Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Links – Fear
[ ] The state uses fear tactics to justify expanding capitalism through empire. The
fear of aliens that the AFF perpetuates only increases the power of political leaders.
Naom Chomsky / Jan 16, 2003 / p.41-44 / Edited by Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp
“Hijacking Catastrophe” 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of Empire” ©2004
http://www.comm287.com/handouts/HijackingText.pdf
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
author ofmore than 90 books on linguistics,philosophy, intellectual history, international
affairs, and US foreign policy.
repression. Russia used it as a pretext for intensifying their massive atrocities in Chechnya. Now it was
defense against terror. China did the same thing in its western provinces, increasing repression against the Muslim
minority, under the threat of terror. Israel did the same thing in the occupied territories. Now they’re fighting terror,
Across the board, the more
not just taking peoples’ land and water. Indonesia did the same.
democratic countries, almost all of them, developed some kind of
repressive legislation to discipline their own populations. Here, it
was called the Patriot Act. These don’t have much to do with terror
—maybe nothing to do with it—but they have a lot to do with
disciplining your own population. Power systems will exploit
(cont…)
their opportunities. They have to achieve that result. They’ll exploit
an earthquake for that purpose, and something like 9/11, well,
that’s easy. I say, yes, it had an effect on the United States, a dramatic one. And a similar one elsewhere.
JE: Let’s close with the election. How would you respond to people who say that there are a lot of structural forces
at work here, that generally presidents are figureheads, electoral politics is passé. Is there something in what
you’re saying about this administration that marks it as different, that calls this kind of thinking into question? How
important do you think this election actually is?
These are matters of judgment. The institutional factors are overwhelmingly important and the spectrum of policy
choices is pretty narrow. That’s why you can find precedents for the National Security Strategy in the Clinton,
Kennedy, and other liberal administrations.
The Clinton administration, in its regular defense presentations, stated quite openly that the United States, if
necessary, would resort to force unilaterally to protect markets and resources. Actually, if you think of what they
said, it goes beyond the National Security Strategy. They didn’t even talk about a threat. With the Bush
administration, it’s a pretend threat; with the Clinton administration, it was straightforward: it was to control
markets and resources.
there’s a group in the White House
So, yes, you can go way back and find precedents, but
right now that has a very narrow hold on political power. They hold
political power by a thread. And they happen to be an extremely
arrogant, dangerous group of reactionary statists. They are not
conservatives. They’re deeply reactionary believers in a powerful
interventionist state.They want to dismantle any form of
progressive state action. The government is there to serve the rich
and the powerful, not the population, and they’re extreme in their
willingness to brazenly and openly use force and the threat of force
to achieve their international objectives. I think that’s extremely
dangerous. Another four-year mandate for a group like that could
lead to actions that are not only dangerous but will be close to
irreversible. So in my opinion, it’s unusual in that respect.
ARMY AT Binghamton Aliens Case
[ ] Fear tactics are the weapon of the state to justify American violence and
capitalism. Reject this rhetoric and these tactics.
Michael Northcott / © 2004 / “An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and
American Empire” / http://stream.paranode.com/imc/portland/media/2007/03/356250.pdf
(BA, MA, PhD, Professor of Ethics at Edinburgh Univ, best known for his work in environmental theology and ethics. He has written
more than sixty scholarly articles on bioethics, the ethics of food, aquaculture, and genetic modification, on fair trade, globalisation,
place, the sociology of religion, theological ethics, and urbanism.)
which had painted the Muslim as the new enemy after the demise of communism, had come true.24 / Bush
seemed to anticipate the crisis which was to come when he
suggested in his Inaugural Address that America stood at a
crossroads of history. He said that he had been privileged to have
been chosen by God to direct America’s military forces to be the
divinely ordained instrument that would bring liberty and
democracy to the nations of the world, and to struggle against
America’s enemies – especially those who possessed ‘weapons of
mass destruction’ – in advancing 10 these values and practices.25 After
the ‘day of terror’ Bush announced a ‘crusade’ against the wicked men who had organised the attacks, and a
military campaign – Operation Infinite Justice – to seek them out and destroy them, albeit resiling from such overtly
Like so many other
religious language after it was pointed out it offended Muslims.
apocalyptics, including Osama bin Laden, Bush believes that he and
those who fight with him are servants of the good and have history
on their side, while those they fight with are clearly evil and ‘will be
defeated’ – a refrain he often repeats.
[ ] The decentered nature of modern life makes fear both a cause and a result of
policies aimed at simplifying identities.
Jan Jagodzinski and Hipfl, Brigitte/ 2001 / “Youth fantasies: Reading "The X-Files"
psychoanalytically” / Students in Media & Information Literacy Education (SIMILE)
(Jan Jagodzinski is a Professor in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta in
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where he teaches visual art education and curricular issues as they relate to
postmodern concerns of gender, politics, cultural studies, and the media (film and television Brigitte Hipfl
is Professor in the Institut für Medien-und Kommunikationswissenschaft, University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
http://www.utpjournals.com/simile/issue2/jagfulltext.html
The paranoia that runs throughout "The X-Files" is a contemporary reflection of the way the "big Other" is slowly decentering as the
decentering is
virtual reality of cyberspace continues to invade our everyday lives. As Dean (1998) argues,
characterized by increased globalization, the hypercomplexity of the age brought
on by networked computers and information, the specularization of politics,
computerized special-effects, competing expert testimonies and opinions,
gigabits of indigestible information, and the undeniable presence of power,
corruption, racism, and violence throughout science and law. Decentering has left
voters and consumers with no criteria by which to choose among various
competing policies, verdicts, treatments, and claims. As a result, the multiplicity
of positions contributes to the circumstance that contemporary political and
social issues remain unresolved. [27]
[You can also run this on case as a ID Politics Turn (Identity categories good)]