NOVEMBER 2007

  edcell


Built by men who had no fear, Skelligs

Getting out of my little office/bedroom/studio in a slumtenement in rathgar dublin, I realised... that work with The Handstand is not finished, also I received disgruntled letters, and encouragements to continue : thanks a million to all who wrote Below is the first text I wish to use on return to the internet. So please pass the word that the handstand www.thehandstand.org has not disappeared. Jos
Braddell

Fear Not

*From the Ramparts*
Junious Ricardo Stanton


“ In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering
as a political strategy.

Instead of treating the attack as what it was - an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary - the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction. Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration's rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the
Bushies stirred up - perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base's older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general. And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.”
Fearing Fear Itself By Paul Krugman The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102907A.shtml (see below.JB.Editor)

Cunning, devious people motivated by a lower consciousness figured out a long time ago, the best way to manipulate the masses is to induce in them either an irrational fear, an unfounded dread by fomenting unease, anxiety and terror or by subjecting them to experiences so horrific and harsh they constantly feared for their very safety or lives. So they subjected them to physical and/or psychological torture, abuse and attack. Their lower consciousness manifests in their abhorrent personal and collective behaviors. To create fear in the masses they manufacture bogeymen and enemies where none exist or they magnify and distort situations for their own agenda. Our kidnaped African ancestors lived in constant fear of the European captives and their agents which included the local and national governments. “The third step in the training of slaves was to awe them with a sense of their master’s enormous power. The only principle upon which slavery could be maintained, reported a group of Charlestonians, was the ‘principle of fear.’... Here than was the way to produce the perfect slave; accustom him to rigid discipline, demand from him unconditional submission, impress upon him his innate inferiority, develop in him a paralyzing fear of white men, train him to adopt the master’s code of good behavior and instill in him a sense of complete dependence. This at least was the goal.” Kenneth M Stampp, The Peculiar Institution page 146, 148

The sons and now the daughters of those who possessed a lower consciousness of fear, greed, warmongering and murder, who employed their benighted consciousness to create a culture of fear and abuse are attempting to maintain that psychological environment in today’s world. Only this time they want us to be afraid of a group of amorphous terrorists their propaganda machine calls “Islamo-fascists” This is absurd, there is no such thing. It is the figment of a NeoCon propagandists psychotic mind. Keep in mind a generation ago their fathers and their mind control apparatus told us it was the communists
we were to dread. It was the godless communists over there who provided the pretext for the politicians to appropriate inordinate amounts of our tax dollars on weapons of mass destruction so we could “defend” ourselves against the communist threat of global domination. The problem with that scenario was, historically it was not the communists alone who were attempting to dominate the world. The US had assumed the mantel of the West as the dominate European imperialist power in the world.

For the last six years the Bu$h administration has used 9-11 (which as most serious thinkers and researchers know was an inside job) as their trump card and pretext to launch a series of invasions (in Afghanistan and Iraq) to steal the resources of these countries and use their strategic location as a base for a much wider imperialist agenda. Bu$h and Co have also initiated proxy wars in places like Somalia and Sudan to gain a toehold in these countries in order to steal their oil. To do this they’ve had to lie and induce massive fear in the AmeriKKKan populous, they had to make us believe we were under attack and the constant threat of future attacks. Whenever Joe and Jane Sixpack begin to clear their head and think lucidly about what is going on, the Bu$hites trot out another video or audio of Osama bin-Laden to terrorize the people; which is a neat trick since bin-Laden has been dead for several years now.
Fear is their primary major tool, they have become first class fear mongers using their buddies and cohorts in the corporate media to beat the drums for more fear and more war.

Like attracts like, the lower consciousness of the ruling elites and the rewards they can bestow attracts others who vibrate on the same mental and emotional frequencies. The fearful, the greedy, the covetous, outer directed people in search for externalized wealth and power are their prey and soulmates. Once the ruling elites get them in their web, they use fear to influence and entrap them to go along with their policies, they use their fear of what people will say about them, the fear their deepest secrets and foibles will be exposed, the fear of being ostracized, fear of being cut off from the riches the elites provide or the fear of being murdered to coerce and manipulate people to do what they say. Is the world a dangerous place? Yes if you believe it to be. The world is as you say it is, your reality is what you perceive it to be. We each have the power of discernment, cogitation and imagination with which we can create our reality. That doesn’t mean that your reality is my reality because there are as many ways to see a thing as there are people to see it. Community means we generally share the same or similar realities because our culture is based upon our common consciousness, how we deal with and within the reality we have created and share. The question becomes do you have the courage of your convictions. Do you have the will and perseverance to project and live your unique reality if it differs from George W. Bu$h’s and the NeoCon’s? Do you have the courage, fortitude and tenacity to reject the false reality propagated by CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal et al?

Are you confident enough in your own powers of cogitation, perceptiveness, reasoning and intuition to stand up for yourself and assert your independence of thought and emotion? If you acquiesce to fear mongers and warmongers like Bu$h the NeoCons the world becomes a scary place. Fear is the portal to the dark side, there a host of other negative ideation and emotions await you. That’s exactly what they want. If they make you fearful, meaning you are full of fear they have won half the battle because then they can then induce you to do anything, as we have seen throughout history. If you have a heart for peace and you are working to develop a higher consciousness, you are not fooled by the Bu$hes and Cheneys of this world. In fact you pity their psychotic state of mind and the pernicious influence they
have on our fellow humans. More importantly you realize you must work to offer another view of the world not just by your rhetoric but also your example.

All is not lost. We can alter the world but first we must alter ourselves. This is a monumental undertaking, one we cannot successfully accomplish if we are burdened and weighed down with fear and uncertainty.

***
Op-Ed Columnist New York Times

Fearing Fear Itself

By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: October 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.

Paul Krugman.

Related

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.

Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits.

Mr. Podhoretz, in short, is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination. And Mr. Podhoretz’s rants are, if anything, saner than some of what we’ve been hearing from some of Mr. Giuliani’s rivals.

Thus, in a recent campaign ad Mitt Romney asserted that America is in a struggle with people who aim “to unite the world under a single jihadist Caliphate. To do that they must collapse freedom-loving nations. Like us.” He doesn’t say exactly who these jihadists are, but presumably he’s referring to Al Qaeda — an organization that has certainly demonstrated its willingness and ability to kill innocent people, but has no chance of collapsing the United States, let alone taking over the world.

And Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did.

All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was — an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary — the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction.

Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.

And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.

Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself — the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.