Fear as A Political Motivator

[marct]

Hi GS,

Marc, you made a great point about today's enemy being tomorrow's ally. That immediately prompted me to think about WWII, where we as a nation (or coalition) demonized the Japanese and Germans (not without good reason), yet in a very short time span after the war we seemed to embrace them as strong allies against communism. Does that mean government generated fear can be turned on and off almost as quickly as a light switch? We used fear to mobilize our population to fight, but then what emotion or logic did we use to turn that fear off and generate the support to spend a substantial amount of money to rebuild those countries? Was it that communism was seen as a greater fear; thus the lesser of two evils? Or were the Germans and Japanese simply seen as defeated and we're a compassionate and forgiving people? Let's face it, the Germans and Japanese behavior during WWII was much more evil than anything AQ has done to date, yet it was very quickly forgotten (or perhaps not well understood).

I think that Communism was one of the factors in the turnaround, but I also suspect that a major factor was that the American public was not as "scarred" by WWII as most other nations. I think that government generated fear, as you cal it (I'd use the term propaganda) can be switched fairly quickly IFF you are dealing with a broadcast media environment - which we were at that time. Nowadays, things are a lot harder since we are dealing with highly interactive media (Mountainrunner and I have been chatting about this in relation to American Public Diplomacy).

The military in a counterinsurgency has always used fear, it is the stick in carrots and sticks. It can consist of curfews, turning off electric power to certain troubled areas, etc., but in general our form of coercion is very gentle compared to the likes of Saddam and Stalin and Hitler, thus much less effective.

I'm not sure if it is less effective, really. One of the problems with excessive use of fear tactics is that people become "numb" to them - fear is "normalized", routinized and cultural practices develop that promote successful survival tactics. Of course, this flips when you have a populace which has developed these cultural practices and you try and use "gentler" forms of coercion. At the same time, a lot of cultural practices seem to operate (at least at the level of neural circuity) by using fear as a boundary/maintenance condition, which means that that form of fear can be used quite effectively without ever using direct forms of action.

Let me toss out an example. As a general warning, let me note that this example may well be offensive to a number of people here - which is, actually, the purpose of the example since I'm trying to stimulate that boundary maintenance fear.

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Example:

Why does the US military support a Don't Ask, Don't Tell (and Don't Pursue) policy in relation to gays and lesbians serving in the military? Are the supporters of this policy so sexually insecure? What are they afraid of, that they aren't really attractive?
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In Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski coined the term "semantic reaction" to refer to this, and it is a manipulation of fear at the symbolic level. The manipulation of this type of fear is, IMO, one of the core strategies behind both successful COIN and Insurgency operations, although I haven't seen it actually discussed in this light.

Marc