| I see the nonsense works pretty well on you. >expansionist power with nuclear weapons pointed at us was not a "made-up" threat At the time of McCarthyism this wasn't really what was going on. What was going on was that capitalists were afraid communism would work. They saw rich and powerful people getting killed or displaced and the "plebs" running things and they were going to make sure it couldn't happen here. >Neither is international terrorist organizations conspiring to attack us International terrorist threat conspiracy theories. Nice. You mean the global terrorist group with all kinds of secret cells hidden under ever rock? Yea, that was all made up bullshit. Al Quaeda is a name we made up to be able to apply our own RICO laws after the first WTC bombing. And you may not realize it, but terrorist groups tend to hate each other as much as they hate anyone else. They are religious extremists after all. >but it's factually incorrect to say they are "made up." They are either utterly non-existent or so small as to be ignorable. >putting gas in your car on a sunny weekend day with the hair on your neck standing up because even though you know that there is a negligible chance of your being the victim of a sniper attack, the possibility scares you in a way that the possibility of death through heart disease, or hell the certainty of death through old age, cannot. What you are describing is irrational, emotional response. None the less, we can't make policy decisions about how you feel. And the media is largely to blame about this. The reported news should be proportional to the effect. The Boston marathon bomb should have been a byline on the local Boston news if it was mentioned at all. |
For me the answer is yes to both. Communism was not a made up threat. Nor did it just impact a few rich people. The Soviets took control of hundreds of millions of people, and maintained control with tanks and guns. For instance ask any Czech who was around in 1968 how fun that was.
As for 9/11, someone flew those planes. (If you're one of the morons who thinks that missiles were used, then go talk to one of the millions of eyewitnesses who watched the second plane fly low and slow over Manhattan - half my workplace at the time was on a balcony and watched it.) Osama bin Laden took public credit. Al Qaeda was both real, and had appeared in lots of stuff before that. After 9/11 they had great branding.
This is not to say that the threats were considered realistically. The domino theory under which we fought in Vietnam was invalid. Supporting every anti-communist power we could just because they were anti-communist lead to our supporting everything from genocide in Cambodia to military coups in Chile.
Likewise this time around, Al Qaeda was not a force in Iraq. (Well, not until we invaded, and then people who wanted to freak us out began calling themselves Al Qaeda.) I do not believe that our response has been proportionate to the threat.
But do try to keep facts in mind. In the Cold War we did face communist countries. We do face terrorist organizations today. Those are not made up.