Tag Archives: The Power of Fear and Nightmares Crime Labeling Theory Deviance Adam Curtis Stuart Hall Moral Panic Mugging Terrorism Terrorist

I’m on a bit of a BBC documentary binge atm. Though this clip is an hour long, you get some of the idea after only watching the first ten minutes. This is another BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, called the Power of Fear and Nightmares.

This documentary argues how the nature of politics in the west has endured a very significant shift in incentives in the past couple of decades. Politicians in the past were focussed on progressed, achieving goals and bringing about good for the public. Now, their role is one that solely protects us from looming dangers like global terrorism and global warming. Adam Curtiss, in his documentary, argues that these dangers are grossly exaggerated if not fabricated to keep a certain ruling elite in power at the expense of spreading fear throughout a society. Politics is no longer a business of bringing about good. Instead, politicians have become managers who can control our fear and claim to know how to protect us from them.

He explains how the fear of Al-Qaeda after 9/11 was hyperbole to say the least. The American media claimed Al-Qaeda had sleeper cells in over 60 countries, including the United States. Additionally, they claimed of Al-Qaedas extensive military arsenal, their hidden bunkers inside caves, and their shadow influence within politics themselves. Adam Curtiss’ basic arguement is that the political ruling elite keep themselves in power by fabricating and emphasizing certain dangers, and claiming to have solutions to them, to spread fear to all their voters and convince them that they (the politicians) can address these problems front on.

It is probably obvious that many parallels can be drawn between this and Stuart Hall’s Moral Panic. In the same way that terrorism and Al-Qaeda’s threat was a gross exaggeration by politicians and the media, the fear of muggings in Britain was very much the same. The introduction of a new label (both “terrorism” and “muggings”) gave rise to a new fear of a particular social problem. This lead to the politics to readjust itself to address these issues and make sure they were dealt with in the appropriate manner. These new labels and the media’s responsibility for portraying them as a “new strain” of crimes/dangers lead to a dissipation of fear throughout the mass public.

I think these two points (the one made by the documentary, the other by Stuart Hall in ‘Moral Panic’) is that crime is not as clear cut and statistically grounded as it is portrayed. The use of labels can lead to the rise of an apparent crime, when in actuality there has not been any new crime at all. A perfect example of a by product of this mentality is the color-coded terror alert warnings (yellow, orange and red) that were on the news for years after september 11th. I lived in NYC for all of that time, and even when the terror alerts were orange or even red, nothing ever happened! It was just a tool to spread fear.

-Nikhil