The myth of the threatening 'other' has been used to manipulate the American public and to mishape public policy since the end of WWII. It lived in the Red Scare of the Cold War, and in the Domino Theory. And it has been rejuvenated as the fear of terrorism and Islam. This article argues implicitly that it is time to stop the fear-machine and to start actually dealing in facts. This article looks at some of the seductive products of the fear machine. It shows how the assumptions about the 'other' that are produced by the fear machine have been wrong. And it suggests that the fear machine is driven by a common group of people with an agenda.
The domino theory, some of us might remember fondly, was the compelling logic for the War in Vietnam. If Vietnam fell, Cambodia would be next. Then Thailand. Then Bangladesh, the wave would sweep over all of Asia: India, Iran, Iraq, Turkey gathering force as it went. It would end-run the Iron Curtain, felling Egypt all of North Africa, Greece, Italy, Austria Germany, France, England. And in the blink of an eye America would be crawling with Communists.
Communists would shut down democracy. They would defile the Constitution. They would force us to work in factories for low wages. They would fill the air with pollution. They would take away our guns. They would outlaw whitewall tires, make us drink vodka instead of beer, and force us to eat dark crusty rye bread instead of pale fluffy white bread. TV shows like Gunsmoke and Roy Rogers would be banned, and maybe even I Love Lucy. Decadent western products like Cheez Whiz* in an aerosol can and sugary cereal would disappear from the grocery store. And we would all become atheists.
It was the fear of losing Cheez Whiz that got my attention. I had lived out-of-country and done without this essential food group for most of my life, and I was not in a mood to give it up. So the war against Communists in Vietnam seemed like a pretty good idea to me, as a young person in grade school. Cheez Whiz was not my parents' chief concern. I still have distinct memories of my parents whispering their fears to each other. The idea of living in a country of Godless Atheists genuinely scared them. What if the Domino Theory were right? What if country after country fell? What if the Red Communists took America? Is that a knock at the door? Do you suppose it's a Communist? Where shall we hide the Bibles? No. It's not a knock at the door. Just the black walnut tree dropping walnuts on the cellar doors.An unusual fall windstorm.
The years wore on. Vietnam fell to the Communists. Today, Vietnam behaves as one more capitalist power of Southeast Asia, one more force to be reconned with. One more land of cheap labor. One more place in the world with an educational system for the masses that rivals or betters that of the United States in terms of attendence. And, who knows, maybe in terms of results? A brief search suggests that if they do not already do so, the Vietnamese are poised to consume more Cheez Whiz per capita now than they did when Americans were there fighting the Communists. In short, those Communists have done more to make Vietnam a bustling capitalist country than Americans ever could have.
During Vietnam's transformation Russia loosened its grip on its Soviet Empire and several countries once under its tutelage have asserted themselves as members of a western, European community. One of the leading nations is Poland. I was reminded of all of these odd relationships suddenly when I read the following blip in a recent issue of The Week. It's by Jaroslave Makowski and it originally appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza:
Since Poland joined the EU Western Europeans have been petrified that Poles will steal their jobs. But there is one Polish worker who is welcome everywhere ... He is the Catholic Priest. Catholic countries such as Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy are in desparate need of priests to staff their churches. Their priests are dying off, and hardly any natives of those countries are signing up to replace them ... Some 7000 young men enter Polish seminaries every year. Once they are ordained the church often sends them abroad ... If this keeps up, priests will quickly become Poland's biggest export."
This jolted my memory. It occurred to me that Pope John Paul II was Polish. A world of Protestants and non-believers who had developed a habit of seeing popes as scoundrels, knaves, and thieves found this Pope personally endearing, his personal faith compelling, and his earnestness and holiness inspiring. People who did not believe in God, in holiness, in religion, in Catholicism looked at Pope John Paul II and saw a man of towering intellect, a man of tenacious and profound faith, a man of inspiring humility. In short, hardly a good person on earth had a bad opinion of him. Think what you will about any institutions he might have ever been associated with or of the particulars of his ideas, his example was almost enough to cause a devout agnostic to suspend disbelief.
Karol Jozef Wojtyla became Pope and took the name John Paul II in 1976. That would have been roughly four years after Nixon won his second term chanting "Peace with Honor," and about two years after Vietnam fell to the communists and Nixon was felled by the truth about Watergate. It would have been the year revolutionaries in Iran siezed the embassy and the father of our President negotiated with them, promising arms and support if only they would hold on to the hostages until Reagan got elected.
Poland would have been under the sway of the communists at that point for more than thirty years. And Wojtyla would have risen through the ranks of the Catholic church in that country, serving as bishop and then cardinal during the 1960s and early 1970's. By all western accounts, the ruthless efficiency of the communist state should have wiped out all semblance of religion or religious practice. The whole church in Poland, complete with all its members, all its rituals, all its functions, and all its functionaries would have been non-existent. If one were to believe the officially sanctioned party line in the west, in 1976, the person Karol Jozef Wojtyla could only have been a miner or a steelworker or a communist party functionary. There was no church in Godless Communist States. Poland was a Godless Communist State. Ergo, no church. It would have been as possible for a Pole to become a Pope as it would have been for a Vietnamese to have been drowned in a bathtub full of Cheeze Whiz.
Yet, there he was. Until I read this particular blip, I had taken it as an article of faith that the communism really did threaten to wipe out religion in the lands it ruled. I had ignored all evidence to the contrary. It had bounced off me like water off a duck. After thirty years of evidence to the contrary, I still believed the old lie. Now I realize the laugh is on us. The Godless Communists, it now turns out, have done more to preserve Catholic religion than all the freedom-loving European nations have managed to do. Poland produced possibly the best Pope in more than a millenium and it now serves as the source of a huge portion of Europe's new priests. Talk about the death of religion under the Commies! Without Poland, the Catholic church in Europe would be done for. Th church can thank God for the policies of those Godless Commies.
This raises lots of questions. What, exactly was the nature of the church in Poland? What was its relationship with the state? John Paul II saw much religious oppression under communism and he was highly critical of communism for this state of things. Was it the repression of the state that somehow preserved the church's status? Or is there a set of cultural memes in communism that are more compatible with religious expression than are capitalist memes? Are there things we can learn from this? How is it that the church under the repressive regime of the Godless Commies grew to have more meaning in people's lives than it did in any western country? The irony of all this is profound.
It has usually been the Christian Fundamentalists who have proved most paranoid about the Godless Commies. The whole conflagration that was the Red Scare in America, though fanned by demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy, was burning in the hearts of rural Americans who loved their God and Country. McCarthy capitalized on the fear of the Godless Commies. He had dozens of people locked away and perhaps hundreds thrown out of their jobs either because they were denounced by their associates as being Godless Commies or because they failed to denounce others as Godless Commies. It was quite a racket, while it lasted.
Between then and now America has had a number of lucid moments. But fear is such an easy means of control that it is almost impossible for the ambitious to keep their hands off. Hardly any emotion is more seductive than fear. Only greed comes close. It sells magazines and newspapers. It sells security services. And it discounts liberties to a level that makes Esau's exchange of his inheritance for a pot of lentils seem like a shrewd bargain.
Hardly any emotion is more effective at driving out reason. Reason flees before fear like cats flee threats of immersion. Until, like a wildfire, it has run its course, and burned up all that is useful, fear always trumps reason. All through the Cold War, communism provided the bogey men, the fear that fueled demagoguery. But with the fall of communism American demagogues have had to find a new object of fear. A new "outsider" who would serve as the subject of fear. The Middle Eastern Muslim provided the perfect replacement. Americans know nothing of Islam. Except they know that it has threatened Christendom since its inception. They know nothing of middle eastern nations, except that they are far away. And that they are filled with people "Not Like Us." And this is all that is required for a recipe of fear. It would be easy to imagine that this could not be happening. It would be easy to explain away the constant drumming of the 'terrorist' them in the press and from government functionaries except that it is roughly the same people using roughly the same language, evoking roughly the same images, for roughly the same purposes as it was with the domino theory and the red scare. William Kristol is writing stuff that echoes Irving Krisol's defense of Joe McCarthy:
In [a recent] Washington Post, [William] Kristol writes, "But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush's foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush's Democratic critics, they know no such thing."
In the journal Commentary in 1952, during the McCarthy era, Irving Kristol wrote, "For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing." http://maxspeak.org/gm/archives/00001332.html
Is it really possible that Kristol wishes for us to compare George Bush to Joseph McCarthy? The temptation to make this comparison is simply too great. The impulse too difficult to resist. But Kristol, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush's brother are principals of PNAC. Kristol cannot push them out at this point. They are inseparable in policy, thought, action. One can only assume Kristol imagined he could get away recycling old rhetoric. But he has managed to recycle old ideas and old images with it.
Demagoguery did not die with Joe McCarthy, nor did the forces that drive it. It seems to me that what we have here is the same group of people with the same ideas using the same tactics and getting the same results. The Red Scare. The Domino theory. The Ubiquitous Terror Threat. TUTT TUTT.
I look outside my window and I see the terrorists at my neighbor's door. They stand poised to break inside. What will they do, torture some confession out of him? Throw him in prison to be tried in secret, convicted and gassed? Or do they simply intend to hurt his wife, reprogram his remote control, and steal his SUV? I look closer and I see their faces clearly. They are young, military men. Men with no hair, black army boots, and sunglasses. Are those crosses tatooed on their forearms? They are being pushed forward by a throng of Fox News reporters ravenous for meat. "He's a terrorist," they are screaming. And I wonder: when will I wake up from this nightmare? When can we all go back to being sane? Come to think of it, I might even be willing to forego Cheez Whiz for a while as part of the deal.
* Cheez Whiz is the registered trademark of the Kraft Food corporation which is wholly responsible for its contents.
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved