It is the middle of the night. A firefighter quietly closes the door behind him, drives to the edge of town and pours flammable liquid inside an abandoned warehouse. A few minutes later, a pillar of fire cuts through the darkness. An hour after that, the same man appears in full gear, heroically extinguishing the blaze in front of local television cameras. A hero \u201cfighting evil\u201d that he himself released only moments earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The firefighter-arsonist lives from fire and for fire. When there are too few fires, he creates them himself. In his world, there can be no heroism without catastrophe, and no identity without heroism<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same mechanism \u2014 though in a far more sophisticated form \u2014 can now be seen in the world of institutions that claim to \u201cstand guard over the good.\u201d If someone\u2019s business model and moral identity depend on fighting hatred, terrorism or disinformation<\/a>, evil stops being merely an enemy<\/strong>. It also becomes a resource. The problem, in this case, lies in a market where grants, donations, clicks and votes are sold. The greater the threat, the larger the budgets and the higher the status of those who declare themselves engaged in \u201cfighting evil.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a foundation long regarded as an iconic organisation monitoring right-wing extremism, was accused of supporting\u2026 the Ku Klux Klan. According to federal prosecutors, the foundation allegedly channelled more than 3 million dollars to people associated with the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations and other extremist groups<\/strong>. The FBI and prosecutors allege that instead of \u201cdemonstrating effectiveness in dismantling extremism,\u201d the organisation in practice \u201cfunded it.\u201d In doing so, they claim, it turned the activity of its enemies into evidence for its own purposes and into media-ready reports for donors.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCultivating one\u2019s own enemy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n