Why
Bush won?
Fear-ology and the lack of
alternatives
PressInfo #
200
November
4, 2004
By
Jan
Oberg,
TFF director
There are good reasons why George
W. Bush won. About two-thirds of America - about 60 % of
the eligible electorate voted, roughly a half of them for
Bush - and the rest of us must now live with both the
accumulated global effects of the first four years and
with more of the same, and probably worse, for four more
long years. For, in the
world of George Bush, God's
mandate from above has now been confirmed by the American
people's mandate from below. So there is a kind of
trinity of God, Bush and the American believers.
Unfortunately none of his policies, except that for
re-election, work - but that seems to bother neither Bush
nor his followers. Let's at least hope that God feels a
kind of guilt by (alleged) association?
1.
Fear-ology
The major reason Bush won is
fearology, the building of politics on manipulation of
fear and the need for protection to one's own advantage.
From the perspective of mass psychology, George W. Bush
had the most appealing program: "I am the Only One who
can promise you protection against the evils of the world
out there." Since in response to 9/11 the President
initiated the misguided and already failed "war on
terror", the deep reservoir of his performance is the
syndrome of "fearology" spiced with eschatological myths
and chosenness: Bush as God's own President, American as
God's own country and the Republicans, GOP, as God's Own
Party - another trinity.
Anyone attempting to explain the
Bush administration by normal political science textbook
theories will miss most of what this fearology is about
and what, consequently, we may be heading for.
Fearology worked; first there was a
manifest attack on the US and it provided Mr. Bush with a
(presumably much needed) manifest personal destiny: to
fight the "Axis of Evil", to eradicate Evil everywhere,
create Paradise on earth and thus become the Protector.
In spite of all the evident failures, - see
TFF
Feature by Craig Aaron -
the majority (albeit a small one) of the American
citizens have now shown that they believe (in) him and
expect to be protected by him; there is a contract now
that did not exist in 2000. No new disaster such as 9/11
has happened in the US, so the protector has a point,
whether or not it is the merit of his administration and
policies.
The rest is very simple, but
requires bold vision and intelligent strategies and
tactics to carry out: you tell people that they are in
mortal danger and if they are actually not, you create
that danger or an image of it. The smoke (screen) would
not work without the fire, the fire that was 9/11. Next,
you choose to deal with that attack so that it produces
scepticism among most friends, hatred among enemies, mass
production of terrorists, and ever decreasing legitimacy
in the eyes of others. This is a very effective
"fearological " policy, because it increases both
the voters' feeling of fear and of being alone and
misunderstood. Osama Bin Laden's conspicuously well-timed
video in support of President Bush was the brain product
of the most gifted manipulator, whoever it was. If it was
bin Laden himself, he can expect to be alive in the
future too after this. ("If you let me survive, I'll help
you survive…")
The protection is not of the
defensive, healing or preventive kind. It is outward and
aggressive. There is no square meter anywhere on earth
where we can relax or feel safe. The world is dangerous,
terrorists lurk around every corner. And if that is not
enough, we go ahead with a Ballistic Missile Defence to
protect America should someone anyhow penetrate to our
mainland. BMD aims to increase the capability to fight a
nuclear war and boosts the - mad - perception that you
can survive and gain from a nuclear war; but that has not
dawned upon the Americans - and, incidentally, also not
upon many Europeans. Illiteracy about complex and
sometimes philosophical security matters is widespread.
Fearology has its own logic: you
have to provoke people all the time and everywhere to
increase the self-constructed threat. Your power would
disappear if no one was fearful and thought they needed
your protection. If fundamentally you changed US foreign
policy and got people all over to love and admire you,
you would be out of the office! Why? Because you have
nothing originally constructive to offer - only
protection from the evil guys.
2.
TANA - There Are No Alternatives
Here it the second reason; the
utter lack of coherent and constructive alternative
programs to George W. Bush's foreign policy. It should
not be that difficult to see that the United
States is now close to a one-party system with two
fractions and that John
Kerry's policies concerning terrorism and the Iraq
quagmire - and all the rest - was difficult to
distinguish in substance from
Bush's.
The main difference might be in the
personality; Kerry has experienced the meaninglessness,
cruelty and absurdity of war (however, repressed for the
sake of the career, one must presume) and he seems to
have less problematic relationships with his past, with
God and with various fundamentalisms. He is probably also
less politically autistic than Mr. Bush. Be this as it
may, he comes across merely as a more "intellectual"
imperialist and militarist with a slightly less
unilateral, (self) isolationist view of his country's
role in the world. However, as President Mr. Kerry might
have appointed Richard Holbrooke his Secretary of State
and Wesley Clarke his Secretary of Defence; with
their disastrous handling of Yugoslavia and Kosovo
five years ago under Clinton, it would be naïve to
believe that imperialism and militarism is a Republican
(GOP) disease only. Both parties choose the antagonistic
Empire option rather than the Democracy-Cooperation
option. In the little longer run, it
could spell the end of the US
empire - but who cares
about the longer run, say 15-20 years in today's
politics?
To put it crudely, the Americans
could vote, but they didn't have real
choice. This distinction is vital in the age of
increasing authoritarianism. Democracy is about choice
and not only about voting. Furthermore, one must
challenge every concept of democracy used about a system
that precludes anyone who does not possess hundreds of
millions of dollars from becoming the country's leader.
Civil society - lovers of peace,
justice, ecological balance, freedom - can now decide to
continue to only talk negatively about George W. Bush and
promote the - traditional on the verge of boredom -
slogans of anti-war and anti-imperialism and being
critical of and against every next piece of Bush policy
and interventionism. We must, of course, but it won't be
enough. If anything, this election shows that the
"criticism only" strategy is too easy and represent no
real challenge to the system.
The failure to stop a President
whose policies have created such utter, predictable chaos
as in Afghanistan and Iraq indeed raises the question:
what did we do wrong? George W. Bush has now been
re-elected after having plunged not only America but the
world into the wrong wars and having achieved absolutely
nothing except physical and cultural destruction and the
death of 100,000 Iraqis - on top of the sanctions-caused
genocide endorsed by the Clinton administration
also after Iraq had been disarmed and which killed
between 500,000 and 1,000.000 innocent Iraqis and the
country's middle class.
But "we" got rid of Saddam? Well
good, but it's the wrong argument. Since other means were
never tried but war, how can anyone say that war was the
only way to topple him? And how high a price can we
morally demand others to pay for our democratisation,
freedom - and oil supplies and profits?
3.
Being against is not enough. The need for constructive
programmes
And that's where the problem lies
with a large part of the global resistance: it is
"against" and "anti-" but it has little of what Gandhi
always insisted on, constructive programs. The millions
of marchers - like the governments of Germany and France
- last year had very little by way of answer to the
perfectly legitimate question: if not war on Iraq, then
what? If not grapping the oil from someone else, then
what? If not massive world violence against terror - then
how to combat terror? If Saddam is the product of the
world's arm trade, then how do we stop it? What kind of
education and media do we need to make people as
interested in peace as they are in computers,
entertainment, Coca-Cola - and violence? If "war is the
only plan in town" there will be war; in most difficult
situations doing nothing is no alternative.
Admittedly, it is easier to fight a
common enemy together - and George W. Bush, US foreign
policy and all it stands for is an enemy in the eyes of
millions. But these millions have not been able, however
legitimate the struggle, to develop anything close to an
alternative vision of how things could be done
differently. Could? Yes, by non-violence - by
Gandhian "ahimsa" and "Satyagraha" through the whole
arsenal of peace by peaceful means as stated in the UN
Charter. The energy went to "fight Bush" rather than to
develop a new paradigm and new strategies. Thus, Bush set
the agenda to which most re-acted. But democracy is about
citizens pro-actively setting the agenda - to which their
elected representatives re-act. It's about visions of the
good society, not fearology practised the other way:
dystopian images of the war, nuclear annihilations,
dislike and contempt for leaders. Peace is so much more
than the working against war and other types of
violence.
Peace is about alternative programs
built on the values of love and cooperation with the rest
of the world. We need to take inspiration from the
history of non-violence and from, say, Jonathan Schell's
The Unconquerable World. We must consistently say
yes to non-violence and not keep silent about, for
instance, the totally unacceptable violence practised by
that part of the Iraqi resistance that kidnap peace and
humanitarian workers.
Bush's re-election tells us that we
must try to use the next four years more constructively.
There will be fears, anger and huge disappointments. We
must somehow overcome them. Fearology and its develish
partner, hopelessness, are tools in the hands of
authoritarian leaders. Defiance and resistance, civil
courgae and resilience can help constructive programs to
emerge - and positive visions can kill both fears
and hopelessness.
Indeed, perhaps, President Bush'
re-election represents an important opportunity for us
all?
More about that in another TFF
PressInfo.
© TFF and the author 2004
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
You are welcome to
reprint, copy, archive, quote or re-post this item, but
please retain the source.
Would
you - or a friend - like to receive TFF PressInfo by
email?
 
|