Khadr and the politics of fear
by Rick Salutin
From Friday's Globe and Mail
July 18, 2008 at 8:09 AM EDT
The Obama cover on this week's New Yorker has a title: The Politics of Fear. It's on the contents page, not on the cover itself. Too bad. It might have aided clarity had it been there, on a little gold plaque like the ones in museums. It's a good term; it applies to far more than the Obama campaign. Fear is a recurring political theme in our time, like the musical catchphrase in Indiana Jones films: DUNduhDUNDUN.
Take those Omar Khadr tapes. Their general import seems clear. We know U.S. forces softened him up with three weeks of sleep deprivation, which counts as torture. (Think how you get after a bad night.) It's called clean torture since it leaves no marks, a preference among democratic governments. He had the impression his Canadian "interviewer" would rescue him and help him get home. The CSIS agent brought Big Macs on the first day and Omar was friendly as a puppy. On Day 2, he realized Canada wasn't there to help, but to get a confession, and he cracked. The agent made jokes, ridiculed his complaints and said harshly that there was nothing he could do to get him moved - in my view, the cruellest moment; not torture perhaps but brutal and, from its tone, sadistic.
Yet many people respond unsympathetically. Not just the ex-U.S. soldier who scorned "young, snivelling, whining, crying Omar." Canadians too, who say, typically: "Omar Khadr made his bed; let him lie in it." It's as if something overrides the normal, sympathetic response; it's the politics of fear since 9/11. That's when the nature of discourse changed; hate and fear became a new norm. I found it reflected in my own mail; till then it was often marked by thoughtful disagreement, which I prize; since then it's had a component of sheer abuse and vituperation.
I think you can call the fear irrational since, as Ottawa journalist Dan Gardner shows in his utterly reassuring book on fear, Risk, our chances of being a victim of terror before or since then are less than of dying in traffic or drowning. The threat of terror, such as it really is, should be effectively dealt with but not magnified and especially not manipulated for other political goals.
By that I mean the way Western leaders have played on excessive fears to pursue quite separate ends, such as eliminating Saddam Hussein or taking control of Mideast oil. The backlash to their policies has increased the dangers of terror, which augments the sense of fear and allows them to justify further policies. The politics of fear could be the caption for the new millennium.
It's worth a glance back at earlier phases in the politics of fear. The hysterical anti-communism of the 1950s was known as The Great Fear, when reds were under the beds. In the 1960s, the fear turned toward youth, and in Canada, toward Quebec separatists. The seventies saw efforts to terrify people about terrorism. The 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, meant a reprise of The Great Fear with the result, common to sequels, of farce. That ended with the sudden, unpredicted implosion of the hitherto horrifying Soviet empire - a force far more formidable in its time than "Islamic terror."
Or revert to another presidential moment: the 1933 inauguration: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin Roosevelt from his wheelchair. How refreshing. What a different take on fear. He faced grave threats from fascist armies, the Soviet ideological challenge and a global depression -- all of which dwarf our problems (except perhaps our unique environmental threat). He added that he meant "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." The genuine threats can be handled.
People in a real fight seem calm, they haven't much time for fear. The trouble with those false and exaggerated fears is they drag your attention away from the real ones, including, as FDR said, fear itself.
Rick Salutin returned home to Canada, following ten years of university study in the United States, in October, 1970. He has been a writer ever since. His many plays include 1837, on the movement for independence from the British Empire; and Les Canadiens, about the famed hockey team and its relation to the spirit of Quebec nationalism, which received the Chalmers award for best Canadian play in 1977. His TV work includes Maria, about union organizing in the textile industry. He has written biography and history, as well as three novels, one of which, A Man of Little Faith, won the Books in Canada best first novel prize. He received the Toronto Arts Award in writing and publishing in 1991 and the National Newspaper Award for best columnist, for his Globe and Mail column on media, in 1993. He held the Maclean Hunter chair in ethics in communication at Ryerson University from 1993 to 1995 and has taught in the Canadian Studies program of University College, the University of Toronto, since 1978 . He has written columns for Canadian Business, Toronto Life, TV Times, the Globe and Mail Broadcast Week and This Magazine, of which he is a founding editor. He was Globe and Mail media columnist from 1991 to 1999 and is now an op-ed columnist. His most recent book is The Womanizer, a novel.
