There is a parallel between the rise and election of Obama and the rise and election of Adolf Hitler.

Have I succeeded in causing any of you to be frightened to death?

galt

And bad laws, once enacted, are rarely if ever rescinded; their acceptance makes possible the almost unnoticed passage of still worse laws. And so step by step, some very gradual, some not, we move ever further from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Where will it stop? Will it stop?

Barbara

Please note that we do not now have a draft. That is one law that was not maintained. The Alien and Sedition act was repealed. The fugitive slave law has been voided. Free speech and publication has better protection than it did during the days of the Comstock Laws. Abortion has been decriminalized (at least in part). And Prohibition was repealed.

Will constitutional erosion stop? Probably not. It will go on until the country grinds to a halt.

I just wanted to note that there have been worse things in the past than are now in force presently. Of course things can get worse than they are now. They could also get better.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Ba'al, we don't have a military draft, but we seem likely to have "Obama Youth"-- Obama's "civil defense force," obligatory for everyone aged 18-25, which he announced must be even stronger than the military, and of which, presumably, he would be Commander in Chief. Also, the huge number of volunteers working for Obama during the campaign are still marshalled, and while in the past such groups were turned over to the Democratic National Committee, now, the people around Obama want to leave them in force but still as volunteers who will support Obama and his policies These two together, plus Obama's equivocal attitude toward gun ownership, are scary; I'm sure I don't have to spell out what they are reminiscent of.

We don't have the Alien and Sedition Act, but if the Fairness Doctrine becomes law once more, as many Democrats intend, it can be the practical equivalent of that section of the Act that forbids criticism of the government, and it certainly will severely limit free speech on radio and television.

We don't have the Comstock Laws forbidding the sale and advertisement of contraceptive devices, but we still have laws against pornography and we seem likely to have new laws prohibiting the depiction of acts of violence.

Prohibition has been repealed, and in its place we have the War Against Drugs and all the laws against smoking.

I don't mean to be the voice of doom. I'm not suggesting that disaster inevitably lies ahead; it still might be averted. I'm saying that it's a very real possibility that we will take giant steps toward a fascist state once we have a Democratic president, Congress, and Supreme Court, and that burying our heads in the sand and talking blithely of checks and balances will change nothing.

Barbara
.

To Jewish Ba'al: we could do very well without using such adjectives, could we not?

Barbara

”If you study the media, as my graduate students and I do, seeking to find shifts in normative conceptualization, you discover something extremely interesting. We looked at transcripts of news programs of the major networks—NBC, ABC, CBS. We also looked at stories in the newspapers of New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We counted the frequency of certain concepts in terms used by the media. The results are very striking.” He paused.

“What did you find?” Evans said, taking his cue.

“There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster. For example during the 1980s, the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed.”

“In what way?”

“These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. It is doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on feat, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic.”

“Why should it have changed in 1989?”

. . .

“At first we thought the association was spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet empire. And the end of the Cold War that had lasted for half a century in the West.”

. . .

“I am a leading to the notion of social control, Peter. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the road—or the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.



“Fear,” Evans said.

“Exactly. For fifty years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in the state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished. Gone, vanished. Over. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something had to fill it.”

Evans frowned. “You’re saying that environmental crisis took the place of the Cold War?”

“That is what the evidence shows. Of course, now we have radical fundamentalism and post-9/11 terrorism to make us afraid, and those are certainly real reasons for fear, but that is not my point. My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before terrorism we feared the toxic environment. Before that we had the Communist menace. The point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without the fear itself. Here pervades society in all its aspects. Perpetually.”

He shifted on the concrete bench, turning away from the crowds.

“Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can’t even see—germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like to believe in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion—a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must live in fear. Amazing.

“How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations—France, Germany, Japan, the US—in fact, we inhabit exactly the same state, the State of Fear. How has that been accomplished?”

Evans said nothing. He knew it wasn’t necessary.

“Well, I shall tell you how,” he said. “In the old days—before your time, Peter—citizens of the West believed their nation-states were dominated by something called the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower warned Americans against it and the 1960s, and after two world wars Europeans knew very well what it meant in their own countries. But the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population—under the guise of promoting safety.”

“Safety is important.”

“Please. Western nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media needs scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis in fact at all.”

. . .

At the very least, we are talking about a moral outrage. Thus we can expect our religious leaders and our great humanitarian figures to cry out against this waste and the needless deaths around the world that results. But do any religious leaders speak out? No. Quite the contrary, they join the chorus. They promote ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ As if they have forgotten that what Jesus would drive is the false prophets and fearmongers out of the temple.”

He was getting quite heated now.

“What we’re talking about is a situation that is profoundly immoral. It is disgusting, if truth be told. The PLM callously ignores the plight of the poorest and most desperate human beings on our planet in order to keep fat politicians in office, rich news anchors on the air, and conniving lawyers in Mercedes-Benz convertibles. Oh, and our university professors in Volvos. Let’s not forget them.”

. . .

“What happened,” he continued, “is the universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastions of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry, formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties. All the new respective codes. Words you can’t say. Thoughts you can’t think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can’t smoke, can’t swear, can’t screw, can’t think. These institutions have been stood on their heads in a generation. It is really quite extraordinary.

“The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can throve only in a restricted setting, behind closed doors, without due process. And our society, only universities have created that—so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They’re fascist to the core, I’m telling you.”

The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."

. . .

Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media." He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then he explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.

"He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."

Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR is not "about" environmentalism, it is "about" the fear industry.
Libertarians are among the biggest consumers of fear.