Fear--And How To (Ab)use It

The Geek in former days enjoyed England. It was a great place to visit in all respects.

Not now. Now, if you held a gun to the Geekmo's head and said, "Get on the plane or I'll shoot," the Geek would have to answer, "Pull the trigger. It's faster and won't hurt so much."

"Why's that?" You ask.

Simple. To paraphrase Lincoln Steffen's (in)famous statement about his trip to post-revolutionary Russia, "I've been over to the future and it doesn't work."

In recent years, England has become a dystopia of intrusive nanny statism, which not only bodes to become worse, but may serve as a model for the United States.

British politicians have become masters and mistresses of exploiting fear. Preying with great success on public apprehensions, many of which were artificially generated, the governments of Blair and now Brown have successfully turned the "sceptered isle" into a paranoid nation of health Nazis and safety Fascists.

The Geek sets to one side the health Nazism to focus on the issue of safety and security.

Pushing the fear button of terrorism, Her Majesty's Government has put a number of liberty reducing measures into place. Since success breeds ambition, HMG now hopes to put further intrusions into place.

The most worrisome of these is the national identity card scheme.

"What's that got to do with us?" You object.

Plenty. It is not unlike the Real ID plan foisted on us in the wake of 9/11. And, like the Real ID exercise in government intrusion, it bodes well to be the nose of the camel in our private, personal tents.

OK, the real rub is that our government, in tandem with the British, is seeking to heighten our fear of shadowy figures labeled "terrorists," to put each and every one of us under greater scrutiny not only as regards actions and behaviors once thought private and personal but to examine (and, if possible) control and limit our words, or access to the words of others and even our very thoughts.

You shake your head slowly. "Come on, Geek! You're getting paranoid."

The Geek wishes that might be the case, but he can't. There are three reasons. Human nature. American history. HR 1955, "The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act."

Walk through the reasons with the Geek and see if we're in tandem when we get to the end. OK?

First of all, the nature of we humans. Fear is the primal emotion. It is the most powerful of the many to which we are all heir. It is the emotion that serves to protect us--or destroy us. Because of its power and universality, it is the best tool for those who wish to manipulate us whether genuine terrorists, advertisers, or politicians.

Another universality of human nature links with the first. Politics is all about power as the Geek has written previously. Politicians seek to maintain and expand their power over the perceptions, beliefs, and behavior of those subject to their sway.

The use of fear is an almost fail-safe way to expand the authority of government and the politicians which comprise it.

Now, let's take a short look at American history. Relatively recent history, the years after the Second World War when the greatest fear of Americans was Communism. For just over ten years, Americans were bludgeoned with fear of Communist subversives in our midst, Communist spies under our beds. It was a time of blacklists, silent lips, books not written or, if written, not published, books not read, thoughts not shared.

It was a time which bears the name of one man, Joe McCarthy, the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin.

Get a grip on this. Senator McCarthy might have given his name to this period of great fear, but he didn't manufacture--or exploit--the fear on his own. He had ample assistance from a number of bellowing stegosaurs such as Pat McCarran (D-NV) and Karl Mundt (R-SD).

(A side note: Karl Mundt once described the Constitutionally embedded rights of free press and freedom of speech as "extreme privileges," which shows the mentality of the fear provoking, power hungry politicos of a half century ago.)

Behind and above all the bloviating, hyperventilating congresswallahs was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, his tight-suited, white-shirted Special Agents and the Feeb's extensive files fed and led the great Anti-Communist Crusade as it rolled over lives, careers, and reputations without regard to truth or honesty.

The juggernaut rolled on and on through the Fifties, the Sixties, and into the Seventies crushing almost all who sought to stand up to it, to block it, to slow its destructive careening across the American political and social landscape.

It sputtered for awhile in the late Seventies only to lurch back to a simulacrum of life in the Eighties when Ronald Reagan brought us "Morning in America." Then, finally, the Great Crusade seemed to have died for once and for all with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Heck, the Commies were gone. It was "the end of history."

Now, like one of those Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the mentality which produced the Great Anti-Communist Crusade is back. The cause of the fear may have changed but the goal remains the same.

The fear to be stoked and exploited now?

Simple: Terrorism. (Notice, that is not the actual adversary of the US or the West today. As you know, the real enemy is Islamism and its violent arm, Jihadism.)

The goal?

Equally simple: Increased governmental power over ideas, words, beliefs, and, thus, behavior.

This brings us to the third reason, the reason that links past and present, the US with the United Kingdom.

HR 1955. (There is a delicious irony to this bill number. 1955 was the year after McCarthy was censured by the Senate for disrespecting the body, but it marked an uptick in the Great Anti-Communist Crusade.)

Sponsored by Rep Jane Harman (D-CA), the bill passed the House with only six dissenting votes just over a month ago and now rests with the Senate Homeland Security and Government Operations Committee. (You might recall that Joe McCarthy gained his renown as chairman of a Government Operations subcommittee.)

Ms Harman's bill seems innocuous enough as it simply establishes a non-partisan study commission charged with investigating how radicalization might occur among Americans as well as how terrorism might become an expanded homegrown threat. It also provides for the commission to propose legislation to avert threats and for the establishment of an "Excellence Center" to continue to devise ways and means of countering homegrown terrorism and ideological radicalization.

(The entire text is available for your edification and deliction at this site if you want it fast. http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/11/25/p21365)

Legislation always looks innocuous, filled with good intentions, written to seem both rational and fear reducing. If you don't believe the Geek, take a look at the Communist Control Act or the McCarran-Walters Act. They were written to seem limited, prudential, fear reducing. In their effect they were anything but.

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act in conjunction with the hopelessly mis-named USA Patriot Act points at a future every bit as grimly marked with federal government intrusion in the words, thoughts, and behaviors of Americans as that already underway in the United Kingdom.

Privacy is central to a full, effective life. The ultimate, most basic purpose of a liberal state is to protect, jealously guard even, the rights of privacy which make a citizen a whole, self-actualizing individual.

The mantra of the Blair and Brown ministries, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," will soon be heard here, brayed to the skies by the congresswallahs seeking to terminally undermine our God (and Constitutionally) given right of private existence.

Recently, a high ranking US intelligence official blithely declared that we Americans would have to redefine privacy given the technology currently existing. He missed the point. It is our choice what and how much of ourselves we will display to the world on the Internet. We decide how we will either expose or conceal ourselves in the virtual universe.

Our choice. Not the government's.

Freedom means the right to choose. To choose whether to be naked to the world or not.

In so far as the past is prologue, to the extent that England shows the wave of tomorrow, fear exploiting politicians will do whatever they think necessary to deny us the right of choice, the freedom to be private selves. It is up to us to stop the newest juggernaut before it crushes us all.

We don't surrender to the Jihadists. We must not surrender to fear and fear mongers in Congress.