Written
by
Frank Furedi
is an author and social commentator. He is
an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in
Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century.
Almost one year on from the riot at the US
Capitol Building, it continues to be used by those in positions of power to
develop a culture of fear – yet another example of a threat being amplified and
raising public insecurity.
There is no need for a pandemic for the
hysterical ruling class to constantly turn on the engine of fear. Without
blinking an eye, the American political establishment has casually
catastrophized the Capitol protest in Washington on 6 January last year.
Almost immediately a political riot by
angry protestors was reframed as an “insurrection” and an act of domestic
terror. Leading Democratic Party figures even sought to link the so-called coup
attempt to Russia, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that the rioters were “Putin’s puppets”.
Despite the relentless quest to uncover a
malevolent conspiracy to overthrow the elected government of the United States,
there is nothing to suggest that what occurred on January 6 was anything more
than an instance of angry, violent rioters invading the Capitol Building.
Despite their best efforts, the FBI and other agencies could find no proof of
any conspiracy. Last August, Reuters reported that “the FBI has found scant
evidence that the January 6 attack on the US Capitol was the result of an
organized plot to overturn the presidential election result”.
This absence of evidence notwithstanding,
America’s cultural elite, along with the leadership of the Democratic Party,
continues to remain in hysteria mode. Indeed, its obsession with the threat of
an insurrection or a coup has hardened during the past year to the point that
it genuinely finds it difficult to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
The New York Times, once a serious news
outlet, has become a slave of its paranoia about an impending civil war. Anyone
reading its commentary would draw the conclusion that what happened on January
6 was akin to the violent rioting that accompanies a bloody coup d’etat.
On the
first day of 2022, its Editorial Board published a piece titled “Every Day Is Jan. 6
Now”. In case anyone failed to get the point of the title, it
added, “Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day”. The statement
evokes a world where the American “Republic faces an existential
threat” and insists that “we should stop underestimating the
threat facing the country”. The threat it refers to constitutes the
millions of voters who continue to support Donald Trump and deny the New York
Times’ version of reality. In its typical alarmist tone, it states, “no
self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying it exists”.
This
feverish irrationality isn’t restricted to America. Across the Atlantic, The
Guardian adopts a similar tone in its treatment of the legacy of January 6. “The US
could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian warns” runs one of
its headlines. In this article, the scaremongering prediction
of an academic in The Globe and Mail is presented as a sensible
assessment of future possibilities. Political science professor Thomas
Homer-Dixon from Royal Roads University in British Columbia urges Canada to
protect itself against the “collapse of American democracy”. And he
warns, “We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem
ludicrous or too horrible to imagine.”
Projecting
a scene akin to one in a dystopian horror film, Homer-Dixon asserts, “By
2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political
instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the
country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.”
The
editorial team at The Guardian appears to have become addicted to the political
pornography peddled by the likes of Homer-Dixon. It also features a piece by Jason Stanley, who imaginatively recasts
the contemporary era as akin to the one that led to the rise of fascism in Weimar
Germany. In a commentary titled “America is now in fascism’s legal
phase”, Stanley paints a picture that looks depressingly
similar to the months leading up to the rise of Adolf Hitler. For Stanley,
there is a clear parallel between the behavior of Trump and Hitler. He
contends that “as in all fascist movements, these forces have found a
popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure
of Donald Trump”.
At first
sight, it is tempting to draw the conclusion that the catastrophizing of
January 6 or the constant evocation of the spirit of Nazi Germany haunting
America is pure scaremongering propaganda. No doubt there is an element of
media manipulation and conscious twisting of reality at play. But on closer
inspection, it seems as if the ruling classes in Western societies have
genuinely internalized the culture of fear. January 6 is simply one catastrophe
amongst the many that preoccupy them.
A striking illustration of how the
self-catastrophizing masochistic ruling elite thinks was offered by Belgian
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo in a speech he gave to the United Nations
General Assembly last September. Pointing to climate, vaccines, and terrorism’,
he stated that “nobody is safe until everybody is
safe”. By linking together three different and disparate elements, De Croo
painted a picture of a world where threats to human existence are endemic. Add
this scenario to the threat of American fascism and we end up with a
21st-century version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
This distorted representation of reality
promoted by insecure elites is having a cumulative impact on public life. Put
simply, it is raising public insecurity – and at the same time diminishing the
capacity of people to confront some of the very real problems they face.
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