#Frederick Schrecker

[mariocki]

Murder Without Crime (1950)

"No murderer can boast that he's committed the perfect murder if the body of his victim is discovered. Because the body itself is proof that the murder has been committed; thus the murder is immediately deemed imperfect."

[fatehbaz]

If American national space is an in-between zone, questions immediately arise about the nature of representation and the derived narrative conditions for claims to legitimacy. Which elements of the nation-state can be presupposed to be civilized [...] and which elements can -- or must -- be transformed because they represent fragments of the wilderness that have to be removed? During World War I and the interwar period, important early concepts were developed that help answer these questions. 

Especially in urban space, the notion of spatial restructuring was influential, and as a result the frontier model of civilization was often applied to urban space. By the 1930s, urban restructuring was routinely called for with references to “urban frontier” in Frederick Jackson Turner’s sense [...], and such language thus informed the spatial manifestation of industrial development in the city.

---

In this context, the relationship between collective violence and the law soon emerged as the most important site for the hostis humani generis constellation’s production of illegitimate Other collectives as political factions. This becomes evident in the First Red Scare in the aftermath of World War I (circa 1919–21). The First Red Scare marks a period of upheaval and civic unrest in the United States that “accompan[ied] American industrial development” [...] and that associated communism with domestic violence carried out by excluded groups, especially within the American urban population. “Native Americans, blacks, Catholics, immigrants -- all, at one time or another, embodied the threat of internal subversion,” Ellen Schrecker explains, and she adds in reference to the First Red Scare: “By the twentieth century, the American ‘Other’ had become politicized and increasingly identified with communism [...].”

---

As Bruce Franklin notes, the classic European notion of inherent civilization is fundamentally shattered by World War I, especially because the war was largely waged in Europe itself. 

As [...] discussion of pirate figures in Victorian literature has indicated, European discourses of civilization still depended on the assumption that Europeans and European space were inherently civilized. European discourses of civilization were not able to explain the war’s “insane orgy of mass murder and devastation” in any way that allowed Europeans to continue to insist on their inherent civilization. Indeed, it seemed that either Europe was civilized (in which case, World War I should not have occurred) or it had degraded into savagery (which would explain the war but was deemed an unacceptable notion). World War I thus occasioned the widespread formulation of alternative models of civilization in Europe that could restore the lost premise of inherent civilization.

These discourses borrowed from the American frontier model, especially in their references to the constitutive importance of transformative revolution and the premise of national space as an in-between zone that was the site of a perpetual civilizing effort. [...]

---

Totalitarianism, in this emerging understanding, held that the massification of populations in twentieth-century Western nation-states required a new form of political organization that responded to, and was thus theoretically based on, the notion of atomized masses. Such masses were to be justly governed by a state that loosely combined Hobbes’s idea of the Leviathan with Rousseau’s idea of social progress. The totalitarian Leviathan, representative of all, was also endowed with a coherent will that corresponded directly to the collective will of the masses. The totalitarian state was to be a living and constantly self-purifying body, made up of all the humans within it. Because of the oneness of state and human, the totalitarian state always legitimately acted on behalf of “its” humans. 

---

Text by: Sonja Schillings. “The Democratic Frontiersman and the Totalitarian Leviathan.” Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence. 2016. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[thedoctorwhocompanion]

The Web of Fear and Lethbridge-Stewart: 50 Years On

The Web of Fear and Lethbridge-Stewart: 50 Years On

On 3rd February 1968, the robot Yeti returned to our screens in The Web of Fear, an action-oriented sequel to The Abominable Snowmen. A new and darker design (sort of akin to the scary-looking Pooh Bear doll that winks at the audience, during the final shot of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh), with a handheld weapon like no other, the Great Intelligence has formulated his revenge for his…

[mariocki]

Mark Of The Phoenix (1958)

“Now, why try to scare me with all this talk about going straight?” “Because I meant it, until - until I met for the first time in five years, the world’s greatest jewel thief.” “Ah - flattery will get you nowhere; you’re only saying this because it’s true!”