oriented,
seeking the apparent safety that comes from making ourselves indistinguishable
from one another. A lynch-mob, driven by some momentary fear, hiding the
individuality of its members behind percaled uniforms, is one of the more
hideous expressions of mass-mindedness. Nor is the lesson on how to collectivize
men and women into a fear-managed horde lost on politicians. One need not
confine one's search for evidence of such practices by considering only
the butcheries of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot.
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- If you pay close attention to what passes for political
discourse in our world, you will discover that it consists almost entirely
of different groups erecting bogeymen with which to terrify us into surrendering
more of our lives and property. Most of academia and the media become eager
participants in this practice, for they are able to provide the appearance
of substance for such threats, as well as the means of communicating such
fears to the rest of us. In such ways are we told of all kinds of dangers
in our lives that none of us would likely have had occasion to become aware
of on our own.
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- Consider just a few of the fear-objects presented to
us in recent years: racism, environmental pollution, over-population, under-population,
corporate greed, welfare cheats, child abuse, child abduction, cigarettes,
oil companies, the hole in the ozone layer, sexual harassers, street gangs,
AIDS, drug use, Satanic cults, pornographic films and magazines, animal
cruelty, nuclear power, teenage pregnancy, bilingualism, obesity, the PLO,
Zionism, depletion of the rainforests, unemployment, pro-abortion and pro-life
activists, oil and power shortages, inflation, crime, monopolists, cholesterol,
global warming (which was, of course, preceded by the threat of global
cooling), insider-trading, multiculturalism, . . . and on and on. The fear-object
du jour is terrorism.
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- It is fear of an impending disaster that keeps us huddled
together like frightened children who expect a super-parent to protect
them from harm. You will note, in today's war-frenzy, that the fear need
not even be based upon fact: it is sufficient that a potential threat can
be hypothecated. The possibility that some dangerous event might occur
is enough to cause many of us to rationalize having the United States go
to war, and to increase the powers of an already engorged police state.
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- A colleague of mine inquired as to why I was opposed
to war. I responded that war is an instrument for increasing state power,
and destroying the lives and liberties of people. He then asked: "but
what if Saddam Hussein was to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA?" "Is
there any evidence to suggest such a threat, or even evidence of Iraq having
such a weapon?," I queried. His response was that we shouldn't wait
until he had developed such a bomb; that even having such a weapon was
a threat to our security.
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- "If that is the case," I went on, "perhaps
we should consider going to war with China, Great Britain, Russia, India,
Pakistan, or Israel: they all have nuclear weapons, and India and Pakistan
seem somewhat inclined to use them. By your reasoning, the fact that the
United States has the greatest assemblage of nuclear weapons may provide
Saddam Hussein with a rationale for attacking America. Perhaps he has grounds
to fear a U.S. nuclear attack of Baghdad."
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- "But why would the Iraqis think we would do something
like that?," my colleague asked. "Because," I answered,
"America is the only country in history ever to have used nuclear
weapons on another nation, and this was done twice!"
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- Watch carefully how politicians, military officials,
and the news media continually create a bogeyman possibility, then reiterate
this possibility enough times so that we (a) become fearful of its reality,
and (b) accede to the government's demands to "do something"
about it. President Bush's "case" against Iraq is a classic example
of this tactic: convert a "what if" into a latent threat, and
chastise those who insist upon evidence to substantiate such a claim!
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- None of this is to deny that there are dangerous people
and conditions in our world for which we need to take precautions. What
we fail to consider, however, is how political systems feed upon threats,
and must concoct - or exaggerate - dangers if they are not otherwise forthcoming.
Most of us are uncomfortable facing the fact that our world has been rendered
far more dangerous to us because of politics.
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- When I was in college back in the early 1950s, a state
senator decided to get into the same kind of anti-communist crusade that
Senator Joseph McCarthy was employing at the national level. He charged
that there were a number of "communists" on the faculty of the
state university, a statement that would have had credibility if applied
to men and women of collectivist persuasion, generally. But, in that sense
most Americans - including the senator - were collectivists. But he clearly
meant something far more sinister, namely, that there were "active
agents of the communist conspiracy" - to use one of McCarthy's trite
lines - operating on the university campus. When university officials responded
that there was no evidence of communist infiltration of the campus, the
senator replied that the lack of evidence only showed how deep-seated the
conspiracy was! President Bush is engaged in the same kind of fear-mongering
reasoning with regard to Iraq.
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- When my daughters were very young, they enjoyed staying
up late on Saturday nights to watch the scary monster movies on television.
On more occasions than I can remember, one would be asked by the others
to "go get daddy!" to sit with them while they watched some Boris
Karloff or Bela Lugosi thriller.
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- As children, we loved scaring ourselves with ghost stories,
eerie sounds in the night, or monsters that might lie under our beds. Occasionally,
reality would offer up confirmations of some of our fears, such as a woman
friend of one of my aunts coming home to find a stranger hiding under her
bed. Perhaps the scariest incident involved friends of my parents, whose
home we often visited. The man's elderly mother lived with them, and had
a dark, heavily-draped parlor as her sitting room. One day she hanged herself,
and thereafter my sisters and I were terrified to go into her darkened
parlor.
-
- The thrill we get from going "aaarrrgghhhhh!"
in the presence of scare-objects, spawned a very lucrative mystery, horror,
and monster film industry in Hollywood to cater to this appetite. Long-running
television series also cashed in on this predilection.
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- Whatever the venue, we enjoyed scaring ourselves in the
company of other kids. Whether sitting around a late-night campfire or
in a darkened movie theater, we found comfort in experiencing our fears
while in the company of others. In the presence of our friends, we lost
our sense of personal vulnerability.
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- The problem is that most of us have carried this mindset
over into our adult lives, with the fear-objects transformed from werewolves
and vampires into real-life human beings. It is no longer the entertainment
industry, alone, that profits from the mobilization of our fears, but the
state. Having learned how tractable men and women are when dominated by
fear, state authorities have seen to it that we are fed a steady diet of
frightful scenarios. It is ironic that the Bush administration would declare
a "war on terror," while the state is able to prosper only by
generating terror in the minds of those it would rule!
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- For decades, the state has emulated Alfred Hitchcock,
Rod Serling, Roger Corman, and other movie producers, by offering us a
steady stream of monsters and villains. Unlike these Hollywood counterparts,
who only wanted us to part with some of our money, statists have longer-range
ambitions: to have us surrender our lives and liberties. Such monster-stars
from the 1930s and 1940s as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, have passed
from the silver screen of history, their roles now being played by the
likes of Ceausescu, bin Laden, and Hussein. Like their predecessors, they
will be appearing at a "theater near you," whether of the motion
picture or military variety!
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- What most of us fail to acknowledge, in the aftermath
of the WTC attacks, is how our willingness to empower the state to deal
with the monsters it has helped us concoct in our own minds, created the
very monsters we had been taught to fear. It was because most of us wanted
"our government" to go out into the world and slay the evil dragons
about which the statists had warned us, that those who were attacked began
to retaliate. Anyone who fails to understand this causal explanation for
the events of 9/11, needs to review Newton's "third law of motion."
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- It is time to abandon our childlike ways, and cease being
content with living the lies we have been taught to accept as reality.
The consequences of remaining immature are simply too great for us to indulge
ourselves in such playground reasoning as "if you're not with us,
you're against us." Whether we are prepared for the maturity of adulthood
that most of us insist upon indefinitely postponing is a decision each
of us will have to make. Too many of us still believe, as we did in watching
all those Frankenstein movies, that "we" are good, and "they"
are evil, all the while failing to comprehend the underlying meaning of
Mary Shelley's great novel, namely, that we have become the creators of
our own destruction!
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- Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University
School of Law.
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- Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
- http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer29.html
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