The Threat that Binds

When I was a child, I loved the television series The Outer Limits. One episode involved some scientists who tried to fake an alien invasion so as to unite the Earth against an outside threat. The premise seemed so plausible to me for at the time it was the height of the Cold War and we Americans seemed united against the Red Menace. The Soviets, and to some degree the Chinese, had missiles aimed at me and were looking for any sign of weakness to kill or enslave me. I was a child, as I said, but many of my elders (outside of my contrarian family) seemed to feel that the threat justified a huge national security apparatus, military adventures in faraway places, conscription, and increased domestic surveillance. They were taxed out the wazoo and their sons and brothers and husbands were dying by the thousands in Asia, but it was all worth it to keep the Communists at bay.

So dire was the threat made to seem, I recall, that it seemed to me inevitable that the Communists would one day rule the world. They were so powerful, and their message, whatever it was, was so compelling that the Free World could barely hope to contain them let alone turn back the tide. Our Way of Life was in peril, and it was unthinkable to question the danger. My uncles questioned it, though, and asked how the Russians, who were so backward and weak when they encountered them in World War II could be so formidable now just twenty years later. Wasn't their system corrupt and inefficient and so mismanaged by the state that it would be impossible for them to mount a credible threat to the US?

It was only much later as I acquired an advanced education that my uncles' questions began to make sense to me. We had been spending untold billions and had not diminished the Soviet threat one iota since I was a child. On the contrary, the actor Ronald Reagan, who had somehow been elected president, was calling for even more massive spending on defense and a bizarro missile shield. My acquaintances in international studies and in government suggested that the Soviets were really pretty weak militarily, despite the scary martial parades and goose stepping soldiery. They couldn't even control Afghanistan, for crying out loud. And their military spending figured to be only a small fraction of ours. Ours appeared to exceed that of the next five countries combined.

Still later when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, it came to light that the Soviet Union had never been even half the threat that the government had made it out to be. We had wasted all that money and manpower for over 40 years on a grossly exaggerated danger. The public didn't spend much time thinking or talking about this embarrassment. Rather, it was heralded as a great triumph of Reagan's militarism. In fact, the fall of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for the military industrial governmental complex. People were beginning to talk about a "peace dividend" and freeing up all the capital and manpower tied up in the national security apparatus. It was vitally important to find another enemy to replace the Soviets.

The first Gulf War and commitments in the Balkans kept the apparatus tolerably busy in the 90s, and we never really demobilized from the Cold War.

Now, we enjoy the benefits of Islamofascism as an enemy, and the national security apparatus can breathe easy. The best thing about the new enemy is that it is an abstraction and can never be inconveniently defeated like the Soviet Union was. It is sufficiently frightening to turn the people into sheep and sufficiently vague that any adventure can be explained as furthering the so called War on Terror. Better yet, the enemy has attacked us and is probably among us; therefore, the national security apparatus demands and gets a lot more domestic power. Even better, any failure of the government can be explained as a lack of resources/power/resolve such that failure will be rewarded with even more resources/power/resolve ad infinitum.

Such an enemy may someday turn America into a totalitarian state if we do not dispel the illusion that fuels the national security apparatus. I was fooled by the Cold War and even joined the Army. In my defense, I was young and unsophisticated and a victim of government schooling to the age of 20. Now I am older (but still unsophisticated) and far wiser (although certainly not objectively wise), and I am smart enough to question it when the government finds an "enemy", be it drugs, poverty, terror, or terriers. I wish that my conspecifics who were conned by the Communist threat will remember and question the latest scam.