Climate of Fear (6 page)

Taking the foregoing together, we find that we need not wait to be visited or infiltrated by beings from outer space to arrive at the same state of fear and loathing that is associated with being manipulated by a force outside our own will. The vector of domination can, and constantly does, assail us in the here and present geographical environment. And we do know that in order to ensure absolute submission, that alien force must first lay a track of fear on which it rolls its juggernaut of domination. Even if the goals are not immediately articulated and may never be fully defined, power revels in first making itself manifest—then other social themes may follow in its wake. May. Or may not. Power is selfsufficient, a replete possession, and must be maintained by whatever agency is required. We have already indicated that the readiest methodology to hand is the inculcation of fear. Ethiopia under Mariam Mengistu and the Dergue, Pinochet in Chile, or Miloševi
c in former Yugoslavia, or the terror regime of the late General Sanni Abacha of Nigeria, all provide chilling contemporary testimonies of this relationship. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is doing his best to ensure that the African continent remains relevant in the global study of this social phenomenon.

The mutual dependency of power and freedom has long been recognized, its consummation undertaken throughout the history of human association to the accompaniment of orgies of human sacrifice. Whether we believe in that reproductive miracle or not, it is useful to seize the nature of power as we do that of Immaculate Conception, an autogenous phenomenon—though one that can also be a product of willed imitation—and then we come to recognize more and more that, for its full savoring, power need not burden itself with such banal undertakings as social responsibility or restraints of morality. Every day, atrocities of once unimaginable dimensions remind us of this fact, events that are traceable to that moment when one individual, already in a rarefied existence of his own, salivates over an exquisite moment of fulfillment as he watches his victims, mostly already existing in that half-life of social invalidation—the other half being mortgaged to the fear of the unexpected—squirm in awe of his efficacy of control. Surely it is not a merely fabulous projection that sees such an individual, alone in his or her hermetic world, suffused with an inward smile of satisfaction:
“Now, you lot, I have you in my power. At this moment, I, and I
alone, know, and am about to decide, your fate.”

I no longer recall the title of the film that was made of the Red Brigade in Italy, after the abduction and murder of a prime minister, Aldo Moro, who was out of power at the time. If we may leave aside the dubious politics of that assassination, and the movement of which these formed a part, what remains ineluctable is the study in smug self-righteousness of his abductors as they proceeded to decide the fate of their prisoner. Blame the director, if you wish, for failing to extract a sense of ideological
necessity,
inevitability,
in the decision that was taken to eliminate him. What came through instead—perhaps it was the director's intention anyway—was the sense of a “hallowed space” as the dominant environment of the revolutionary cell, an evocation of the unreal that was accentuated by the real psychological extract, the autonomy of power, conveyed in the demeanor of these mostly young individuals. This all-pervasive extract was, in my view, the exercise of power. These individuals, separated from a world that they genuinely despised, or affected to despise, were lodged in the hermetic enclosure of absolutism. A limited environment, yes, but an environment that they totally controlled, and of which they were the privileged janitors. This was what mattered most. They were not deciding the fate of an individual, not even of a symbol, I felt, but were simply engrossed in the exercise of secretive dominance, and this was what lent that film its bleak and pathetic intensity. One was transported into another world whose basic commodity, evenly shared within the circle of the Chosen and celebrated with all due ritual and solemnity, was simply—power. Unnamed, unacknowledged, power was nonetheless the palpable fetish of worship.

Well, theorizing apart, the young executioners, imbued with a sense of a “holy mission,” or simply wallowing—albeit with all appearance of deep reflection—in the pure ambience of power, left the Western, capitalist world in no doubt whatsoever about their essential product: a climate of fear that enveloped the moneyed, their relations, the remotely connected, the political class, the middle class, and, occasionally, innocent victims of what military language loves to gloss as “collateral damage.”

I must continue to insist that we do not underestimate the relevance of a material base—even justification—of the “holy mission” in all of this. However, even the most evidently objectivized base of the “holy mission” is often complicated by the sheer relish that is experienced in the control of others. It is not possible to reject absolutely the notion that one—just one in four, in ten, in two dozen—may be governed by no more than an impulse to secret, furtive dominance, the fulfillment of that individual by a moment of self-abandonment to this mysterious essence of power. I know, because I have met some such individuals. So, I am certain, have others in this audience. For now, I could do worse than attempt to burrow into the core of this commodity, one that has remained a puzzle to psychologists and philosophers—Hegel, Hobbes, Nietzsche, and all—and, as with all riddles of the human condition and social impulses, leaves one with more questions than answers. This is not a matter of obscurantist speculation. Rather, there is an almost obsessive quest for some clarifying clues when one has been a participant in the kind of deadly struggle that ensues when one individual, a single mortal with no discernible exceptional qualities, convinces himself that it is his mission to bludgeon a populace of some millions—ten, twenty, forty, a hundred or more millions—into submission.

So now, directly to that conundrum—power—just what is that? We know what it does. For a start, power takes away the freedom of the other and replaces it with fear. Still, that does not answer the ontological question. What, we may ask, is the common factor, the ingredient that guarantees a trill of nervous apprehension in, on the one hand, an audience watching
Dr. Strangelove
and, on the other, the citizens of Maryland with a sniper on the loose? Power, of course. The primitive fear of being controlled. It does not matter whether it is an invasion from outer space or power wielded from a subterranean command post: some alien force is about to take control of us, to dominate—and, if necessary in the process, to terminate our existence. We never stop to think—or, at best, a secondary consideration is whether such a force might be for the good, that humanity might indeed be improved by such a takeover. Volition, to which we desperately cling, is the very definition of our mature completion as social beings. The basis of rejection that registers itself in an audience seated at a theatrical or cinematic representation of the megalomaniac has always been the antithesis of human volition—power!

We have known it also described as a sexual substitute or an aphrodisiac, but this only begs the question. Victims of rape often take a different position. Next to the horror of bodily violation, a frequent admission by victims is of the humiliation of being totally subjected to another's control. And the more sadistic the rapist, the greater his urge to exact an acknowledgment from the victim of submission to his dominance. Sexual gratification is of course at the heart of such violations, but pre-eminent is the satisfaction of dominating another, making him or her totally subject to his whims, some of which may not even be sexual in nature. In whatever proportion we choose to present these cravings, there is no question that a sense of power generates its own satisfaction, and is an important element in the drive toward rape. So, once again, back to the question—just what
is
power?

Is it perhaps no more than a deadly mutation of ambition, one that may or may not translate into social activity? Any fool, any moron, any psychopath can aspire to the seizure and exercise of power, and of course the more psychopathic, the more efficient: Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Sergeant Doe, and the latest in the line of the unconscionably driven, our own lately departed General Sanni Abacha—all have proved that power, as long as you are sufficiently ruthless, amoral, and manipulative, is within the grasp of even the mentally deficient. So, power is really neither efficacy nor a mandatory facilitator of vision or political purpose. Of course the pursuit of power may be impelled by vision, but power in itself is not to be mistaken for vision. On the contrary, true vision may eschew power, may totally repudiate power, seeking to fulfill itself by that hardy, self-sacrificial route that does not lean on the crutch of power. There are individuals in every field of human endeavor who have pursued their vision, and in a multiplicity of fields—to the benefit of millions and tens of millions around the world—without that promiscuous facilitator named power. And power, let us stress just once more, need not be an individual aspiration; it can be no more than mere participation in a collective exercise, a variant that is the intriguing and proliferating arm of hegemonic obsession of a unit within a totality.

Since I do not believe that we shall ever arrive at a satisfactory explication of power, I have settled for that functional one—that is, a definition that enables us to proceed to the social neutralization of this affliction whenever it rears its head. After all, the manifestation of raw power is an encounter that is inevitable right from infancy, and through the normal course of existence—be it in a rainstorm, the force of lightning, or an earthquake. Even the casual wind that takes down a rotten branch or a roof or two is a manifestation of the hidden force of Nature that suddenly exercises its authority from time to time, and without any intervention from man. Nature, therefore, sometimes reveals herself as a pure expression of power—and it is perhaps somewhat more than an anthropomorphic conceit to suggest that man, in those activities that incline him toward the exercise of dominance, is merely attempting a crude appropriation in response to that elemental attribute that is an expression of the very forces that surround and threaten to overwhelm him, not least of which is mortality.

In short, power is, paradoxically, the primordial marshland of fear, from which emerges the precipitate of man's neurotic response to mortality. Therein he proceeds to attempt to match himself with the force of Nature, that agency through which the various apprehensions of God, Super Being, or whatever name— including Death—are filtered. You cannot, however, contain within yourself the elemental force of death, godhead, a thunderstorm, an earthquake, or a volcano, never mind the comparison of some energetic types to a whirlwind. Those who take such metaphors personally are subject matter for traditional psychiatry, and it is for this reason that ancient societies devised a number of ritualized scenarios for the banalization of power. As a dramatist, I have myself experimented with a number of rituals toward that end. Here is one—designed, however, only for the formal, not the shadowy counterpart of manifest power. It takes off from the French play-wright and exorcist Jean Genet.

A glitzy brothel, most appropriately, is the setting for Jean Genet's ritualization of the insatiable collaborator—power—in his play
The Balcony.
There, the power-obsessed come periodically to act out their fantasies. Here now is a summary of my variation on Jean Genet:

Suppose we modernized Genet's rather primitive stage mechanics to embrace the very latest in special effects, à la Steven Spielberg. Society would proceed to offer its ruler a chance to erupt with the earthquake, soar on flues of the thunderstorm, and become virtually one with the convulsion that attends the birth of new planets. Encased in a Virtual Reality capsule, a super Jacuzzi, the Maximum Leader would dominate the universe every day before breakfast. As a finale—and here I must acknowledge the inspiration of the innovation of that late leader Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who soared with the sunrise and disappeared into the clouds every morning on his nation's television—the Leader would watch the daily waste of his bodily functions morph into a celestial orb—the sun, no less—rising over the horizon, approving the beginning of a new day for his people.

After such an immersion in the utter sublimity of galactic power, any mortal must emerge with nothing but contempt for the mere pittance of awe and terror that are the normal dues from his miserable subjects. He would leave them—us—to wallow in our now unappealing state of . . . unbroken freedom, and the absence of fear.

I am persuaded that this is a ritualistic offering that no man-eating dictator, with the innate theatrics of that breed, could ever refuse.

Three

Rhetoric That Binds and Blinds

I propose to address this topic from two directions— one, the political; the other, the religious. Given the fact that, in the present day—and indeed, in a nearly unbroken continuum of history—both often prove to be merely two sides of the same coin, it should not be surprising if, from time to time, it would indeed appear that all we are engaged upon is tossing up, just like a coin, one two-sided notion. We watch it spin through the air in a blur of rapid alternations, and succumb to the law of gravity—known as coming down to earth—to reveal one side or the other, almost interchangeably. The sanctimoniousness that often characterizes one— the political—on the one hand, and the sacrosanctity that is claimed as the foundation of the other, even when it extends its constituency to the political and the mundane, make it clear that they are both claimants to the same highway of influence and control of human lives whose ultimate destination is power—the consolidation of power in itself, or the execution of policies that aspire to the total control of a polity.

Thus, the president of a powerful nation addresses a political situation in what amounts to the language of revelation tinged with messianism. Nearly on the other side of the globe, a religious leader whips up his citizens in a frenzy of alarm whose tenor is that the very salvation of their collective soul—and only incidentally the survival of the state—is jeopardized. In the hysterical condition that is aroused in the populace, hundreds of youths are sentenced to be hanged for the crime of being “agents of Satan,” “enemies of God,” and so on. Back again on the other side, wars of dubious justification are launched, humanity is savaged, the globe destabilized, and all rhetoricians of power sleep soundly, until it is time for the next hysterical whip-up. The coupling within “for God and country” is no historic accident.

Let me, as we proceed, call attention to the fact that hysteria is not always an outwardly expressed abnormality, usually loud and violent. In fact, there is the quiet form of hysteria, as medical experts will testify. Hysteria can also manifest itself as a collective and infectious outbreak, one that cannot always be accurately traced to a logical causative event. At its most affective, it emerges as the product of a one-way communication—a monologue, in short—that succeeds in blinding its followers to the very realities that surround them while sealing them in a community of conviction, even of the unresolved kind. That condition is indifferent to verification of the content of what is being communicated, indifferent to the moralities or justice—if any—of its claims, or the probable consequences of its pursuit. The moment is all, and creates for each affected member a highly solipsistic existence within a charmed circle, whose only reference point is that infinite moment of mass excitation. The rhetorical hysteria that is produced in such circumstances often dissipates soon after, but not always. Numbers promise more than safety, as in “safety in numbers”—they often guarantee certitude and invulnerability. Thus the collective conviction that sustains the individual may be dissipated with the physical dispersal of the crutch of numbers—let us say, after a political or religious rally. In such a case, the pathology of the moment is redressed by a return to reality, and each individual regains his or her whole being—until the next time.

However, a hard core of the message embedded in that emotive ferment may linger on, resulting in individual recalls, at various levels of consciousness, of the basic tenor of the collective experience, urging on the execution of its embedded message. The core of retention may be beatific, resulting in a resolve to improve the lot of a long-neglected neighbor, make restitution where some illegality has been committed, or an immoral advantage secured. It can lead to a grandiose vision for the betterment or salvation of mankind. The religious variety is prone to generating such an aftermath, a Moral Rearmament longing of one kind or another. On the other hand, alas, it may produce the very opposite, the destructive and apocalyptic. The ideological route is an equally mixed bag, but usually more disruptive, more contradictory, since it lays claim to rational processes yet acts with the dogmatism of pure revelation.

What I have referred to as rhetorical hysteria may therefore be safely considered the product of a one-way communication; that is, the monologue or public harangue. Dialogue, on the other hand, actually involves exchange, and the circumstances must be very abnormal indeed when it results in the hysterical condition. It is both convenient and relevant to personify, at this point, the difference between these two through the contrasting personalities of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, and others of like temper, and the current, embattled leader of Iran, President Khatami. We shall return to this most instructive pair toward the end.

It would also help, perhaps, if we advanced our exploration of the rhetorical theme through the terrain of light relief, if only to nudge the more self-assured nations, movements, and religions in the direction of a sense of proportion. We might reflect their certitudes through escapades that are often no more than self-indulgent gambits, which they would prefer to despise as simplistic mimicries of their own more advanced and elaborate, as well as better-structured and -packaged manifestos. What often develops to the level of rhetorical hysteria may begin as small pinpricks designed to annoy a complacent society and perhaps reinforce a group feeling of dissidence, but may grow into veritable monstrosities of absolute notions that run amok, consuming all within sight until they eventually consume themselves or are consumed by more rabid challengers. I shall share my favorite example, but not just yet. First, we should establish the sociopolitical background and context, just to situate ourselves in the general ambience of its times.

Many here will still recall that leftist phase of the sixties, labeled Trotskyite or Maoist, one that is now being superseded by other radical motions toward the transformation of man and society. It is a phase that is now receding into obscurity, thanks mostly to the collapse of communist ideology. I happen to believe that the humanistic foundation of the socialist ideal has not been thereby invalidated, but this belongs to another discourse entirely. In any case, the passion for a basis in ideological righteousness is still daily manifested in isolated anarchic acts against society, as well as in ideologically based wars around the globe. The period that I wish to recall was characterized by the exploits of the Red Brigade, based largely in Italy, Action Directe in France, the Baader-Meinhof in Germany, etc., with clones in Latin America and Japan, in addition to one or two isolated spots in Asia. Perhaps the most sensational single event of that period was the kidnapping and murder of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Kidnapping of businessmen or their relations for ransom was commonplace, nor can one easily forget the ruthless, cult-style executions in hidden mountain caves of Japan for alleged crimes of deviation from the pure strain of the revolutionary ideal. Not too surprisingly, other variants resulted in convoluted alliances between ideological and criminal impulses—drug trafficking allied to radical idealism in countries like Colombia.

The famous youth-inspired 1968 uprising in Paris that attempted to resurrect a commune modeled after the Paris Commune of the French revolutionary ferment was another notable manifestation of the passion for change, a severe testing of the status quo, and very French in temper, despite its continental alliances. Other names like Daniel “Danny the Red”, Cohn-Bendit, Regis Debray, and Angela Davis entered the lore of world revolutionary gladiators, satellites in orbit around the ultimate symbol of the times—Che Guevara. Depending on which arc of the class spectrum one occupied, and the methodology of action advocated and deployed, the overall movement evoked among the world population extreme degrees of admiration, revulsion—and fear. How wide would the movement spread, especially among youth? How deeply would it undermine the fabric of society?

This, then, was the setting for a far less sensational but widely spread offshoot of the same cast of mind—the junior partner, if you like—that had sprung up within the radical atmosphere of the sixties. It is the extract from the diffuse, nonlethal offshoot, a proliferating mantra, that I wish to identify as typifying the nature of rhetoric that, in varying degrees of flippancy and adolescent conviction, can graduate over time into an agenda for unreflective extremism. It builds up to a hysterical level that turns an otherwise rational section of humanity into active conduits for, at the very least, a mandatory suspension of disbelief. It is a phenomenon that reveals itself in its abandonment of skepticism. A new community is born, imbued with its own moral code—again, not one that is subjected to rigorous tests—that places itself outside existing social arrangements. A complacent society views it at first with a condescending amusement, later with trepidation.

How I came to observe this process firsthand was just as relevant to my observations. I was in self-imposed exile, a therapy I had embarked upon for another situation of lethal rhetorics that had sacrificed a million or two of Nigerian humanity under the rhythmic mantra:
To
keep the nation one is a task that must be done.
Our civil war was being concluded in a mood of euphoria and, as I emerged from prison detention, I was not sure which form of hysteria grated more—the tone of nationalist jingoism that had surrounded me before I was locked up, one that made that war inevitable in the first place, or the barely suppressed triumphalist smugness into which I was thrust as I regained my freedom. Military success was equated with a divine vindication of the war.

On the other side, in the breakaway Biafran state, the same syndrome had more tragic results. Youths went into battle with nothing but wooden guns in their hands, captives of the same rhetoric that was drummed daily into their heads—
No
power on the African continent can subdue
us.
That belief had somehow translated into the mimic guns with which they charged the federal foe, as reported by a colleague who pronounced himself numbed by the experience. Was it any different, I wondered, from the self-submission of normally hardheaded men to the rhetorical powers of a Ugandan, Alice Lakwena, and her Holy Spirit Mobile Forces? Alice's volunteers charged into hails of bullets, convinced that they were immune to their penetration, that the force of bullets was neutralized as a result of the inoculation that Alice had administered to them. After the capture of Alice in Tanzania, a university professor who had been part of her army was asked, in an interview, how it was possible for him, a man of presumed intellect, to have been persuaded of the supernatural powers of this woman, and for so long. He could proffer no answer, only that he supposed that they had all been under some spell. Fatalities, he said, had been rationalized away—such victims were only the weak in faith. This scenario has been sadly encountered in many more civil-war zones all over the continent, most especially among the child soldiers.

And now we come to the nurturing environment of the mantra. As I began my lecture tour of some European universities during that exile, it did not take long for me to realize that the mood of the historic Paris uprising was still in the ascendant, never mind the failure of that movement—and perhaps the zeal, being all that was left, was even more willfully embraced on that account. I came into daily contact with students and all manner of disenchanted youths seeking a revolutionary answer to the inequalities, the oppressive contradictions of their societies. Maoists, or Maoist-Leninists, or Trotskyites,

Proudhonists, or Maoist-Leninist-Trotskyites, Stalinist-Leninists . . . no matter what hyphenated revolutionary tendencies they professed, all had one fundamental trait in common. They were bearers of a new illumination on the condition and future of human society. They were the subversive agents who would topple the bourgeois order and liberate the “new man” with all his potential, unfettered by the norms of a failed society, its hypocrisies and dubious ethical values. They formed a compact of solidarity with the marginalized no matter how remotely placed—from the bauxite mines of Jamaica to the coal mines of South Africa. Ideologically schooled in Marxism, even at its most rudimentary, most did not directly espouse anarchism as a social philosophy, but gave a practical, anarchic demonstration of the cue they had elicited from Karl Marx's analysis of law: law was not neutral, but was an instrument to protect the interests of the ruling classes. In a class struggle, therefore, which it was their avowed mission, indeed their duty, to initiate, law itself was to be repudiated.

As for wealth, from where did wealth emanate but from the exploitation of man by man, proven by the immoral profit from the surplus labor of others? Thus, logically, their enabling mantra, based on the authority of Karl Marx, which declared quite simplistically that
All
property is theft.
That slogan was put into practice in any number of ways, from the merely self-dramatizing gesture to the socially disruptive, once it was placed in tandem with Marx's interpretation of law, which could now be taken as advocating its own overthrow.

In Germany or France of the late sixties to early seventies, a student who took a parked bicycle, motorbike, or motorcar that belonged to another did not consider it an act of theft. He kept it and returned it at his leisure, or simply kept it for as long as it took him to acquire a more attractive or convenient one, abandoning the former hundreds of kilometers from where its owner last saw it. Libraries bewailed their helplessness as students took away books and never returned them, often returning to exercise their right to “borrow” some more. Others felt that the shelves of bookstores should be open to the acquisitive mood of the reader. Students felt quite noble in raiding the accounts of a parent or guardian—or indeed, the neighborhood store.
All property is theft
—and that, do take note, included intellectual property. In short, plagiarism was no crime.