|
November 1, 2005
I ended an earlier post on the politics of fear with the claim that ' politics has internalised the culture of fear.' If we accept this, then the insight of Frank Furedi makes good sense. He says that:
....the politics of fear could not flourish if it did not resonate so powerfully with today's cultural climate. Politicians cannot simply create fear from thin air. Nor do they monopolise the deployment of fear; panics about health or security can just as easily begin on the internet or through the efforts of an advocacy group as from the efforts of government spindoctors. Paradoxically, governments spend as much time trying to contain the effects of spontaneously generated scare stories as they do pursuing their own fear campaigns.
This is the discourse that both conservatives (in the US & UK) and social democrats (UK) are constructing.
That's true. Environmentalists talk in terms of the end is nigh whilst the Howard Government is trying to ease the anxiety it has created with its warnings about a scary world with a flu pandemic.
Furedi takes an interesting twist:
Perhaps the distinct feature of our time is not the cultivation of fear, but the cultivation of vulnerability.... When most forms of human experience come with a health warning, we are continually reminded that we cannot be expected to manage everyday risks. And if vulnerability is the defining feature of the human condition, we are quite entitled to fear everything.
There he leaves it. That doesn't deal with the politics of the national securtity state, which in the name of preventing terrorism, employs a politics of fear to create the most extensive national security apparatus in our nation's history. It doesn't deal with the discourse of terrorism and the way that it has been normalized.
As Katrina Lee Koo observes in her Terror Australis: Security, Australia and the 'War on Terror' Discourse in Borderlands:
Since September 11, 2001 there has been an intense normalising practice in place with regard to Australian security. The result of this practice is an unquestioning acceptance that the changes in lifestyle, the deprivation of certain liberties and the lack of human empathy when dealing with others are necessary to ensure security. From changes in airport security procedures ... to the ASIO home raids that took place across Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in October and November 2002 ...there seemed plausibility in the argument that there must inevitably be, as ASIO Director-General Dennis Richardson argued, 'a further lowering of the risk tolerance threshold' ....Consequently, the threats of terrorism and the practices of counter-terrorism have become normalised into everyday life. Social and political life in Australia has become reconceptualized to include the imminent possibilities of terrorism, the need for eternal vigilance and the acceptance that certain sacrifices need to be made to protect the greater community.
This is the discourse that the conservatives (in the US & Australia) and social democrats (in the UK) are constructing.
|
The media tries to create the same kind of dependancies between itself and its audience. Look at any news promo; "Your child could be kidnapped on their way home from school. We show you how to keep your children safe"
Government is trying to make us dependent on them. If not the welfare state, then through them telling us only they can quell our anxieties.