[lbo-talk] Paranoid Styles, Soviet and American (was Hamas "a project of Shin Bet")

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/22/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is also the case that the Terror received a lot of
> support because cleaning out the middle and upper
> echelons of the Party provided upward mobility for the
> lower cadres ("Kill the Trotskyist spy --- and give me
> his job!!!").
>
> I think that the section of Kara-Murza's book Soviet
> Civilization: From 1917 to the Great Victory that I
> translated that I translated evokes the spirit of the
> 1930s pretty well. I posted it here before in bits,
> but I cleaned up the translation a bit and post it
> below:
>
> A very important feature of the "Stalinist
> repressions" consists in that the actions of the
> government were met with mass support, which it would
> have been impossible to either organize or imitate.
<snip>
> One can imagine that this mass "witch hunt" craze was
> generated by interfactional contradictions in the
> Party elite that were made possible by repressions
> with ritual accusations (sabotage, spying, etc.). But
> then a separate mass sentiment arose, and it was used
> by the authorities to solve pressing political tasks.
> Then, it was necessary to carry out the complicated
> task of "calming things down" – to pull society out of
> its passionate mood.
<snip>
> The ideological campaign of Perestroika made thinnking
> about the repressions more difficult, using an overly
> simplifoed model of the phenomenon. Thus, much was
> said about how the trials were "fabricated." But no
> one [at the time of the repressions] understood the
> ritual accusations literally, and it is important to
> understand how they were interpreted. Tukhachevsky was
> accused of "organizing plots and espionage," but
> people thought to themselves that he was really being
> punished because he shot hostages in Tambovskaya
> Guberniya in 1921 and suggested using chemical weapons
> against peasants. When L.P. Beria was executed as an
> "English spy," noone was in amazement and the absurd
> accusation -- everyone believed that he was really
> being killed as a bloody-handed butcher who had cut
> short the lives of many innocent people (here, we are
> discussing the received wisdom about Beria, and not a
> reliable assessment of the actual state of affairs).
>
> As is not surprising, theideologues of Perestroika
> themselves went down the road of mystification,
> departing from the principles of law: making up
> unfounded "lists" to be rehabilitated corresponding
> completely to to unfounded "lists" to be repressed.
<snip>
> In other words, the repressions were the result of a
> complicated, contradictory process in which various
> groups and currents collided. It was not at all a
> simple machine acting upon the push of a button in
> some cabinet.

This is a very useful article.  What is true of Stalinism is even
truer of the nature of American hegemony: it's a "complicated,
contradictory process in which various groups and currents collide,"
for which various degrees and kinds of popular support exist among
various groups of people and which generates new jobs and new avenues
of social mobility, not a simple top-down process which only "the
Right" supports and "the Left" opposes.

America would never have become a state with the highest incarceration
rate in the world, surpassing states run by far more authoritarian
rules, if the Right at the top alone had supported law and order
politics.  There are so many groups who want more zealous prosecution
of crimes about which they are most concerned, among whom are ordinary
people, some of whom are on the Left or at the Center and do not want
law and order approaches to crimes and issues other than those that
concern them: working-class parents who are worried about sexual
offenders; feminists who want to have rapists, wife beaters, child
sexual abusers, etc. punished; people whose family members became
addicted to drugs; working-class people -- including Blacks and
Latinos -- in poor neighborhoods with higher rates of street crimes
than richer ones, who are more often victimized by crimes than the
rich but see the police are quicker to respond to calls for help from
richer neighborhoods than poor ones; better-off strata of the working
class who actually live in very safe suburbs but are influenced by the
media's overwhelming focus on crime* -- especially violent crime and
sex crime -- and feel unsafe and think that the country is getting out
of control; and so forth.

*  <blockquote>Extra! May/June 1994

Crime Contradictions
U.S. News Illustrates Flaws in Crime Coverage

By Janine Jackson and Jim Naureckas

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Despite the impression one would get from news coverage, the incidence
of crime has not risen dramatically in the past year. The most
reliable research suggests, in fact, that there is no more violent
crime today than there was 20 years ago.

What there is more of--much more--is crime coverage. According to The
Tyndall Report (2/94), crime took up more than two and a half hours
(157 minutes) a month on network news from October 1993 until January
1994. In the three years ending with January 1992, by contrast, these
network shows spent 67 minutes a month on crime stories.And the
coverage has taken on a shrill tabloid tone, designed to evoke fear,
as with NBC Nightly News' regular feature "Society Under
Siege."</blockquote>

<blockquote><http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/teaching_backgrounders/crime/tv_crime_facts.cfm>

* According to FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the rate for serious violent
crimes dropped 6 percent and the rate of crimes against property fell
10 percent in the United States between 1990 and 1995. During that
same time span, network news coverage of crime increased by 240
percent.

* In the real world, homicides declined by 13 percent between 1990 and
1995, while network news coverage of murders for the same period
increased by 336 percent.

* Crime reporting on the three major U.S. networks reached a peak in
1995 (at 2,574 stories). Even if you exclude stories about the O.J.
Simpson murder trial and Oklahoma City bombing, stories about crime
outnumbered all other topics. Overall, CBS and NBC aired the most
crime news, broadcasting more than 27 hours of crime coverage apiece
(nearly 4.5 minutes per newscast), while ABC devoted 22 hours to crime
(3.5 minutes per night).

- from Media Monitor, Vol XI Number 3: July/August 1997.</blockquote>

And this is before the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001!
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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