Session 1: Political Uses of Evil

Session 1: Political Uses of Evil
Chair: Lois Drawmer

Commodification of Fear: A Blueprint For Evil
Fred Karns
Independent Scholar, University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia U.S.A.

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed—Stephen Biko
There are no apparent limits to the construction of fear as a political commodity, certainly not if one looks at the current U.S. government’s seemingly inexhaustible ability to produce whatever degree of fear it may require for achieving its ideological ends.  The Bush administration has repeatedly manipulated commonly-cherished ideals, long-accepted definitions of principles and fundamental beliefs as a way of manufacturing a multiplicity of realities that serves their political objectives.
This practice of manipulation raises a number of questions for which I would like to find answers:  by what methods has the U.S. government been able to take commonplace ideas and turn them into objects of fear and political commodities?  What are the underlying reasons for manufacturing these fears?  How were these objects of fear so convincingly constructed as to be unquestioningly accepted as a reality by so many people?
I will explore how the Bush administration has taken artificially created fears and coded, weighted, narrated, and sold them as “the gravest threat to humankind in recorded history.”  I will look at how, since 9/11, purposefully-created multiple realities have been “bought and paid for” with acquiescence.  With the willing surrender of fundamental freedoms, and with with the surrender of the wills and the minds of the “consumers,” the transaction is complete.
I will also examine how the success of the political “commodification of fear” is contingent on the invention and construction of a complementary object on which to reflect this manufactured fear.  That object, since 9/11, has been evil qua terror.  Evil and terror are malleable terms, and both are powerful tools in the invention of a bizarre commodities market. Both are terms that are representative of abstract concepts that have been fetishised—endowed with the power of human beings, who, Americans are told, hate the Western way of life and are bent on destroying it.  These indefinable but immanently flexible terms were carefully chosen and have been successfully used by the Bush administration as instruments to convince millions of people that their continued existence as a free people depends entirely on their deference to the purported wisdom of their government and support of a war to annihilate these evil forces.
How have the underlying relationships of this “market of political commodities” been kept hidden from view, and how have so many of “we the people” been led to and sold on an understanding of the world based entirely on the construction of new evil and these new realties?

Can I Play With Madness? The Psychopathy of Evil, Leadership, and Political Mismanagement
Frank Faulkner
University of Derby, UK

This paper will examine the psychopathy of evil as an aspect of political leadership, and noting specifically Machiavelli’s treatment of the subject as it applies to leaders, often juxtaposed by Chomsky’s pronouncements. The rationale for this approach is within the observation that GW Bush and A Blair, specifically, have evaded prosecution for civilian deaths in Iraq, despite mounting evidence that they are directly responsible for the conduct of the Coalition military in that region.
The above must be viewed in the context of opposition groups, such as Stop the War, The Lancet medical journal, Iraqbodycount.com, and Military Families Against the War, as supposed moral entrepreneurs and self-appointed ethical guardians, who consistently argue for an immediate withdrawal of troops amid mounting concern over non-combatant casualties.
Moreover, evil as a concept in this scenario is apparently being ‘normalised’ in the media as an everyday or trivial event, often below celebrity indiscretions in news running orders. So, is this a deliberate ’downplaying’ of evil, or merely an acceptance of the banality of pernicious political leadership? This paper will unearth the facts versus the rhetoric, and come to a suitable judgement based on available evidence.

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Deformed Discourse in the ‘Axis of the Willing:’ The Hint of Evil and the Touch of the Monster in the Media
Phil Fitzsimmons
Centre for Research in Language and Literacy, University of Wollongong, North Wollongong, Australia

Arising within a methodological framework of auto-ethnography, this paper discusses critical elements of language use in the media that encased 9/11, the London bombings and the ensuing riots in Sydney Australia. Using Williams’ (1996) notion of ‘deformed discourse’ as an overarching paradigmatic lens, the results of this study found that the language use of key stakeholders, and the media itself, in America, England and Australia has been characterised by a series of nested metaphors that subtly hint at the perceived evil nature of Islam. This has had the effect that by linguistically ‘deforming’ elements of the corporeal Islamic body, there has been the attempted creation of a first world cultural capital, albeit within a vocal minority, that negates all Muslims ‘as human as we know it’ and denies the Islamic cosmological viewpoint as ‘being valid as we know it’. While having an immediate effect of racism and vilification, this paper argues that the naming of evil at a national world-view level, however subtle, only serves to create or perpetuate a similar or parallel expression of perceived evil within the dominant naming body. This ‘naming of otherness’ also serves to deny any similar evil within the more powerful cultural group as well as a denial that the ‘monstrous evil other’ is always created by the perceived ‘pure’ national body corporate, and is found within that group as a natural and necessary component (Cohen 1996, Garret 2003).
“… the Other is not only a brother, but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality” (Foucault 1970:326)