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On Fear

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

When I was a boy, I had a recurrent dream. My father and I were driving over a bridge that spanned the whole width of Lake Superior near the Wisconsin home of my middle childhood. The bridge was long and tottered in the wind as my father sped over it in the dark. Then, all of a sudden, it ended, and our ’32 Chevrolet catapulted into the cold lake, where I struggled to escape from drowning. I would awaken trembling, with dark fantasies all around me. Some nights I would run to my parents’ bedroom for reassurance. As four of my brothers and a sister had died in my childhood, I was afraid. I needed comfort — to be reassured that I was alive and protected.

We are all in a like dream. Karl Rove recently assured Republican leaders running for Congress that they would win again on the issues of terrorism and security. The president has told us that the torture of Islamic prisoners has kept us from terror. Almost weekly, we hear of the terror threat rising again to level orange. Then it subsides, only to go up again when the administration commits another egregious act of incompetence. We are afraid. We are to be kept permanently afraid. And we can be kept afraid by disasters vaguely alluded to, disasters predicted, disasters in other countries, disasters allowed to happen, and the manipulation of the imagery of Armageddon. Afraid, we hope that daddy who is in the next room is protecting us.

The Bush/Cheney Administration is characterized by many as a ‘neo-conservative’ administration, referring to the numerous figures who studied with the University of Chicago professor, Leo Strauss: Paul Wolfowitz, Abraham Schulsky, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith — the leaders of the New American Century Project, the men who drew up the blueprint for Donald Rumsfeld on how terrorism is to be used by the administration (cf. Seymour Hersh’s articles in The New Yorker). George Bush may be an incurious man, as Al Gore once said, but he is not stupid. He has surrounded himself and his propaganda machine with brilliant men. They believe not in democracy, but in benevolent autocracy. Since these men craft the message and policy for the Bush/Cheney Administration from inside and outside the executive branch, we need to know their mentor understood fear, and why they are now so set on producing it.

Their mentor, Leo Strauss, was a brilliant teacher who attracted the best and the brightest at the University of Chicago. He did not believe in democracy. As a Jew who had experienced Hitler, he concluded that Hitler arose from democracy gone wrong — that the wrong elites had used democracy to come to power. The goal, as Strauss saw it, is to place the right elites in power, ones who have the interests of the nation in mind. As political scientist Sheila Drury has observed about Strauss,

As far as his politics, it came out of his experience in Nazi Germany. He saw the world, basically, as made up of groups that are pitted against each other in mutual hatred and animosity. You either destroy your enemy or you’re destroyed by your enemy. Political society has to be organized in a way that makes the enemy very paramount, always somehow in view. Only the prevalence of the enemy will keep people united, will keep them together, will keep them strong. So, if you don’t have any enemies then you better follow the advice of Machiavelli and invent some.

Leo Strauss’s political world is made up of the wise who know how to make up the myths — Plato’s philosopher kings who know that civil society is created out of violence; the gentlemen – Plato’s military, who will do what the wise tell them to do if given a “noble lie” that appeals to their sense of honor and glory; and the selfish, slothful rabble — who can be brought to rise above their worthlessness and hedonism only by the fear of doom. Strauss also did not believe in any religion. But he did believe that popular religious ‘fictions’ should be used to organize the stupid masses, and he feared that world government would become tyranny. Hence, perhaps, the religious right’s concept of Armageddon, embodied by the United Nations.

Though Strauss saw his teaching as having little or no current political relevance, I believe it his frame through which Wolfowitz, Schulsky, Kristol, Perle, Feith — the former leaders of the New American Century Project — see the world.

Central to the project of these neo-cons is a belief in the wise leader’s construction of the “noble lie” through manipulation of the media, creating a myth that will unify the people and inspire them to greatness. Part of the construction of that lie, as Strauss viewed the matter, resides in the political control of intelligence.

In the case of the present regime, it is the construction of the view that Iraq was a funder of terror; that it had weapons of mass destruction to put in the hands of terrorists to destroy cities and nations in a matter of seconds (as Colin Powell’s testimony to the United Nations suggested); that America is under attack from a militant Islam; that this Islam – which may be most of Islam — seeks and has the means to destroy the West; that the great confrontation will lead to the battle of Armageddon and “end time” events; and that we must be afraid every moment or we will be destroyed.

The need to construct and sustain the noble lie explains the weapons of mass destruction story; the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame; the setting up of Secretary Powell at the UN; the Tim La Haye Armageddon propaganda machine; the confrontation with Iraq; and the discovery of plots against America on almost a weekly basis. It may even explain why the administration had to manipulate the elections in Florida and Ohio (see Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s piece in Rolling Stone magazine); and why it was so indifferent initially to warnings about Al-Qaida. With so much intelligence that a 9/ 11-style event was about to happen, why was the intelligence not brought together and why was nothing done about it? Why was NORAD so slow to act when we knew that the 9/11 planes had been taken over?

This is not to suggest an active conspiracy. One can make things happen by allowing them to happen. (They will be allowed to happen again if we do not look to port security, luggage-hold plane security and a variety of other areas.)

The ‘evidence’ for the noble lie about the Iraqi threat came out of Dick Cheney’s frequent visits to the CIA and his insinuations of incompetence by then Director George Tenet, out of the administration’s reliance on Douglas Feith’s “Office of Special Plans,” and from a hundred other sources. These places manufactured the lies, to which Karl Rove and his propaganda machine repeatedly pointed to create the specters that flamed our horizons and blocked our vision. We will have more of these terror alerts and talk of dangers before the November election.

This is not to say that there are no real dangers out there, especially after we and our allies have ravaged much of the Islamic world. But other nations have faced terror and disruption — France from the Algerian rebels, Germany from the Baader-Meinhof Gang, England from the IRA, and Russia from the Chechnyan rebels. The nations that survived these difficulties mostly intact, first did something about the causes that so often make people turn to terror — unemployment, marginalization, discrimination, exploitation and lack of self-determination. I was in England last year when the London bombings took place. And while the government developed subway caution systems, no one raised the specter of apocalyptic plots to destroy Britain. The British had already known the IRA.

Fear is necessary to the noble lie. It will, according to Karl Rove, win the House elections this fall. But not all Republicans are guilty of promulgating the myth, nor are the Democrats free of it. Chuck Hagel has been notably free from it; Ben Nelson has not. I could recite names from each party nationally who have resisted or contributed to our sense that the bridge will not take us over the troubled waters, and that we must flee to our Commander in Chief for comfort and courage. One or both candidates in most of our elections will peddle the story for the House and Senate next month.

But we should not go back to my childish nightmare. It may indeed be that we face tough times, terror attacks, times that the actions, which partly followed from the noble lie, created. But as Benjamin Franklin put it, “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.”

When you vote this fall, vote your hopes and expectations. And not your fears. Vote peace, vote health care, a decent minimum wage, a balanced budget, tax justice, the abolition of whiskey border towns, and the diminution of global warming.

Mr. Bush may think that he has Jesus for his philosopher, as he once said, but his administration has Leo Strauss. It has mastered the art of fear, and not the arts of love and hope. If we succumb to its noble lie, we will indeed have no democracy at home and none to spread abroad. We will have fear — not Fascism, but a kind of Bismarckian autocracy — that will permanently change us for the worse, and never let us get over our nightmare.