Fear trade

move will

trigger

arms race

This appears as a headline in today’s Australian, and laid out as above. The “Fear trade” is an apt, if not wholly unintentional, description of many a ‘News‘ headline. The Fear trade was integral to successive re-elections of John Winston H. The Fear trade is a proud sponsor of Mr AB on Botty (anag.) The Fear trade is cunning, baffling and powerful – it manages to convince human beings that they should pay it king’s ransoms to incarcerate other human beings who have done nothing more than take urgent steps, during times of conflict, to run away from carnage.

How disappointing that the Fear trade seems to be so darn successful. Phone hacking of bereaved families is a Fear trade norm; selling wars is too…uranium, as well.

Barack Obama seemed to be a vocal critic of the Fear trade, before becoming US President. A proposed US ‘Pacific Century’ is flagged by his acolytes and sponsored by…the Fear trade. Is nothing sacred, for friggin’ christsakes!

Here’s what the late, great and humanistic John Steinbeck had to say about the Fear trade:

“Now for so many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid, sarcomic terror.”

(J. Steinbeck, Once There Was A War, 1958)