The history this book describes takes us into an Orwellian universe in which truth is often a cynical device, in which concepts appear to mean their opposites, and in which our civilisation's grand dreams of progress and enlightenment are drawn aside to reveal an underlying structure of baseness and horror. Yet the European political theorist R. N. Berki sees no contradictions. As important as it is to struggle against such dilemmas, they will not be easily escaped, and not by simplistic appeals to truth. Security has no truth. The truth turned upside down.
Security has no truth .
While security is always spoken about as a universal, commonsense value, I wonder if security's power instead lies in the very slipperiness of its significations, its ironic structure of meaning, its ability to have an almost universal appeal yet name very different arrangements of order and possibility for different groups of people. Thus, it may be more useful to worry less about what security is than how it operates as a form of power . My view is that security is a particularly sweeping and insidious form of power that runs through the entire social body. When we see the Current Affairs Bulletin describe the Cold War in 1952 as less a strategic contest than 'a struggle for the hearts and minds of men', or John Howard say in the 1999 Federation Address that 'the success or failure of a nation essentially begins in the homes of its people', we are witness to a technology which seeks to tie our bodies and hearts into a transnational circulation of power, money and resources - too often without our full understanding or say. There are countless other examples, from figures as diverse as Henry Parkes, Billy Hughes, John Curtin, Paul Keating and Mahathir Mohammed.