"It was argued, and is argued to
this day, that terrorism posed a threat to American individual freedoms.
Yet, the greatest threat to American freedom proved to be, not the
terrorists, but the very government that purportedly protects Americans.
Indeed, the years following the September 11 attacks, the Bush
administration managed to perpetrate some of the most severe
infringements on individual rights since the Roosevelt administration.
All the while, Al-Qaeda has yet to seriously threaten the United
States."
A Culture of Fear
Monday, August 30, 2010
by Jonathan M.
Finegold Catalan
Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet foreign spokesman Gennadi
Gerasimov warned the United States, "We have done the most terrible
thing to you that we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of an
enemy."
For nearly half a century, the elusive threat posed by the Soviet Union
formed the basis of American foreign and domestic policy. Much of the
United States' political and economic development was in fact a product
of the government's exploitation of a supposed Soviet menace. Gerasimov
recognized that the fall of communist Russia denied the American
government the ability to exploit the fear of Marxism to its own benefit.
It was as if the American government had lost its reason for
being.
The United States has a long history of exploiting fear for the purpose
of legitimizing its growth. The current generations of American citizens
are direct witnesses to over eight decades of such exploitation. In the
Great Depression, the government used the fear of capitalism to
legitimize previously unforeseen growth in the size of the federal
bureaucracy. As the Depression wore on, the state's inability to spend
its way into prosperity led to public skepticism. Thus, the government
quickly shifted its focus to the threat posed by Japan, Germany, and
their allies. Perhaps most relevant to current Americans was the fear of
communism perpetuated through the Cold War. No less than two wars were
justified by this anticommunism, as were political repression and a
radical expansion of bureaucracy and the military-industrial
complex.
As Gerasimov suggested, the fall of the Soviet Union left the US
government without a justification for its existence. The state no longer
enjoyed an overbearing threat with which to distract the masses while it
grew in size.
Unfortunately, this situation did not last long. Indeed, the past decade
witnessed the development of an overwhelming American fear of terrorism.
Americans have apathetically allowed the repression of their freedoms in
the name of some greater cause (a cause, ironically, justified as a
mission to preserve American freedoms).
While support of American imperialism, otherwise termed
"counterterrorism," has recently waned, the government is now
reinforcing its legitimacy by once again intervening on behalf of the
common man against the capitalist system. By this means the United
States' bureaucracy continues to grow virtually unhampered, and
individual freedom has necessarily decreased.
Our government's authority is based on the notion that only the state can
protect the American people from the vices of greed and opposing
ideologies. The state thrives off the creation of a false dichotomy
between stateless ruin and state-induced prosperity. The actual
relationship is quite clear, however: the state itself is actually
the people's greatest threat.
The Great Depression and World War II
The Great Depression witnessed one of the
earliest large-scale increases in federal power in 20th-century American
history. The state, looking to find a scapegoat for the disaster, was
quick to demonize capitalism and greedy irrationalism as the culprits
behind the dramatic depreciation of the general standard of living. The
solution was benign government intervention, guaranteeing the laborer a
living wage and promising progress and growth through central management.
The fear of economic collapse, poverty, and misery led the American
people to largely ignore, or even allow and accept, the growth of
bureaucracy.
Uninterested in having any opposition, the state
either bought off differing politicians or purged those who stood in the
system's way, most through the use of the newly created Internal Revenue
Service.[1] While pointing at the ills caused by free and unfettered
businessmen, Hoover became the largest peacetime spender in the history
of the country; Roosevelt later shamed Hoover with even greater fiscal
expenditure. Despite large spending programs and rampant bureaucratic
growth, neither president successfully ended the depression.
Failing to stimulate the United States out of the depression, the
American government desperately needed a new enemy to distract the
country's attention with. The rise of Adolf Hitler in Europe and the
growing threat of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific provided Roosevelt
with the perfect target. Intervention in Europe was justified not merely
on account of helping the British or opposing German fascism. The
government instead built a culture of fear.
Propaganda posters depicting German jackboots crushing small-town
American churches, or Germanic invasion forces converging on New York
City, were distributed throughout America's cities. Another such poster
depicted the Germans and Japanese looming ominously over the United
States, one with a pistol and the other with a bloody dagger, reading,
"Our homes are in danger now!" The Roosevelt administration
made it clear that the intentions of the Axis powers were to threaten the
freedoms of Americans proper.
Creating a threat was necessary if Roosevelt was to persuade the
noninterventionist doves, many of whom still peppered the bureaucracy.
Indeed, after the First World War only a direct threat could justify
American involvement in a new European war. To this end, Roosevelt's
administration managed not only to run a considerably large propaganda
campaign, but also to coax the Japanese into a clear
provocation.
The Roosevelt administration's campaign of escalation toward war
culminated with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a number of other
American territorial assets in the Pacific Ocean. A direct attack on the
United States provided all the justification necessary to intervene both
in the Pacific and in Europe. The result was a two-theater war, costing
the United States nearly 300,000 lives (and many more wounded), and
leaving Europe and Japan almost completely shattered. All the while, the
American state continued to grow in size, power, and capability.
Anticommunism and the Cold War
After the end of the Second World War, the Soviet
Union replaced the defeated Axis Powers as the greatest threat to the
United States' freedom. Soviet Russia was no less than the heart and
origin of global communism. It infected much of East Asia, including
North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The Red Army posed a direct menace to
free and capitalist Western Europe and, indeed, to the free world in
general. The perceived Soviet threat provided the rationalization for the
Cold War, which ensued between 1946 and 1991. In the period between 1946
and 1991 Americans saw quite possibly the greatest expansion of
bureaucracy in the US government ironic for a country purportedly
focused on fighting communism.
Fear of communism validated American involvement in two major wars: Korea
and Vietnam. Justified or not, both wars held great implications
regarding the growth of the state.
The first of these two major wars was fought in Korea, between 1950 and
1953. The Korean War spelled the end of the anti-interventionist movement
in the US government. The post–World War demobilization proved excessive
for a country intending to challenge global Marxism. The North Korean
invasion of Southern Korea in mid-1950 caught the United States, in the
midst of said demobilization, severely unprepared for a new war. The US
government was determined to never be caught off guard again, and the
years following the end of the Korean War witnessed the development of
the American military-industrial complex and the foundation of a
permanent wartime military.
The Korean War confirmed a new age of militarism, where the United States
was ready and willing to intervene in the name of anticommunism (or, at
least, behind the veil of anticommunism). Forming powerful alliance blocs
across the world, both the United States and the Soviet Union prepared
for their inevitable confrontation the "Third World
War."
Fear of inevitable war, and the consequent exploitation of such fear by
the state, led to the creation of a soon-sprawling military-industrial
complex. A growing military required armaments, encouraging the
enlargement of a permanent war-materiel industry. Given the
public-private nature of this particular market, it is unsurprising that
it soon devolved into a system in which companies would directly lobby
government for contracts, and where the company with the most friends in
government usually won. The establishment of a network of favoritism led
directly to a situation in which politicians readily justified different
military programs just to necessitate the continued production of war
supplies. As the military-industrial complex grew in size, it became so
important that politicians only needed to point to the vast amount of
workers it employed in order to justify its existence. This, in fact, is
the form in which the military-industrial complex exists to this very
day. It is a relic of the Cold War.
The government consistently exploited the fear of communism to meet the
needs of individual bureaucrats. Most well known is the case of
McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy ingeniously used the fear of
communism to discredit his political opponents and protect himself from
criticism. As a method of censorship, he had hundreds of individuals,
most related to the entertainment industry, blacklisted. While Senator
McCarthy's purge represented an extreme case, which ended by the
late-1950s, fervent state-sponsored anticommunism did not
recede.
The roots of the United States' second major anticommunist war, the
Vietnam War, were firmly planted in the mid-1950s, with the dissolution
of French Indochina into two independent Vietnams. While the North fell
under communist rule, the South consolidated under the brutal leadership
of Ngo Dinh Diem. The South, firmly anticommunist, was promptly
buttressed by the fiscal and military support of the Eisenhower
administration.
The Diem regime's brutal method of governance, including enslavement and
execution, triggered the beginning of the Viet Minh insurgency. The
United States responded by declaring unwavering support for the South
(lest the United States lose even more face, given the debacle at the Bay
of Pigs and the erection of the Berlin Wall in Germany). By 1963, 16,000
American personnel were deployed in Vietnam. This rose to a couple
hundred thousand within the next two years.
While the Vietnam War proved to be an absolute disaster, its most lasting
legacy was not the cultural antistate revolution that it sparked in the
United States. Rather, despite the mounting opposition to the war, it
managed to finally solidify the bureaucracy's ability to wage war without
a congressional declaration (despite the War Powers Resolution, which was
supposedly meant to reverse the extreme powers granted to the presidency
by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). This made future war efforts much
easier to organize, leading to a number of military operations during the
1980s, including Grenada and Panama.
In retrospect, especially for those who have no recollection of the era,
it is rather difficult to understand the culture of fear imposed by the
state. Through the exploitation of the public's fear of communism, the
United States legitimized the military-industrial complex, instigated
short anticommunist purges, launched two major wars (and many smaller
ones), and supported several brutal dictatorships throughout the world.
Ultimately, the Soviet Union fell without a single shot fired in anger
between it and the United States. No world war materialized. Communism
fell not by the sword, but by its own internal inconsistencies.
Ironically, the Cold War's losers were the citizens of the "free
world," who, by turning a blind eye to rampant government growth
were enslaved by their own "protectors." Soviet foreign
spokesman Gerasimov warned the American government of the great harm the
Soviets had inflicted by collapsing. Government-sponsored slavery
suddenly lost its principal justification.
Terror
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the new
centerpiece of government's fearmongering soon emerged. A series of minor
bombings in the 1990s and finally the ghastly attack on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, confirmed the Soviet
Union's replacement -- global terrorism.
The nation was swept with terror frenzy. Like communism before it, the
elusive threat of terrorism justified two wars and numerous infringements
on the individual rights of American citizens. The Bush administration
launched two military invasions within two years of each other --
Afghanistan and Iraq. Both wars were supposedly fought to protect
Americans from the suspect threat of global terrorism.
It was argued, and is argued to this day, that terrorism posed a threat
to American individual freedoms. Yet, the greatest threat to American
freedom proved to be, not the terrorists, but the very government that
purportedly protects Americans. Indeed, the years following the September
11 attacks, the Bush administration managed to perpetrate some of the
most severe infringements on individual rights since the Roosevelt
administration. All the while, Al-Qaeda has yet to seriously threaten the
United States.
Furthermore, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan left Al-Qaeda
virtually untouched. While Afghanistan supposedly harbored Al-Qaeda
figurehead Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda was already widely dispersed
throughout other countries. And of course Iraq had no meaningful
relationship with Al-Qaeda.
New Tools of Repression
Unsurprisingly, the two wars in the Middle East
have taken their toll on the people's trust in the state. Support for
continued interventionism abroad continues to wane, as it becomes clear
that neither of the wars has much to do with global terrorism or the
protection of American freedoms. However, the state has once again
shifted policy to cope with the change in public opinion.
The fear of terrorism has by and large been replaced by the alleged
threat of capitalism and animal spirits. The threat once again becomes
greed, and as usual, there is only one solution embracing the state.
Naturally, the masses have once again fallen for this appeal to fear.
Without government intervention, alleges the regime, the country will
fall into a spiral of poverty and misfortune. The people, otherwise free,
will find themselves the downtrodden slaves of the free market.
The government thrives on creating these false dichotomies: war or
invasion, militant anticommunism or a global communist revolution, war or
terrorism, economic interventionism or economic misery. It offers the
masses two choices, utopia or hell. The one, it claims, can only be
provided by the state, while the other is the product of an unprotected
and anarchic society. These illogical fears have tended to win over
reason, and the government continues to grow unchecked.
A century of war, corruption, interventionism, and inflation have failed
to dissuade the public from apathetically accepting government growth.
This phenomenon can perhaps be explained by noting the collective
rejection of reason and logic, spread through the system by the ranks of
intellectuals and academics who willingly accept this transition to
irrationalism. For whatever reason, bureaucratic expansion has been left
virtually unopposed.
Fortunately, the recent dismantling, by means of the Internet, of the
state's monopoly on education has allowed for the formation of pockets of
resistance. These represent the development of a liberal
counterrevolution to the now mainstream culture of statolatry -- a return
of reason. Before such a movement can set in, however, the culture of
fear created by government must be dispelled. Man must not allow himself
to fall prey to the state's exploitation of his emotions. Man must, once
again, recognize the fallibility of the state and the availability of
other options.
Jonathan M. Finegold Catalán writes from San Diego and studies political
science and economics. He blogs at
economic thought.net.
Notes
[1] Burton Folsom Jr. (2008),
New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged
America (New York City, New York: Threshold Editions),
pp. 146–167.
http://mises.org/daily/4644
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- A Culture of Fear M. Johnson
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