OMNI
MANUFACTURED
FEAR USA NEWSLETTER #5, January 25, 2019.
COMPILED BY
DICK BENNETT for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
(First Newsletter on Fear October 22,
2007; 2nd on Nov. 19, 2007; 3rd January 16, 2011; #4
March 16, 2013). Go to OMNI’s Web Site
for newsletters.)
What’s at
Stake? When was the US not hyped up by our leaders against constructed
enemies?
TABLE OF CONTENTS: FEAR USA, the National Security
Fortress, Newsletter #5, January 25, 2019
Glassner, The
Culture of Fear. 1999. Mechanisms of
Frightening the Public.
Trump
Woodward, Fear.
2018. Fear and Loathing in the Trump White House.
Abramsky, “Trump and the Triumph of Fear….”
Abramsky, Jumping
at Shadows. 2017. The science and
psychology behind Trump’s fear-based politics.
Looking Back
Over 60 Years
May, Fortress
America. 2017. US obsession with security vs. public good.
Strauss, Fox News in Age of Fear. 2016.
Porter, Manufactured Crisis…Iran Nuclear Scare. 2014.
Rothkopf, American
Leadership in an Age of Fear. 2014.
OMNI: Be a Giraffe
OMNI’s Newsletters on Fear
TEXTS
Techniques of Arousing Fear
The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner.
Basic, 1999. Mullins Main Library,
HN59.2 .G58.
Glassner might appear to be distracted into
triviality by the numerous fearsomeness of our society—Martians, plane wrecks, black
men, smack, youth, crime, campuses, immigrants. But his book provides an excellent
rhetorical handbook of mechanisms of fear-making: for example, how fears are sold, small
dangers rather than large, exaggerated examples, overstated statistics, faulty
diagnoses, misdirection, perpetuating prejudice, wars rather than police. In contrast, the books in this newsletter
are about major dangers, but particularly the most threatening of all: nuclear
war and global warming.
Trump: Fear and Loathing in the White House
Bob Woodward.
Fear. 2018.
Review:
“Scary Stuff” by George Packer.
With “Fear” and Trump, Bob Woodward Has a Bookend to the Nixon Story.
With “Fear” and Trump, Bob Woodward Has a Bookend to the Nixon Story.
Almost half a century later, the ghost
of the scandal that launched Woodward’s career haunts the Trump White House. By George Packer.
The New Yorker, September 24, 2018 Issue.
Bob Woodward’s “Fear”
belongs on a shelf with the literature of mad kings, next to Robert Graves’s “I,
Claudius,” featuring the Roman emperor Caligula, and Ryszard Kapuściński’s
“The
Emperor,” about the last days in the court of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie.
Those books are masterpieces of fictionalized history, while “Fear” is a
remarkable feat of reporting conveyed in prose that couldn’t be called
literary. But they resemble one another in their atmosphere of antic dread—the claustrophobic, gut-tightening sense
that power has come utterly unmoored from reality, and no one in the palace is
safe from the wild impulses of the ruler. There’s nothing comparable in
American journalism, except maybe Woodward’s “The
Final Days,” co-written with Carl Bernstein, about the downfall of Richard Nixon. Yet even
Nixon—drunk late at night and talking to paintings in the White House
residence—seems relatively sane and pitiable compared with Donald Trump. You half
expect to find Woodward’s Trump ordering the execution of the entire National
Security Council, declaring himself a god on Twitter, then anointing his
daughter as heir to the throne.
The title of the book comes
from Trump’s definition of “real power,” whether in terms of political clout or
the ability to bully a woman he has victimized. But the fear around his Presidency has nothing to do with his skillful
use of intimidation, and everything to do with the dangerous consequences of
his erratic behavior. At Trump’s core lies a need always to look strong, which,
of course, makes him look weak. In several scenes, one adviser or another
struggles to find the right, flattering words that will keep the President from
starting a nuclear war.
No one has any respect for
Trump. In the course of the book, his chief of staff calls him “an idiot”; his
Secretary of State ups it to “a fucking moron”; his Secretary of Defense
compares him to an eleven-year-old; his top economic adviser and his personal
lawyer consider him, respectively, “a professional liar” and “a fucking liar.”
(Various denials have been issued.) Gary Cohn, the economic adviser, tells the
President to his face that he’s “a fucking asshole,” while Trump calls Cohn “a
fucking globalist.” When Cohn first tries to resign, Trump mocks him for being
under his wife’s thumb, not to mention treasonous. There’s no end to the
Cabinet members and generals whom Trump is eager to insult in front of their
colleagues, or to fire by tweet. A
coarse and feckless viciousness is the operating procedure of his White House,
and the poison spreads to everyone. Only snakes and sycophants survive. MORE https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/24/with-fear-and-trump-bob-woodward-has-a-bookend-to-the-nixon-story
This article appears in the print edition of the September 24,
2018, issue, with the headline “Scary Stuff.”
George Packer is the author of, most recently, The Unwinding: An Inner
History of the New America.
Trump’s
Triumphant Fear Machine
Sasha
Abramsky. “Trump and the Triumph of Fear
in American Politics.” The Nation (Oct. 9, 2017). “He
demonized entire races and religions and celebrated torture during the
presidential campaign—and still won.”
JUMPING AT SHADOWS: The Triumph of Fear and the End
of the American Dream by Sasha Abramsky. 2017.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sasha-abramsky/jumping-at-shadows/
KIRKUS REVIEW
KIRKUS REVIEW
A
provocative look at the science and psychology behind fear-based politics.
Demos
senior fellow Abramsky’s (The House of Twenty Thousand Books, 2015,
etc.) argument feels simultaneously complex and familiar: constant
sensationalism via social media and selective journalism of the Fox News
variety has overwhelmed rationality within society. “Our anxieties and terrors
were being nurtured by people and institutions who stood to make a buck out of
those fears,” he writes. “In the campaign for the US presidency in 2016, those
fears were nurtured as never before.” This American tendency to make
fundamental decisions “with worst-case-scenarios as a psychic backdrop” is
creating a more oppressive society, particularly for the poor and people of
color, while corporate or criminal interests may profit. In crisply organized
chapters, the author links a particular fear-driven aspect of life, such as
extreme firearm or “prepper” culture or obsessive “helicopter parenting,” to
the science behind brain chemistry and pattern recognition that may explain the
ease of conditioning us to be fearful. He notes this occurred on a national level
following 9/11, when citizens permitted the attackers’ fanaticism “to dictate
the terms of our policy discourse.” Similarly, Abramsky is disturbed by Donald
Trump’s rhetorical embrace of torture, which he views as an attempt to make his
supporters complicit in any such actions. While more benign, he draws
connections to fear-based movements such as preppers or anti-vaccination
parents as part of a broader trend against rational risk calculation: “It turns
out that pretty bizarre understandings of risk and fear are the norm rather
than the exception.” The author argues that neurologists are using MRIs to
understand how “simple presentiments of risk” have left us vulnerable to the
manipulations of bigots. Though his argument can seem broad or overly tailored
to current trends, Abramsky presents a clearly written synthesis of science and
sociology.
A thoughtful progressive feint against the vulgar fearmongering of the moment.
A thoughtful progressive feint against the vulgar fearmongering of the moment.
THE
PAST 60 YEARS
Obsession
with Security
FORTRESS AMERICA: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy by Elaine Tyler May. 2017.
FORTRESS AMERICA: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy by Elaine Tyler May. 2017.
Publisher’s
Description:
An award-winning historian untangles the roots of America’s culture of fear, and argues that it imperils our democracy.
For the last sixty years, fear has seeped into every area of American life: Americans own more guns than citizens of any other country, sequester themselves in gated communities, and retreat from public spaces. And yet, crime rates have plummeted, making life in America safer than ever. Why, then, are Americans so afraid-and where does this fear lead to?
In this remarkable work of social history, Elaine Tyler May demonstrates how our obsession with security has made citizens fear each other and distrust the government, making America less safe and less democratic. Fortress America charts the rise of a muscular national culture, undercutting the common good. Instead of a thriving democracy of engaged citizens, we have become a paranoid, bunkered, militarized, and divided vigilante nation.
An award-winning historian untangles the roots of America’s culture of fear, and argues that it imperils our democracy.
For the last sixty years, fear has seeped into every area of American life: Americans own more guns than citizens of any other country, sequester themselves in gated communities, and retreat from public spaces. And yet, crime rates have plummeted, making life in America safer than ever. Why, then, are Americans so afraid-and where does this fear lead to?
In this remarkable work of social history, Elaine Tyler May demonstrates how our obsession with security has made citizens fear each other and distrust the government, making America less safe and less democratic. Fortress America charts the rise of a muscular national culture, undercutting the common good. Instead of a thriving democracy of engaged citizens, we have become a paranoid, bunkered, militarized, and divided vigilante nation.
Roger
Ailes Fox News Fear Factory
Why
We're Living in the Age of Fear By Neil Strauss. Rolling
Stone, October 6, 2016.
This is the
safest time in human history. So why are we all so afraid?
For the media and politicians, your fear is
worth billions Jen Senko
believes that her father was brainwashed. As Senko, a New York filmmaker, tells
it, her father was a "nonpolitical Democrat." But then he transferred
to a new job that required a long commute and began listening to conservative
radio host Bob Grant during the drive. Eventually, he was holing himself up for
three hours every day in the family kitchen, mainlining Rush Limbaugh and,
during commercials, Fox News.
How
Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory
Rolling Stone 2011. (See: Gabriel Sherman's best-selling book on Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, which
details Ailes' rise to power and
how he built Fox News into a cable news behemoth.) http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-were-living-in-the-age-of-fear-w443554
The onetime
Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history.
Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network
"It
reminded me of the movie Invasion of the
Body Snatchers," Senko says. "He used to love talking to
different people to try to learn their language, but then he became angry about
illegal immigrants coming to the country, that they were taking jobs from
Americans, and that English was becoming the secondary language."
Senko is not
alone. A California schoolteacher says her marriage fell apart after her
husband started watching Fox News and yelling about government plots to take
away his guns and freedom. On the left, my friend Phoebe has had to physically
remove her mom, who she describes as a "Sam Seder news junkie," from
family functions for raging against relatives about the "dark place"
this country is going to.
"All of
these emotions, especially fear, whip people up into a state of alarm and they
become angry and almost evangelical about what they believe," says Senko.
"It's like a disease infecting millions of people around the
country."
If this
election cycle is a mirror, then it is reflecting a society choked with fear.
It's not just threats of terrorism, economic collapse, cyberwarfare and
government corruption – each of which some 70 percent of our citizenry is
afraid of, according to the Chapman University Survey on American Fears. It's
the stakes of the election itself, with Hillary Clinton at last month's debate
conjuring images of an angry Donald Trump with his finger on the nuclear codes,
while Trump warned "we're not going to have a country" if things
don't change.
Meanwhile, the
electorate is commensurately terrified of its potential leaders. According to a
September Associated Press poll, 56 percent of Americans said they'd be afraid
if Trump won the election, while 43 percent said they'd be afraid if Clinton
won – with 18 percent of respondents saying they're afraid of either candidate
winning.
Trump's
rhetoric has only served to fan the flames: "They're bringing drugs.
They're bringing crime. They're rapists." "It's only getting
worse." "You walk down the street, you get shot." Build a wall.
Ban the Muslims. Obama founded ISIS. Hillary is the devil. Death, destruction,
violence, poverty, weakness. And I alone can make America safe again.
But just how
unsafe is America today?
According to
Lewis & Clark College president Barry
Glassner, one of the country's leading sociologists and author of The Culture of Fear, "Most Americans
are living in the safest place at the safest time in human history."
Around the
globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent
crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than
ever, our air is the cleanest it's been in a decade, and despite a slight
uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991. As reported
in The Atlantic, 2015 was "the best year in history for the average human
being."
So how is it
possible to be living in the safest time in human history, yet at the exact
same time to be so scared?
Because,
according to Glassner, "we are living in the most fearmongering time in
human history. And the main reason for this is that there's a lot of power and
money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these
fears."
For mass media,
insurance companies, Big Pharma, advocacy groups, lawyers, politicians and so
many more, your fear is worth billions. And fortunately for them, your fear is
also very easy to manipulate. We're wired to respond to it above everything
else. If we miss an opportunity for abundance, life goes on; if we miss an
important fear cue, it doesn't.
"The more
we learn about the brain, the more we learn it's not something that's supposed
to make you happy all the time," says Andrew Huberman, a Stanford
neurobiology professor who runs a lab studying fear. "It's mostly a
stress-reactive machine. Its primary job is to keep us alive, which is why it's
so easy to flip people into fear all the time."
In other words, our biology and
psychology are as flawed and susceptible to corruption as the systems and
politicians we're so afraid of. In particular, when it comes to assessing
future risks, there is a litany of cognitive distortions and emotional
overreactions that we fall prey to. MORE
(a major article) http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-were-living-in-the-age-of-fear-w443554
Manufactured
Iran Scare
Porter, Gareth. Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran
Nuclear Scare. Basic Books, 2014.
Reviewed by John
Waterbury.
Porter is a journalist who has reported on Iran for several years.
He argues that Iran’s nuclear energy program is peaceful and that widely cited
evidence of the Islamic Republic’s attempts to design nuclear weapons relies on
fabrications concocted by Israel and the United States. He takes seriously the
declarations of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and of his predecessor,
Ruhollah Khomeini, that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic and that Iran does not
seek to develop them. To explain Iran’s record of deception relating to its
nuclear program, Porter claims that U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from
developing its civilian nuclear program have left Tehran with no choice but to
work covertly and cover its tracks. He points to domestic political factors in
Israel and the United States to explain why Tel Aviv and Washington would
conspire in this alleged ruse to mislead the world about Iran’s intentions. The
risk for Israel and the United States, of course, is that they might have to go
to war to confront a threat that, Porter alleges, they know does not exist.
NATIONAL INSECURITY: BUSH AND OBAMA
FEAR-BASED POLICIES
American Leadership in an Age of Fear by David Rothkopf. Public Affairs, 2014. 496pp. [These related books
are in Mullins:
Power, Inc.
: the epic rivalry between big business and government--and the reckoning that
lies ahead. Running the world : the
inside story of the National Security Council and the architects of American…. Superclass : the global power elite and the
world they are making.]
KIRKUS
REVIEW Oct. 1st, 2014
A distinguished journalist
and scholar looks at the shaping of America’s national security and foreign
policy for the past decade.
We live, writes Rothkopf (Power
Inc.: etc.), in an age of fear
in which the instant delivery of horrific images ratchets up the dread of
terror attack, even as the country suffers a financial meltdown. These national
emotional traumas help account for the swings in our policymaking, from the
George W. Bush administration’s “overheated” response to the 9/11 attacks to
the consequent temporizing of the Barack Obama administration, desperate to be
seen as “un-Bush.” Bringing to bear his own government experience and decades
of writing about these issues, Rothkopf sympathetically examines the two
presidents and their principal advisers—he’s interviewed over 100 of them—and
demonstrates how the sense of threat
informed so many of their decisions during this highly charged era.
Focusing evenhandedly on the personalities that transformed so much of our
foreign policy and national security strategies, he considers the Bush team’s
second-term makeover, the surge in Iraq, his handling of the 2008 financial
crisis and the role played by national security in that year’s election. The
author examines the construction of the Obama foreign policy team, the failure
of Richard Holbrooke’s AfPak shop within the State Department and of George
Mitchell’s efforts in the Middle East, the illusory “pivot” to Asia and “reset”
with Russia, the secret outreach to Iran, and the flat-footed response to the
Arab Spring, the drone war, and the widespread and largely unknown (until the
Snowden disclosures) cyberwar. Rothkopf emphasizes the difficulty of properly
calibrating our policy amid the zeitgeist of
fear, and he makes some proposals that might allow us to better adjust.
A sharp, immensely
readable account of how we’ve arrived at this juncture and where matters stand
as we anticipate the election of a new president.
JOIN OMNI
What is the mission of OMNI?
What is the mission of OMNI?
With the
Quakers (the AFSC, FCNL):
a world free of war and the threat of war,
a society with equity and justice for all,
a community where every person’s potential may be fulfilled,
an earth restored. . . .
(my addition: an informed, fearless, defiant public).
a world free of war and the threat of war,
a society with equity and justice for all,
a community where every person’s potential may be fulfilled,
an earth restored. . . .
(my addition: an informed, fearless, defiant public).
With the
United Nations:
Adhering to the UN’s Charter and the UDHR.
Adhering to the UN’s Charter and the UDHR.
The entire peace,
justice, and ecology movement, of which OMNI is a part, seeks to create a
better world. OMNI was created in 2001 precisely
because numerous social organizations existed in NWA, but not one to promote
world peace actively through social and economic justice, equality, human
rights, and democracy, and to demote violence, cruelty, secrecy, surveillance, and
political repression, especially by banning nuclear weapons, connecting local
and global. Later (by 2006) we added the
even more urgent problems arising from warming. OMNI was never intended to be or perceived
as a passive or lukewarm or entertaining undertaking. Plenty of organizations exist for that. Or turn on Prime Time.
BE A GIRAFFE
DON’T FEAR, STICK YOUR NECK OUT
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Something
New and Maybe Wonderful
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Celebrate
Arkansas’ Giraffe: SAM TOTTEN,
preeminent opponent of genocide: scholar and rescuer.
A sample of OMNI Newsletters on Fear,
exposing the sources and consequences, and suggesting cures.
US WAR ON/OF
TERROR
Newsletter #12, June 12, 2015
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2015/06/war-onof-terror-newsletter-12.html
Newsletter #12, June 12, 2015
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2015/06/war-onof-terror-newsletter-12.html
CIA
Newsletter #1, Jan. 1, 2013
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/01/cia-newsletter-1-revised.html
Newsletter #1, Jan. 1, 2013
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/01/cia-newsletter-1-revised.html
SURVEILLANCE,
NSA #9, December 2013
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/12/surveillance-nsa-newsletter-9.html
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/12/surveillance-nsa-newsletter-9.html
US NATIONAL
SECURITY STATE
Newsletter #1, March 22, 2013
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/03/us-national-security-state-newsletter-1.html
Newsletter #1, March 22, 2013
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/03/us-national-security-state-newsletter-1.html
Newsletter
#2, June 9, 2013 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/06/us-national-security-state-nss.html
Contents of
OMNI’s Newsletters on US Culture of Fear, #2,
November 19, 2007
Fear-Up
Technique
Molly
Ivins v. Fear-mongers
3
Local Writers v. Fear
George
Arnold: Ann White and White Flour Scare
Terrorism
Xenophobia
Nuclear
Enemies
Police
Shoot to Kill
Pentagon/White
House Use of Fear
From
Before WWII to Bush-Cheney
Diverse
Public Fears
CONTENTS US Culture of Fear #3,January 16, 2011.
Manufacturing
Fear
Books
Robert Reich on
START and Intolerance
Noam Chomsky
Fear Social
Justice?
War on Terror
Fear Mongering
More Books on
Fear and Critical Thinking
Contents US Culture of Fear #4
Dick, Religious
Discrimination and Persecution
Dick’s Letter
to Free Weekly, Fear-Based Foreign
Policy
Donahue’s Film,
Body of War
Engelhardt’s
Book on Fear USA
Lieven Review
of Mueller, Terrorism Hype
Lean, Fear of
Muslims
Wallechinsky,
Big Pharmas, Profits from Disease Threats
Horwitz and Wakefield
END FEAR NEWSLETTER #5 January 25, 2019
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