Fear Rules
The power of irrational fear in the United States is extraordinary. It ranks up there with the Israel lobby, the military-security complex and the financial gangsters. Indeed, fear might be the most powerful force in America.
Americans are at ease with their country's aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, which has resulted in a million dead Muslim civilians and several million refugees, because the U.S. government has filled Americans with fear of terrorists. "We have to kill them over there before they come over here."
Fearful of American citizens, the U.S. government is building concentration camps apparently all over the country. According to news reports, a $385 million U.S. government contract was given by the Bush-Cheney regime to Cheney's Halliburton to build "detention centers" in the United States. The corporate media never explained for whom the detention centers are intended.
Most Americans dismiss such reports. "It can't happen here." However, in northeastern Florida not far from Tallahassee, I have seen what might be one of these camps. There is a building inside a huge open area fenced with razor wire. There is no one there and no signs. The facility appears new and unused, and does not look like an abandoned prisoner work camp.
What is it for?
Who spent all that money for what?
There are Americans who are so terrified of their lives being taken by terrorists that they are hoping the U.S. government will use nuclear weapons to destroy "the Muslim enemy." The justifications concocted for the use of nuclear bombs against Japanese civilian populations have had their effect. There are millions of Americans who wish "their" government would kill everyone that "their" government has demonized.
When I tell these people that they will die of old age without ever seeing a terrorist, they think I am insane. Don't I know that terrorists are everywhere in America? That's why we have airport security and homeland security. That's why the government is justified in breaking the law to spy on citizens without warrants. That's why the government is justified to torture people in violation of U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. If we don't torture them, American cities will go up in mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney tells us this every week.
Terrorists are everywhere. "They hate us for our freedom and democracy." When I tell America's alarmed citizens that the United States has as many stolen elections as any country and that our civil liberties have been eroded by "the war on terror," they lump me into the terrorist category. They automatically conflate factual truth with anti-Americanism.
The same mentality prevails with regard to domestic crime. Most Americans, including, unfortunately, juries, assume that if the police make a case against a person and a prosecutor prosecutes it, the defendant is guilty. Most Americans are incapable of believing that police or a prosecutor would frame an innocent person for career or bureaucratic reasons or out of pure meanness.
Yet, it happens all the time. Indeed, it is routine.
Frame-ups are so routine that 96 percent of the criminally accused will not risk a "jury of their peers," preferring to negotiate a plea bargain agreement with the prosecutor. The jury of their peers are a brainwashed lot, fearful of crime, which they have never experienced but hear about all the time. Criminals are everywhere, doing their evil deeds.
The United States has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than "authoritarian" countries such as China, a one-party state. An intelligent population might wonder how a "freedom and democracy" country could have incarceration rates far higher than a dictatorship, but Americans fail this test. The more people that are put in prison, the safer Americans feel.
Lawrence Stratton and I describe frame-up techniques in "The Tyranny of Good Intentions." Police and prosecutors even frame the guilty, as it is easier than convicting them on the evidence.
One case that has been before us for years, but is resolutely neglected by the corporate media, whose function is to scare the people, is that of Troy Davis.
Troy Davis was convicted of killing a police officer. The only evidence connecting him to the crime is the testimony of "witnesses," the vast majority of whom have withdrawn their testimony. The witnesses say they testified falsely against Davis because of police intimidation and coercion.
One would think that this would lead to a new hearing and trial. But not in America. The Republican judicial Nazis have created the concept of "finality." Even if the evidence shows that a wrongfully convicted person is innocent, finality requires that we execute him. If the convicted person is executed, we can assume he was guilty, because America has a pure justice system and never punishes the innocent. Everyone in prison and everyone executed are guilty. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in prison or executed.
It is all very simple if you are an American. America is pure, but other countries, except for our allies, are barbaric.
The same goes for our wars. Everyone we kill, whether they are passengers on Serbian commuter trains, attending weddings or funerals, or children playing soccer in Iraq, is a terrorist, or we would not have killed them. So was the little girl who was raped by our terrorist-fighting troops and then murdered, brutally, along with her family.
America only kills terrorists. If we kill you, you are a terrorist.
Americans are the salt of the earth. They never do any wrong. Only those other people do. But not the Israelis, of course.
And police, prosecutors and juries never make mistakes. Everyone accused is guilty.
Fear has made every American a suspect, eroded our rights and compromised our humanity.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Entries(RSS)
PCR is right on, as usual. We're witnessing the deconstruction of America as we know it. It's been going on for a long time, but is clearly gaining momentum now at an alarming rate with the help of the last two administrations.
Keep speaking out Paul, your voice is much appreciated and,I feel, helpful and encouraging to many.
Readers of Chroniclesmagazine.org should be aware that Mr. Roberts has agreed to do a column that has grown out of pieces he has published and sent to the magazine. The title, "Growing Up in America," reveals his subject--the contrast between the decent country of his youth and the nightmare it is turning into.
The widespread addiction to TV is one means by which this fear is spread. I refer to TV as "The Fear Vendor". Everyone I know who watches TV news regularly is so misinformed and fearful that it's impossible to hold a decent conversation with any of them.
Radio was used to the same purpose before TV and the print news medium was as well, but TV seems to be a more pervasive influence on the collective mindset of today's society than the earlier mass media were.
I watched people in a mall one day, as they walked by a kiosk manned by a single salesman with a TV on which he played a DVD recording of the sales pitch for his product. Most of the people who had just run the gauntlet of other kiosk vendors who would greet them and try to get them to stop would be brought up short, as if mesmerized, by the TV screen.
Until the addiction to TV is broken, our society seems doomed to being indoctrinated with the rankest nonsense our political class is able to shovel at them.
Would it be wild speculation to suggest that the detention camps are for "right-wing extremists" profiled not long ago by Director Napolitano of Homeland Security?
I'll be 54 next week and I feel sorry for American youngsters -- anybody under about 45, actually -- who never knew how free America once was.
"The United States has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than 'authoritarian' countries such as China, a one-party state."
While this statistic is true on its face, one could argue that authoritarian China is itself one vast prison, and that those Chinese not actually behind bars are being detained in the minimum security section of a monumental slammer. With occasional furloughs for "good" students et al.
Not picking a serious argument with PCR. Just offering a different perspective on one of his points.
Dr. Fleming @ 2
I look forward to Mr. Roberts' column. I have read a few things which he has written about his boyhood. He could have well been one of us who grew up and came of age in that place called Pollock with its locus at the old Indian Inn and with its traditions and customs spreading northward to Fish Creek, southward to Flagon Bayou, eastward to Little River and westward to the L&A Rail Road.
Well the country is turning into a nightmare, that much is clear. But why not dish the blame to it's rightful owner, the American left and it's apotheosis the big O. Instead it is vast conspiracy that PCR consistently keeps misdiagnosing.
This article runs so parallel with Dr. Wilson’s “Your Future As A Terrorist” that I would believe the two had corroborated. The herd mentality is a little discussed malady, but explains much. The news reports the Holocaust Museum shooter and the key words are given - “hate”, “prejudice”, “racism” – and then connects them with “guns”, reinforcing what is, of course, the belief of the ‘thinking, compassionate norm’. Even, as PCR points out, even atrocities are accepted because they don’t affect us, only some other ‘thing’ lumped under a heading. What is the difference between the incineration of innocent women and children on the islands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the exterminations of the holocaust? Within the ‘norm’, good and evil are dictated by various, shifting parameters, and by abstract notions such as ‘us’ and ‘them’. There are no universals. (Torture is not wholly wrong; it depends upon who is using it) What is accepted today may be the ultimate evil tomorrow, or vice, versa. The massacre of women and children at the Waco compound resulted in no public outrage; there were no uprisings. The division was drawn; the key words were used; and people went on about their mundane lives. Truly pathetic.
'corroborated' above should have been 'collaborated'.
"We have to kill them over there before they come over here." That's what the petty officer told the class at Recruit Training Center in 1972 when I enlisted in the navy. Plus ca change ...
Terrorists are everywhere. Indeed, they can be seen serving in the military, fixing broken cars, finishing basements, mowing their lawns on Saturday mornings, and writing letters to the editor to complain about tax hikes. They are called disgruntled white males.
@9 MAP
And one of the key words used at Waco was to accuse David Koresh of being a child molester. When Vladimir Putin rose to become leader of Russia the same charge was leveled, except it was Vlad had a penchant for little boys.
The good news is that newspapers are going broke -- primarily because of their lies, TV network news is aimed at God's Waiting Room, and the internet has the reputation of World Weekly News.
@12 E.G. The internet has great potential as a source of real facts. And probably scares to death those who would control us in the name of 'freedom'.
It's true. America is a nation of chicken-hearted, power-worshiping peasant dullards.
@13 MAP
Did you forget "and democracy?" I hesitated to mention the internet because for now it's something of a free-for-all with regard to sources of information. But I get the impression that visits to certain websites are recorded and users are being watched. For example, on Thursday, I went to whack-job von Brunn's site, but yesterday it was blocked from access. The webcops will use "protecting children" as their excuse.
@14 S.L.
I have never really met a peasant dullard, but there are way too many college-educated dullards around who spout off politically correct platitudes spoon fed by idiotic professors of Queer Studies, Chicano Studies, and other soft sciences. No, I'll fellowship with the shine-sipping, snuff-dipping, tobacco-chewing good ole boy who views opening day of bow season as a high holy day before I'll attend a conference of neocons.
YEEE HAW!!!
You'd rather be around white trash, breathing in second-hand smoke and arguing over who can hit the empty beer bottle from 100 yards with a rock?
Hitting a empty beer bottle from 100 yards with a rock would probably be one of the most difficult feats one could imagine and I certainly would not mind being in the company of someone who could pull that off,
Etienne,
You left out making likker.
McCallum
McCallum, he did mention drinkin' some likker, though.