Profit from fear


How much of the fear of terrorists is justified? And who gets the goodies?
I've never been fond of the conspiracy-cabal theory of history. This one does get some history right, even as it overlooks more than it documents.

In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed a handful of Wall Street lawyers and investors to posts in his administration, including James Conant, James Forrestal, and Paul Nitze.  Upon Roosevelt’s death (and the coinciding fall of the Third Reich), this influential group began an attempt to fill the trade vacuum left in postwar Europe.  While Europeans and Soviets would have preferred a neutralist trade environment, these State Department officials in the final years of the 1940s sought US trade supremacy, and thus set about creating a Soviet “communist threat” that ran counter to the CIA’s own National Intelligence Estimates.   

By 1951, this group had formed the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which by March of that year successfully motivated Congress and the public to buy into the “threat of communist enslavement” through fear-based rhetoric in the media, setting in motion the Cold War and a US economy driven by conflict. 

The rest isn't quite so accurate, and it overlooks the Islamist movements that were beginning to emerge during the 1950s and 1960s. However, there is no doubting that a small and vocal group was firmly entrenched in the State Department through at least the Nixon Administration.

Would the Soviets and Europe have settled for a neutralist trade environment? Unlikely. The Soviets were already distrustful of the United States. President Wilson had illegally sent U.S. troops to overthrow the Communists in Russia. The Soviet General Staff of WWII had already helped repel one American invasion in their youth, they weren't going to bend down to another.

Notice how this article deliberately skips President Wilson and his role in what would become World War I. He was the President who dragged America kicking and screaming onto the stage of world diplomacy. And even he had built on the efforts of his predecessors, especially Theodore Roosevelt. The climate of fear goes back a lot further than 25 years, or even 100 years.

So how much of the fear was justified? That's the question. If some fear hadn't been there already, it couldn't have been grown.

Hat tip Strike the Root.

Additional Technorati Tags

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - August 14, 2006 at 04:10 PM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved