Anarchic update news all over the world - Part 1 - 13.05.2019

Today's Topics:

   
1.  Germany, FDA-IFA, THE GROUP ADS (de)[machine translation]
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
2.  anarkismo.net: Brazil's right-wing rising - Part 1 by Bruno
      Lima Rocha (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
3.  Cnt-ait Paris: INDONESIA: After the riots of 1st May 2019 in
      Bandung, Surabaya and Makassar and a fierce repression,
      anarchosyndicalists and the AIT/IWA are in the focus of the local
      police. [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
4.  Britain, AFED: Organised #91: The Scare Cycle - Moral Panics
      and National Elections (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1






We as ADS (On the search) understand us as an association of people from the Greater 
Nuremberg, connected by the rejection of the capitalist system as a whole and the 
resulting discriminatory forms of power. ---- The capitalist system expresses itself 
through a property relationship, which requires the exploitation of humans, animals and 
nature in every area of life. Capitalism governs all our lives, so we can not absolve 
ourselves of its forms of domination by which we have been socialized. ---- Nevertheless, 
we do not want to stop at this point, but try to move beyond it both internally and 
externally and to put these behaviors into everyday life. In a nutshell, we want to show 
solidarity with all those affected who share our emancipatory aspirations. That's why we 
also try to avoid hierarchies within the group structure and make decisions by consensus.

Focal work of the group takes place depending on the group constellation and the current 
political necessity.

We as AdS (Looking) see us as anti-authoritarian and
anti-national. Since we do not consider it reasonable
to delegate political responsibility according to a representative principle, we 
fundamentally reject the state as a form of social organization, as well as the nation as 
a legitimizing element for it.
To overcome these conditions, we see a social revolution as a necessary means, which must 
be conducted at every level and which requires the reflection of every human being.
As a basic prerequisite for the social revolution
self-managed spaces must be created, which already today question the prevalent social state.
At the same time, the acquisition of (everyday practical) knowledge is a key to 
self-determination for us. This allows the concerns in
such rooms, without being dependent on others, to take in hand.

Our goal is to transform the current situation into a
decentralized libertarian organized society structure that ensures that each person can 
meet their needs
together with all other stakeholders of a society.

Since we see our group in a constant development process, the self-image is also to be 
seen in this context.

As of: 01.02.2015

Furthermore, Looking for a member of the Federation of
German-speaking Anarchists and understands the Declaration of Principles of the FdA as an 
addition to the self-image:

Aims:

Our goal is a rule-free society without borders, classes and states based on free accord, 
mutual help and anarchist federalism characterized by bound mandates from the grassroots.

This society should be pluralistic, so that different life plans and collective basic 
orders can be tested, lived and implemented on an equal footing - linked by federalism.

Since we reject any domination and exploitation of human beings, we are committed to the 
abolition of all forms of domination and exploitation in cultural, political, sexual, 
social, economic or other respects. This includes the rejection of hierarchies and 
totalitarianisms in every form.

We are committed to the needs-based and environmentally friendly use of natural resources.

People image:

We are convinced that in principle we humans are able to live independently and 
self-determined in a free society and to act responsibly.

The current inability to actually live in a society free of domination and the reluctance 
to embrace it are not due to the "nature of man". Rather, education, promotion, 
socialization and the economic, political and social conditions in which a person grows up 
and lives are decisive. We do not take ourselves out.

How we want to achieve our goals:
forms of action:

The basis of our actions is to neither want to suffer domination nor to exercise rule. We 
express this attitude by our mutual help, our refusal to stately institutions, 
disobedience of any kind, the implementation of direct actions and demonstrations, the 
realization and implementation of our creativity, a concrete experimentation of anarchist 
realities and anarchist everyday culture and the rule - free self - organization based on 
the anarchist federalism. From the self-organization of those affected and interested 
parties, the revolutionary self-administration of all collective areas of life (production 
and reproduction sites, municipalities, neighborhoods, ...) should grow.

The choice of funds is based on our goals. It is in direct proportion to the given 
circumstances and depends on the actual situation.

We reject proxy models and the formation of political parties - as is common in 
exploitative economies and in parliamentarianism - because they contradict our ideas of a 
society free of domination.

Ways to achieve a rule-free society:

The FdA wants to build on the federalist ideas in all areas of social life and adapt them 
to the requirements of today. In anarchist federalism, we see the foundation of a true and 
lasting self-determination, which alone guarantees freedom, equality and solidarity.

We do not seek a takeover, but the abolition of political rule.

We do not want to make any prescriptions as to whether the state of anarchy should be 
individualistic, mutualistic, collectivist, communist, syndicalist, etc., as long as the 
path is consistent with our general principles. The FdA sees its task in being a possible 
contact point for all anarchists, to mediate between the various streams of ideas in 
anarchism in order to facilitate cross-directional collaboration.

Why we organize:

More generally, we think that there are a variety of reasons for organizing in a political 
context. First, it is a personal asset and support that has continuity. A group that meets 
regularly develops trust among each other, which allows a respectful and honest 
interaction with each other. At the same time, a group is far more able to act as one or 
more scattered individuals. Continuous work or the realization of larger projects is 
thereby much easier, if necessary tasks or required resources are distributed on as many 
shoulders as possible.

Moreover, most of us who are active in grassroots political groups will eventually reach 
their limits. Many projects can not be realized because of lack of infrastructure, 
financial resources or human resources. In addition, a certain amount of frustration can 
become permanent if one's own work stagnates on the ground, does not produce any visible 
results, or if one generally feels lost or incapacitated as a small group. There are a 
variety of groups, projects and people who have similar ideas about a future world and how 
to get there. It therefore seems logical to us that these groups and people exchange, 
network and unite, be it for pragmatic reasons to bundle information, resources and contacts.

http://aufdersuche.blogsport.de/die-gruppe-ads/

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Message: 2






Part 1 of an audio series debating the reasons for the right-wing rising in Brazil, 
contextualising and analysing the rise of Bolsonaro and the right-wing in Brazil.
https://soundcloud.com/ilrigsa/brazilian-political-column-1
Part 1 of an audio series debating the reasons for the right-wing rising in Brazil, 
contextualising and analysing the rise of Bolsonaro and the right-wing in Brazil.
Related Link: https://soundcloud.com/ilrigsa/brazilian-political-column-1

https://www.anarkismo.net/article/31417

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Message: 3





The May Day demonstrations in Indonesia gave rise to various actions by anarchist and 
anarchosyndicalist groups. In Bandung, Surabaya and Makassar, several cortege including 
some black blocks, clashed with the police. ---- In Bandung, the event was mainly attended 
by high school students, students or precarious workers. Some were dressed in black or 
wore red and black flags. (see the release of the Anarchist Catut Library of Bandung in 
Annex 1). At the end of a chase with the riot police, 619 young people (including 14 young 
women) were arrested by the police who grouped them together, parked, undressed and 
shaved. They were then piled up like cattle in pickup trucks and transferred to the 
Central Commissariat. ---- To read and see the pictures: http://blog.cnt-ait.info (in 
french) or a summary in english to download: 
http://blog.cnt-ait.info/public/INTERNATIONAL/INDONESIE/INDONESIE_2019-05-01_en.pdf

Below the chronology of the events that occurred on May 1st 2019 in Bandung:
Protesters trapped by the police ...
May 1, 219 in Bandung
(Indonesia): anarchist
demonstrators penned by the
police
May 1, 219 in Bandung
(Indonesia): anarchist
demonstrators parceled by the
police are undressed
May 1, 219 in Bandung (Indonesia): anarchist
demonstrators stripped naked are piled in pickups by
police
May 1, 2019 in
Bandung
(Indonesia):
anarchist
protesters are
regrouped in the
course of the
police station after
being shorn
According to medias, dozens of
other anarchists have been held
also in Surabaya and Makassar
where rallies were organized.
Anarchist demonstration on
May 1, 2019 in Surabaya
Anarchist rally on May 1, 2019
in Makassar
These arrests were not random. In Jakarta, 26,000 policemen were mobilized to oversee the 
KSPSI trade union, the
country's main union and a true state in the state, to prevent any risk of "infiltration". 
During the demonstration in
Jakarta and Bandung KSPSI violently attacked anarchosyndicalists who were demonstrating 
quietly.
Demonstration of May 1, 2019
in Jakarta, the
anarchosyndicalist bloc is
present in the demonstration
This is not the first time that KSPSI attacks our fellow companions. Already on May 1, 
2018, the gathering of our
friends of the PPSA (Persaudaraan pekerja anarko syndicalis, "fraternity of 
anarcho-syndicalist workers") had been
attacked violently by the KSPSI.
At a press conference on May 2, 2019 at the South Jakarta police headquarters, Chief of 
Police Tito denounced the
anarchosyndicalists as the instigators of these events. He said that "Anarchosyndicalism 
is a doctrine of foreign
origin. It is an international phenomenon in which workers want to break the law and 
determine their own rules.
This is called anarcho-syndicalism. This has been developing for a long time in Russia, 
then in Europe, in South
America, including Asia. "According to him, this phenomenon has developed in Indonesia in 
recent years.
For his part, Chief of Staff Moeldoko called for intensifying the crackdown on 
anarchosyndicalists, to which General
Tito responded that all the anarchist and anarchosyndicalist groups in Indonesia were 
mapped and that actions -
including re-education - were going to be implemented. (see press release of Indonesia, 
Appendix 2)
In addition, the head of the police Tito recalled that the anarchosyndicalism was an 
internationally structured
movement, several newspapers recalling that the AIT (international anarchosyndicalist 
organization, whose general
secretary went to Indonesia in June 2018) had launched a call to workers by 1 May (see 
Annex 3)
(CNT-AIT Paris, Sources: Indonesian press and Indonesian militant sites, google translate)
contact@cnt-ait.info
http://blog.cnt-ait.info

------------------------------

Message: 4






The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (andhence clamorous to 
be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless seriesof hobgoblins, all of them ---- H. 
L. Mencken ---- As a general rule, democratic theory tends to represent actors within 
representative democracies as essentially rational beings who, despite a tendency to be 
corrupted by the exercise of power, follow a rationality that can be accounted for. 
Rational choice theory, for example, sees individual choices, understood to be the result 
of one or another form of reasoning, as the basis of social phenomena.(1) At the more 
sophisticated end of the spectrum, democratic theory will even acknowledge some level of 
dysfunctionality in traditional institutions and argue for reform of their corporatist 
tendencies, as one might argue for managing the symptoms of cancer without pretence or 
hope of effecting a cure.(2) But the point remains.

Far less understood or accounted for, for the most part, is what Maurice Brinton has 
called the irrational in politics.(3) Working-class electoral support for radical 
reactionaries proposing austerity programs that would hurt them was not, Brinton felt, 
especially rational. The average working-class voter of middle age, far from being open to 
democratic politics, was probably ‘hierarchy conscious, xenophobic, racially-prejudiced, 
pro-monarchy, pro-capital punishment, pro-law-and-order, anti-demonstrator, anti-long 
haired students and anti-dropout'.(4) Trying to discuss measures for the redress of 
working-class grievances would, Brinton felt, ‘almost certainly meet not only with 
disbelief but also that positive hostility that often denotes latent anxiety', a fact that 
led him to conclude that ‘certain subjects are clearly emotionally loaded'.(5) Cognisant 
of such, the noted US journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken wrote at some length on what 
Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich would later, in analysing the nascent national 
socialist movement, refer to as the ‘mass individual'.(6) Ideas, Mencken noted, ‘leave 
them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental 
- the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men':

Fear remains the chief of them. The demagogues, that is, the professors of mob psychology, 
who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the cornerstone 
of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of 
the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last 
analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting ‘Fe, 
Fi, Fo, Fum!' It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. The whole 
history of the country has see the melodramatic pursuit of horrendous monsters, most of 
them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, 
the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum 
demon, John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, 
German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. The list could be lengthened 
indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the Republic could be written in terms of it, and 
without omitting a single important episode. It was long ago observed that the plain 
people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. This 
explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statespeople of 
genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities.(7)

By mid-century, Menken's observations had enjoyed development at the hands of political 
scientist Richard Hofstadter, who outlined the ‘Paranoid Style in American politics - a 
style of mind, not always right wing in its affiliations ...[characterised by]heated 
exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy'.(8) This made the persecution 
complex a key facet of political discourse, Hofstadter argued, systematising grandiose 
conspiracy theories after the style of the ‘clinical paranoiac', who exhibits a ‘chronic 
mental disorder characterized by systematic delusions of persecution and of one's own 
greatness'.(9) While both he and the demagogue are ‘overheated, over-suspicious, 
overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic in expression', however, only the clinical 
paranoiac feels the ‘hostile and conspiratorial' world to be ‘directed specifically 
against him'.(10) The spokesman for the paranoid style, on the other hand, finds it 
directed ‘against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not him alone, but 
millions of others'.(11) This is a significant difference, in that

Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a 
personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense 
that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far[as]to intensify 
his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.(12)

Such observations carry down to the present moment with a conspicuous salience. 
Criminological research into US national elections finds that the political preferences of 
white Americans are often shaped by stereotypes of African Americans as ‘lazy, welfare- 
dependent, violent, or demanding special favors'; in other words, that ‘race cues often 
racialize white public opinion', and ‘racial messages do shape the political response of 
white citizens', in the manner described both by Hofstadter and Mencken.(13) When the 
political responses of whites feed into crime policy, this research finds the primary 
source of information to be what is reported by the corporate press, which as a result of 
the stereotyping of minorities becomes the basis of government initiatives in that regard. 
‘There is no evidence that political elites' initial involvement in the wars on crime and 
drugs was a response to popular sentiments', notes Katherine Beckett:

Public concern about crime was quite low when candidate Barry Goldwater decided to run on 
a law and order platform in the 1964 presidential election. Similarly, when President 
Ronald Reagan first declared a ‘national war on drugs' in 1982 and when he called for a 
renewal of this campaign in 1986, fewer than 2% of those polled identified drugs as the 
nation's most important problem. Nor is the most recent reincarnation of the crime issue a 
response to popular concern, although the public's attention has certainly shifted in that 
direction. Only 7% of those polled identified crime as the nation's most important problem 
in June 1993, just before the legislative debate over anti crime legislation began. Six 
months later, in response to the high levels of publicity these legislative activities 
received, that percentage had increased to 30%. By August 1994, a record high of 52% of 
those polled were most concerned about crime. Gallup Poll analysts concluded that this 
result was ‘no doubt a reflection of the emphasis given to that issue by President Clinton 
since he announced his crime bill in last January's State-of-the-Union Address, and of the 
extensive media coverage now that the crime bill is being considered by Congress'.(14)

Beckett concludes by noting the irony of official data indicating a decline in the 
prevalence of most types of crime during this period. The facts of the situation 
notwithstanding, racist cues provided by the political class became the basis for a series 
of exercises in scaremongering, not least of which was the use of the scare campaign over 
black criminal Willie Horton by George Bush Snr. during the 1988 presidential debates, 
culminating in a moral panic over the ‘knockout game' in 2013.(15) The prevalence in US 
national elections of scaremongering using the paranoid style to take advantage of the 
strong vein of irrationalism in politics is more than sufficient to invite the re-framing 
of the democratic election cycle as a ‘scare cycle'. The scare cycle contrasts with the 
theoretical notion of election cycles as forums for dispassionate policy debate, places 
where the voting public are presented with the facts and left alone to make up their own 
minds, as those who aspire to power scapegoat convenient targets for policy failures.(16) 
H. L. Mencken, observing this in the 1920s, wrote that ‘the whole aim of practical 
politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by 
menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary'.(17)

Moral Panics and the Scare Cycle

One of the main problems in coming to terms with the menacing of the public with an 
endless series of hobgoblins is that it involves deception as a matter of course; 
furthermore, the capacity to carry out scapegoating campaigns also implies the power to 
control the meaning of words, which in turn implies the power to silence criticism. Hence 
scapegoating campaigns have typically only proved identifiable as such long after the 
fact. In the past few decades, however, sociological research into moral panics, in 
concerning itself with episodes in which ‘a condition, episode, person or group of persons 
emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests',(18) has expedited 
the process of identifying scapegoating narratives, offering critical insight into the 
production of imaginary hobgoblins.

In the seminal Folk Devils and Moral Panics, sociologist Stanley Cohen explored the 
reactions of local communities and media outlets to youth-related disturbances at a number 
of English seaside towns in the late 1960s. The youth involved belonged to various 
subcultures. He argued that a process of ‘deviant amplification' was at play. Since the 
disturbances were largely little more than a series of brief clashes between rival youth 
subcultures, the reaction was disproportionate to the threat presented to the communities 
concerned.(19) Despite producing no lasting damage to life or limb, they were presented 
publicly as the beginning of the breakdown of society. It was argued that the media 
reaction was consciously instigated as a kind of morality play by community leaders who, 
perceiving a threat to their privilege and power, were anxious to reassert both - 
paradoxically rendering themselves both cause and cure of the problem.(20) Seeking to make 
sense of this paradox, Cohen referred to a manual for disaster response groups, outlining 
an almost identical process for the process of ‘deviant amplification', or ‘the production 
of deviance' - the production, in other words, of imaginary hobgoblins with which to 
terrify the public and stimulate the desire for draconian laws that could be used later 
for other purposes. Cohen quoted Howard Becker to the effect that ‘deviance is created by 
society ... Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes 
deviance and by applying those rules to particular persons and labelling them as 
outsiders'.(21) Deviance as a social phenomenon, then, depended far more on who had the 
power to define the meaning of the word and impose their own definition on popular 
discourse than on theparticular characteristics of anyone thus labelled.(22) In practical 
terms, this meant that rather than responding to social crises with constructive actions 
addressing the grievances of those involved in conflict, the ‘moral entrepreneurs' 
responsible for the panic sought leverage through deviance production to rehabilitate the 
ideological foundations of the status quo and the legitimacy of those who represented it. 
In providing the power structure with a way to polarise public opinion, it also provided 
them with a hobgoblin or bogeyman with which to sow terror, smear critics and opponents on 
the basis of guilt by association, and reposition themselves as public saviours under 
crisis conditions of their own making. The labelling process became the basis for scare 
campaigns that would trigger primitive ‘fight or flight' responses in the public, which 
could then be harnessed for political purposes. Thus ‘social control leads to deviance', 
Cohen pointed out, not vice versa.(23)

Given the requirement that there be control over the channels of mass communication, 
deviance production was, by definition, an elite-controlled process.(24) In Cohen's study, 
suppression of the root causes of the youth disturbances by a sensationalist corporate 
media looking to sell newspapers was a critical factor in the successful engineering of 
moral panics. Thus, youth alienation created by high unemployment and the fear of change 
in older generations triggered by the rise of youth culture were not considered. 
Overwhelmed by events, and either unwilling or unable to address the actual causes of the 
problem, older and more established community members took the easy option of demonising 
disaffected youth as hoodlums and thugs, and the media took advantage of the situation for 
their own purposes.(25) In such cases, where unethical, immoral, harmful, dangerous and 
even criminal behaviours need reconstructing as morally just and right, the group of 
behavioural traits understood in social psychology as ‘moral disengagement' turn out to be 
particularly useful.(26) In contrast to cartoonish stereotypes of villainy as the result 
of a sociopathic rejection of morality per se, research into moral disengagement 
recognises that we rarely reject morality outright; rather, we apply it selectively. 
Broadly, the mechanisms of moral disengagement include:

1. Displacing or diffusing responsibility (everyone does it, it's normal, and so on);

2. Misrepresenting injurious consequences as beneficial to the victim (they like it, it's 
good for them);

3. Demonising and dehumanising the victim (they are bad/evil, therefore the rules we have 
for regular people don't apply);

4. Articulating a self-defence in morally absolute terms (those who aren't for me are 
against me; willing conflation of criticism of ideas/ attitude/conduct/policy and attacks 
on person and rights).(27)

Insofar as it constitutes a means of dehumanising or demonising of the other, deviance 
production can therefore be seen as a form of moral disengagement. To the extent that this 
is the case, moral disengagement would seem to be intimately associated with moral panics 
in constituting one of its characteristic facets. If moral panics create a safe space for 
scapegoating, the mechanics of moral disengagement act as the engine of deviance 
production and moral panics. While not all forms of moral disengagement appear in every 
episode of deviance production, moral panicking over external threats will 
characteristically involve falsely associating dissent, criticism, questioning, challenge, 
doubt, or failure to worship with the requisite level of awe, with attacks on one's person 
and rights on the basis of the persecutory tactic of ‘guilt by association'. Deviance 
production will inevitably depend on a logic that boils down to victim-playing, 
victim-blaming and the ‘false dilemma' fallacy (those who are not for us are against us).

The false dilemma becomes the basis for an a priori confusion, as noted, of object and 
relation, in which dysfunctional, unjust and irrational social relations that produce 
crises can be swept under the rug in the name of persecuting the deviant stereotype now 
characterising a victimised group. There can be no dysfunctional social relations if they 
are not even acknowledged to exist. Neatly summarising this fact in defending his 
declaration that ‘the means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the 
instruments of tyranny at home', founding father and author of the US Constitution James 
Madison pointed out during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1777 that 
‘among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war whenever a revolt was 
apprehended'.(28) Few have taken issue with him; the Romans too, it seems, were 
preoccupied with imaginary hobgoblins, not a small part of their legacy.

Hobgoblins in History

The historical background to moral panics provides further insight into the nature of 
scare cycles. Historical inquisitions, show trials and kangaroo courts provide precedents 
for today's kangaroo court of public opinion, where trial by inquisition has been replaced 
with trial by a mass media devoted to the use of deviance production and victim-blaming to 
expedite the manufacture of consent.(29) As Trumbo, a recent Hollywood film on the subject 
reminds us, Hollywood in the 1950s fell to ideological hysteria and authoritarianism as 
screenwriters and directors were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee 
(HUAC) and asked to answer the question: ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of 
the Communist Party?' Those called before the Committee who refused to answer or to betray 
friendships by naming their associates were held in contempt and blacklisted from the 
motion picture industry as communists, in the name of defending democratic norms.(30)

In a climate of moral panic, what belief system the accused subscribed to was immaterial; 
what mattered was that they had been identified as non-conformists. The Committee did not 
even need testimony to achieve its task; J. Edgar Hoover's ‘Security Index' became the 
basis for the actual function of the HUAC as ‘inquisitorial theatre'. Said a HUAC 
investigator to the Washington Star in 1957: ‘We wouldn't be able to stay in business 
overnight if it weren't for the FBI'.(31) In this respect, the HUAC operated on the same 
basis as every other form of the proverbial kangaroo court throughout history. The accused 
did not appear before the Committee to argue a case, but to demonstrate deference to the 
Committee and allegiance to the status quo (and the vested interests behind it). Those who 
failed to submit to such ideological policing, specifically aimed at Hollywood with a view 
to purging the cultural beacon of the Western world of crimethink, received the mark of 
otherness for daring to doubt the right of the HUAC to assume the role of thought police. 
Since the HUAC operated on the principle that ‘those who are not for us are against us', 
it was taken

for granted that refusal to venerate the Committee with the requisite level of awe was 
tantamount to a vote for Stalinism.(32)

In the same vein, throughout the three centuries of the European witch-hunts, opposition 
to burning at the stake was identified with giving aid to witches, or even with being a 
witch oneself; thus does the very first line of the unhinged and misogynistic 
witch-hunting tract, the Malleus Maleficarum, declare that anyone who doubts the existence 
of witches is a heretic.(33) If you cast doubt on the official orthodoxy or think for 
yourself, the Brides of Satan win - as do the communists, or indeed the terrorists.

Much like the HUAC, the witch trials were less designed, as Silvia Federici has revealed, 
to save Europe from an actually existing threat than they were to neutralise a rebellious 
peasantry. Lately released from their feudal bonds by the decline of the feudal economy 
and the experience of famine and pandemic, mass deference to theocracy became notably 
lacking; fearing for its temporal power, the Catholic hierarchy turned to other means to 
protect itself.(34) Much like the HUAC, the witch trials functioned as show trials to 
identify and persecute dissenters and nonconformists, terrorising those ensnared in their 
web with the prospect of burning at the stake, and forcing them to name their associates 
in ritual punishment for disobedience and nonconformity while providing the theocratic 
Terror with new targets. Other notorious kangaroo courts, such as the Stalinist show 
trials of the Great Purge of the 1930s, performed the same function. Dissidents were 
arrested as counter-revolutionaries and forced to give up names of their associates to 
avoid the firing squad; in this instance, as in the others, opposition to abuses of power 
was equated with support for capitalist reaction - if you think for yourself, the 
counter-revolutionaries win).(35)

In all of the above examples, the climate of elevated emotions they produced functioned as 
an enabling narrative for persecution based on a fear of the other and the equally great 
lust for revenge, with the aid of an appropriate victim mentality and willing blindness to 
the difference between being criticised and being attacked. The success of this approach 
depended on the viciousness and vociferousness of the scare propaganda enabling it, and on 
the opportunities available to those so motivated to attack their political opponents in 
the name of upholding justice. The HUAC is especially instructive for us today in 
demonstrating how completely pre- and anti-democratic dynamics of fear, revenge and mob 
justice can weasel their way into formally or purportedly democratic systems of 
government, and the great damage they can do. History might exonerate the victims and 
condemn the perpetrators, but it can never recover what was lost to and by victims. 
Likewise, the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives destroyed by show trials tilting 
after witches, counter-revolutionaries and other deviants and evil-prone misfits can never 
be reclaimed, even if history later condemns the institutions that took them.

Hobgoblins and the News Cycle

The essential problem of historical show trials is the fact that the moral-panic 
narratives upon which they turned could be reinvented in other forms, giving rise to new 
deviant stereotypes, new persecutions and new blood lettings. This is complicated by the 
characteristically deceptive nature of scapegoating propaganda, and the difficulty of 
combating the hegemony of the corporate mass media. One particularly courageous attempt to 
confront this problem has been the vastly underrated seminal study of corporate propaganda 
by Alex Carey in his Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, which examines, among other things, 
the origins of the HUAC.(36) Commenting on the origins of what became the public relations 
industry (or these days ‘strategic communication'), Carey notes 
‘three[twentieth-century]developments of great political importance: the growth of 
democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a 
means of protecting corporate power against democracy'(37) - factors of particular 
significance where the national election cycle is concerned, paradoxically enough. In a 
remarkable passage, while ruminating at some length on the historical relationship between 
these three developments and Hofstadter's ‘paranoid style', Carey describes a three-stage 
process for the reconstruction of ideological orthodoxy under cover of what is essentially 
moral panic:

1. A threat (real or imagined) from outside the United States achieves a dramatic impact 
on popular consciousness;2. This effect occurs at a time when liberal reforms and popular 
hostility to the large corporations and the power they exercise are perceived by 
conservative interests as a profound threat from inside the U.S. social and political 
system. Finally, 3. The two perceived threats merge, to the discredit of the internal 
reforms and of any political party, persons or policies associated with them.(38)

We would do well to recall that this was published in 1995; I have read no eerier 
foreshadowing of the future than this. Some of Carey's examples are referred to above, 
others may be found in earlier periods of American nativism.(39) Carey's description of 
corporate propaganda in the United States recalls instances of deviance production evident 
in premodern and totalitarian societies, raising serious questions as to how deeply 
entrenched the basic assumptions fuelling them are in our own period. While some might 
read conspiracy theorising in such commentary, note what Edward Bernays, the ‘Father of 
Public Relations', wrote in his own work on the subject: ‘the conscious and intelligent 
manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in 
democratic society' -

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government 
which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our 
tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of ... It is they 
who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and 
contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.(40)

Alex Carey notes that this ‘conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits 
and opinions of the masses' takes the form of the development of a corporate narrative 
that identifies the particular, sectional and partisan interests of a burgeoning corporate 
power with the common interest of the nation as a whole. In this narrative, defenders of 
partisan economic interests were provided with a means of blame-shifting by wilfully 
conflating criticism of one's conduct with attacks on one's rights and person, as per the 
false-dilemma fallacy associated with moral disengagement. It was unthinkable that one 
could criticise prevailing economic and social orthodoxies because they deserved it; 
within the binary mode of thinking, one could only be for an increasingly oligarchic 
status quo, or outside and against America.

It was blinkered thinking of this kind that gave birth to the HUAC. A paradox is 
conspicuous here in that the HUAC acted in the name of defending democratic norms while 
using methods previously associated with the Great Purge and the European witch-hunts. A 
direct comparison is unnecessary to show that the dynamics upon which the HUAC turned the 
production of deviance and victim-blaming based on a victim complex enabled by a tendency 
to identify doubt in the prevailing orthodoxies with giving aid to the evil-doers - were 
identical. The false dilemma was equally serviceable whether the kangaroo court took an 
institutional form or the form of ‘inquisitorial theatre', sustained by public opinion 
shaped and moulded by public-relations narratives designed to ‘pull the wires which 
control the public mind'.

Australian Hobgoblins

The recent history of election cycles in Australia bears out this point, the most glaring 
example being the fallout from the terrorist attacks of 2001. Katherine Gleeson notes that 
this was one of several gifts of heaven-sent manna received by Prime Minister John Howard, 
who in using terrorism for electoral purposes set a precedent for all who followed on the 
basis of deviance production and scapegoating, the oldest tricks in the book. 
‘Historically,' Gleeson writes, ‘provoked attack offers leaders an extraordinary 
opportunity for increased political legitimacy' -

With an election looming and trailing in the polls, the chance to engage Australia in what 
was perceived publicly as a legitimate war was arguably too good a political offering to 
passup. According to McAllister, the Labor Party held a 13-point lead over the Liberal 
Party in the first six months of 2001, and looked set for defeat were it not for the 
vote-turning issues of border protection and terrorism. Polls throughout the world 
reflected the reality that voters opt to support the incumbent government in times of 
uncertainty and existential threat; Howard rode this wave with great success. He was 
remade as something of a war leader in the style of his great mentor Robert Menzies; he 
became the ‘deputy sheriff' he had aspired to two years prior; he successfully wedged the 
ALP on security; he took on a new image as a gutsy conviction politician; and he promised 
Australians security against that which they feared (rationally or otherwise).(41)

As a precursor to the torrent of xenophobia and Islamophobia unleashed in September 2001 
came the Tampa affair (in August that year), in which 438 refugees from Afghanistan were 
rescued by the eponymous Norwegian vessel in international waters, then denied entry into 
Australia. Together with the ‘children overboard' affair in October, in which the 
government lied about refugees throwing their children into the water as their boat sank, 
these incidents were widely regarded as the catalysts for the Coalition victory in the 
November federal elections.(42) Ian Ward noted that ‘these events were part of a carefully 
calculated Liberal Party strategy to revive its flagging electoral stocks'(43) - one whose 
wild success offered a clear precedent for elections to come. While it has never been 
illegal to seek asylum in Australia, Howard nevertheless declared on 3AW radio his belief 
‘that it is in Australia's national interest that we draw a line on what is increasingly 
becoming an uncontrollable number of illegal arrivals in this country'.(44) Such comments 
were dabbling in both deviance production and moral disengagement; the labelling of 
refugees as ‘illegals' demonised and dehumanised them while allowing Howard to play the 
victim of this threat to Australia's national interest, and to victimise those who were 
already victims of a war he had played a part in starting.

These were also characteristic features of the children overboard affair, where on the eve 
of the 2001 election the Howard government claimed that asylum seekers had thrown their 
children into the sea as their fishing vessel sunk. These claims were false - at the time 
of the alleged incident the boat, with 223 people on board, including fifty-six children, 
was still afloat and limping back towards Indonesia.(45) A Senate inquiry established to 
determine what had happened later concluded that ‘[t]he story was in fact untrue', and 
that the Howard government had known they were

false accusations prior to the federal election.(46) The report explicitly noted that 
these false claims were ‘used by the Government to demonise[asylum seekers]as part of the 
argument for the need for a "tough" stand against external threats and in favour of 
"putting Australia's interests first"'.(47) Despite these and subsequent findings against 
the government's claims, the timing of a second Senate inquiry prior to the 2004 election 
permitted the affair to dominate that campaign too, once more helping to return the Howard 
gov - ern ment to office.(48) Such was its distain for Howard's ‘[cynical exploiting 
of]voters' fears of a wave of illegal immigrants by demonising asylum-seekers', that even 
the usually ultraconservative Australian newspaper entitled one story, ‘PM's Credibility 
Blown out of the Water', adding that ‘this disturbing saga still has a long way to go'.(49)

Not one to let facts get in the way of inquisitorial theatre, however, Howard continued to 
campaign on ‘border protection', to great media fanfare led by papers like The Australian, 
famously declaring that ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in 
which they come', and continuing to stir the pot with comments to the effect that ‘this 
campaign, more than any other that I have been involved in, is very much about ... having 
an uncompromising view about the fundamental right of this country to protect its 
borders'.(50) Border protection was never in question, though Howard's insinuation that it 
was carried the implicit assumption, rarely challenged by the mass media, that Australia's 
adherence to international refugee conventions was undermining Australian sovereignty. 
Howard's victim complex in this respect reflected his moral disengagement, manifest in his 
victimisation of unfortunates later found to be legitimate refugees - many of whom 
eventually resettled in New Zealand.

Rick Kuhn notes that this campaign strategy provided Howardwith a way to promote the 
unpopular austerity platform that had seen the Liberal Party lose the ‘unlosable' 1993 
election. With a hat tipped to the rising figure of Pauline Hanson, whose policies he 
would eventually appropriate as a strategy to undermine her political support, racism 
provided an eminently suitable distraction - one that could be combined with Reaganite 
counter-terrorism narratives and incipient xenophobia in the wake of the September 11 
terrorist atrocities in the United States.(51) These inevitably received similar treatment 
according to the established script. Howard led the way in linking terrorism and illegal 
immigration, declaring on the AM radio program on 19 September 2001 that ‘every country 
has a redoubled obligation in the light of what has happened to scrutinise very carefully 
who is coming into this country'(52) - the linking of one existential threat to another 
being an example of another noted phenomenon that moral panic researchers have called 
‘convergence'.(53) In another speech, Howard announced that Australian voters ‘must also 
ask themselves who is better able to lead this country in the dangerously different 
strategic and economic circumstances in which the country now finds itself'(54) - being 
‘tough on terrorism' was now a campaign platform.

As the basis for the scare cycle, such talk also begat the ‘Pacific Solution', whereby 
refugees to Australia would be warehoused offshore, which by 2005 had cost $220 million, 
in addition to the $336 million spent on a new 800-bed detention camp on Christmas Island, 
and $58 on Manus Island.(55) As it turned out, the border protection industry would become 
a useful Keynesian economic stimulus and job-creation program - for border guards, 
Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers, as well as their suppliers and outfitters - with 
few complaints from the paragons of laissez-faire capitalism about state intervention in 
economic life. Indeed, as one commentator put it, ‘stopping the boats is bad for 
business'.(56) Howard gloated as he was re-elected that people would ‘remember that period 
that I stopped the boats'.(57)

In 2004, Howard again deployed the rhetoric that had worked so famously four years 
before.(58) In this, as before, he had the help of Toby Ralph, known these days for taking 
a job in 2007 for the Australian Constructors Association to develop a strategy for 
unleashing a ‘politically damaging campaign' against the Australian Labor Party unless it 
toned down its opposition to the government's Work Choices legislation,(59) the 
Association clearly recognising Ralph's skill in blame-shifting. Crikey notes that the 
plan ‘was shelved when Labor agreed to postpone its plans to abolish the building industry 
watchdog'.(60) Howard's re-election speech made sure to make hay with popular fears of 
terrorism, alleging that ‘terrorism has cast a dark cloud over the world', and that ‘it is 
a challenge that must be repulsed, and a challenge best repulsed by us being determined to 
live the lives of a free and democratic society'.(61) He added, ‘whether popular or not, I 
will never hesitate to do whatever is right and necessary, to protect Australia and the 
Australian people against the threat of terrorism'.(62)

As the already toxic political discourse was further inflamed by such comments, spilling 
over into ugly episodes such as the Cronulla race riots of 2005, Howard pressed on, 
claiming it was in ‘Australia's national interest' to support the continuing war on 
terror, even as this created the conditions for the rise of Islamic State, as Paula 
Matthewson has saliently observed:

While it may be eminently logical to bolster security measures to deal with the rise of 
organised and lone wolf terrorists at home, it makes little sense to participate in a 
military campaign similar to the one that caused home-grown extremists to arise in the 
first place.(63)

Otherwise preoccupied with the emotions of the moment, however, the kangaroo court of 
Australian public opinion failed to notice or anticipate the possibility of such 
developments. In 2003, The Onion quipped: ‘If you thought Osama bin Laden was bad, just 
wait until the countless children who become orphaned by U.S. bombs in thecoming weeks are 
all grown up',(64) as today they now are, with the predicted consequences now bemoaned by 
all and used as an excuse for further responses along the same lines as those that created 
the problem to begin with, ad infinitum.

Lacking new major events to seize on, Howard was ousted from office in 2007, although he 
left a lasting legacy - attack ads from both sides of the political fence seeking to 
capitalise on the priming of hateful negativity throughout the electorate.(65) In 2013, 
newsmedia doyen Laurie Oakes noted with approval that ‘Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is 
turning back the tide on the boats', recalling that ‘Rudd once promised not to "lurch to 
the Right" on border protection' - no one was complaining that he was adhering to 
Hofstadter's paranoid style too.(66) As the saying goes, however, those who live by the 
sword die by it too: an unprecedented scare campaign around Rudd's proposed Resource Super 
Profit Tax (RSPT) on mining radically undermined the government and contributed to Rudd's 
downfall in June 2010, reminding us of Carey's observation regarding the growth of 
democracy alongside the growth of corporate power, the latter in this case funding a 
supreme example of a constructed scare campaign via the amplification of what it meant to 
be Australian.(67)

Having taken advantage of the unprecedented corporate-funded scare campaign, Prime 
Minister Julia Gillard likewise pandered to the prevailing sentiment regarding refugees, 
eventually managing to have the Australian mainland excised from the migration zone for 
the purposes of avoiding national commitments to international refugee conventions - 
something Howard had tried to do and failed, his backbench having determined the strategy 
too mercenary and dishonest.(68) Following the example of her predecessor, Gillard too 
died by the sword, this time at the hands of Howard's disciple Tony Abbott, who in making 
his election strategy the production of deviance through three-word scare slogans 
demonstrated that he had learnt his lessons well.(69) Abbott declared at around this time: 
‘What we will ensure is that we are not played for mugs by the people-smugglers and their 
customers ... we will not be taken for a ride as a nation and a people'(70) - though if he 
had sincerely wanted to break the people smugglers' ‘business model', he only needed to 
permit the asylum seekers entry into the country in line with international refugee 
conventions. Not being serviceable to scare-cycle narratives, however, such options were 
off the table.

Abbott's use of three-word slogans (for example, ‘Stop the Boats') provides relevant 
context for the recent 2016 double dissolution election, triggered by the failure of a 
Bill to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). Minister for 
Industrial Relations Senator Michaelia Cash alleged of the construction industry that ‘the 
level of industrial unlawfulness in this sector adds to the cost of every project', 
thereby hurting productivity (and, by implication, the national good, as per Carey's 
corporatist narrative referred to above).(7)1 Cash alleged that the upshot of these 
attacks on productivity and idealism was that ‘Australians pay more'; she and the 
government remained silent, however, on the rising cost of electricity thanks to the $48 
billion in taxpayer funds spent augmenting the power grid.(72) The failure of the Turnbull 
government's scare narrative to capture the public imagination in light of such 
inconsistencies perhaps goes some way towards explaining Turnbull's reversion to 
xenophobia in the face of low approval ratings prior to the 2016 election. Similar 
behaviour has also been a marked characteristic of his US

counterpart in Donald Trump, both as a campaign strategy and a response to low approval 
ratings, evidencing Ghassan Hage's contention that ‘Muslim-bashing has become de rigeur 
and widely seen by politicians as a route to popular success', as has war against their 
countries.(73) This fact certainly proved a salient one for Pauline Hanson, returned at 
the recent election to the Senate as the spokesperson for her revitalised One Nation 
party.(74)

For his part, the Assistant National Secretary for the Construction, Forestry, Mining and 
Energy Union (CFMEU), Dave Noonan, said supporters of the ABCC had

... engaged in a campaign of smear and disinformation calculated to induce a moral panic 
in the community about the construction industry ... The reason for that is simply to 
persuade the public to accept draconian laws in relation to industrial relations that 
would not otherwise be acceptable.(75)

To the extent that in initiating another stage of the scare cycle the government was 
reading from the age-old script of moral panicking and witch-hunting, Noonan may have been 
unaware how right he really was.

Conclusion

As scapegoating narratives become intertwined with national elections and the news cycle - 
devoted to the vested interests of the billionaires who own and control the mass media and 
the task of manufacturing consent through deviance production - historical forms of 
panic-driven scapegoating may be seen as precursors to contemporary varieties. Just as 
history repeats in the appearance and reappearance of campaigns of persecution carried out 
by witch-hunts, literal and otherwise, so too is the election cycle being reduced to a 
scare cycle in which electoral success is measured in terms of the capacity to menace the 
public with imaginary hobgoblins.

Election campaigns in Australia over the last fifteen years at least have far more in 
common with the kangaroo courts of history than contests of policy traditionally 
associated with representative democracy - more even perhaps than the personality contests 
that have tended to substitute for policy debates in the contemporary period. Where 
scaremongering becomes a basis of election cycles, its narratives provide candidates with 
pretexts to reconstruct themselves as defenders of the nation, regardless of their actual 
track record, or their support for the kind of neoliberal social and economic policies 
producing disastrous effects for the living conditions and opportunities of majority 
populations. In doing this, they represent a tacit admission of failure on the part of 
those seeking to exonerate themselves of blame, and of a broader failure of the system 
overall. ?

Ben Debney lives in Melbourne, Australia. Twitter: @itesau

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Categories: Edition 91,

http://organisemagazine.org.uk/2019/03/18/the-scare-cycle-moral-panics-and-national-elections/

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