Resort To Fear
By Noam Chomsky
22 July, 2005
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.
Klemperers
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 Japans
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 historys 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 Japans December 1941 bombings the
date which will live in infamy, in FDRs (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
ringing words were more than justified under the doctrines of
anticipatory self-defence that prevail among the leaders
of todays 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 Japans 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 Churchills 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 Bushs framework for
fighting terrorism has its roots in the lofty, idealistic tradition
of John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson.
We can put aside
Wilsons shameful record, and keep to the origins of the lofty,
idealistic tradition, which Adams established in a famous State paper
justifying Andrew Jacksons 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 Gaddiss
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 Fist 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 Jacksons 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 nations
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