Politics & Power Quote by Mark Poster

Poster’s line is a cold-blooded reversal of the usual script: terrorism isn’t just a threat governments respond to; it’s a political resource governments can spend. The phrasing “in good part” matters. It sidesteps conspiracy-bait absolutism and instead makes a structural claim: even when terrorism is real, the official story around it can be engineered into propaganda. That restraint is what gives the accusation bite.

The subtext is about narrative management. “Deflect attention” implies a media ecology where outrage is finite and attention is the true budget. If the public can be kept staring outward, they’re less likely to scrutinize what’s happening inward: surveillance creep, militarized policing, emergency powers that never quite expire. Poster’s sharpest move is “mostly imagined.” He’s not denying attacks; he’s pointing to how the “outside enemy” becomes a composite figure, inflated beyond evidence, stripped of specificity, and made to stand for a permanent state of danger. That imagined enemy is “highly dangerous” precisely because it’s narrative-proof: you can’t negotiate with a symbol, and you can’t measure the endpoint of a feeling.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th/early-21st-century postmodern critique of power: governance increasingly operates through images, risk discourse, and managed fear. Poster is pressing readers to ask not only “Are we safe?” but “Who benefits from how safety is described?” It’s a warning about how democracies can be softened into compliance without announcing themselves as authoritarian.