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Title: The Manipulation of Fear Author: Noam Chomsky Date: July 16, 2005 Language: en Topics: fear, World War II Source: Retrieved on 11th September 2021 from https://chomsky.info/20050716/ Notes: Published in Tehelka.
The resort to fear by systems of power to discipline the domestic
population has left a long and terrible trail of bloodshed and suffering
which we ignore at our peril. Recent history provides many shocking
illustrations.
The mid-twentieth century witnessed perhaps the most awful crimes since
the Mongol invasions. The most savage were carried out where western
civilisation had achieved its greatest splendours. Germany was a leading
centre of the sciences, the arts and literature, humanistic scholarship,
and other memorable achievements. Prior to World War I, before
anti-German hysteria was fanned in the West, Germany had been regarded
by American political scientists as a model democracy as well, to be
emulated by the West. In the mid-1930s, Germany was driven within a few
years to a level of barbarism that has few historical counterparts. That
was true, most notably, among the most educated and civilised sectors of
the population.
In his remarkable diaries of his life as a Jew under Nazism — escaping
the gas chambers by a near miracle — Victor Klemperer writes these words
about a German professor friend whom he had much admired, but who had
finally joined the pack: “If one day the situation were reversed and the
fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the
ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after
all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing.
But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors
three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the
lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.”
Klemperer’s reactions were merited, and generalised to a large part of
recorded history.
Complex historical events always have many causes. One crucial factor in
this case was skillful manipulation of fear. The “ordinary folk” were
driven to fear of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to take over the world,
placing the very survival of the people of Germany at risk. Extreme
measures were therefore necessary, in “self-defence”. Revered
intellectuals went far beyond.
As the Nazi storm clouds settled over the country in 1935, Martin
Heidegger depicted Germany as the “most endangered” nation in the world,
gripped in the “great pincers” of an onslaught against civilisation
itself, led in its crudest form by Russia and America. Not only was
Germany the prime victim of this awesome and barbaric force, but it was
also the responsibility of Germany, “the most metaphysical of nations,”
to lead the resistance to it. Germany stood “in the centre of the
western world,” and must protect the great heritage of classical Greece
from “annihilation,” relying on the “new spiritual energies unfolding
historically from out of the centre”. The “spiritual energies” continued
to unfold in ways that were evident enough when he delivered that
message, to which he and other leading intellectuals continued to
adhere.
The paroxysm of slaughter and annihilation did not end with the use of
weapons that may very well bring the species to a bitter end. We should
also not forget that these species-terminating weapons were created by
the most brilliant, humane, and highly educated figures of modern
civilisation, working in isolation, and so entranced by the beauty of
the work in which they were engaged that they apparently paid little
attention to the consequences: significant scientific protests against
nuclear weapons began in the labs in Chicago, after the termination of
their role in creation of the bomb, not in Los Alamos, where the work
went on until the grim end. Not quite the end.
The official US Air Force history relates that after the bombing of
Nagasaki, when Japan’s submission to unconditional surrender was
certain, General Hap Arnold “wanted as big a finale as possible,” a
1,000-plane daylight raid on defenceless Japanese cities. The last
bomber returned to its base just as the agreement to unconditional
surrender was formally received. The Air Force chief, General Carl
Spaatz, had preferred that the grand finale be a third nuclear attack on
Tokyo, but was dissuaded. Tokyo was a “poor target” having already been
incinerated in the carefully-executed firestorm in March, leaving
perhaps 100,000 charred corpses in one of history’s worst crimes.
Such matters are excluded from war crimes tribunals, and largely
expunged from history. By now they are hardly known beyond circles of
activists and specialists. At the time they were publicly hailed as a
legitimate exercise of self-defence against a vicious enemy that had
reached the ultimate level of infamy by bombing US military bases in its
Hawaiian and Philippine colonies.
It is perhaps worth bearing in mind that Japan’s December 1941 bombings
— “the date which will live in infamy,” in FDR’s (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
ringing words — were more than justified under the doctrines of
“anticipatory self-defence” that prevail among the leaders of today’s
self-designated “enlightened States,” the US and its British client.
Japanese leaders knew that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the
Boeing production lines, and were surely familiar with the public
discussions in the US explaining how they could be used to incinerate
Japan’s wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian
and Philippine bases — “to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire
with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps,” as retired
Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that “simply
delighted” President Roosevelt. Evidently, that is a far more powerful
justification for bombing military bases in US colonies than anything
conjured up by Bush-Blair and their associates in their execution of
“pre-emptive war” — and accepted, with tactical reservations, throughout
the mainstream of articulate opinion.
The comparison, however, is inappropriate. Those who dwell in teeming
bamboo ant heaps are not entitled to such emotions as fear. Such
feelings and concerns are the prerogatives only of the “rich men
dwelling at peace within their habitations,” in Churchill’s rhetoric,
the “satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what
they had,” and to whom, therefore, “the government of the world must be
entrusted” if there is to be peace — a certain kind of peace, in which
the rich men must be free from fear.
Just how secure the rich men must be from fear is revealed graphically
by highly-regarded scholarship on the new doctrines of “anticipatory
self-defence” crafted by the powerful. The most important contribution
with some historical depth is by one of the leading contemporary
historians, John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University. He traces the Bush
doctrine to his intellectual hero, the grand strategist John Quincy
Adams. In the paraphrase of The New York Times, Gaddis “suggests that
Bush’s framework for fighting terrorism has its roots in the lofty,
idealistic tradition of John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson”.
We can put aside Wilson’s shameful record, and keep to the origins of
the lofty, idealistic tradition, which Adams established in a famous
State paper justifying Andrew Jackson’s conquest of Florida in the First
Seminole War in 1818. The war was justified in self-defence, Adams
argued. Gaddis agrees that its motives were legitimate security
concerns. In Gaddis’s version, after Britain sacked Washington in 1814,
US leaders recognised that “expansion is the path to security” and
therefore conquered Florida, a doctrine now expanded to the whole world
by Bush — properly, he argues.
Gaddis cites the right scholarly sources, primarily historian William
Earl Weeks, but omits what they say. We learn a lot about the precedents
for current doctrines, and the current consensus, by looking at what
Gaddis omits. Weeks describes in lurid detail what Jackson was doing in
the “exhibition of murder and plunder known as the First Seminole War,”
which was just another phase in his project of “removing or eliminating
native Americans from the southeast,” underway long before 1814. Florida
was a problem both because it had not yet been incorporated in the
expanding American empire and because it was a “haven for Indians and
runaway slaves… fleeing the wrath of Jackson or slavery”.
There was in fact an Indian attack, which Jackson and Adams used as a
pretext: US forces drove a band of Seminoles off their lands, killing
several of them and burning their village to the ground. The Seminoles
retaliated by attacking a supply boat under military command. Seizing
the opportunity, Jackson “embarked on a campaign of terror, devastation,
and intimidation,” destroying villages and “sources of food in a
calculated effort to inflict starvation on the tribes, who sought refuge
from his wrath in the swamps”. So matters continued, leading to Adams’
highly regarded State paper, which endorsed Jackson’s unprovoked
aggression to establish in Florida “the dominion of this republic upon
the odious basis of violence and bloodshed”.
These are the words of the Spanish ambassador, a “painfully precise
description,” Weeks writes. Adams “had consciously distorted,
dissembled, and lied about the goals and conduct of American foreign
policy to both Congress and the public,” Weeks continues, grossly
violating his proclaimed moral principles, “implicitly defending Indian
removal, and slavery”. The crimes of Jackson and Adams “proved but a
prelude to a second war of extermination against (the Seminoles),” in
which the remnants either fled to the West, to enjoy the same fate
later, “or were killed or forced to take refuge in the dense swamps of
Florida”. Today, Weeks concludes, “the Seminoles survive in the national
consciousness as the mascot of Florida State University” — a typical and
instructive case…
…The rhetorical framework rests on three pillars (Weeks): “the
assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States, the
assertion of its mission to redeem the world” by spreading its professed
ideals and the ‘American way of life,’ and the faith in the nation’s
“divinely ordained destiny”. The theological framework undercuts
reasoned debate, and reduces policy issues to a choice between Good and
Evil, thus reducing the threat of democracy. Critics can be dismissed as
“anti-American,” an interesting concept borrowed from the lexicon of
totalitarianism. And the population must huddle under the umbrella of
power, in fear that its way of life and destiny are under imminent
threat…