The Fear Factor

Optimists don't think war is on the way because they can't believe the White House has completely "renounced reality."

Pessimists argue that the hallmark of the Bush presidency is the renunciation of reality.

Bush continues to raise the fear stakes, going on about the demonic plans of Islamic extremists to take over the Muslim world and restore a caliphate. Is this crude propaganda to scare Iran into submission? Or is it a prelude to "End Times"?


Over at RaptureReady.com, a kind of Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, the "Rapture Index" is hovering at 160, a rating meant to indicate when loyal Christians will disappear from earth just before the beginning of the Great Tribulation.

An Attack on Iran would send the rapture index through the ceiling, and all those crazy Christians will wet their pants with joy.

The relationship between current events and end times prophecy is played by Bush for his fundamentalist followers.

He was asked last year following a speech on the 'War on Terror' whether he believed the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism were signs of the Apocalypse.

Bush said he hadn't thought of it that way. However, just three days after 9/11, he seemed to act as if he had found himself within a fantastic cosmic scheme, declaring that the nation’s responsibility to history was already clear: "to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil" [scary shit].

By taking up the language of "good vs. evil," Bush casts his vision and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan.

Pessimists can just hear Cheney arguing that he and Bush have only two years left to do the Lord's work before they are followed by weaklings and cowards, whether they be Republican or Democrat.


As Congress debates and considers what to do about Iraq, the shadow of a far greater foreign policy mistake hovers over Iran.

The most cogent argument suggesting that the Bush Regime may attack Iran is that capitalism always contains the seeds of fascism. This is particularly true when capitalism is in crisis.

When the interests of corporate power versus worker come into even sharper conflict, this creates the need for the ruling class to resort to ever greater aggression, lies, and demagoguery.

The confusion and fear involved in the often cartoonish ‘war on terror’ is a necessary policy — society has not suddenly become irrational and crazy, but hysteria and fear are the last remaining tools of government to foment war and mask social reality.

This process has been in progress for five years. The 'fear factor' is losing its effect. Boy George has cried wolf too many times. What better way to ratchet it up again than another war against 'evil'?

The most successful aspect of nationalism is fear-mongering. It's evoked to ensure the readily manipulated masses will discard their paltry freedoms, forget their social position, and abandon their reason, placing all hope in a regime that acts as protective figure of authority.

First, you induce fear, then you offer an antidote to that fear. This is the modus operandi of all authoritarian regimes.

This tactic has been so overused in the U.S. that it has become a parody of itself. Americans are obedient, patriotic and willing followers of a strong leader.

This 'American Ideology' functions in the same way as fascist techniques — it distracts from domestic concerns while creating a ‘national’ identity exploitable by a corporate-led, imperialistic regime.

The fascist formula is only effective so long as the real issues are distorted, and the listeners are preconditioned to accept outlandish claims based on bigotry, fear, and violence.

This desperation of corporate America increases daily, with the recent speeches of Bush and his henchman as proof.


Fomenting war against Iran has taken on ridiculous proportions, as the White House tries to make unrealistic links to any organization they group together as ‘terrorists’. This is similar to the policies used by the fascist regimes of Europe during WWII.

Such an analogy, based on historical falsifications and intended to create more war, is not only highly ironic, but insane.

The fervent demagoguery in government is a reflection of the capitalists pulling the strings, who, facing stagnant growth and increased competition from emerging economies, have only their militaristic trump card to use in response.

Are we approaching critical mass? Nafeez Mossadegh Ahmed, author of Behind the War on Terror and The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked, comments on the seeming irrationality of the Bush regime's plans to attack/invade Iran.

The American Empire has reached an acute phase, with a profound and long-drawn-out economic crisis, accompanied by an endless succession of wars.

Is Iraq the tipping point? A prolonged and ‘unsuccessful’ war is the only social phenomenon sufficiently catastrophic in its effects to set up conditions ripe for fascism. Especially, if capitalist structures were severely injured but not yet overthrown.

The question he poses to all of us is this: Why would the U.S. ruling class pursue its interests in this manner?

Ahmed suggests that he “post-9/11 military geostrategy of the ‘War on Terror’ does not spring from a position of power but rather from entirely the opposite.”

He claims that the “global system has been crumbling under the weight of its own unsustainability. We are fast approaching the convergence of multiple crises that are already interacting fatally."

Ahmed asserts that senior level planners in the policy making establishment have appeared to calculate “that the system is dying” but the last “viable means of sustaining it remains [sic] a fundamentally military solution.”

One that is designed to “rehabilitate the system … to meet the requirements of the interlocking circuits of military-corporate power and profit.”

Bush has declared America at war “with Islamic fascists seeking to destroy freedom-loving societies.” Remember Huey Long’s famous dictum that fascism would come to America clothed as anti-fascism?

* I am indebted to It Could Happen Here by by Gregory Meyerson and Michael Joseph Roberto, published by Monthly Review

[1] H.D.S. Greenway
[2] James Cooke

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