DON'T FEAR 'EM, KILL 'EM (via Thomas A. Corcoran):

Is Fear Itself the Enemy? (EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, 2/14/04, NY Times)

[A]t a time in which a war on Islamist terror is working itself out in so many incarnations and with so many controversies, what seems noteworthy is that there are now so few examples of graphic American propaganda and none using ethnic or racial caricatures.

Yet this conference, called "Fear: Its Uses and Abuses," which extended over three days, paid little attention to that difference. Beginning with former Vice President Al Gore, who delivered the keynote address, speakers asserted again and again that the American government is preoccupied with instilling fear. The conference, organized by the journal Social Text and its editor, Arien Mack, gathered scholars like the poet and critic John Hollander, the political scientists George Kateb and Ira Katznelson, and the law professor Cass R. Sunstein. There were talks on the neuropsychology of fear, the social psychology of fear and fear in literature, and varied analyses of the Bush administration from critics like the Nation columnist Eric Alterman and Aryeh Neier, the president of the Open Society Institute.

But the dominant idea was that, as the conference's thematic statement put it, fear was being "encouraged by our government and exacerbated by our media." It was compared with the irrational fear of Communism and the perversions of McCarthyism. It was described as part of a counter-constitutional coup by a radical right. Talks about other aspects of fear — how, for example, it tends to drive out reflective thought with its stimulus of the "lateral nucleus of the amygdala" — mainly served to frame the theme. Mr. Hollander devoted some time to discussing Roosevelt's classic statement that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but after a while it became evident that "fear itself" was what many speakers wanted to inspire, not just to describe.

Mr. Gore asserted that a "powerful clique" had the run of the White House. We were being ruled, he said, by a president with a "determined disinterest in the facts," who "abused the trust of the American people by exploiting the fears of the American people," and a Republican party that thinks of other Americans as "agents of treason." The "machinery of fear is right out in the open," he said, "operating at full throttle." [...]

There was a reluctance to use the concept of an enemy to refer to anything but domestic political opponents. This is similar to a problem described in Lee Harris's Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, a new book that in its idiosyncratic brilliance and unrelentingly aggressive vision about the war on terror is bound to stir more controversy — and fear — than the New School conference. For we live, according to Mr. Harris, in a civilization with an intellectual culture that is reluctant to take the idea of an external enemy seriously; its enemies, though, have no such qualms.

"We are caught," Mr. Harris writes, "in the midst of a conflict between those for whom the category of the enemy is essential to their way of organizing all human experience and those who have banished even the idea of the enemy form both public discourse and even their innermost thoughts."

For those prepared to accept even some of Mr. Harris's premises, there is nothing to fear but the lack of fear itself.

Both sides are right here. We have no more reason to "fear" Islamicism than we did Communism or Nazism--none is/was a serious threat to the Republic. However, they are/were our enemies and our enemies deserve to be treated rather harshly--in fact deprived of all power, and if possible of life--regardless of whether they can do anything even remotely similar to us. As Mr. Rothstein writes, what's notable about our current war is that President Bush has avoided fear-mongering and demonization of Islam, even as he's cold-bloodedly pursued the enemy. Compare this to FDR who may have said "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" but who also rounded up innocent citizens and put them in concentration camps simply because of their race and proceeded to pursue a horribly misguided war policy in Europe because his hatred of the Germans blinded him to geopolitical realities.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2004 12:05 PM