The part of this I don't get is the people who act as if this hasn't always been the way we live. I see articles like this one, who say openly that Americans haven't always lived in fear. I disagree completely. I think if you look at our past, you'll find that there was never a time since America was established that white men didn't thrive off a heavy dosage of fear-mongering and scare tactics.
Our first and most brutal enemy wasn't Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. From approximately 1622-1924 we were at war with the American Indian. While we systematically exterminated many of their forces and drove them from their lands, propaganda spread throughout America that the real terrorist was, in many cases, the victim. We ran them out of their villages, murdered them, made treaties and broke them. Meanwhile, we spread a message that the Indians were savages who would burn down your ranch, rape your wife, kill your cattle, scalp your head, and enslave your children. We were the ones who brought the smallpox epidemic and had more guns. We were the ones to be afraid of.
I guess they couldn't find the picture where he was cuddling babies?
We created a fear of the Indians, because even then we understood that if our people were afraid of our enemies, they'd allow us to go above and beyond the law to justify our actions. The same reason The Patriot Act went through and was allowed to exist in 2001 also entitled early settlers to drive out our original arch-nemesis in 1901: those pesky redskins.
After we decimated them, we needed a new nightmare to keep our people in check. Along came the Japanese on Sunday, December 7, 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II. By this time we were delivering our media in new and exciting ways. We had invented the radio. So much false reporting and misinformation was coming out of radio reports that CBS Radio came out with a counterpropaganda program called Our Secret Weapon, where Rex Stout would separate fact from fiction and also use the most exaggerated lies of the week to entertain the public.
Hollywood looked to draw money off the current agenda, so they replaced the normal villains in their films with Japanese and Nazis. Depicted as monsters without compassion, the films caused Hollywood to lose its foreign market. However, without the trouble of worrying about boycotts now, since those other countries weren't paying attention, they could paint other nationalities any way they liked without consequence.
As World War II came to close, America found a new fear of the Russian persuasion. The Cold War was upon us. Our country had just got out of World War II and needed a new reason to fear the Soviet Union, so word spread of the threat of nuclear attack. In elementary schools, students regularly did drills where they "prepared" for an atomic bomb. Communist rule threatened the very fabric of the American way of life in our country.
The point I'm making is that fear-mongering in America is nothing new. We've been afraid since the days when we were settlers out on the prairie. After the Cold War, segregation was the order of the day. While the Civil Rights Movement was taking place, the Vietcong were savage animals who wanted to eat our young during Vietnam.
The only thing that has changed over the years is how we ingest our media. Now it's all on Facebook. With the advent of social media, stupid people are allowed to spew nonsense at us constantly and repeatedly. This steady stream of bullshit gets regurgitated back at the public, because people are gullible idiots and the Share button is their best friend. Thus, fear-mongering is building because it isn't just the mass media trying to scare us, it's also your childhood friend who doesn't realize the satirical news site he's quoting is false. As long as none of us are doing research on what we're supporting, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
"Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live." - Dorothy Thompson
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