[Peace-discuss] Fear renders men…stupid and miserable…

[C. G. Estabrook]

Although the commentator's penultimate paragraph is accurate, her/his account of 
the "Middle Ages," common as it is, is as intellectually respectable (if not so 
sophisticated) as a belief in phlogiston.  This sort of ignorance is pervasive 
among the college-educated political class of the US; as Chomsky says, you have 
to be highly educated to believe stuff like that. A proper corrective would be 
to read some actual history - or even basic works like the Communist Manifesto.

It's certainly true that fear has been a political motivator particularly in the 
US.  A society founded on two of the greatest crimes in human history - the 
extinction of the native Americans and the enslavement of native Africans - has 
a lot to be afraid of, perhaps principally its own conscience, if not the 
revenge of the victims. But the fear of just retribution expands in the last 
fifty years as America's victims come to include much of the world.

In their supreme cynicism, that fear has been mobilized by the American elite. 
The post-WWII domestic policy of the USG is encapsulated in the advice of 
Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg to President Truman, that he "scare the hell 
out of the American people," in order to get his imperialist policies accepted - 
policies necessitated by the fact that only WWII had cured the Depression, and 
the end of the war seemed to mean the return of the Depression.

Luckily for our rulers, the new bete noire, terrorism, was conjured within a 
decade of the disappearance of its predecessor, communism.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Fear is what makes our world turn…  GGreenwald's piece, 
> 
> [http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/02] 
> 
> is followed by several perceptive comments. I cite one of them below. 
> 
> 
> Published on Saturday, January 2, 2010 by Salon 
> <http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/02/fear/index.html>
> 
> 
>   The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears
> 
> by Glenn Greenwald
> 
> I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually 
> had an excellent column 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01brooks.html?sudsredirect=true> in 
> yesterday's /New York Times/ that makes several insightful and important 
> points.  Brooks documents how "childish, contemptuous and 
> hysterical" the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist 
> episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the always-hysterical American 
> media.  The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful 
> Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, 
> child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe.  Whenever the Government fails 
> to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly 
> combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries 
> that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever 
> happens.  Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held 
> accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders 
> ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and 
> destructive.  Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time 
> something threatening happens:  /please, take more of our privacy away; 
> monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage 
> in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people 
> without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us 
> Safe./
> 
> This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet 
> of fear and terror for years.  It regresses into pure childhood.  The 
> 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, 
> who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the 
> same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by 
> endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to 
> Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to 
> keep them Protected and Safe.  A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated 
> on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be 
> degraded and depraved.  John Adams, in his 1776 /Thoughts on Government/ 
> <http://www.ashbrook.org/library/18/adams/thoughtsongovernment.html>, 
> put it this way:
> 
>     Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is *so sordid and
>     brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates
>     so stupid and miserable*, that Americans will not be likely to
>     approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
> 
> As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in 
> maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power.  For a 
> variety of reasons, nobody aids this process more than our establishment 
> media, motivated by their own interests in ratcheting up fear and 
> Terrorism melodrama as high as possible.  The result is a citizenry far 
> more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could 
> ever dream of achieving on their own.  For that reason, a risk that is 
> completely dwarfed by numerous others 
> <http://www.unitedjustice.com/death-statistics.html> -- the risk of 
> death from Islamic Terrorism -- dominates our discourse, paralyzes us 
> with fear, leads us to destroy our economic security and eradicate 
> countless lives in more and more foreign wars, and causes us to beg and 
> plead and demand that our political leaders invade more of our privacy, 
> seize more of our freedom, and radically alter the system of government 
> we were supposed to have.  The one thing we don't do is ask whether we 
> ourselves are doing anything to fuel this problem and whether we should 
> stop doing it.  As Adams said:  fear "renders men in whose breasts it 
> predominates so stupid and miserable."
> 
> What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was 
> predicated on exactly the opposite mindset.  The Constitution is 
> grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more 
> important than mere Safety.  Even though they knew that doing so would 
> help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the 
> Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable 
> cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and 
> convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual 
> punishment.  That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, 
> limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more 
> important than mere survival and safety.  A central calculation of 
> the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints 
> on government power *even when*doing so means we live with less safety 
> and a heightened risk of danger and death.  And, of course, the 
> Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by 
> people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, 
> precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and 
> safety.
> 
> These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in 
> our political discourse.  It is fear, and only fear, that predominates.  
> No other competing values are recognized.  We have Chris 
> Matthews running around shrieking 
> <http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/#postid-updateA1> that 
> he's scared of kung-fu-wielding Terrorists.  Michael Chertoff is 
> demanding 
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/31/AR2009123101746.html> that 
> we stop listening to "privacy ideologues" -- _i.e._, that there should 
> be no limits on Government's power to invade and monitor and 
> scrutinize.  Republican leaders 
> <http://www.mattwallace.net/2005/12/john-cornyn-civil-liberties-do.html> have 
> spent the decade preaching that only Government-provided Safety, not the 
> Constitution, matters 
> <http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/000396.htm>.  All in 
> response to this week's single failed terrorist attack, there are -- as 
> always -- hysterical calls that we start more wars 
> <http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/73651-lieberman-yemen-will-be-tomorrows-war-if-preemptive-action-not-taken>, initiate 
> racial profiling 
> <http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/28/right-wing-ethnic-profiling/>, imprison 
> innocent people indefinitely 
> <http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/73883-senior-democrat-halt-detainee-transfers-to-yemen>, 
> and torture even more indiscriminately 
> <http://www.sphere.com/nation/article/poll-finds-americans-favor-waterboarding-christmas-day-terror-suspect/19299536>.  
> These are the by-products of the weakness and panic and paralyzing fear 
> that Americans have been fed in the name of Terrorism, continuously for 
> a full decade now.
> 
> Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted 
> dynamic, the point on which Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've 
> thought most important.  What matters most about this blinding fear of 
> Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result. 
>  Policies can always be changed.  What matters most is the radical 
> transformation of the national character of the United States.  Reducing 
> the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a 
> child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more 
> consequential than any specific new laws.  Fear is always the enabling 
> force of authoritarianism:  the desire to vest unlimited power in 
> political authority in exchange for promises of protection.   This is 
> what I wrote about that back in early 2006 in /How Would a Patriot Act?/:
> 
>     The president's embrace of radical theories of presidential power
>     threatens to change the system of government we have.  But worse
>     still, his administration's relentless, never-ending attempts to
>     keep the nation in a state of fear can also change the kind of
>     nation we are. 
> 
> This isn't exactly new:  many of America's most serious historical 
> transgressions 
> <http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/01/putting-terrorist-threat-into.html> -- 
> the internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War 
> I censorship laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of 
> fear-driven, *over-reaction to extrenal threats, not under-reaction*.  
> Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the 
> primary fuel over the last decade.  As the events of the last week 
> demonstrate, it continues to spread rapidly, and it produces exactly the 
> kind of citizenry about which John Adams long ago warned.
> 
> 
>  Here is a comment I found interesting:
> 
> /The fear mechanism is an old one. In the middle ages the best artists 
> of the time were hired to depict it. The murals in European churches 
> show the wonderfully imagined horrors and tortures of hell. You can 
> understand why a populace would be willing to submit to the rituals and 
> tithing of the church and to support a group of parasitic clergy living 
> in gold plated luxury in order to avoid those torments. The people would 
> be willing to go out on Crusades to prove their devotion and to bring 
> salvation to the heathens. The practices of the aristocracy, the 
> practices that caused poverty, faded into the background./
> 
> /For a while the paradigm shifted away from worshipping a church and 
> submitting to the powerful. It shifted toward rationalism and personal 
> responsibility./
> 
> /We have regressed to a people quivering before authority. "Terror" is 
> the devil on earth. Terrorism is marvelously imagined, magnified, 
> created, publicized and depicted in great vivid detail by the most 
> skilled story tellers available. It is used to get us to submit to the 
> rituals and spending required to control it. Out of our sometimes meager 
> incomes, we will support a consortium of wealthy weapons producers in 
> order to protect ourselves. Manufactured fear infantilizes us and 
> distracts us from the business of life, from education, jobs and health. 
> We follow anyone like children, joining Crusades, hoping for the 
> illusion of safety./
> 
> /In both cases, the imagination is far more destructive than the reality./
> 
> /
> /
> 
> 
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