US Government and NRA Both Use Fear to Achieve Policy Objectives
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Loretta Prencipe)
Fear is a primary, primordial emotion.
It can easily be manipulated so that reason and logic are bypassed, as people cower in support of anything that will allegedly save them from what they perceive as a threat to their lives.
Since 9/11, the US government has been masterful at using fear to manipulate voters into supporting large-scale military intervention and intrusive surveillance policies. Fear is the fuel for the expansion of a military-industrial-surveillance state.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has long used fear as the basis for justifying unrestricted gun availability. However, just scratch the surface of much of the NRA's inflammatory rhetoric and you will find racism. Indeed, the subtext of the NRA's alarmist appeal on behalf of gun ownership primarily appeals to white males. White people need guns, the NRA says with a coded nod and a wink, because "the other" - males of color - are, in this racist sub-narrative, a daily threat to the lives of "law-abiding" white males and their families. You can draw a straight line from the institution of slavery - justified by disputing the humanity of Africans - to the NRA's appeal to white males.
This practice of creating a stereotyped class of people to fear - let us call them "the other" - is as prevalent in US government and corporate media today as it is in the NRA. These days, "the other" label is categorically applied to Muslims.
Homeland Security Today, an online publication that is marketed to companies that profit from the military-industrial-surveillance complex - as well as government officials involved in "homeland security," posted an article on February 16 entitled, "Homeland Security Committee Chairman: Radical Islamist Extremism 'Spreading Like Wildfire'":
With estimates that 20,000 foreign fighters - including 3,400 Westerns - from 90 countries around the globe have traveled to Syria to fight for terrorist organizations, US counterterrorism officials are becoming increasingly worried that they will return to American shores to conduct an attack on the homeland.
"We need to accurately define the threat - violent Islamist extremism - and recognize it is spreading like wildfire around the globe," said House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX). "These fanatics want nothing less than destruction of our way of life, and now their ability to match words with deeds is growing at an astonishing rate. In recent years, their safe havens have proliferated and their ranks have swelled."
In the wake of the Islamic State’s (ISIS) barbaric display of the horrific murder of the Jordanian pilot, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing last Wednesday to examine current efforts to thwart the dual threats of foreign fighters and homegrown terror.
One can deplore the horrifying executions committed by ISIS while still asserting that if ISIS didn't exist, the US government would have had to find or invent another entity to stir fear in the US population. That is because only with an ongoing "other" to foment fear can the executive branch and Congress expand unconstitutional powers. The presence of that "other" also allows the military to continue making war, and allows the private sector to profit from defense and surveillance contracts.
Richard Hofstadter wrote a prophetic essay in 1964 in Harper's Magazine. It was entitled, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter noted:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization....
He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
Although Hofstadter's historical examples of the paranoid style may be a bit dated - the essay was written more than 50 years ago - his conclusions stand the test of time: "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."
The paranoid style - whether it be the US strategy of expanding empire through fear or the NRA's use of veiled racial incitement to expand gun ownership - is doomed to failure, according to Hofstadter: "A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop."
In short, the politics of fear are doomed to fail in achieving security and peace.
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