FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)

There’s a lot of it about these days, as top administrations officials fall, predictably, under the mildly scrutinous eye of a vaguely interested press. There’s plenty of it from two different directions: one is spreading it around about attacking Iraq, which is apparently a gateway to Hell, and the other is spreading more rumors of terrorist attacks that never happen and/or are completely made up, with no facts to support them, but which a pretty large part of the American populace still lends a fair amount of credence to. The Register has al-Qaeda poised to strike hard via the Internet, which has several links to extremely well-crafted pieces of propoganda posing as article, completely devoid of content and reading exactly as a White House press release would like to sound. Some insult the intelligence enough to drag up rumors from only a few months ago that were shown to be profoundly false then and haven’t increased in veracity since.

“Today we find new FUD by USA Today, in which, ironically, an old and fully discredited rumor of al-Qaeda using steganography to share their diabolical plans on Web sites is resurrected and passed-off as news. … His sources, predictably, are all anonymous ‘officials’.”

It is this reliance on anonymous officials which should be a warning claxon for people, that the report is without credence simply because it fails to present evidence to support its claims, but it doesn’t for some reason. Simply making the allegation is enough to plant the seed, the meme, that people will remember months from now as “Al Qaeda uses the Internet to trade information in porn images”. It’s in this fashion that these falsehoods creep into the public psyche and establish themselves as fact.

“Now, with the current struggle on Capitol Hill to approve Dubya’s new Gestapo, it’s essential that the man in the street be frightened and confused by a torrent of ‘news’ pointing to incomprehensible threats which only Big Bro has the knowledge and skill to protect him from. … Look for a lot more of this cyber-terror drivel over the next two months — … or until Enron, Harken Energy and Halliburton cease making headlines.”

That is exactly the point. It’s hard to believe this incompetent information is actually believed at a high level; the suspicion must always be that is released and approved for public consumption in order to distract and dismay. It’s done on purpose so anyone that tries to notice that the Bush and Cheney compounds are making an extraordinary amount of money on War and when that’s not enough, they cheat their stockholders out of even more money and get away with it is ripe for being called ‘un-American’ for noticing these things when the administration has the weighty task of fighting insidious evil everywhere and can’t be held responsible for amorality because the weight of the world is on their shoulders and they’re doing the best they can (eat your heart out, Morford).

Mark Morford of the SF Gate talks about the same distractions in the press, but focuses on the impending attack on Iraq in Bush Smells Like Old Money.

“Witness all the angry puffed-up deflections, every reproach of the president and every suspicious glance in the direction of his corporatized administration instantly retorted with a nice “how dare you don’t you know we’re at war” or maybe “the president has a great deal on his very compact little mind right now and he can’t be bothered with the details of, you know, rampant favoritism and hypocrisy.” ”

But, perhaps, the nation is tiring of these charades. Perhaps they’re sick of playing along and believing in a war they’d rather not have and waving their tired, little, faded flags for an administration that seems to just keep on taking and taking and taking. Maybe there’s hope that people will start to think for themselves again instead of rationalizing away all evidence of hypocrisy in order to substantiate a pre-ordained and agreed-upon worldview. Morford holds out hope for that, but also can’t help but slide in a last-second barb

“Of course that day will come. Of course you hope the populace cannot and will not be lied to for very long, … and maybe we will finally realize the need for a different, long-term tack to defend our nation, change our oil-desperate foreign policy, commit fewer corporate atrocities and political puppeteering in foreign lands that tend to spawn all that hate in the first place. … Yes, that will be the day. Unless that’s the day Bush declares war on Iraq.”

That is what is unfortunate. As the public skin wears thin and people start to question in larger numbers, all it takes is a war or some such fabricated offense to the nation, as is the case with Iraq (not the 9-11 attack, lest you think I’ve truly gone off the rails), to push people right back on the unquestioning patriotic bandwagon, once again ready to be told to ignore all manner of transgressions, which are the natural purview of those in power because of all they do for you.