Douglas Kellner
Media Spectacle, Fear and Terrorism
Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, both the U.S. corporate media and the Bush-Cheney administration generated a politics of fear that enabled the administration to push through their right-wing agenda and invade Iraq. The following articles shows how both the Bush-Cheney administration and corporate media in the United States privileged the ‘clash of civilizations’ model, established a binary dualism between Islamic terrorism and civilization, and largely circulated war fever and retaliatory feelings and discourses that called for and supported military intervention, leading to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
George W. Bush notoriously uses Manichean discourse to construct the ‘evil Other’ who attacked the U.S. and to highlight the goodness of the U.S. against the evil of terrorism, using completely binary discourse. In his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, declaring his war against terrorism, Bush described the conflict as a war between freedom and fear, between ‘those governed by fear’ who ‘want to destroy our wealth and freedoms,’ and those on the side of freedom.
For years to come, Bush continued to use the word ‘freedom’ to describe both what he was fighting for and what the terrorists were opposing. While Bush ascribed ‘fear’ to its symbolic Other and enemy, as Michael Moore’s 2001 film Bowling for Columbine demonstrates, the U.S. corporate media have been exploiting fear for decades in their excessive presentation of murder and violence and dramatization of a wide range of threats from foreign enemies and within everyday life.
Clearly, the media and the Bush administration whipped up fear and panic in their post-9/11 proliferation of reports of terrorist threats, obsessive focus on terrorism, and demands for retaliation. The media became weapons of mass hysteria that created tremendous fear in the population that made them look anxiously to the government for protection, rendering the population malleable to manipulation.
Since the September 11 strikes, the Bush administration has arguably used fear tactics to advance its political agenda, including tax breaks for the rich, curtailment of social programs, military build-up, the most draconian assaults on U.S. rights and freedoms in the contemporary era in the so-called U.S.A Patriot Act, and a highly controversial and divisive March 2003 war on Iraq. The Bush-Cheney administration used a fearful population and Congress to push through his extremist agenda and the media were their weapons to help continually generate fear and a public ready to accept curtailment of their freedoms to protect them and make them secure.
In his September 20, 2001, talk to Congress, Bush drew a line between those who supported terrorism and those who were ready to fight it. Stating, ‘you’re either with us, or against us,’ Bush declared war on any states supporting terrorism and laid down a series of non-negotiable demands to the Taliban who ruled Afghanistan, while Congress wildly applauded. Bush’s popularity soared with a country craving blood-revenge and the head of Osama bin Laden. Moreover, Bush also asserted that his administration held accountable those nations who supported terrorism – a position that could nurture and legitimate military interventions for years to come.
Interestingly, Bush Administration discourses, like those of bin Laden and radical Islamists, are fundamentally Manichean, positing a binary opposition between Good and Evil, Us and Them, civilization and barbarism. Bush’s Manichean dualism replicates as well the Friend/Enemy opposition of Carl Schmidt upon which Nazi politics were based. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and ‘the Terrorist’ provided the face of an enemy to replace the ‘evil Empire’ of Soviet Communism, which was the face of the Other in the Cold War. The terrorist Other, however, does not reside in a specific country with particular military targets and forces, but is part of an invisible network supported by a multiplicity of groups and states. This amorphous terrorist Enemy, then, allows the crusader for Good to attack any country or group that is supporting terrorism, thus promoting a foundation for a new doctrine of preemptive strikes and perennial war.
Such hyperbolic rhetoric is a salient example of Bushspeak that communicates through codes to specific audiences, in this case domestic Christian right-wing groups that are Bush’s preferred recipients of his discourse. But demonizing terms for bin Laden both elevate his status in the Arab world as a mythical superhero who stands up to the West, and helps marshal support among those who feel anger toward the West and intense hatred of Bush.
Bush and the global media helped produce a mythology of bin Laden, elevating him to almost superhuman status, while generating fear and hysteria that legitimated Bush administration militarism geared toward the ‘Evil One,’ as Bush has called bin Laden, equating him with Satan. And associating oneself with ‘good,’ while making one’s enemy ‘evil,’ is another exercise in binary reductionism and projection of all traits of aggression and wickedness onto the ‘other’ while constituting oneself as good and pure.
The discourse of ‘evil’ is totalizing and absolutistic, allowing no ambiguities or contradictions. It assumes a binary logic where ‘we’ are the forces of goodness and ‘they’ are the forces of darkness. Such discourse legitimates any action undertaken in the name of good, no matter how destructive, on the grounds that it is attacking ‘evil.’ The discourse of evil is cosmological and apocalyptic, evoking a cataclysmic war with mythical stakes.
In this perspective, Evil cannot be just attacked one piece at a time, through incremental steps, but it must be totally defeated, eradicated from the earth if Good is to reign. This discourse of evil raises the stakes and violence of conflict and nurtures more apocalyptic and catastrophic politics, fuelling future cycles of hatred, violence, and wars.
It is, of course, theocratic Islamic fundamentalists who themselves engage in similar simplistic binary discourse and projection of evil onto the other which they use to legitimate acts of terrorism. For certain Manichean Islamic fundamentalists, the U.S. is ‘Evil’, the source of all the world’s problems and deserves to be destroyed. Such one-dimensional thought does not distinguish between U.S. policies, leaders, institutions, or people, while advocating a Jihad, or holy war against the American monolithic evil. The terrorist crimes of September 11 appeared to be part of this Jihad and the monstrousness of the actions of killing innocent civilians shows the horrific consequences of totally dehumanizing an ‘enemy’ deemed so evil that even innocent members of the group in question deserve to be exterminated.
During the build-up to first the Afghanistan and then the Iraq war, the mainstream corporate media in the U.S. largely replicated the discourses of the Bush administration and thus produced a politics of fear that the Bush administration exploited. The lack of debate in the U.S. corporate broadcasting media points to an intensifying crisis of democracy in the United States. While the media are supposed to discuss issues of public importance and present a wide range of views, during the epoch of Terror War they have largely privileged Bush administration and Pentagon positions.
Part of the problem is that the Democratic Party did not vigorously contest Bush’s positions on terrorism and voted overwhelmingly for his authority to take whatever steps necessary to attack terrorists, as well as supporting the so-called U.S.A Patriot Act, that greatly curtailed civil liberties and his 2003 war against Iraq. Most of the rest of the world, and significant sectors within U.S. society, invisible on television, however, opposed Bush administration policy and called for more multilateral approaches to problems like terrorism.
The ‘Axis of Evil’ and the road to IraqBy early 2002, George W. Bush faced a situation similar to that of his father after the Gulf War. Despite victory against the Taliban, the limited success of the war and a failing economy provided a situation that threatened Bush Junior’s re-election. Thus the Bush-Cheney regime needed a dramatic media spectacle that would guarantee its re-election and once again Saddam Hussein provided a viable candidate enabling ‘the war on terrorism’ to morph into an era of perpetual war against terrorism and the countries that support terror, a situation in which media spectacle was used to promote policies of unilateral aggression.
In his televised State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, George W. Bush promised an epoch of Terror War, expanding the Bush doctrine to not only go after terrorists and those who harbour terrorist groups, but to include those countries making weapons of mass destruction. The State of the Union speeches are typically rituals of unity in which the parties pull together to celebrate the country, and while presidents often use the occasion to promote their agendas, Bush’s speech signalled a major rupture with previous policy, providing the basis for what would emerge as the ‘Bush doctrine’ of preemptive war.
Claiming that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constituted ‘an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,’ Bush put the ‘world’s most dangerous regimes’ on notice that he was planning to escalate the war on terror. Bush used the term ‘evil’ at least five times in his State of the Union address and thus extended his discourse of the war on terror to the so-called ‘axis of evil.’ In the speech, he would evoke the fear of nuclear missile attack on the U.S. to justify preemptive strikes, a strategy that would soon be deployed on Iraq. Exploiting fear thus was a major tactic to push through his radical shift in foreign policy, as well as his rightwing domestic agenda.
As 2002 unfolded, the Bush administration intensified its ideological war against Iraq, advanced its doctrine of preemptive strikes, and provided military build-up for what now looks like inevitable war against Iraq. While the explicit war aims were to shut down Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ and thus enforce UN resolutions, which mandated that Iraq eliminate its offensive weapons, there were many hidden agendas in the Bush administration offensive against Iraq. To be re-elected Bush needed a major victory and symbolic triumph over terrorism in order to deflect from the failings of his regime both domestically and in the realm of foreign policy.
While it is still not clear exactly why the Bush administration undertook to invade and occupy Iraq, there are a set of reasons quite different than the official ones. Whereas the explicit war aims were to shut down Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ and thus enforce UN resolutions mandating that Iraq eliminate its weapons, there were many hidden agendas in the Bush administration offensive against Iraq. As suggested above, there were domestic political reasons why a threatened and then executed war against Iraq could benefit the Republicans.
Moreover, ideologues within the Bush administration wanted to legitimate a policy of preemptive strikes and the so-called ‘Bush doctrine,’ and a successful attack on Iraq could inaugurate and normalize this policy. Some of the same unilateralists in the Bush administration envisage U.S. world hegemony, the elder Bush’s ‘New World Order,’ with the United States as the reigning military power and world police. Increased control of the world’s oil supplies provided a tempting prize for the former oil executives who maintain key roles in the Bush administration. Contracts for corporations like Halliburton and sectors of the military-industrial complex would be an even more highly profitable source of revenue for groups that support the Bush-Cheney regime, and oil companies have profited by the chaos in the region through higher prices and profits.
Furthermore, key members of the neoconservative clique in the Bush administration were linked to Israel’s reactionary Likud party, which wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime because he was seen as a threat to Israel. Finally, one might note that George W. Bush’s desire to conclude his father’s unfinished business and simultaneously defeat evil to constitute himself as good, and in Oedipal Tex fashion to allow Bush Junior to prove himself to his father, provided a psychological dimension to the thrust toward war and helped drive Bush Junior to war against Iraq with the fervour of a religious crusade.
Complex events in history often have multiple causes and there were no doubt different agendas at work driving the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. But to sell the policy to the public the Bush-Cheney regime had to provide reasons that would resonate and generate support. After 9/11, the Bush administration used fear to mobilize consent for its hard rightwing domestic and foreign policies, and to gain support for Iraq they utilized a discourse of fear, evoking nuclear mushroom attacks, chemical and biological weapons attacks, and connections between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda to attack the United States. Intelligence was ‘cherry-picked’ and ‘stove-piped’ to help generate fear of Iraqi weapons programs, that turned out to be non-existent.
With all these agendas in play, a war on Iraq appears to have been inevitable. Bush’s March 6, 2003 press conference made it evident that he was ready to go to war against Iraq as he constantly threatened Iraq and evoked the rhetoric of good and evil that he used to justify his crusade against bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Bush repeated the words ‘Saddam Hussein’ and ‘terrorism’ incessantly, mentioning Iraq as a ‘threat’ at least sixteen times, which he attempted to link with the September 11 attacks and terrorism. He used the word ‘I’ as in ‘I believe’ countless times, and talked of ‘my government’ as if he owned it, depicting a man lost in words and self-importance, positioning himself against the ‘evil’ that he was preparing to wage war against. Unable to make an intelligent and objective case for a war against Iraq, Bush could only invoke fear and a moralistic rhetoric, attempting to present himself as a strong nationalist leader.
Bush’s discourse displayed Orwellian features of Doublespeak where war against Iraq is for peace, the occupation of Iraq is its liberation, destroying its food and water supplies enables ‘humanitarian’ action, and where the murder of countless Iraqis and destruction of the country will produce ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’ In a pre-war summit with Tony Blair in the Azores and in his first talk after the bombing began, Bush went on and on about the ‘coalition of the willing’ and how many countries were supporting and participating in the ‘allied’ effort.
In fact, however, it was a Coalition of Two, with the U.S. and UK doing most of the fighting and with many of the countries that Bush claimed supported his war quickly backtracking and expressing reservations about the highly unpopular assault that was strongly opposed by most people and countries in the world, and when things started to go bad pulled out their troops and material support as quickly as possible.
On the whole, U.S. broadcasting networks tended to present a sanitized view of the war while Canadian, British and other European, and Arab broadcasting presented copious images of civilian casualties and the horrors of war. U.S. television coverage tended toward pro-military patriotism, propaganda, and technological fetishism, celebrating the weapons of war and military humanism, highlighting the achievements and heroism of the U.S. military. Other global broadcasting networks, however, were highly critical of the U.S. and U.K. military and often presented highly negative spectacles of the assault on Iraq and the shock and awe high-tech massacre.
We now know that the U.S. and U.K. Iraq invasion was based on groundless claims and systematic deception. As the history of recent totalitarian regimes demonstrates, systematic deception and lying rots the very fabric of a political society, and if U.S. democracy is to find new life and a vigorous future there must be public commitments to truth and public rejection of the politics of lying. A chaotic reality in Iraq undermined the Bush rhetoric of victory and liberation, and showed that spectacle politics can be reversed in which what appears to be a positive outcome can turn negative.
Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture, including works in cultural studies such as Media Culture and Media Spectacle; a trilogy of books on the Bush administration and the media, including Grand Theft 2000, From 9/11 to Terror War, and his latest book Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy.
His website is at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html.
