Titanic Post

Just finished reading Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear. One dialog concerned how governments guard themselves from being overthrown by maintaining a level of fear among their subjects. If the citizens of a state are distracted by a fearsome enemy (ideally foreign and dark-skinned homosexual people,) or a new horrible diseases (AIDS, Bird Flu, and Cholesterol,) or the environment (Global Warming, Climate Change, and Katrinas,) the state can go about its real business of enriching its leaders and their friends. Fiction?

This reminded me of a class I took in the early nineties titled Dilemmas of War and Peace. The instructor was a Professor Yosef Lapid, an expert in international government. He played a tape, recorded sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, at a meeting of all the living Secretaries of State and other notable people. They were audibly upset about the unexpected fall of the Soviet Empire and losing a faithful enemy of fifty years. They were frantically searching for new reliable sources of fear to justify our huge expenditures on defense and, although they didn’t say this outright, to keep the citizens’ attention diverted from what was really going on.

Chrichton had his character in the novel speak of PLM, “the politico-legal-media complex…dedicated to promoting fear in the population—under the guise of promoting safety.” Further: “Politicians need fear to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money, The media need scare stories to capture an audience.” Fantasy? Fact? Fiction? Or just another conspiracy theory. You decide.