People Can Be Scary

[forsyth]

This article, Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren't Listening, made the rounds a few months back, came to mind recently.

There are a signifigant number of people out there who think hordes of "terrorists" are going to invade America and force us all to live by fundamentalist Islamic law. Many of these people think this is already happening in Europe. (see: America Alone, or better, don't see it.)

This belief is without any kind of basis in fact. It is, frankly, not true in any sense. Yet this fear continues to drive many people. If you doubt me, read some of the reviews of the book on Amazon.

People are voting and making policy on the basis of a fear we're going to be invaded by "terrorists" and "islamofacists". And people are actively pushing that idea. No matter how stupid or obviously false it is.

Comments

[amazingadrian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think America's Cold War fears were more legitimate than fears of any kind of terrorist "invasion". Attacks on the scale of 9/11 are such that they can only really happen once before people get wiser and play smarter. It would be showing that an entire nation wasn't learning from it if it was allowed to happen again, and that's rather insulting to the intelligence of human beings. That isn't to say that the terrorists won't attack again. They've tried. It's just extremely unlikely we'll ever see anything on that scale in our own country again, unless if systematic govenrmental failure occurs. That said, thinking that the terrorists could ever feild a force large enough for some kind of 'invasion' is laughable. They are barely able to maintain a gurella war against our forces in their own homeland; I can't see any feasibility behind their finding some means to come here, bringing all their weapons with them, and amassing enough people to constitute a threat that couldn't be smashed immediately by the National Guard.

It's that Cold War mentality; I'm willing to bet you these are all people who were raised coming out of that era or the descendents thereof.