Fear Free

-> Censorship, Paranoia and Oppression

Welcome to your feardom!

In this session you will find that “you shouldn’t fear the fear”, as Ivan Novak from Laibach told us in an interview.

Here we gallop through the concept of freedom developed in the 2nd half of the 20th century especially in Western and Eastern Europe and the U.S. Along this notion of freedom, you will find plenty of fear, paranoia, oppression, surveillance, and a whole range of dilemmas between freedom and safety.

We recommend you here Adam Curtis’s cool film essays about the western notion of contemporary freedom. Fear is at heart of our world. fear governs us, the wish for safety becomes our ultimate drive in a society of precarity. In which way are and were freedom and fear complementary drives in neoliberalizing societies from the ’70s on?

What’s the difference between negative liberty (freedom from something) and positive liberty (freedom to do something)? Why and how has negative liberty became so prevalent in the West? Who is this Isaiah Berlin anyway, who helped shape post-war political liberalism with his distinction of positive and negative liberty?

If you look into this dossier and watch TV Free Europe on the thematic “Fear Free” day every Tuesday, you will find:
– jokes from the Kádár era, as weird prints of a Gulash-communism in Hungary
– a video performance we did at Club Aliga, the former secret campsite of the communist elite, in search of freedom and the resonance of Kádárist categories of “tűrt” (tolerated), “tiltott” (forbidden), támogatott (supported) in today’s Hungary
– from freedom to fear – What happened to our dream of freedom? – the TRAP by Adam Curtis.
– Free channels within a prison: Gabriele Stötzer in the GDR prison and Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky in the nazi prison
– From 11.9 to 9.11 – how the Fall of the Wall is part of the story of 9.11
– Laziness as an act of resistance, of doing things differently. Mladen Stilinović and his „praise of laziness”
– the silent majority / csendes többség in West and East, coined by Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan
– WHO STOLE THE SHOW? Viktor Orbán’s speech on 1989 16 june
– conspiracies: was the System Change orchestrated by the USA / CIA or UFO-s in 1989?
– The end of history coined by Fukuyama in 1989 and why did we get stuck in the 20th century? by Mark Fisher
– an interview with Ivan Novak (Laibach) by Jasna Hribernik / Studio Nova Gorica

The complementary pole of domination that is associated with danger, threat, and fear has ever since Antiquity been insurrection and revolt, the contact and association of the many that can no longer be controlled by those in power and may lead to threats to order, to disorder and chaos – Isabelle Lorey