Fear as a Weapon

President Bush has also been fueling the fires offear in almost every
speech he has given since September 11, 2001. Here he is in a typical speech,
delivered on October 6, 2005, transparently attempting to whip up as
much fear as possible in order to try to prop up Americans’ diminishing
support for the country’s ongoing occupation of Iraq:

The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments
in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from
Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated
agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail
our government into isolation.

Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, “We
will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the
eternal life.” And the civilized world knows very well that other
fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole
nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history....
With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global
ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new
challenges and unprecedented dangers.

Islamic terrorists, here as always,are depicted as omnipotent villains with
quite attainable dreams of world domination, genocide, and the obliteration of the United States. They are trying to take over the world and murder us all. And this is not merely a threat we face. It is much more than
that.It is the predominant issue facing the United States—more important
than all others. Everything pales in comparison to fighting off this danger.
We face not merely a danger, but “unprecedented dangers.”

For four years, this is what Americans have heard over and over and
over from our government—that we face a mortal and incomparably
powerful enemy, and only the most extreme measures taken by our government can save us. We are a nation engaged in a War of Civilizations, a
nation whose very existence is in peril. All of our plans for the future,
dreams for our children, career aspirations, life goals—these are all subordinate, all for naught, unless, first and foremost, we stand loyally behind
George Bush as he takes the extreme and unprecedented measures necessary to protect us from these extreme and unprecedented threats.

It is that deeply irrational, fear-driven view of the world that has been used to convince Americans to acquiesce to the administration’s excesses
and abuses of power. And it is not difficult to understand why it works.
After all, if it really were the case that terrorism constituted the sort of
imminent, civilization-ending threat the administration has spent the last
four years drumming into everyone’s head, then it might be extremely
difficult to gin up much outrage over an eavesdropping program—war-
rants or not—or over a few American citizens being rounded up and put
in military prisons without any charges. When our very survival is in
imminent danger, all else pales in importance, and we may feel extreme gratitude toward those who seek to save us, even if hey break a few laws
to do it.

In fact, it has become unacceptable in polite company to even raise
the prospect that the threat of terrorism may be exaggerated. During the
2004 election, John Kerry stumbled in his clumsy way towards challenging this fear-mongering when he was quoted in The New York Times Magazine as saying, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists
are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.” This provoked the
predictable outrage from the Bush camp that Kerry, along with Bush’s
other opponents, was not serious about fighting terrorists and was too
weak to protect our children from this unparalleled menace, and the issue
was never spoken of again.