History is on our side---the threat of apocalypse mobilizes the war effort and ensures domestic totalitarian control over ideology as groundwork to justify external violence

Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed – it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida's suitably menacing phrase) "remainderless and a-symbolic destruction," then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypseis defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an "other" people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished "general population."This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag's incisive observation, from 1989, that, "Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not 'Apocalypse Now' but 'Apocalypse from Now On.'" The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse(the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful. That is, throughthe perpetual threat of destruction– through the constant reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse – the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, "life-administering." Power, he contends, "exerts a positive influence on life … [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations." In his brief comments on what20he calls "the atomic situation," however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as "managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,"agencies of modern power presume to act "on the behalf of the existence of everyone." Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating."If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, "this is not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill' it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.