Colin Todhunter: Imperialism In The X-Factor Age

In Vietnam, Agent Orange was dropped by the US to poison a foreign population. In Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, depleted uranium was used. In Western countries, things are a bit more complicated, because various states have tended to avoid using direct forms of physical violence to quell their own populations, unless you belong to some marginalized group or hit a raw nerve, as did the Occupy Movement last year. The pretence of democracy and individual rights has to be maintained. One option has been to use South American crack cocaine to dope up potential troublesome sections of the population. Its worked wonders: Highly lucrative for the drug running intelligence agencies and banks awash with drug money, while at the same time serving to dampen political dissent in the most economically and socially deprived areas. Another tactic has of course been the massive ever increasing growth of the surveillance industry to monitor ordinary citizens. But drugs, surveillance and direct violence are kind of a last resort to keep a population in check. Notwithstanding baton charges, tear gas and the use of rubber bullets on the European mainland and that the US Government is not ruling out the use of violence on its own people, ideology via the media has, and continues to be the choice of method for population control in Western countries. Whether its through the paranoia induced by the fear of terrorism or more general propaganda spewed out by the mainstream news channels, political agendas and modes of thought are encouraged which seek to guarantee subservience and integration, rather than forms of critical thought or action that may lead to a direct questioning of, or a challenge to prevailing forms of institutionalized power. From trade unions to political parties, oppositional groups are infiltrated, deradicalised and incorporated into the system, and critical stances are stifled, ridiculed or marginalized. Consensus is manufactured both in cultural and political terms.