- by Nathan Barnes
- The Guardian
- Issue #2126
Image via James Vaughan flickr.com (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Michael Moore, in his excellent film Bowling For Columbine, remarks upon the culture of fear in the United States. It is the most discernible link to and justification for the country’s equally prevalent gun culture.
Moore, you will remember, did some elementary but telling on-the-spot research on the high murder rate, multi-locked doors, suspicion, and fear on the part of people in Michigan compared with the unlocked doors, openness, lack of fear, and low murder rate of people living just over the border in Canada.
With more guns than people, and backed by its super-power arsenal, the US population should be the most secure and least frightened in the world. Instead they are the most fearful. They are afraid of their neighbours, strangers, foreigners, the UN, the police, the Devil, and aliens from outer space.
This should not surprise anyone. After decades of assiduous promotion of a culture of acquiring wealth by fair means or foul, people can hardly be blamed for assuming that others must covet what they have.
At the same time, and with equal assiduousness, capitalism denies that society develops according to scientific laws. Instead it cultivates the view that society is subject to totally random acts, that crime and violence are arbitrary, indiscriminate and entirely unpredictable.
In such a seemingly chaotic world, with these messages drummed into them all the time, it is understandable that US citizens, who have a startlingly high rate of superstition and an appallingly low standard of general education, should be so susceptible to fear and paranoia.
It is equally understandable that the capitalist ruling class fosters that fear and paranoia for its own benefit.
US ruling circles have used various mythical “threats” to justify hiking the military budget, or the FBI’s or the CIA’s budgets, ever since the end of World War II.
The overthrow of socialism in the USSR removed the most generally useful of all the “threats” – the “Soviet threat.” This was paradoxically the most “visible” but also the most mythical. That it was mythical did not diminish its usefulness, however.
While ordinary US citizens welcomed the removal of the “Soviet threat” and looked to a “peace dividend” wherein previous military spending would be diverted to socially useful projects, the big corporations looked around for a new “threat.”
Corporations with Pentagon contracts, the most lucrative sort you can get, and corporations who found it beneficial to have their economic clout backed up by the military might of an unchallenged superpower, were united in their desire to keep the military budget at record levels.
They found “their most persuasive excuse for inflating the military budget since the Soviet threat” in the September 11 suicide airliner bombings of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The “terrorist threat” emerged.
But terrorists are, almost by definition, relatively small scale, and while they helped to generate fear, they could not really be used to justify a world-dominating military. So “rogue states” were added to the mix.
But even these failed to measure up as viable “threats” according to the previous ways of assessing a threat. So, the Pentagon, the State Department and other relevant US agencies changed the very definition of what constitutes a “threat.”
As US writer Diana Johnstone puts it in Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions: “From its pinnacle of power, the United States can scarcely perceive any tangible threats.
“Instead of feeling safer, the ‘defence’ planners imagine potential threats everywhere. These go beyond invisible ‘terrorists’ or recalcitrant ‘rogues.’
“From now on, the United States fears the very potential of anybody, anywhere, to have the capability to pose any sort of threat. … Here is the bottom line to ‘globalisation,’ and it signifies world economic domination by military means. …
“The pretext is flexible: Harbouring terrorists, building weapons of mass destruction, or ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ – all can be used to justify bombing as part of an unfolding strategy of global control.”
But there is a flaw in this grand design: it is impossible for capitalism to control all sources of information, to mould and manipulate all opinion, to silence or sideline all dissenting views. People’s own life experiences teach them about the different class allegiances of corporations and working people.
Many of them never succumbed to the paranoia and patriotic fervour whipped up. For example, tens of thousands took to the streets in the mass rallies and marches against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
For those partaking in protests, like thousands of others around the world who demonstrated on the same day, the real threat comes from their own government and the corporations that back it. The “Pentagon threat” and the “CIA threat” are the ones that they find most fearsome.
And, unlike the “Soviet threat” of yore, those threats are very real indeed.
