America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of the content of their Facebook posts, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented and their communications monitored
These threats are not to be underestimated.
Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.
Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. Even while President Obama insists that "freedom is more powerful than fear," the tactics of his administration continue to rely on fear of another terrorist attack in order to further advance the agenda of the military/security/industrial complex.
An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at a 40-year low, is such fear of terrorism rational?
Even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the shootings in San Bernardino and Paris, statistics show that those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government's endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda--the propaganda of fear--a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.
So far, these tactics are working.
As history makes clear, fear leads to fascistic, totalitarian regimes.
It's a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.
As I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, modern America now possesses all of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it's not only expedient but necessary. In times of "crisis," expediency is upheld as the central principle--that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.
Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring.
It's called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences.
For example, neuroscientists observed how quickly fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports:
In the experiment, researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling.
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