Originally published in Counterpunch.
Donald Trump began his first week in office by fulfilling his campaign pledge to declare a ban on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries he associates with terrorism — Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, though he neglected to name a single country where he has business interests. The ban has since been blocked in the courts. Unnamed was Saudi Arabia, ironic given the role of the Saudi Royal Family in spreading Wahabism, the version of Islam that has been so instrumental in fueling fundamentalism. The cognitive dissonance attached to Trump’s patently selective concern based on his business interests (no doubt also influenced by other concerns like the interest of the US in the petrodollar regime) was only part of the more generalized cognitive dissonance surrounding terrorist narratives that has tended to characterize the moral panic over terrorism better called the Terror Scare (aspects of which are discussed in Gershon Shafir, ed, Lessons and Legacies of the War on Terror, Routledge).
Another area where this cognitive dissonance was evident was the gag order Donald Trump signed immediately after his inauguration for federal government departments including the EPA, one mandating political review of scientific reports prior to release. The intent of this order to suppress and deny the science surrounding climate change had been made unmistakably clear by the removal of any mention of climate change from the White House website as it was changed over to reflect the policies of the incoming executive. In this case as in that of the Muslim Ban, the cognitive dissonance seemed to derive in the main from Trump’s propensity to tilt at manufactured, invented or imaging threats while actual tangible ones were permitted to continue and exacerbate without acknowledgement, much less question or challenge (in 2012, Trump infamously tweeted that ‘The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive’). Some crises are worthier than others depending on their serviceability to power and in inverse proportion to their relation to messy concepts like empiricism, causality and science.
As if to demonstrate, only a few days after the Muslim Ban came into effect, 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a university student known for his white supremacist sympathies, opened fire in a mosque in Quebec City, killing six and wounding nineteen. He has since been charged with five counts of attempted murder. While Justin Trudeau immediately denounced Bissonnette as a terrorist, the typically bellicose ‘not-sure-whether-internet-troll-or’ POTUS was uncharacteristically silent, even though the social dynamics at play in Canadian society are to all intents and purposes identical not only to the United States, but the west writ large. Trump’s telling silence spoke loudly to the cognitive dissonance of associating terrorism with exterior threats, since the terror perpetrated in Quebec City was homegrown — as has been the majority of the acts of terror perpetrated in the US since 9/11.
Even after the Quebec City shootings and before the victims of that tragedy are even buried, Trump continues to focus solely on Muslims as potential sources of terrorism, his next step being to rename the US government’s counter-extremism program from ‘Countering Violent Extremism programme to ‘Countering Radical Islamic Extremism’ — and before the bodies of the victims of Alexandre Bissonnette were even in the ground at that. Trump’s militant ignorance, the dominant narratives surrounding terrorism prevalent in the decade and a half since 2001 continue to be belied by the facts, which belie the self-serving, self-vs-other binary logic that enables the shifting of blame onto some convenient scapegoat or other, as well as the invocation of double standards that put sanctions on various policies, attitudes and behaviours only when not carried out by us. Not very coincidentally, the same is also true of his attitude towards global warming.
Where terrorism is concerned, on the first count is the nature of terror historically as a function of state power. During the latter phase of the French Revolution, for example, the Jacobins used the terror of the guillotine as a weapon to neutralise opposition to their power in the name of putting down threats to the nation. On this occasion, the logic of ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of France and the revolution win’ served to shift the blame for the problems caused by the autocratic style of Robespierre and the Jacobins onto anyone who dared acknowledge them. The Bolsheviks applied the same logic to silence critics of their power as enemies of the revolution, a logic employed by Trotsky against the rebellious Kronstadt sailors, and then by Stalin, who instigated a panic in the same vein in the aftermath of the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, this time paradoxically enough against the Trotskyists who had used the same rationale to persecute enemies of their own power previously. Failing to understand this account in no small part for the inability of the radical left to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to rise above the thinking that produced them.
Just as the Jacobin reaction produced the Committee for Public Safety (to keep members of the public safe who weren’t put to the guillotine, at least) and the Great Terror, so too did the Bolshevik reaction produce the Stalinist cabal, the Great Purge and the Moscow Show Trials. While some prefer to focus on the personality of Stalin as the root cause for the decent of the Soviet Union into totalitarianism the rooting out of dissent beginning with Lenin in the name of defending the revolution from exterior perils (if you think for yourself the Tsarist reaction wins) might also be considered fertile soil for his rise to power and the terror that followed. In each instance the playing of the victim associated with the construction of the mythology of an external threat, be it enemies of the nation, tsarists and capitalists or terrorists, blaming of the victim by associated dissenters and others in the way as agents of the constructed threat, and the ‘if you think for yourself the evildoers win’ logic characteristic of moral disengagement, the collective term understood in social psychology for mechanisms of blame-shifting.
On the second count is the specific history of US support for terror regimes in Latin America, Asia and Mesopotamia. As Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and many others have since documented in exhaustive detail, support for fascism and state terrorism has been the rule of US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War, when the United States found itself the global military and economic hegemon, a position it has coveted ever since. Examples include countries like Iran in 1953, where the government of Mohammad Mossadegh, an opponent of anglo-imperialism, was overthrown with crucial CIA support for the Shah, later overthrown in turn as a shameless puppet of US oil imperialism by the 1979 revolution, and Guatemala in 1954, where nepotistic links between the directors of the United Fruit Company and the US political establishment were exploited to entreaty a CIA-directed coup against the government of Jacobo Arbenz, whose attempts to treat the chronic poverty of previous regimes under the sway of United Fruit was anathema to the preferential treatment to which it was accustomed.
As Greg Grandin has pointed out, US-sponsored state terrorism in Latin America amounted to a workshop for imperial state terrorism worldwide. Dozens of examples abound, not least of which being that of Salvador Allende in Chile, overthrown in a CIA-backed coup on 11 September 1973. Installed in his stead on this most historically ironic of dates was Augusto Pinochet, one of the most bloodthirsty thugs in all of Latin America (and who, as Naomi Klein has pointed out, were allowed to use his country as a Shock Doctrine lab for the economic fundamentalisms associated with neoliberalism that have since become standard fare). The reasons the US supported fascist state terrorism in the third world is well understood, and was articulated in unmistakable terms by George Kennan, a leading internal planner who declared in 1946 that
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
While doing a disservice to those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the training grounds of imperial state terrorism, Kennan’s candor does history a service insofar as his comments reveal the understanding of the political establishment that crisis exists primarily in terms of threats to privilege. Narratives around terrorism reflect similar understandings. While the imposition around the globe of the neoliberal morés tested in Pinochet’s Chile has had devastating consequences for billions of people, thrusting the mass of humanity ever deeper into poverty, misery and alienation while expediting a massive shift of wealth upwards to the archetypal 1%, the dominant narratives around terrorism tells us that the primary threat to civilization is terrorism — and very specific kind at that. It tells us the following in essence:
- The vested interests of the transnational corporate elite and the common good of the whole world are one and the same.
- What appears on the surface as imperial aggression over oil is in fact the defense of our interests from those who want to do harm to the common good.
- Islamic fundamentalists and refugees fleeing wars over oil are responsible for global warming.
- We must have war or we will have chaos.
All of these statements are patently absurd. They are also the logical conclusion of narratives built on what sociologists researching moral panics call ‘the production of deviance.’ This refers to the production or manufacture of crises revolving around deviant threats where the characteristically subjective concept of ‘deviance’ is defined as the antithesis of privilege, which is ‘normal,’ and imposed on public discourse through, in this case, corporate media domination of mass communication (ideological hegemony). Characteristic of the production of deviance are the high drama and overblown theatrics of ideologically induced hysteria; in the case of the Terror Scare, deviance production is responsible for turning ‘terrorist’ into an all-consuming identity that defies proactive attempts to understand underlying motivations that, in other circumstances, might be addressed by cooler heads more effectively and with less outrages against international law and human rights. Scare mongering, in seeking to rationalize the scapegoating of a billion Muslims for the social, economic and environmental consequences of neoliberalism as the late capitalist expression of the injustices in irrationality inherent to the system, are in this sense merely the practical fulfillment of the ‘straight power concepts’ Kennan prescribed five to six decades ago.
To the extent that Trump’s islamophobia serves the same scapegoating function and embodies the same straight power concepts, it might be said to perform the role of what historian Frank Van Nuys has called the ‘national safety valve’ of popular racism. In this vein, Australian academic Ghassan Hage has infuriated alt-righters by asking ‘Is Islamophobia responsible for global warming?’, the defensive reactions of those to whom his question refers unintentionally providing an answer. If racism is a national safety valve for social tensions created by institutional injustices and irrationalities, and the dynamics of deviance production at the core of Islamophobia are dominant features of American history (and arguably of many other periods of history), this begs the question as to the difference between Republican and Democrat administrations. Obama did, after all, reject Keystone XL and was, at least on the rhetorical level, an opponent of prejudice. Some insight into this comes to us via the HBO documentary The Newburgh Sting, which documents the 2009 arrest by the FBI of four men from Newburgh, NY and subsequent conviction on terrorism-related charges following an attempt to bomb two Jewish temples in the Bronx.
As The Newburgh Sting reveals, prior to trial the FBI presented the case as open and shut to a subservient media, which duly passed them on as fact in a grand exercise in deviance production and sensationalism. What the FBI claimed was a cell they had surveilled in the lead up to an attack was in fact however one lead by an informant himself facing fraud charges. The FBI financed the activities of the cell through this informant, and supplied the (inert) bombs and missiles for the attack that their own informant had planned. The four men arrested as conspirators didn’t know each other previously and could only be persuaded to participate after being promised cars, holidays and $250,000 — an effective strategy for recruitment from the black underclass, and a particularly effective strategy for one cell member whose brother had a cancerous tumor and no health insurance. According to the sister of both these men, the informant ‘told David they need more people,’ but to ‘make sure they’re Muslims’ — they would need to be for it to be a Muslim conspiracy when they were caught.
For their part, the recruits are recorded on surveillance video making diabolical threats such as, ‘We don’t want to hurt nobody . . . We want to just destroy property. We don’t want to take no lives,’ and ‘we ain’t for taking no lives; the life you save could be your own.’ Such comments seem to account for the fact that the group acted at night, out-of-hours, though not before the FBI informant had taken them from New York to Connecticut to collect inert bombs and missiles, having needed to cross state lines for the group’s actions to become a federal offense under terrorism statutes! At the arrest, the NYPD brought out 100 officers, a semi-trailer, an armored tank, the bomb squad and the Joint Terrorism Task Force to collect what they knew very well were inert materials — and which, it turns, out, hadn’t even turned on when the four were arrested. None of the above facts made it into the media that evening.
However, as the dissenting judge in the trial that followed wrote,
The government agent supplied a design and gave it form, so that the agent rather than the defendant inspired the crime, provoked it, planned it, financed it, equipped it and furnished the time and targets. There simply was no evidence of predisposition under our settled definition of the term . . . The government made them terrorists. I am not proud of my government for what it did in this case.
David A. Lewis, a federal defender who represented one of the Newburgh Four, added that the government, in the name of the war on terrorism, ‘wasted its time and resources making criminals of men who would never have been terrorists and posed no danger if simply left alone.’ Making criminals out of ordinary men, however, was anything but a waste of time and resources from the point of view of the manufacture of consent through the production of deviance, all the more so now that Trump has answered Obama’s immigration raids with his own (according to Fortune more than 2 million people were deported under the previous administration, including a record of more than 409,000 in 2012). If history is any indication, the same will be true after Trump is replaced, and so on. This tells us something of why the Newburgh Sting was only one of several such episodes, Glenn Greenwald asking pertinently in The Intercept, ‘Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?’ (2/15). The candor of George Kennan suggests that if deviant threats don’t exist, they need to be invented, for the people must have a bogeyman to fear and hate — be they terrorists, liberals, feminists, communists, witches, refugees, immigrants, drug addicts, minorities, or some other convenient target or stereotype. Meanwhile Voltaire rolls in his grave, knowing it doesn’t matter a great deal to the functioning of anglo-empire whether the figurehead at the top is nasty or nice.
As noted above, if the socially and economically marginalized population of Newburgh, NY, are responsible for the effects of neoliberalism that made them vulnerable to FBI entrapment, then by the same logic they must be responsible for climate change, for poverty and environmental destruction are products of the same thing. Naomi Klein points out in her Edward Saïd Memorial Lecture, ‘The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,’ that this kind of attitude is a necessary facet of the divide between worth and unworthy crises; scapegoating and othering, defined as ‘disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region.’ Not only is the value of Othering, Klein points out, that ‘once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion,’ but the whole point of Othering, of deviance production, is that ‘the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction,’ be they refugees fleeing global-warming fueled war in Syria, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the 36 million starving in East Africa, or the marginalized citizens of Newburgh caught in an FBI trap.
What does this have to do with climate change? Perhaps everything . . . This kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools – of ranking the relative value of humans – are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.
Sadly, space prevents us from exploring this history further, though lately it has been examined very usefully by researchers such as Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch), Jason W. Moore (Capitalism in the Web of Life) and Michael Perelman (The Invention of Capitalism). What remains is the fact that deviance production, Othering, moral panicking, persecution of scapegoats, blame-shifting and manufacture of false crises have played pivotal roles in creating and maintaining the world from which actual crises have been borne (as Federici reveals, the European Witch Hunts played a vital role in the emergence of capitalism). The paradox of worthy crises alongside unworthy crises can be accounted for as the difference between those that provide ideological pretexts for state terror in defense of class privileges, and those that result from a system that prioritises the maintenance of privilege over the common good and socializes costs while privatizing benefits to that end, and that tend towards exposing the system for what it is.
Having been captured by the transnational, neofeudal corporate oligarchy responsible for creating global warming in the first place, electoral systems based on a two-party duopoly can be counted on to maintain, to one degree or another and in one style or another, hysterical preoccupation with unworthy crises and casual indifference or militant ignorance towards the worthy. As Klein points out, ‘The wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries in the world think they are going to be OK, that someone else is going to eat the biggest risks, that even when climate change turns up on their doorstep, they will be taken care of.’ To assume otherwise is to assume that the class of sociopaths who spawned Trump and Clinton, who collectively are as privileged as they are predatory, care deeply and passionately about the lives of those they are in the midst of making scapegoats for it all.
