I read a good book recently. It was called 'State of Fear', by Michael Crichton. If you look it up on the net you'll find a lot of people ranting and raving because in it characters use scientific evidence to suggest global warming isn't the problem it's made out to be. They think this means Michael Crichton thinks environmentalism is a waste of time. They are understandably cross about this. But then again, these are probably the same people who think 'Jurassic Park' is
about dinosaurs. 'State of Fear' is about (see if you can guess, clue's in the question)... fear.
Ecce extract:
"There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as
crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or
disaster. For example, during the 1 980s, the word
crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word
budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as
dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed."
"In what way?"
"These terms started to become more and more common. The word
catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic."
"Why should it have changed in 1989?"
"Ah. A good question.
Critical question. In most respects 1989 seemed like a normal year: a Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the
Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; Jane Fonda, Mike Tyson, and Bruce Springsteen all got divorced; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions;
Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France, and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other. But in fact the rise in the use of the term
crisis can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which happened on November ninth of that year."
And so it is. Be afraid, they tell you.
In the good old days, before the fall of the Berlin wall, before the Cold War came to an end the one way nobody expected (that is relatively peacefully with the only offensive weapon dispatched by America being David Hasslehoff), there was a stable background level of fear. Fear the Communists, about whom we know so little, fear what they may be up to behind the iron curtain, fear the current numpty in the Whitehouse might accidentally put his coffee cup down on
THE button and end the world. Fear Them, conveniently all in one place, staying put, easy to point at, easy to see they're not like us. Slow news day? Flip a coin and run "We beat the Communists at...." or "Intelligence sources fear...."
Now not only is that enemy all but gone, but it didn't take a big dramatic showdown to do it. "If it carries on this way", say those who want to be able to push our buttons and make us react predictably,"next time we tell them to be afraid of something, they might not believe us. If they don't believe they need to be scared, they wont believe they need our Wonderful New Solution (TM) to save them. Then we wont be able to control them." Et apres that, the deluge.
You're going to get HIV from being looked at by a member of the gay mafia who are running everything, the ice caps will melt, East Anglia will be under water, everywhere else will be either permadrought or insect ridden swamp. The flies will spread diseases, and you'll get full blown AIDS. You'll find that out when you go to the hospital to be treated for the skin cancer caused by the hole in the ozone layer and the lung cancer caused by pollution and passive smoking. On the way back from the hospital you'll get a phone call from your boss telling you he's given your job to an immigrant, then you'll get mugged for your mobile phone by a ten year old on drugs with a gun and a rotweiller. He'll knock you down in the street and you'll get bounced into the next county by the bull bars on the front of the car the drunk driver that hits you is driving. You'll wait three hours for an ambulance that will get stuck in traffic on the way to the hospital, six hours in a corridor in A&E, then when they finally find you a bed in the Double Oncology with AIDS and Fractures ward, they'll feed you beef offal and eggs and let the CJD fight it out with the salmonella to see which kills you first, unless it takes too long, in which case you'll be thrown out to free up the bed and get blown up by the IRA trying to take the tube home.
And that just takes you up to the mid 90s. The facts often don't correspond. The earth may be getting hotter, or colder, or just going through cycles or small fluctuations in temperature. We should not pollute so we don't have to live in a polluted world. Britain is not having an AIDS epidemic. (Africa is, but we hear about it about once a month, two thirds of the way down the news, in passing when there's something else to report. We don't fear catching HIV from people we'll never meet, let alone sleep with or get bled on by, so there's really no mileage in it for them) But we should behave sensibly with regards our sexual health in general. Violent crime is not out of control. The behavior of the young is worsening, but find a point in history when it wasn't. You are unlikely to be affected by gun crime unless you're part of the drugs/crime/gang culture yourself. Nevertheless, it's best not to take shortcuts down dark alleys in parts of town where there is a crime blackspot. We do not need to fear these things as long as we are aware of them, and do our best not to be very very stupid. Even BSE was dealt with without causing a recession or a major public health issue, which would have been all we deserved for our farming methods.
Do not believe you should fear just because Murdoch or the Daily Mail say you should. Do not act out of fear. People acting out of fear do desperate, foolish things. Like vote Tory.
Now they want you to fear 'Muslim fundamentalists', as if Islam has managed to come up with a way of being utterly foul that every other religion in history failed to come up with. They tell you to fear the 'Islamisisation' of Europe, because if there was a majority of Muslims in France, we'd suddenly be parked next to a nation of headscarf wearing, woman oppressing, democracy opposing lunatics who'd want to take our country next and swamp us with terrorists. Oh be afraid, be afraid.
There are some foul old countries ruled by Muslims. No mistaking it. Countries who don't let women vote (1928), countries who torture (1917/1984) or execute people (1969), sometimes for the people they associate with (1808), execute people for stealing (1861), countries where it's a crime to belong to certain religions (1951). For anyone unclear what the numbers in brackets are, that's when Britain stopped being one of those countries. The 1917/1984 one is the Catholic church outlawed torture in 1917. Britain finally passed a law on it in 1984. But we're oh so fucking smug, we're so brilliant, cos whatever we are, we're
us and
us is always better than
them. All those things were right when we were doing them. Never mind that each country has always changed at a different pace to every other country.
My point is not that we should turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in other countries. My point is not that we're hypocritical to comment. My point is countries and regimes have always done these things. They are absolutely not a Muslim thing, or an Arab thing, or even a non-democratic country thing. They're an arsehole thing. We've taken hundreds of years to become a non torturing, killing, invading, empire building, human rights abusing, religiously persecuting and feudally ruled country. Funnily enough we're still not perfect now. We still debate whether insulting or persecuting people because of some religions not on the list yet should become illegal! You may not discriminate against someone because they are Jewish. You may discriminate against them for being a Pagan.
Listen hard to the way the media describes what's going on, and how they describe the countries they're talking about. You might not get any useful information about that country, about how it's ruled, about the political makeup of the population, about the proportion of people who are not fundamentalists of whatever religion or political stance is prevalent in that country. You will not hear about resistance movements, organisations for democratic change or constitutional reform. You wont hear what the proportion of the population are not that bothered either way and would just like to get on with the weekly shop in peace. The reporter wont have even looked it up. But you can be damn sure you'll hear "Muslim country", "Communist country". They associate words very carefully so that when you hear "fundamentalist" or "Muslim" your mind's eye will see a Bin Laden looking nutter with a big gun in one hand, beating his six wives with the other. Why do they want this? Because fairy stories about the bogeyman are easier to write and more sensational to present than the distress of moderate Muslim men about the way they're portrayed. Because if you're fearing the enemy, you probably wont be looking to closely at what 'we' are doing wrong. Because if they can get you to fear 'them', the evildoers, and they're the ones who exposed 'them' as the horrors they are, you'll probably trust them to sort 'them' out. And once you're trusting them, the world's their oyster and they've slipped some domestic cock up past without anyone noticeing.
I remember when the stereotype of Muslims was a gaggle of Muslim women walking from Harrods to the already bag laden taxi to drop off their purchases before moving on to further punish their husband's plastic in Harvey Nics. Oh poor downtrodden designer clad little lambs. The people you have any reason to fear, you should not fear because they are Muslims. To call them Muslims is an insult to true Muslims, who will point out as soon as anyone gives them thirty seconds to get a word in edgewise between the bouts of slagging and fear mongering that terrorist violence is against their religion, as is mistreating women. There is nothing about just being a Muslim that makes a person dangerous or unpleasant. Neither are all fundamentalists terrorists. A Nun is a Catholic fundamentalist.
The people you should fear, you should fear because they are arseholes. Violent arseholes hiding behind religion so that they can do what they enjoy most: hurting people who can't fight back, just like their Irish counterparts and every other bunch of issue hijacking nutjobs in history. And you should fear them as much as you fear getting hit by lightening twice, as the chances of dying in a terrorist attack are about the same: 1 in 9million. As a Brit you have more chance of getting killed by ETA in Spain than by Al Quaeda here. There have always been these people. The only things that change are the colours of the flags they're hiding behind and the target they're shooting at.
Even from those regimes run by violent oppressive arseholes, we have little to fear. They cannot invade. They wouldn't even joke about it. We have plenty weapons and plenty allies. They will not throw nuclear bombs at us. The USSR was humungously bigger than all the countries we're meant to be afraid of put together, and they never did. Virtually all the countries in the world know they could never win a war against us, never get anywhere near our borders by air or sea. They all know that if they throw one nuke, we and our American friends will make of them a large glowing crater. They are not coming. They might want to hurt us, or America, might, but they can't.
"But what about September 11th? They hurt us then. So many lives were lost! It was a disaster!" Very sad, the action of arseholes, but hardly a disaster. The Tsunami, that was a disaster. Two thousand people? More people die in landslides and floods and famines or of diseases every day. September 11th was the most they could manage, and no one's gonna get caught like that again. An earthquake killing thirty thousand is a disaster. AIDS in Africa is a catastrophe. A few thousand people dying in a terrorist attack is a sad waste of life. It's unfortunate, which is how the British army categorize collateral damage.
And you know what? If France did become a majority Muslim country with the laws they have there, religion and politics must remain separate. With the scrutiny of the EU no one could ever take the vote away from women in a European country. With the scrutiny of the EU and the UN no one could ever bring in laws or scrap laws to allow discrimination against women or non Muslims. You will never be beaten by police in France for being a woman in sunglasses. It will never and could never happen.
As for Britain, we'll be lucky if we ever get to the position where we're not ruled by the head of the church of England, where it's no longer regarded that it's 'normal' to be Christian as opposed to an atheist, agnostic or member or another religion, where dressing in non-western clothes doesn't make you suspect, and where it's no longer ok to slag off peoples religions just because you don't understand them. 1951? That's when Witchcraft ceased to be a crime. That recently people believed Witches were in league with the devil, and therefore it should be against the law for them to practice their religion, make herbal remedies for instance, meditate with candles and collect crystals, or just generally believe what they believe. That's a good few years after we'd finished fighting the Nazis for persecuting Jewish people.
But by all means fear Muslims, fear disease, fear violence. Believe that violent crime is out of control, that anyone male and under thirty in a hooded top is going to attack and rob you. Believe there's still a threat of nuclear war, believe you're a target for terrorists, believe virtually every food you see in the supermarket is bad for you. Believe you're too fat and no one will love you, believe everyone in a country whose government you don't approve of supports that government and wouldn't want to change their regime, and couldn't if they wanted to. Believe American corporations will buy the world, believe your government is conspiring against you, believe every organisation that stands for anything good is a lame duck. Believe no one can be trusted, and no good can come of anything.
Then buy this car, eat at this fast food chain, watch this romantic comedy on DVD, buy this washing powder, take this flu remedy, and above all, don't y'all forget to have a nice day now.
