Posted by Lee Russ Action-as-propaganda can reinforce an oddly reassuring feeling of certainty, helping to bend reality into line with a distorted and propagandistic image of the world. It also distorts our perceptions of this reality so that the gap between public perception and official propaganda is further diminished. Hannah Arendt's concept helps us to understand how the wagers of the 'war on terror' have in effect taken something irrational (a magical solution to the problem of terror) and through their actions made it appear to many people (and, crucially, large sections of the American electorate) to be both rational and plausible. In their daily lives people are buffeted around by chance, and the massive economic and social disruption in the US has fuelled a sense of insecurity and uncertainty which 9/11 compounded. Arendt understood how our desire for certainty and predictability could feed into abusive ideologies. "What the masses refuse to recognize", she wrote, "is the fortuitousness that pervades reality". Consistency, however constructed, was deeply alluring: Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices--and this not because they are strong or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape gains them a minimum of self-respect. Arendt saw how this respect could come from denigrating--or even attacking--others, and how this aggression could, in addition, generate (spurious) legitimacy for itself. Part of the source of this 'legitimacy' was what has been called 'just world thinking', where people in effect assume that punishment implies a crime, and where this assumption serves to protect them from the fear of a totally arbitrary world. Significantly, 'just world thinking' may be more tempting as the world--and accusations--become more arbitrary: thus, the more irrational the actions of the Bush administration, for example, the greater may be the felt need to reassure oneself that 'there must be a reason' for the selection of victims (and therefore that 'we' are safe). Arendt suggested that another means by which violence could generate its own legitimacy was by allowing leaders to make their own predictions come true--first, when people came to resemble a distorted and propagandistic image of them (as sub-human or disease-ridden, for example); second, when alleged historical laws about the triumph of a particular group or idea were 'revealed' as accurate; and third, when humanitarian ideals were similarly 'revealed' as an unrealistic irrelevance. Again, these ideas will prove relevant in relation to the 'war on terror'. 'JUST WORLD THINKING': MIGHT IS RIGHT Part of the 'proof' that legitimises a witch-hunt is typically generated by the witch-hunt itself. Confession-under-duress helps to make the persecution more plausible, as we have seen. But punishment can itself be used to imply guilt. As Arendt observed in the context of the Nazi holocaust: "Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: 'What crime must these people have committed that such things were done to them!'" Taking one's moral cues from a regime of punishment may seem a very subservient attitude, but it is also part of how any human being grows up and learns about 'right' and 'wrong'--by noticing what is being punished and what is not. How, in the spring of 2003, did Americans and the British know that Iraq was the enemy? Why, because they were now at war with it! In a sense, the guilt of Iraq was 'proven' by the fact that it was earmarked for punishment. More generally, the very extremity of a 'counter-terror' response (ignoring the UN, invading Iraq, abusing human rights at Guantanamo and other US military bases, and so on) may be taken, at some level, as evidence of the extremity of the targets' guilt. Link: http://www.dailyscare.com/2156/action-as-propaganda
on 9/26/2007, 10:45 am
75.69.88.150
Action-as-Propaganda
By David Keen
Sociologist Stanley Cohen noted in 2001 that according to 'just world thinking', victims "deserve to suffer because of what they did, must have done, support doing, (or will do one day if we don't act now)" --a formulation that uncannily anticipates the justifications made for attacking Iraq in 2003. The common inclination to infer guilt from punishment seems to have helped the Bush administration to set aside not only international law but a central tenet of law in general--that guilt should be established before punishment is meted out.
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