Letting Others Do The Blogging For Me: 'Fear Will Keep The Local Systems In Line'

In a recent entry, I mentioned that I was reading Glenn Greenwald's excellent new book, 'How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok'. I finished it today and cannot recommend it enough.

In one chapter, he explores the administration's use of fear and the role that has played in keeping the scandals involving his power grabs so under control. It is one of the most concise and pitch-perfect summaries of the state of fear that the Bush administration has worked so hard to envelope American with... and the dangerous implications that this has for democracy. Below I copy the introduction-

In one sense, it is difficult to understand how the Bush administration been able to embrace such radical theories of executive power, and to engage in such recognizably an-American conduct -- first in the shadows and now quite openly-- without prompting a far more intense backlash from the country than we have seen. It is true that the President's approval ratings have sunk to new lows in 2005 and 2006. The broad and bipartisan support he commanded in the two years after the 9/11 has vanished almost completely. And yet, despite all of the public opinion trends and the President's steadily declining popularity, there has been no resounding public rejection of the administration's claims to virtually limitless executive power and its systematic violations of the nation's laws.

That is because the Bush administration has in its arsenal one very potent weapon-- and one weapon only-- which it has repeatedly used: fear. Ever since September 11, 2001, Americans have been bombarded with warnings, with color-coded "alerts", with talk of mushroom clouds and nefarious plots to blow up bridges and tall buildings, with villains assigned cartoon names such as "dirty bomber", "Dr. Germ", and so on. And there has been a constant barrage from the White House of impending threats that generate fear-- fear of terrorism, fear of more 9/11-style attacks, fear of nuclear annihilation, fear of our ports being attacked, fear of our water systems being poisoned-- and, of course, fear of excessive civil liberties or cumbersome laws jeapordizing our "homeland security".

Our very survival is at risk, we are told. We face an enemy unlike any we have seen before, more powerful than anything we have previously encountered. President is devoted to protecting us from the terrorists. We have to invade and occupy Iraq because the terrorists will kill us all if we do not. We must allow the President to incarcerate American citizens without due process, employ torture as a state-sanctioned weapon, eavesdrop on our private conversations, and even violate the law, because the terrorists are so evil and so dangerous that we cannot have any limits on the power of the President if we want him to protect us from the dangers in the world.

And later in the chapter he notes why it is so hard for people to cut through that fear-

[O]ne rarely hears anyone arguing that the terrorism threat, like any other threat, should be viewed in perspective and subjected to rational risk-benefit assessments. That is because opinions about terrorism are the new form of political correctness, and even hinting that this threat is not the all-consuming, existential danger to our republic portrayed by the White House is liable to draw questions about one's patriotism and one's sanity.

These themes are seen again this weekend as Glenn analyzes the reactions to the news that Canada apprehended some potential terrorists in his latest blog post:
Remedial NSA eavesdropping course