A few months ago I pointed to an important piece in Foreign Affairs by Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen who argued that despite the constant fear-mongering and threat inflation in America, we are actually very secure and face very few, very minor external threats. I especially liked their explanation of why this threat inflation comes about. I called it the public choice of U.S. warfare:
Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests. The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government — defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments.
See Zenko interviewed on these ideas further:
As Less Antman said recently, “Drowning people in fear is the key to power.”
…But fear has shelf-life. And its successor is anger.
But fear-mongering has a successor: a false-flag attack.
"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." — Yoda
Suffering leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads…
UH, no duh!
"Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. Indeed it is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." — Douglas MacArthur, 1951
Be scared, be very scared. Your rulers will have it no other way.
Do you realize that more Americans die every month due to lack of health insurance than died on 9/11? This is nuts.
Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests. The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government — defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments.
It also helps to spend several decades, if not an entire century, gulling and dumbing down the masses in prison-like indoctrinaria laughably mislabeled "schools." You'll need to giive yourselves at least a century to obliterate any last vestige of their ability to think critically, apply common sense, reason facts for themselves, or the ability to assume any responsibility for their own lives, well-being, and future and you'll have the perfect nation of terrified cowards just BEGGING you to be their Big Brother Protector.
Amerika started on that path circa 1850, with the advent of the first compulsory public "schools" in New England, and is now reaching the apex of the effort with the metastasizing of the police state. Only a century and a half to turn what started out as a nation of rugged individualists into a gulag of terrified, brainless sheep requiring cradle-to-grave nursing and control – not bad!
Fear disables reason and reason fights war which kills –
Therefore fear is necessary to kill the planet and all living things.
Don't interupt their mission, by thinking.
Just be afraid. anything'll do. Iraq Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, Homeland Security, the police state, govt red tape, just as long as you fear.
They lost the Soviet Union and that left a big hole which they rushed immediately to fill.
I do believe all the ideas you have introduced in your post. They are very convincing and can definitely work. Still, the posts are very short for novices. May you please prolong them a little from next time? Thank you for the post.