Securitization of information causes violent regimes of fear and control – war on terror proves
Van der Pijl ’18 [Kees; January; Chair of International Relations and the University of Sussex, Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy (CGPE), President of the Committee of Vigilance against Resurgent Facism; Surveillance Capitalism and Crisis; “Introduction,” p. 5] SPark
The United States has sought to turn its historic advantage of hosting the world’s key IT industries into a competitive advantage. Profiting from its militarypre-eminence, its role as the provider of the world’s reserve currency, and enjoying the privilege of running permanent budget, commercial, and current account deficits, the US worked with the IT firms to establish a global security state grounded in ‘Total Information Awareness’. This is the link between the surveillance regime (which includes the voluntary deposition of personal data in social media) and the War on Terror. On the basis of its information advantage, the United States keeps global society in a state of tension by a range of military and intelligence activitiestargeting ‘demographic bulges’ in the reserve army of labour. In the process, even risking or provoking acts of violence against US/Western targets is part of the scenario because this allows armed control to be imposed. A domesticpolitics of fear has been deployed to win public support.
All this was explicitly discussed as a single project in the Israeli-US NeoCon discussions on a War on Terror. It was originally worked out in the early 1980s and revived after the Twin Towers attacks on 9/11, combining the attack on terrorists with pre-emptive war against ‘states supporting terror’ as well as imposing the corollary surveillance regime and suspending a range of freedoms on the home front.
Ultimately the doctrine behind the global strategy of tension entails the explicit option and regular practice of targeted assassination of opponents. ‘The subliminal purpose of terror tactics,’ Douglas Valentine argues in his book on the ‘Phoenix’ assassination programme in Vietnam, ‘was to drive people into a state of infantile dependence. In this sense, the CIA psy[chological] war[fare] experts were not exorcists come to heal Vietnam and liberate it from Communist demons; their spells were meant to break up the society and project its repressed homicidal impulses onto the Communists’ (Valentine 2000: 63, emphasis added). This insight still today applies to the condition of Western society in the War on Terror. As Dominick Jenkins observes, the Bush administration began the practice of making al-Qaeda a blank screen for the people’s fears; the spectacular theatrics of the Twin Towers collapses was exploited to show ‘the existence of a new kind of terrorist network with the power to threaten civilisation itself’ (Jenkins 2002: 265).
