The Politics of Fear (Part I)

Editor's note: This post has been plaguing me for over a month. It started as a response to a forward that arrived in my inbox sometime in late February. It morphed into something that required way too much research and way too many words. I still haven't gotten to my response to that forward (sorry Polihan). I will someday. At this point I just want to purge it from my entire being. It's really long, so I'm going to post half of it right now, and half next Saturday. I don't want you to think that you have to set aside an hour every time I post something. Peace.

I. HUAC and Junior Senator Joseph McCarthy

So back in the days leading up to the Second World War, the United States Government established the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities (the SCUAAINPCOPA for short…not really…they just called it the McCormack-Dickstein Committee). In case you didn’t catch it by the ridiculously long and unnecessarily specific title, this committee was charged with the super-fun task of locating Nazi spies in the US. It eventually grew into the more widely remembered House Committee on Un-American Activities or HUAC.

In the late thirties and through WWII, HUAC investigated, and essentially turned a blind eye to the heinous (and very “un-American”) crimes of the Ku Klux Klan and the hypocritical detention camps used to pacify potential Japanese-American spies (i.e. every Japanese- American they could find), while working to find and question anyone suspected to have been in the same room at any point in their life of a copy of Mein Kampf (before 1945) or The Communist Manifesto (after 1945). The true nature of this committee was not brought into the American public eye though until they began orchestrating hearings exploring the accusation that many in the motion picture industry were spreading Communist propaganda. From 1947-1958, HUAC was responsible for blacklisting the “Hollywood Ten” and publicly interrogating hundreds of other entertainers, government employees, lunch ladies, etc. The members of this committee are largely to blame for creating much of the anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War (even though Joseph McCarthy gets most of the credit).

The reason I bring all this up is because HUAC and its predecessors, along with Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced a new brand of government sponsored fear mongering that has been assaulting free speech for over seventy years. The 21^st century version of this strain of politics has mutated into a steroid pumped and media driven monstrosity that has people fleeing to guarded and gated communities, locking all four deadbolts on their front door, activating the alarm system, and hiding under their beds in the middle of the afternoon in anticipation of the next suicide bombing to ravage the bloody streets of Ladue.

II. Fear and Loathing in the Rubble at Ground Zero

Since 9/11, we have been under attack. They’d like us to believe that we are under attack from suicidal heathens who want nothing more than to see every American dead (see “Fade to Black and White”). They’d like us to believe that the world is at an apocalyptic crossroads—that we are on the verge of the cultural and religious crusade of our time—that now is our time to stand up for freedom and fight the ultimate enemy. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? I’d go see that movie. The only problem is that we are not living in a freaking movie! Bush, you are NOT Aragorn, the rightful heir to the kingdom of Gondor. Go back and reread his speeches—they are terrifying, but also darkly hilarious. I really think he has convinced himself that we are in a battle for Middle Earth against a bunch of Orcs. Seriously.

The real attack is being waged against the American public is the same one that McCarthy and friends used during the red scare—the attack on dissidence. The formula for this sort of assault on everything truly American is very simple. All you need is an ideological scapegoat, and a citizenry that is, above all other things, blindly patriotic and senselessly terrified. That’s it.

During the Cold War, these ingredients conveniently fell into place and set into motion Senator McCarthy’s lifelong dream of conducting the political witch-hunt of the century. Patriotism comes naturally after you kick the shit out of a bunch of genocidal Nazis. There’s really no need to discuss it further than that. Finding a scapegoat was almost as easy. There were plenty of members of the Communist party right here in the United States (McCarthy first claimed there were 205 Communist spies in the state department alone) just ripe to be persecuted and prosecuted, labeled as “un-American” and filed neatly and voicelessly in a jail cell or, after they ratted out all of their friends, the witness relocation program. And the Communists were an easy propaganda target with the arms race going on, the ideological differences, the poverty, and of course the ominous symbols (a hammer and a sickle…really…that’s what they chose).

Creating the fear was just as effortless. People all over the world and in the US were still reeling from the destruction and aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When it came out that the Russians had nukes just as powerful, people were so petrified that they moved to the suburbs and started buying as many appliances as possible to get their mind off the impending doom of the apocalypse. The McCarthyists knew they could use the public’s irrational fear to ensure that they had the license to wage whatever proxy wars (foreign or domestic) they wanted under the pretense that they were fighting communism. In the meantime, it was a perfect opportunity to beef up military spending to create a permanent armaments industry and as Eisenhower put it, invest in “an immense military establishment.” And if anyone said anything that they didn’t like, they could easily shut them up by playing the Commie card. The duel effect of these policies of terror did much to scar the American people. They were not only afraid of a nuke falling on their head, they were also afraid of being labeled a Communist and shunned by their neighbors. Fortunately, with the help of courageous journalists (wow, I wish we had some of those!) like Edward R. Murrow (go watch Good Night, and Good Luck right now if you haven’t seen it yet) the dangers of this type of fear mongering were temporarily defeated and McCarthy and his henchmen were dishonored (even though the arms race and proxy wars continued well into the eighties).

Does any of this sound at all familiar to you?

Bush didn’t drop any nukes, but he didn’t have to. Bush also didn’t need to look far for a scapegoat. Bin Laden killed both stones with one bird (four really) when he decided to get 19 of his friends together and fly some planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And just like in the fifties, people were scared. When people are scared, they get paranoid. The lens with which they view the world becomes a deeper shade of red, and instead of smiling at the light-brown-skinned, unfamiliar bearded dude that passes them in a quiet hallway, they look down, fist clenched around their keys, breath held, wondering if the strange man looks “American” enough. It goes without saying that when a country finds itself in a situation where a large majority of people are behaving as if they were on an acid trip in Las Vegas with Hunter S. Thompson, it is headed down a very dark road.

Today’s media-machine doesn’t help either. I mean, just after 9/11 they had reporters on camera dressed in those bright yellow biohazard suits complete with gas mask and the scary international symbol. They KNOW that the minute most of us see those suits we are naturally going to think about that freaky scene in E.T. when Elliot and posse escape from the evil yellow-suit-wearing-government agents via flying bicycle. I don’t know about all of you, but this scene gave me vivid nightmares for years. Now CNN has their reporters dressing like them? What the fuck. If I EVER see ANYONE walking down Arsenal wearing one of those suits, I am moving to Canada the next day. You can hold me to that. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC—they bathed themselves in that fear like pigs in feces. Ratings soared and people couldn’t change the channel. The tune-in-or-else-you-and-your-family-will-die-in-a- horrible-death-at-the-hands-of-the-terrorist-policy adopted by the 24 hour news stations kept us on the edges of our seats, shaking our heads, and wondering if we should go to confession before the Red Horse of War darkens the sky the neighborhood Walmart.

So, of course we were willing to sacrifice some civil liberties. Tap my phone, read my emails, install cameras in the street lights, hell, you could put one on my front door if you think it’s going to help. Send to FBI to tail law-abiding citizens if you think they hate America, set up secret CIA prisons around the world, torture anyone with that terrorist look in their eye. And while you’re at it, hold them without charge and deny them legal council—you know what, just get rid of habeas corpus all together, it’s outdated anyway. A suspected terrorist is as bad as an actual terrorist, and we’re better safe than sorry. Do what you have to do Big Brother, because we’re at war, and I have a yellow ribbon sticker on my car, and a flag flying outside my house, and I love America enough to make a sacrifice or ten so that you can save us from the terrorists. I’ll sacrifice my fucking country for America if you ask me to.

When this sort of suspicion is ambient, people feel it necessary to overcompensate. It’s like the big car/small penis theory. If you’re constantly looking at everyone and wondering whether or not they love America enough, you naturally feel like everyone is wondering the same thing about you. So you break out the American flag and fly it proudly everyday instead of just on holidays. You buy a little flag for your car window, and a red, white, and blue ribbon magnet to put opposite your yellow one. You order a “these colors don’t run” t-shirt off ebay, a bumper sticker with an eagle on it, and maybe even a patriotic bandanna. This behavior is the nonverbal equivalent to standing in the middle of the street and yelling at the top of your lungs, “I AM NOT A TERRORIST.” And you feel it necessary because you have turned your suspicion inward upon yourself. You are afraid that you are a terrorist. Whoa.

An ideological scapegoat.

A citizenry that is blindly patriotic and senselessly terrified.

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Intriguing shit I came across researching for this post:

• Awesome history of the fucked up HUAC hearings

• 2003 article about the current trend of censoring Hollywood dissenters

• What happens when people protest in America (click on picture gallery)

• Letters section of September 23, 2002 issue of The Nation that features this letter by some guy named John Zavales:

“I was in the Pentagon on September 11. Our office was on the opposite side of the building, and as we filed out none of us guessed how horrible it was until we saw, from the parking lot, the columns of smoke. That first evening, amid the shock and sense of loss, I thought, "This is what blowback really means." No one can excuse Al Qaeda's murderous hatred, but I now realize that this terror network was made possible by the arms and money we provided the Afghan mujahedeen during our demented anti-Soviet crusade. Those Americans who supported these thugs and psychopaths should be ashamed. Whenever I see that antidrug ad that claims that buying pot helps terrorists, I am reminded that our own cold war "patriots" helped to slaughter 3,000 people, and tried to kill me at my desk.”