Manufactured external enemies alternately take domestic and foreign forms

Evidence

The nosology that Freud ultimately develops always involves substitutions and topographical articulations and disappearing acts. Distinct defense mechanisms are put in place that constitute and deconstitute the enemy object in complex ways along shifting lines of interiority and exteriority, the enemy within and the enemy without. “In phobia of animals the danger seems to be still felt entirely as an external one, just as it has undergone an external displacement in the symptom. In obsessional neuroses the danger is much more internalized.” (145). Freud designates these rwo spheres of enmity as “social” versus “moral.” “That portion of anxiety in regard to the super-ego which constitutes social anxiety still represents an internal substitute for an external danger, while the other portion-moral anxiety-is already completely endo-psychic” (145-46). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 448 (#expands, via linked claim)

Unity is therefore something that has been consciously and actively promoted by pied-noir associations from the outset. In 1977, the first edition of L’Algérianiste, the monthly magazine of the Cercle Algérianiste, opened with the declaration: ‘We want to maintain our identity, living as we want to, proud of our past and strong because of our fraternal links.’ A decade previously, another pied-noir publication, L’Echo d’Oran, placed a similar stress on the twin themes of ‘solidarity’ and ‘friendship’ in 1965 when it reminded readers of the proverb: ‘Defeated, divided, a country dies. / Defeated, united, a country is reborn.’ Believing that there were plenty of outside forces who would seek to sow disunity for their own gains, maintaining internal unity was advocated by associations as the best way to guarantee the survival of the Pieds-Noirs as a collective entity and the most effective means of ensuring that their demands were taken seriously by the French state. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 649 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A manufactured external enemy masks and justifies internal caste inequality — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1194; The flexible terrorist category is repurposed against domestic movements threatening empire; When one manufactured enemy faded, nationalism simply found a new target form — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1398 (+8 more)

Related

• Groups invoke external enemies to justify the suppression of internal disunity (similarity 0.86)
• Enemy objects shift along axes of interiority and exteriority. (similarity 0.85)
• A manufactured enemy works best against groups that reject the unifying cause (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The flexible terrorist category is repurposed against domestic movements threatening empire #exemplifies (0.92)
• Enemy objects shift along axes of interiority and exteriority. #expands (0.82) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 448
• Groups invoke external enemies to justify the suppression of internal disunity #exemplifies (0.82) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 649
• When one manufactured enemy faded, nationalism simply found a new target form #qualifies (0.80) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1398
• Removing a named external threat intensifies rather than softens dominant-group nationalism. #qualifies (0.80) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 1391
• For many Islamist radicals the internal enemy takes priority over foreign ones #complicates (0.78)
• Clash-of-civilizations rhetoric ideologically legitimized both foreign wars and domestic attacks #exemplifies (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 421