Anyone who sees the world that way really ought to immediately read this post by Digby in its entirety, which insightfully demonstrates that the principal emotion which accounts for the appeal of George Bush -- and which really lays at the center of most of the issues dominating the Bush-loving world-view – is fear. Fear of the terrorists. And it’s not merely garden-variety fear, but a form of wild and neurotic paranoia which overwhelms rational judgment and comes to outweigh every other competing consideration.
Intense and limitless fear of terrorists has become the North Star of our country. Everything emanates from it, and we always look to it for guidance.
The debate over Bush’s warrantless and lawless surveillance of American citizens has illustrated the central role which this fear plays in virtually everything we publicly discuss, and it also highlights its disturbingly neurotic character. Those who argue that the President must be bestowed with unprecedented executive power to protect us have but one argument in their bag of tricks – fear of terrorists.
All of the conservative tough guys who strut around with their chests puffed out like John Wayne at high noon babble hysterically, like babies, when they tell us how frightened they are by terrorists. This week, we have seen one Bush-defending Republican after the next parade before the cameras shrieking that we MUST give up our freedoms because otherwise WE WILL DIE - THE TERRORISTS WILL KILL US!!!! As Russ Feingold pointed out, they have taken Patrick Henry’s demand of "give me liberty or give me death" -- what was the hallmark of the American character and its preeminent commitment to liberty – and turned it into a begging, needy plea to be saved by the all-powerful Government in exchange for giving up our liberties.
Terrorism is certainly a threat that ought to be aggressively confronted, but there are lots of other dangers to our safety and health, many of which are at least statistically more threatening. Contrary to the paralyzing fear which our nation’s politicians have whipped up in Americans, terrorism is hardly some incomparable and uncontrollable existential danger which ought to make us abandon every other concern and which floods every other priority. But that is how it is viewed and whined about by those with the greatest pretense to courage and strength.
An exchange between two commentators in a thread here a few days ago powerfully illustrated this dynamic. Rick, who writes the blog The Real Ugly American, is a hard-core conservative who is pro-war, pro-Bush and unabashed in holding himself out as a real warrior who wants to stand up to America’s enemies rather than flee. Jake is an anti-Bush, anti-war liberal. Rick defends Bush's warrantless surveillance of American citizens and Jake opposes it. Here is the short but quite representative exchange they had on that topic:
The Ugly American
No I do not think the FBI or any other police agency should conduct warrentless searches or surveilance in criminal matters. Which seems to be where you and Glenn are missing the point entirely. This is not a criminal matter. This is a war for the survival of our nation and modern civilization. The stakes could not be higher.
Jake
There are so many things to fear. Why pick terrorism? Why not tackle the issue rationally, with money and appropriate threats, and yes, even appropriate action . . .
When I read you, it is almost as if I am reading someone with a emotional illness, someone who will trade away rights for an ephemeral sense of "security". There is no security in this world, in this life. No president can give it to you, no God can give it to you. You are at risk of your life ALWAYS.
And terrorism is the least of your worries, not if you travel in a car much at all or live in a big city, or live in almost any third world country. . . . Trading away freedom for security is a fool's gamble. Eventually you will have neither.
Who is the one here who sounds rational, calm and fearless - and who is the one who sounds hysterical and scared? As the blogger Maha put it after excerpting some blindly trusting right-wing pleas to George Bush for protection:
Translation: I dont know what Bush is doing, but I want him to keep doing it to protect me from the terrorists.
This is not "resolve," people. This is cowardice. This is being a herd of frightened beasts stampeding off a cliff.
The apex - really, the zenith - of this shivering fear-wallowing was the exceptionally well-staged Republican National Convention, where one Republican speaker after the next shrieked that we must re-elect George Bush because only he can make us safe, only he can protect us from the terrorists. Without George Bush, we weak and vulnerable Americans are all doomed. Here is Zell Miller explaining how his fears drove him to support George Bush:
And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower, and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family?
The clear answer to that question has placed me in this hall with you tonight. For my family is more important than my Party.
There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that man's name is George W. Bush. . . .
I have knocked on the door of this man's soul and found someone home, a God-fearing man with a good heart and a spine of tempered steel -- the man I trust to protect my most precious possession: my family.
Do people who live in suburban and rural Georgia - or Ohio - or Nebraska, really live in terrorizing fear of Al Qaeda? When they think about the threats they face to their lives and to their children, is an Islamic terrorist attack really at the top of the list - before violent crime and health risks and car accidents and obesity and abductions? If so, isn’t that just plainly warped?
In this view, George Bush is not just an elected official, but the Prime Protector of our families. Is our political process really driven by the view that our nation’s children are at risk from the immeasurable and incomparable threat of terrorist attacks from which only George Bush can save us? Is that really a healthy or rational way to go about constructing one’s life, let alone a nation?
The basic principle of risk is that risk equals impact times probability: "In professional risk assessments, risk combines the probability of a negative event occurring with how harmful that event would be."
But we don’t use that rational process - or any rational process - when engaging in a risk-assessment of terrorism. We hear politicians talk incessantly of radiological bombs smuggled inside of suitcases and detonated in Times Square and the impact of that scenario overwhelms us, without giving any thought to its probability, without comparing it to other risks, and without weighing it against or even thinking about the magnitude of the price we are willing to pay to minimize this risk.
In fact, it is essentially prohibited in good company to even raise the prospect that the threat of terrorism is exaggerated. It is an inviolable piety that there is no such thing as overstating the terrorism risk. One is compelled to genuflect to, and tremble before, the paramounce of this Ultimate Threat upon pain of being cast aside as some sort of anti-American, terrorist-loving loon.
A terrorist detonating a nuclear weapon in our cities? Why, what could possibly be worse than that? Nothing else matters! We must stop this at all costs.
There are all sorts of cataclysmic risks which could end not just our lives, but the lives of millions of people. The polar ice caps could melt and flood all of our cities, a risk which many scientists believe is a real and present and danger. The earth could collide with a meteor. A rapidly fatal and easily transmittable virus could seep into the population.
The mere existence of a fatal danger does not justify its singular domination over our lives. We don’t built walls around our cities to prevent polar ice cap flooding or stay in our homes to avoid contracting a fatal virus. That’s because we don’t live with the all-consuming goal of avoiding risks or simply preserving our physical existence. Quality of life matters, not just its continuation. Those are the only truths which can explain Patrick Henry’s preference for death over a life without liberty, or the willingness of people to fight and die in wars.
The simple and undeniable fact is that the number of people who have died in attacks by Islamic terrorists is minute by any measure – not just in America but around the world. Deaths from terrorists attacks have usually been measured by tens, rarely by hundreds, and when they work in their most spectacular and once-a-decade form, in the thousands. That pales in comparison to the death toll from literally countless other dangers, which kill substantially more people and will continue to do so.
How and why has this singular, thus far quite-manageable risk overtaken our entire national consciousness and caused us to bestow upon it an almost religious significance? We are we so eager to give up our freedoms in its name and to let it force us to radically restructure the governmental balances which the Founders of this country created and which for two centuries have served us so well?
Virtually every political issue and polarizing public controversy of any importance over the last four years has been generated by this fear. Whether it is the war in Iraq or debates over executive power and civil liberties or the use of torture or of secret prisons, terrorism fears lie at its core, and almost always determine its resolution. And, the 2004 Presidential election was about little else. Fear of terrorism has overtaken both our present and our future, and has drowned out virtually every other competing national aspiration and concern.
It is hard to imagine what a nation which is fueled by fear can actually accomplish. Most people know individuals in their lives who live this way on the micro-level – scared before they are anything else, pathologically risk-averse, always hiding and exerting excess caution lest something go wrong. In its more extreme form, it manifests as a life-destroying mental disorder. It is a pitiful image, and such people typically achieve very little. They cannot, because their fear is paralyzing.
A nation can suffer collectively from this same syndrome. A nation which is driven and shaped by fear is not a nation that will be bold or courageous, nor is it one that will make rational choices. Hysteria and paranoia have never been the American national character, but along with the founding principles of our Republic, the Bush era seems to be changing that, too.
Good post. I would only add that by definition, "terrorism," is calculated to cause a sense of terror that is out of proportion to the actual probability of getting killed.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure others have addressed this elsewhere, but your excellent post reminds me again of the fact that no one seems to say much about Oklahoma and Timothy McVeigh. Was that not terrorism? I'm sort of curious that the Oklahoma survivors have been so quiet in this national conversation. Have I missed something?
ReplyDeleteI recall that the Oklahoma survivors raised their voices at the beginning of the terrorism war, shortly after 9/11 but they were drowned out by others. They were basically shouted down because their concerns weren't "appropriate" or even worthy of consideration.
ReplyDeleteI recall that the Oklahoma survivors raised their voices at the beginning of the terrorism war, shortly after 9/11 but they were drowned out by others. They were basically shouted down because their concerns weren't "appropriate" or even worthy of consideration.
ReplyDeleteWhere to begin?
ReplyDeleteAmerican character is not accurately diagnosed as neurotic and fear-driven. Americans are pragmatists, and tend to reject extremism of any stripe. The current general attitude toward terrorism is neither excessive nor extreme.
September 11, 2001 involved not merely the loss of some 3,000 lives on U.S. soil, but the nearly complete shut-down of our air transportation system and other infrastructures for at least a week, in some respects longer than that. People spent days and weeks waiting for other shoes to drop, and it was, in fact, simply terrifying. In large part because no one could say where else, or how else, mindless and massive harm might be planned and imminent. No doubt thousands of others died that day in automobile accidents and from preventable deaths due to smoking, obesity etc. But those deaths fit into the structure of daily life and do not disrupt the nation; they are foreseen and we accommodate them psychologically, as a polity.
No reasonable person should object to the govt directing its abilities and resources to ensuring that unexpected, grossly disruptive violence does not occur here again, to the greatest degree such prevention is commensurate with our laws. Reasonable people can and do disagree as to what prevention efforts are compatible with a free nation under our constitutional scheme, but few think the threat from “asymmetrical” warfare is not a very serious one, meriting more concern than a war on [disease of the week].
But Americans have not reacted with particular paranoia, and certainly not as they allegedly have in other historical eras. It is surpassingly common for the intelligentsia to decree that all of yesteryear’s concern over domestic Communists constituted McCarthyism and silly “red scares.” Americans were thought to be, by some, obsessed with fear of the USSR and, indeed, in the 50s and 60s there was quite a thriving industry for the construction of bomb shelters in case the Soviets launched nuclear weapons at us. School children all over the nation were instructed in how to roll under their desks and cover their bodies, in a quite pathetic effort to convey that something actually could be done to protect them from the radiation of a detonated Bomb. Little along these lines is happening today.
There surely was a lot of fear, and what some said was paranoia about “reds” turns out to hold extensive merit. Decades after highly classified information was released, we learn beyond reasonable debate that there really were plots and spies infested throughout the U.S. govt and the defense industry, and that these people gave Stalin the Bomb, and various naval and aircraft defense systems, well before the Soviets otherwise would have acquired them. One direct consequence of all this was that Stalin was emboldened to authorize North Korea to invade the South, confident that with our nuclear monopoly ended we could not credibly threaten to use our nuclear weapons and stop that war. He was right, and Truman sent us to war, where some 58,000 Americans lost their lives.
(Interestingly, it was the NSA’s predecessor that allowed us to learn of all this very serious spying, albeit too late to do too much to prevent the harm. During WWII, the U.S. govt intercepted Soviet diplomatic and other sorts of cables coming into the U.S. and abroad, and eventually decrypted them in a project codenamed Venona)
One might wish there had been a bit more paranoia during the 40s, so we could have had less realistic fear, decades of living under Mutually Assured Destruction, and a war in the 50s. Americans did, rightly, reject the excesses of Joe McCarthy, but it is certainly arguable that insufficient credence was given in many quarters to the actual threat of domestic Communists taking marching orders from a foreign tyrant.
Americans today are certainly no more neurotic in their views toward terrorism than were their forebears in the 40s and 50s vis-à-vis the actual threat of Stalinism. Somewhat less so, in fact. They are clear-headed about not wanting any horribly disruptive replays of 9/11, but there has not been, for example, a large uprising to harm or stigmatize Arab-Americans. If they are willing to assume that the NSA and other intelligence agencies know some things we ought be damned glad they do, and that this info has prevented additional terrorist strikes, history may well vindicate them when then relevant materials become declassified, decades from now.
Finally, Americans do prefer John Wayne on foreign policy grounds over, say, Alan Alda. In a dangerous world that would seem both pragmatic and right.
Very well written.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at our nation’s history you find that politicians have always exploited fear to get their way with an otherwise noncompliant public. Fear of a genuine threat is played up to disproportionate levels compared to the actual threat.
Frank Kofsky wrote an interesting book on this theme (Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948.) One of the main threads in the book is that after WWII ended, the airplane industry didn’t want to end their subsidies from the U.S. government, but recognized that the public was unlikely to keep funding war time level subsidies without a war. Truman, some of his military advisors, and the airline executives found an interesting solution: they substituted “security” for “subsidy.” – In this case they played up the threat of war with Russia. But that trick, scaring the public so they support policies they otherwise would not, has been a hallmark of American democracy since.
Try to imagine all the conceivable ways the U.S. could be attacked. There is really no other conceivable method for attacking the United States other than with an unconventional attack, such as hijacking civilians airliners and turning them into missiles. If we reflect on the situation we should quickly realize that we enjoy a remarkable degree of security in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world.
Many analysts and commentators have pointed out that the Bush administrations actions often run at cross purposes with the stated goal: to defeat terrorism. The war in Iraq has inflamed hatred for the west and calcified the belief that the U.S. is a hypocritical colonial power masquerading as the Johnny Appleseed of democracy. It has led to more terrorist activity, and provided a terrorist training ground for militants. Etc. Moreover, all of this was predictable and predicted, at times by the very same people who are now “surprised” at the chaos they have unleashed in Iraq. (ex. Bush’s father wrote about the likely effects of invading Iraq in his memoir that nailed the situation we are now in, the excerpt is floating around the web.)
Fear leads to irrational behavior, and it is the fear of terrorism that must be stressed and reinforced to muster support for what is on surface irrational behavior. Without fear, people might begin thinking rationally. They could start asking uncomfortable questions or question whether the stated goals add up.
This post is B-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-t! like a fine piece of chocalate, i was sad when it ended. Keep pounding them, Glenn!!!!
ReplyDeleteFinally, Americans do prefer John Wayne on foreign policy grounds over, say, Alan Alda. In a dangerous world that would seem both pragmatic and right.
ReplyDeleteYeah - the point is that it's not very John Wayne-like to sturcture one's whole life and political views and priorities around a single petrifying fear of a single enemy. Begging the government to let you give up your freedoms so that it will protect you in its big warm arms is not exactly the defining behavior of John Wayne. That's one irony - the ones who claim to revere the John Wayne image sound like 5 year-old school girls scared of their own shadows.
The second irony is that the vast majority of people who live in the population centers most likely (by far) to be the target of terrorist attacks - NY, LA, Chicago, Washington DC - aren't sitting around petrified, begging the Government to exert more control over their lives in order to protect them. They're not the ones who want more and more extreme measures in order to protect against the improbable threat (even for them) of dying at the hands of a terrorist.
The places where majorities can be found who are shaking in their boots are places where the odds of a dying in an Al Qaeda attack are less than a meteor hitting. That's what happens when the Government spends year after year exploiting a genuinely bad event - 9/11 - in order to drive people to live their lives in irrational fear so that they will give up their liberties in exchange for being protected.
You are right that Communism was a real threat. And so is terrorism. Nobody disputes that. But it has become the Be All and End All of our political existence and that is truly deranged - and deliberate.
Whatever happened to the land of the FREE and the home of the BRAVE?
ReplyDeletehypatia, actions speak louder than words, and a paranoid neurosis is what *I* read in the tea leaves of American politics. Where is the calculation of probabilities? Where is the assessment of actual risk? Where is the consideration of alternatives?
ReplyDeleteIt seems more likely to me that 9/11 fears are emblematic of Bush himself, and his hysteria has infected a large portion of the country. The ugly American is the other side of that coin - they stuck us hard and now we are gonna put them down.
Except, of course, we don't actually know who "them" is. Ok, we know who ONE of them is, but we seem to have kind of forgotten about him. Maybe even to the extent of letting him slip out of our hands. Think Tora Bora.
No, we are not acting rationally. Just when we NEED rational, competent leadership, we have Bush, who got scared half to death on 9/11 and has never recovered.
To the extent Bush drives the national consciousness, we are in fact a nation of the neurotic and fear driven.
Jake
This is a rather silly argument because it focuses on the individual rather than the collective well-being.
ReplyDeleteCertainly the odds of a a given person being killed by a terrorist is lower than other possibilities, but a sucessful terrorist attack causes tremendously more damage to the nation as a whole.
This would then increase the possibility for a given individual to die from an act of terror.
Left unanswered, our enemies become emboldened and more attacks would follow.
Perhaps you believe that if we act Christlike and "turn the other cheek" the radical muslims will convert to your views.
Our society is based on trust and goodwill, which quickly break down after these types of attacks.
Our enemies willfully seek our destruction. Any sucesses work toward a tipping point where power shifts to the these enemies and we all die.
People here are free to smoke cigaretess(sort of) drive cars, skydive, walk down dark alleys, eat transfats at will and so forth, but being killed by another human being is unacceptable for our society to work properly.
I strongly agree with Glenn's post (see above), but at the risk of being unpopular, I would add that Bush is not entirely to blame for our neurotic condition. America has a much lower tolerance level for bad things happening to us, and a higher sense of expectations, than the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteIt was precisely this psychology that made 9-11 exceedingly harsh for us. "They did this -- to US?????" The shock and belated realization that we're not immune has as much to do with our overcompensating behavior than anything Bush said or did.
Collective well being? How is that different from individual wel being? Is not "the collective" the sum of "the individual"? And the truth is that we as individuals are not that at risk from terrorism. Drunk drivers, now that is another story.
ReplyDeleteNo one said don't pay attention to violent radicals wherever they might be. I just think we need to do it in a balanced and thoughtful way. That is, we should consider the outcomes before we jump into the actions.
And to think that our society is based upon trust and good will is to miss the actions of the Republican machine for the last decade. To me, those actions speak of abuse, not of trust and goodwill.
A terrorist act is a disaster like any other disaster. It is only our foolish pride and sense of entitlement that allows us to be fooled by thougths of some perfect "security". It's all calculated risks, and frankly, we human beings are not good at that calculus unless we DO the calculus. We intuit much more harm from things like terrorism and less from things like drunk driving, yet the first is a blip on the radar screen while the second has damaged our country to the tune of untold billions of $'s and millions of personal misery.
Not that our reaction to 9/11 hasn't cost billions, or caused much misery, but that was a choice, and a damn poor one.
It's called keeping your eye on the ball. Bin Laden was the ball. Iraq was the cheerleader. Is it any wonder things are so screwed up? Which one has Bush been keeping his eye on?
Jake
Glenn writes; The places where majorities can be found who are shaking in their boots are places where the odds of a dying in an Al Qaeda attack are less than a meteor hitting. That's what happens when the Government spends year after year exploiting a genuinely bad event - 9/11 - in order to drive people to live their lives in irrational fear so that they will give up their liberties in exchange for being protected.
ReplyDeleteFirst, you are completely overlooking the very human and rational reason to fear highly intelligent, extremely motivated and well organized people who wish to inflict maximum damage on the Great Satan – us. They would dearly love to acquire and release small pox on our population, cosmopolitan and flyover; to poison water supplies; to release sarin nerve gas in major airport or subway hubs; and preferably to do all at the same time. They do not care about anything but killing and maximizing disruption, especially on Americans.
Commerce and travel do not cease because there are 50,000 vehicular deaths a year, or because a meteor might hit the planet. Simply releasing a hideous disease that has been eradicated – small pox – would cause enormous panic and many deaths. And if you have no familiarity with small pox, I suggest you google it – it is a wretched way to die.
It is not irrational to fear what well-organized, technically sophisticated and well-funded people might do on U.S, soil. Few of us ever remotely considered they would hijack fuel-laden airliners and crash them into centers of commerce and govt, but they did. Do you think there just might be some other…unpleasant .. things these same fanatics might not wish to do, seek to do, and would do if not prevented?
John Wayne, of course, has nothing to do with this, except for you to invoke his name as a rhetorical device; Wayne actually advocated unflinchingly standing up to the enemy, most definitely including the great one of his day, Communists. To my knowledge, he supported governmental efforts to remove Communist security risks from federal posts and sensitive defense industries, even when the left shrilly ranted that these were a heinous and unnecessary attack on civil liberties. Indeed, while many claimed that Truman’s Executive Order 9835, that created the Federal Employee Loyalty Program for investigating federal employees and routing out Communists and their sympathizers, I don’t think Wayne objected -- but a lot of others did.
Nor do I think Wayne was troubled when Eisenhower issuedExecutive Order 10450 that imposed a requirement of federal employees that they demonstrate “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States” such that “. . . employment and retention . . . is clearly consistent with the interests of national security.” But I can assure you that many critics screamed in the same hyperbolic manner you are here, that we were destroying our Republic in the name of an exaggerated (or non-existent) threat. Yet it stands.
Americans today are not unreasonably fearful of terrorists. But they do expect their govt to make sure, to the best of its ability, that nothing like 9/11 –or worse – happens again. Bush has done that, and deserves much credit, even if we should seriously examine the murky legal area in which he is grounding some of his claimed authority. I may well agree with you that he has gone too far, although I would want to know more about the nature of the technology used for the warrantless NSA surveillance before I would feel competent to make a decision. What horrors it may have prevented are classified, and we won’t know how many deaths and profound national disruption have been prevented from occurring, not until such data is declassified.
Governmental secrecy is an evil. It is sometimes, rather infrequently, a necessary one -- we have no choice but to trust govtoperating in secret under rare circumstances, unless we are to let those who would take advantage of complete transparency do so, possibly at our terrible peril. The Lord Acton admonition regarding power and corruption is true; so is Justice Goldberg’s dicta about the Constitution not being a suicide pact. It is a deep and profound tension between these two truths, and not one amenable to being resolved by overwrought accusations that most of your fellow citizens are mentally ill.
hypatia, I am not overlooking such things as these "highly intelligent, extremely motivated and well organized people who wish to inflict maximum damage on the Great Satan – us. They would dearly love to acquire and release small pox on our population, cosmopolitan and flyover; to poison water supplies; to release sarin nerve gas in major airport or subway hubs; and preferably to do all at the same time. They do not care about anything but killing and maximizing disruption, especially on Americans." I simply calculate they are less likely to kill me than a drunk driver. So far, the statistics are all on my side, and all you have going for you is fear.
ReplyDeleteIt is NOT reasonable to react as we have. How is it reasonable to say we are engaged in a war on terror, then invade Iraq? Were we cleaning out a nest of terrorists? Ermm, not so much. (That phrase is from firedoglake - gotta love Jane and Redd). No. We acted completely irrationally. And we continue to act irrationally. We COULD follow the lead of the 9/11 commission. There seem to be lots of things a rational human being might do in the recommendations of that commission. So far as I can tell, Bush has pretty much ignored the commission and gone his own fearful and irrational way. I am open to correction in that regard, however.
So, please correct me. Show me all the rational things Bush has done. I mean other than, say, pre-emptive invasion, torture, special rendition, Gitmo, the FISA mess, banning nail clippers on airplanes, and on, and on, and on.
I detected a false note, a prejudiced assumption, if you will, in this most recent comment. You say "They do not care about anything but killing and maximizing disruption, especially on Americans." I don't think that is especially true. So far as I can recall, Islamic terrorists all have an agenda, and damaging America and Americans is a means to an end, not the end itself.
Casual hyperbole, hypatia, or fear mongering? For whom are those words intended? Glenn's audience, or you?
Jake
There has been some interesting research recently on post-traumatic stress disorders which suggests that people who are "second hand" witnesses often have more trouble overcoming their fears about a bad event than the people it happened to do. I think there is some of that going on here.
ReplyDeletehypatia - the lesson to be learned from the "red scare" is that conflating actual real-world risks into magical boogiepersons harms the effort to deal with the dangers we face. If the cold war FBI had actually just gone looking for Soviet spies, they could have found them. But instead, the right couldn't resist using the commie symp label on people they didn't like. Because there were a lot of people on that list, the actual spies were able to hide among the garden variety lefties.
If the cold war FBI had actually just gone looking for Soviet spies, they could have found them. But instead, the right couldn't resist using the commie symp label on people they didn't like. Because there were a lot of people on that list, the actual spies were able to hide among the garden variety lefties.
ReplyDeleteThat is all simply wrong as a matter of clearly established history. The FBI, in fact, did find hundreds of them, but many could not be prosecuted or publicly identified, because doing so would have entailed revealing the Venona project about which I linked above. (And in many cases the identities of the spies identified by code names in the Venona decrypts remain unknown.)Further, some were merely "garden variety lefties," e.g., Asst Sec'y of the Treasurey Harry Dexter White, who secretly met with the agents of the Soviet defense ministry's version of the KGB, and gave these agents classified and other data, unbeknownst to FDR.
It made perfect sense to surveille lefties who consorted with Communists and their front organizations, because many of these were admirers of Stalin who, when in a position to do so, passed sensitive information to their murderous hero. But at the time the FBI was undertaking this surveillance, and Truman and Ike were issuing Executive Orders to purge disloyal "lefty" citizens from sensitive positions, the hue and cry from manyt was that this was all baseless paranoia.
The govt knew better due to highly classified data such as (but not limited to) Venona, and today, may also be in a far superior position to assess the actual threat of terrorists than are people posting on the internet.
Bravo, Glenn. Keep fighting the good fight.
ReplyDeleteWhatever happened to "Give me Liberty or give me Death"? Or "The only thing to fear is fear itself"?
ReplyDeleteI'm disgusted by the panicky shrieking of these conservatives with their "But they want to KILL US!!" rationale for every abuse of power. It is not worthy of a free nation, not worthy of the history of the United States.
These people would trade freedom and justice for what? The same security that a hog has in its pen, at the mercy of those who provide its feed?
We have to stop coddling and making psychobabble excuses for this aspect of the Conservative character. They're afraid of minorities, afraid of foreigners, afraid of sharing with others, they're fucking afraid of everything.
If this were a movie, conservatives would be the hysterical guy who wants to leave the other crewmen behind on the sinking boat ; one of us Liberals would have to punch him and get on with saving the others.
"First, you are completely overlooking the very human and rational reason to fear highly intelligent, extremely motivated and well organized people who wish to inflict maximum damage on the Great Satan – us. They would dearly love to acquire and release small pox on our population, cosmopolitan and flyover; to poison water supplies; to release sarin nerve gas in major airport or subway hubs; and preferably to do all at the same time. They do not care about anything but killing and maximizing disruption, especially on Americans."
ReplyDeleteThis is pure paranoia. How exactly have you arrived at this brillant conclusion? If Islamic terroists were indeed intresting in doing theses things, it would have happened already. They are well within the current capablilites of the large well organized terroists groups. Look at Israel, a country that is infested with terroists who profess to want to destroy the entire state and yet all they ever do is blow themselves up in public places and kill a hand full of people. Do you truely think that if they really wanted to poison the water supply they couldn't manage it? Look at 9/11. The terroists could have easily crashed into the nuclear power plant they flewver instead of the towers and could have caused unbelieable death - but they did't. Their goal wasn't to kill a lot of people, but to make a huge statement and to knock the sense of invisibilty away from America. The planes they crashed carried a small percentage of their normal capacity and if the recording of Bin Laden talking about the results is accurate, that had absolutely no clue that the crashes would lead to the towers collapsing and to the deaths of a couple of thousand people. Now I'm not saying that Islamic terroists aren't a threat and in anyway saying that we shouldn't take steps to guard against the treat they pose. I just don't believe that they are the number one threat facing the average American. I completely agree with Glenn's post. If the government wants to make me feel safe they could start with removing my fear of being unable to pay for medical treatement, being seriously injured or killed in car crash, or getting cancer all very real and statistically likely outcomes. In the list of daily concerns, being killed by a terroists isn't even a blip on my radar and I live near some prime terroists targets. I am just completely disgutesed with the irrational fear of so many of my fellow citizens who are ready to spend a fortune on trying to catch the bogyman but who cry social welfare or government interference at any suggestion of Nation Healthcare or government regualation of pollution.