The instrumentalization of fear
Published on October 20, 2005
An interesting article by Denis Duclos,
Sociologist, Research Director at CNRS, author of The Werewolf Complex,
The Fascination with Violence in American Culture, 2005 reedition with new preface,
La Découverte, Paris.
Source:
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2005/08/DUCLOS/12433
These thriving industries of permanent fear
On the domestic front, the "war on terrorism" leads to an endless accumulation of all kinds of data on individuals— their occupations, friendships, purchases, reading habits. In a technological escalation, each technological failure justifies the deployment of ever more complex arsenals... and yet they remain just as ineffective as ever in achieving their stated goals. But the expansion of the fear market has other, more clandestine drivers...
The deadly attacks in London from July were part of a sequence of acts primarily targeting nations involved in military occupation in the Middle East. They are the products of an asymmetric war (1) that leaves little choice for those—religious or not—who perceive a "crusade" being waged not so much to export democracy as to control resources.
That said, whether resistance or blind terrorism, the countries struck must protect their citizens. And as the G8 leaders have finally admitted, the deep solution to violence lies in eradicating oppression and poverty (2). In the short term, the Spanish chose an effective response after the horrific attack that killed 186 people on March 11, 2004 in Madrid: the withdrawal of their occupation troops from Iraq, coupled with a swift police investigation.
This is not the path taken by other major countries involved: instead, priority was given to a "techno-centric" response targeting a large number of foreigners considered—regardless of terrorism—as "undesirable" (3), as well as the entire population.
Following the collapse of American intelligence, the spectacular attacks of September 11, 2001 immediately triggered an escalation of systems aimed at gathering precise knowledge about millions of people in order to extract information about the potential malice of a few individuals.
Four years later, the techno-security machine is running at full speed—especially in so-called "free" countries. Travelers and their luggage are radiographed, biometric data are stored, mobile phones are monitored, millions of phone numbers are archived, fingerprints are digitized, and vast databases from government agencies and corporations are cross-referenced.
This frenzy is no longer justified by the search for a (bad) needle in a (good) haystack: while the FBI still does not know the identities of some of the perpetrators of the Twin Towers attack, Matrix file analysts have sent 120,000 names of ordinary American citizens labeled "high terrorism risk." Tens of thousands of "false positives"—as many quasi-judicial errors—have resulted from biometric checks at the empire’s borders: the case of pregnant women arrested by body heat detectors (supposedly detecting the emotional terrorist) deserves special mention!
Since 2001, many airports, municipalities, and corporations have persistently repeated the disastrous experience of Tampa: companies Graphco, Raytheon, and Viisage had generously offered the city a comparative study of 24,000 criminal photos against the faces of 100,000 spectators at its famous American football championship. Only a few unfortunate individuals were charged...
Incongruous in light of the hunt for suicide bombers that prompted it, mass surveillance does not correspond either to controlling clandestine migration flows, which by nature cannot be reduced to verification procedures and will only diminish through economic balance between world regions.
So how can we explain this relentless pursuit, criticized by most practitioners—police or military—of counterterrorism? Why, despite its proven ineffectiveness and disproportionate scale relative to its goals, does a voracious appetite persist for data collection, personal data digitization, bodily trace tracking, and constant tactile, visual, thermal, olfactory, and radiofrequency monitoring of human beings everywhere? Why photograph Londoners 300 times a day and continuously film them with 2.5 million scattered cameras, when we know this did not prevent terrorists from detonating bombs on July 7? Why push for mandatory identity cards and abandon the principles of privacy (4) and individual anonymity vis-à-vis public and private powers?
Beyond the pretexts of maintaining order, there is only one meaningful explanation: institutions and corporations have discovered in managing fear a sustainable source of power, control, and profit.
Since September 11, Mr. George W. Bush’s policy has offered a plausible solution: mobilizing the entire planet around the security objective. A brilliant idea. Unlike oil, the reservoir of anxiety fueled by economic crisis, climate change, and demographic boom, is not about to run dry. Provocation, seizing populations in indignation and fear, remains possible at any moment. Urgency legitimizing action without democratic guarantees, companies and institutions selling "security" can fully commit to the business of fear (5), confident in state support, even though a climate of anxiety usually harms business.
Thus, under the pretext of a protean danger, a global security armada is being constructed, whose rapid and functional convergence suggests it is the core of a new capitalism in the making: a capitalism of fear.
Four intertwined movements structure this transformation:
– An acceleration of connections between innovations across different segments of the fear market: identification, surveillance, protection, arrest, detention;
– A fusion between the reorientation of war industries and military organizations toward training and equipping repressive forces, and the concurrent militarization of civilian security forces;
– An increasing articulation between public and private powers, both in terms of identity control and the capacity to constrain and prohibit;
– An ideological push, simultaneously pursued in legal, political, administrative, economic, and media domains, aimed at perpetuating "manageable" anxiety and making generalized preventive control seem the new normality of human existence.
Most major industrial and technological groups now offer, in a quasi-militant fashion, security services or products based on their traditional orientations. Each professional acronym now conceals...