The Terministic Filter of Security: Realism, Feminism and International Relations Theory Page: 25
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safety of a nation (Lifton and Falk 100) and create "what one Defense Department memo
once described as a "psychological impact...on the countries of the world" (Lifton and
Falk 31). Although writing in 1982, Lifton and Falk seem to prophesize our new post-
Soviet world full of Gulf War(s), anti-terrorist bombings in Central Asia, air campaigns
in Yugoslavia and mass migration. The new state searches for enemies in revolutionary
and disruptive societies, concerned for the dramatic pace of social change and the
revolutionary zeal of new movements.
And we then look elsewhere for targets for our increasing terror about nuclear
instability and find such targets in countries with pressures toward social change
and revolution. We thus contribute to an atmosphere of extreme polarization that
favors technological terrorism: either the use threat or violence by governments
in possession of high technology, or the attempt of small, oppositionist groups to
invoke violent threats by interrupting that technology (37).
In that way, Lifton and Falk argue that states engage in the process of threat
construction in order to stockpile weapons which justifies the need for complex
procedures and bureaucracies to tend to the weapon's existence and protect them from
threats external and internal (147). Thus, the protection racket is perpetuated.
Paul Chilton (1997) relies heavily on Murray Edelman's Politics as Symbolic
Action for his conclusions about the centrality of language, in particular metaphor, in the
formation of ideas and knowledge regimes. He argues that metaphor is exclusive: it
selects some perceptions while ignoring others. Chilton's justification for linguistic
analysis is abbreviated, but is very similar to Burke's explanation of terministic screens
and his theories of language in his book Language as Symbolic Action (Chilton 200).25
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Mueller, Eric. The Terministic Filter of Security: Realism, Feminism and International Relations Theory, thesis, December 2001; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3040/m1/28/: accessed May 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .