remain scared like a good little citizen

A leaflet and advertising campaign costing £8m was launched by the Home Office today, advising us what to do in the event of large scale emergency. This has been dressed up as relating to a wide range of possible scenarios, but is clearly aimed directly at the non-specific continuing threat of terrorism which has got us all so scared and of which we are warned on a weekly basis.

May I take this opportunity to remind you that the last terrorist attack on British soil was in 1994 and was committed by the IRA. There has NEVER been an Islamic extremist terror attack on British soil.

This document is of the type issued during the cold war warning of the dangers of nuclear attack. The difference is that those nuclear bombs actually existed, and the use of one would cause millions of deaths at a stroke. Terrorism is by its nature limited, confined and small-scale. Why the need for advice of the type issued regarding matters of actual potential national crisis?

Why do they want us to be so scared and to think we are constantly in such massive imminent danger when this is patently not the case?

http://www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk/


"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it
is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people
don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in
Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any country."
--Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials

 

are you going to beautiful days?

 

I was reading that site and followed a link to the MI5 site ... on the page about current threats they have a link to this nice little disclaimer:

http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page8.html

So basically what they are saying is. "listen to us at your own risk ... 'cos we might be talking shit"

 

For anyone who never saw this first time round you can read it here

 

That's an interesting point you've raised there. I mean, sure, the World Trade Centre attack was tragic, and possibly the deadliest terrorist attack on record but, the death toll was still way short of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki or Hiroshima for example, or the air raids on various European cities in WW2, or Vietnam, etc, etc. The fact remains that many more people will die as a result of smoking or poor cardiovascular health in one year than all the terrorist attacks which take place in one year. I personally am not taking very much attention to the government's warnings and besides, Britain's security is very good actually. Much better than America's and serious questions have to be asked about the air traffic surveillence surrounding New York on 9/11.

 

You have to remember that the government want to make us feel scared so as we can support them next time they decide to declare a war for no god damn reason. If they make out to us that there is a threat than the majority of the people in this country wont bat an eyelid when they act upon this so called threat because they will lap up everything the goverment has told us without a second thought.

Apparently in the WW's soldiers from opposing countries were going around spearing babies for fun... now people were told that to make them dispise the opposing countries and support the govenment against these "baby spearing monsters".... yet the chancess of that being totally true is quite low.

The people get sucked into the govenments propaganda and thats is all these scares are, propaganda. Yes there is a chance that we will get attacked by terrorists.... there is also a chance one of the masive nuclear power stations we have dotted around the country could explodd polluting the country with radioactive chemical... but you dotn hear about that every god damn day because thats nnot good for buisnes.... war on the otherhad... war is good for buisness.

 

Scary stuff! As if climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and keeping a few tins of boiled potatoes is going to protect you from nuclear winter... Has anyone seen the film "The War Game"? It was made by the BBC in the 1960s and deals with the possible consequences of a medium scale nuclear attack on Britain. The government banned it from being shown on TV for twenty years fearing what would happen if people really understood what nuclear war would mean. Instead we got pissy little leaflets telling us to fill the bathtub with water and not to go outside! Nonsense. Back then, they didn't want us too scared in case we rebelled against the nuclear proliferation that was going on and disrupted the military industrial complex which depended on it. They just wanted us scared enough to see the necessity for having large numbers of nuclear bombs and sold us the fiction that a nuclear war could actually be won if we had more bombs than the Russians. "The War Game" blew that myth apart by demonstrating that nobody wins a nuclear war and the government banned it. Now, they want us to be disproportianately scared of a relatively minor threat so that we will see the necessity for the continuation of the same military industrial complex...

I think Fleassy has it right that keeping us in fear of attack is a propaganda tool which means we won't question our government's actions to "protect" us. This kind of warning happened weekly before the Iraq war in early 2003 - then the warnings died off following the war, when the threat of retaliatory terror was actually much higher - see Madrid. Now we are getting these warnings every couple of weeks again - I wonder what's next? What is the propaganda preparing us for this time?

Probably, why?

 

so, was George Orwell a satirical novelist or a prophet?

 

War to provide peace - mmm..Iraq??
Engsoc - current "labour" party??
Telescreens - well just look at the amount of surveillence, satellites, Celldar, RIP act etc etc.
Man dont ya reakon Goldstein could be Osama bin Laden?? A clieche face used to provide fear and hatred to a terrorist scare story.

Not there quite yet though, we can still say that two and two make five, i mean four.

 

Interesting article here about the latest "terror threat" to US financial institutions... http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=547432

If you read between the lines it seems there is absolutely no time scale for this supposed threat, so the deployment of armed guards and temporarily increased security measures can be nothing other than sheer bluff! It comes to something when even a national front page news story like this one notices the political convenience of such warnings of unspecific imminent danger...

Two minute hate, anybody?

 

Don't know if you've ever seen Donnie Darko but you're sounding dangerously like Kitty Farmer there!

Donnie Darko: I just don’t get this. You can’t just lump things into two categories. Things aren’t that simple.

Kitty Farmer: The Life Line is divided that way.

Donnie Darko: Life isn’t that simple. I mean who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.

Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions.

Donnie Darko: Okay. But you’re not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else.

Kitty Farmer: If you don’t complete the assignment you’ll get a zero for the day.

Donnie Darko: <deep breath>…

PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE

Principal: Donald… let me preface this by saying that your Iowa test scores are intimidating. So… let’s go over this again. What exactly did you say to Ms. Farmer?

Kitty Farmer: I’ll tell you what he said. He asked me to forcibly insert the Life Line exercise card into my anus!

http://www.stainlesssteelrat.net/ddscript1.htm

 

This has been confirmed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1275178,00.html

The information was three or four years out of date. Yet we still needed to have armed security guards patrolling the financial district of New York as if this was an actual emergency or an imminent threat. Just like the "tanks at Heathrow" episode last year which was based entirely on phoney or exaggerated 'intelligence' of a potential threat, this was nothing more than an exercise in black propaganda on the part of our democratic representatives. Aren't you proud to be free?

 

Hmm, emotions can't be boiled down to love and fear, as Donnie quite rightly says:

Donnie Darko: Life isn’t that simple. I mean who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.

does the person returning a wallet feel love or fear? neither but they do react on an emotional level.

Emotions are just far too complex to be boiled down to anything, they're a lot closer to chaos theory than Boolean laws...

 

Interesting though this is, this thread was supposed to be about fear as a mechanism of political and social control... sorry, I know I started the tangent (universe) myself, I blame the wormhole I inadvertently opened up by watching Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead the other night...

 

hmm, so in there there's fear, pity, love, jealousy etc. far from just going back to 2 emotional routes you've shown how it's are nowhere near enough to deal with emotions in any real way.

(sorry Showmet, felt I had to reply to that one)

 

But Sar, by no stretch of the imagination is fear the opposite of love! Moving away from fear does not necessarily mean embracing love, and a lack of love does not necessarily imply any kind of fear, and it's a bit of a sophistry to say that these two emotions underpin everything we experience. I suppose a sense of safety and security might be the opposite of fear, whatever emotion that would be. While hate might be a more accurate opposite of love. These ideas; love, hate, fear and a sense of safety - and many more - can be applied in interesting ways as potential motivating factors in just about anything we experience, but any such application relies on some degree of abstract interpretation of underlying motives, and that's what you're doing - not noticing essential truths but forcing a simplistic interpretation onto a complex set of ideas.

I'm with Donnie - I don't think it particularly helps to shoehorn the entire spectrum of human experience into these two poles - what's the point? What does it achieve? All it seems to do is simplify some very complex ideas into a rather convenient and platitudinous catchphrase. I'm in favour of more complexity in interpretation rather than less, and all the fear / love thing does is remove the complexity and simplify things down into a rather easy and ultimately meaningless binary opposition. The most interesting and important areas are always the complicated shades of grey, not the blacks or whites.

Screw you guys, I'm going home

 

This is much closer to the truth:


http://www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk/

 

I did read that properly and I pointed out that acknowledging the existence of other emotions ran counter to rooting all emotions in fear and love. There are many things which cause emotional responses that have nothing to do with fear and love as I pointed out in the post above, just because on situation can be read by one person in this way doesn't mean that any other situation is in any way related. Emotions are too big an issue to pigeon hole like that.

 

It's a well-known tool of new-age cultism. Basically, armed with this logic, whenever anyone fails to smile and hug you, you can accuse them of being slaves to their fear and closed off to love. It allows you to dismiss a whole myriad of alternate points of view and emotional responses while sitting on your high horse and gazing down with patronising love upon those poor fear-filled people below you. Not that I'm accusing Starfly of this, but this is the root of the philosophy.

And of course in order to argue against this position, the new-agers are counting on the fact that you'll sound as though you're arguing against love and in favour of fear. Quite cunning, really.

 

That is excellent! Someone else emailed me that link about a week ago and I genuinely didn't notice ...