Ever notice that the US state uses almost exactly the same rhetoric in its War on Terror as it did in its War on Communism? Here is Murray N. Rothbard during the subsidiary War on Vietnam:
The United States is again being subjected to that “complex of fear and vaunting” (in the brilliant phrase of Garet Garrett’s) which drove us, and the Western world, into two other disastrous wars in our century. Once again, the American public is being subjected to a nearly unanimous barrage of war propaganda and war hysteria, so that only the most searching and rational can keep their heads. Once again, we find that there has emerged upon the scene an Enemy, a Bad Guy, with the same old Bad Guy characteristics that we have heard of before; a diabolic, monolithic Enemy, which, generations ago in some “sacred texts,” decided (for reasons that remain obscure) that it was “out to conquer the world.”
That “complex of fear and vaunting”—We’re the world’s only superpower, haha! OMG the terrorists are going to get us!—is certainly on display now. And below the top levels of the regime, the bureaucrats are as swayed by the propaganda as the booboisie (and not only because it inflates their own importance and power). Here is yet another hilarious-awful example: the Bakersfield, CA, airport is shut down over jars of honey, the innocent brutalized, and hysterical TSA agents taken to the hospital because of the “fumes.” (Thanks to KT)
11:52 am on January 10, 2010
