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ARMY AT Binghamton Aliens Case

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.

Recall how George H. W. Bush won the election: it was by playing


the race card. Either vote for me or black criminals will rape your
sister. That was the main feature of the election, which raised him in the polls. In 1989, they
called for another phase of the drug war. Hispanic narco-traffickers
were going to destroy us unless we did something to protect
ourselves from this massive assault. In a couple of weeks, fear of
drugs rose from practically nothing to a top issue in peoples’ minds.
Crime, drugs, Libyans, Nicaraguans, Grenadans, Arab terrorists—
they’re all attacking us from all over the place. Therefore, we have
to cower in fear under the umbrella of power. The brave cowboy will
save us from all of this.
When Karl Rove pulls the same tricks now, he’s just replaying a
familiar record. Every commentator should be pointing out that
every one of these things is just a replay of a very familiar formula.
You can ask about the reasons, but the fact of the matter is it’s a
very frightened country and this goes back long before the Reagan
administration. For whatever reason, there’s a lot of fear in the country. Fear of outsiders,
fear of crime, fear of welfare mothers, fear of blacks, fear of aliens,
fear of all sorts of things. And it’s easy to stimulate that kind of
fear, just as it has been in other countries. Germany is a striking
example because it was, in many ways, the peak of Western
civilization. It didn’t take long for Hitler to be able to convert
Germans into raging maniacs. And that goes back in our history,
too.
During World War I, the United States was a very pacifist country, and most people had no interest in becoming
involved in an internal European war. It’s a very reasonable reaction. But the Wilson administration created the first
major state propaganda agency and corporate committee on public information. Orwell would have loved that. The
state propaganda agency did succeed in turning the country
into raging anti-German fanatics to the point where the Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn’t play Wagner; they
wanted to destroy everything German. It’s a technique that works, and Rove and his guys made it very clear that
this was going to be the primary program of the administration. They’re not keeping it a secret.
Just take a look at when the Republican Convention is taking place. By pure coincidence, it’s taking place in New
Pure coincidence has nothing to
York City just before another anniversary of September 11?
do with it. They made it clear in both their words and in action that
they’re going to try to control the population by fear.
And it’s worldwide. The United States is extreme, and it’s extremely
important because of its enormous power, but just about every
power system in the world exploited 9/11 as a technique of
ARMY AT Binghamton Aliens Case

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.)

Bush uses this same apocalyptic language to advance an imperial


vision of American power and in so doing he taps into a core feature
of American evangelicalism. Around 40 per cent of Americans describe themselves as
evangelical Christians, and opinion polls regularly indicate that a quarter of all Americans believe that they are
even beyond Christian circles, apocalyptic plots –
living in the end times.22 And
alien invasions, asteroids that threaten to destroy the earth,
skyscrapers razed by fire, cities over-run with vast spiders, people
scratching out a living in a post-nuclear war world – are the stuff of
many American movies and novels.
Why are Americans so drawn to the apocalyptic? There are a
number of possible answers to this question. One is that the
American Revolution and the terrible Civil War that followed
represented a unique combination of apocalyptic violence and
religious fervour. Ministers in the Civil War believed that its extreme violence presaged the end of the
world, and as the blood of thousands stained the land, soldiers sang the apocalyptic anthem ‘mine eyes have seen
the glory of the coming of the Lord’ who was ‘trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored’ with
its implicit sacrificial theme.23 Another
answer may be found in the terrible
economic depressions of the 1870s and 1930s, as America embraced
the new corporate capitalism that set industry and technology
against the health of the land and the welfare of workers and local
communities, and whose effects were so powerfully memorialised in Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of
Wrath. Then there was the fear of nuclear annihilation after the
Soviets had successfully followed America in making and testing the
atom bomb, an event that planted introduction 9 fear into every
American and which saw the emergence of a new genre of
apocalyptic movies about alien invasions, body-snatchers and other
terrors. For decades afterwards, every neighbourhood in America had its own nuclear fall-out shelter and
school children were drilled in what to do in case of attack. The nuclear mushroom cloud is often compared by
millennialists with the battle of Armageddon, spoken of in the Book of Revelation, in which the fire and heat is so
American Apocalyptic lives off fear: fear of
intense as to melt the crust of the earth.
the outsider, fear of the slave who became a citizen, fear of
communists, fear of corporations and the military, fear of aliens,
fear of criminals, fear of the federal government. As Michael Moore showed in
his Oscar-winning documentary movie Bowling for Columbine, American cable news and TV shows provide viewers
with a daily fix of fear with their constant footage of criminal acts, police shoot-outs, police car chases, the war on
drugs, the war in Israel, and now the ‘war on terror’.
Ironically and tragically for America, apocalyptic violence of a sort was visited on the American mainland on
September 11, 2001. Its agents were also apocalyptic believers. Like American millennialists, Osama bin Laden and
his followers believe that history will end in violence and that only through violent wars will the new history that / is
foreordained come about, which is to say when the Grand Caliphate will emerge as the united global government of
all the Muslims on the earth. Bin Laden and his followers want to shape a new history, to set the world on a new
path, and they are willing to sacrifice their own lives for this cause by generating acts of terrifying violence. Nothing
could be more terrifying for most Americans than to see their financial and military headquarters literally melting
down before their eyes in the face of this Arab onslaught. It was as if all those apocalyptic movies from the 1990s,
ARMY AT Binghamton Aliens Case

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]

The social imaginary of paranormal monsters, of the supernatural, or of


previously repressed sexualities and subjectivities is the result of this breakdown
of boundaries and transgression. The alien is linked to the indeterminability of
the rationality of the public sphere and, hence, to the collapse of its possibility. The
series provides the appropriate catch phrases: "Trust No One" and "Deny All Knowledge." The ideal of the public sphere and civil
The alien
society relies on a minimum of trust, on at least the ability to distinguish friends from enemies (the "us" from "them").
deconstructs this friend/enemy binary. The alien is an icon for the "undecidables"
that fit neither category. The monster and the hybrid are unclassifiable and
ARMY AT Binghamton Aliens Case

therefore belong to a post-evolutionary and neo-Darwinian account of punctuated


evolution. They seem to appear from nowhere; they "drop out of the skies." Here,
creation theory bumps against the "hard" evidence that is sought by science. In this sense, it is no surprise why Native Americans
Alien
befriend Mulder when he is seriously wounded in a National Security bomb explosion and given up for dead.
presence is an invitation to suspicion. Mistrust, anxiety, and conspiracy run
throughout. The anxiety is about breeding, miscegenation, and hybridity - about
the collapse of distinctions between the alien and ourselves as the true natives.
In many respects, the paranoic fear of aliens is replicated by racist anti-immigrant
movements and political parties who cloak their deep fear of the other in
nationalist rhetoric. [28]

[You can also run this on case as a ID Politics Turn (Identity categories good)]

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