User:Kingturtle/paranoia

I am putting together a unit for my U.S. History class. For lack of a better title, I am calling it The History of Paranoia in the United States (I am sure a better title will emerge later, but that's what I am calling it during these planning stages). There are some obvious topics to cover in such a unit: Salem witch trials, both Red Scares, Palmer Raids, Espionage Act of 1917, Sedition Act of 1918, Sacco and Vanzetti, Smith Act, Japanese American internment, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, House Un-American Activities Committee, Hollywood Ten, McCarthyism, Alger Hiss, J. Edgar Hoover, Operation TIPS, USA Patriot Act

There are some other topics that will also fit in nicely: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Unidentified flying objects, Mattachine Society, The Puppet Masters, Peekskill Riots, The Crucible, John F. Kennedy assassination, Area 51, Camp X-Ray.

I am just starting to work all this out. Please help me with brain-storming. I am looking for anything that describes how (at any point in U.S. history) the government or a realm of society develops tremendous fear.

Thanks! Kingturtle 19:20, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * You might want to consider (or better, set as an exercise) why these things are feared. Perhaps:
 * That there's something in the collective American psyche that requires an external antagonist; that America is confortable only when it knows who it's fighting. From the British, the savage indians, the germans, the japs, the red terror, Al Qaida.  In the absence of a real foe, is a paper tiger inflated into one, e.g. Mohamed Farrah Aidid and Manuel Noriega.
 * That the fear is manufactured deliberately, for the political ends of the manufacturer. cf The Power of Nightmares
 * moral panic is always a fun read.
 * It might also be interesting to compare the US's paranoia, which is almost entirely fear of the external enemy, with the paranoias of other countries' paranoias about internal enemies.
 * And your mention of Area 51 is interesting; you can learn a great deal about the post-word psyche of the US by watching science fiction movies of the time (it might be worth showing Earth vs the Saucermen and and old Star Trek with the obviously red-chinese Romulans. -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 00:29, 1 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Those are all very helpful avenues. What books or articles can I read to learn more about U.S. societal distrust of the British and of the Natives? Kingturtle 00:58, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

OK, at your request, here are a couple of thoughts. Paranoia usually refers to unjustified suspicion or fear of something relatively imaginary or delusional. I assume you are looking for examples of mass or at least widespread and popular fear with no reasonable basis. You have listed some items that strike me as somewhat disparate, with several not particularly fitting any sort of mass fear definition and others perhaps not fitting the delusional or imaginary part of the definition of paranoia. Most of your cases might be fairly described as "examples of government officials acting against citizens with a severity that seemed excessive to only the most liberal 2% of public opinion then but now seems excessive to the most liberal 20% of public opinion." Maybe 30% might be more accurate at present but after the recent election I'm not that optimistic.

I wouldn't argue that many are examples of overreaction or undue severity, some were ill-conceived in the sense that they did not further the purposes of those who committed them, and some were unjustly misdirected, but are you really going to argue that fear of communism was delusional or that the threat was imaginary? We certainly have ample post-soviet confirmation that there were plenty of Russian spies and agents in the 20th century working (pretty ineffectively I'll grant you), to replace our economic and political structure, that the CPUSA was a "wholly-owned-subsidiary" of the soviet government, and that Stalin was far more loathsome and terrible than most of the critics of those measures you listed believed at the time. The Patriot Act and many airport security measures are both damaging to us and ineffective, but are you seriously going to argue that the threat is delusional or imaginary?

If you really want to focus on delusional or imaginary threats, how about "black helicopters", chemtrails, aspartame, fluoridation, and the rest of Art Bell's fantasies? Or the Trilateral Commission and the Wikipedia cabal?

It also occurs to me that the radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds might be a better example of actual public panic on a small scale than Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Good luck. End of brain storm. alteripse 00:35, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

What's Wikipedia cabal? &mdash; Sebastian (talk) 02:51, 2005 May 1 (UTC)


 * There Is No Cabal, least of all a cabal. -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 09:24, 1 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, Paranoia isn't the best word to describe what I am trying to get at. Maybe hysteria? What I am looking for are examples through U.S. history in which great numbers of people in our society react with such fear against an enemy that innocent people get hurt, and that the Constitution itself is pushed aside. Of course, incidents like War of the Worlds are insightful. Kingturtle 00:58, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

How about yellow peril and Year 2000 problem? -- Toytoy 09:25, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

Check out The Power of Nightmares (The Politics of Fear) by BBC (transcript). There are torrents available (it will eventually be released on DVD, but is not yet). This 3-part documentary explains how 2 particular myths were engineered (the threat of the USSR and the threat of international terrorism), why (Strauss' ideas about dangers of individualism and the need of a myth to unite the nations) and who did it (neocons who agreed with his view). Paranoid 15:58, 4 May 2005 (UTC)


 * The coming swine flu outbreak of 1976. -- Toytoy 02:29, May 6, 2005 (UTC)

The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, by Richard Hofstadter, ISBN 0674654617 is the classic. Browsing at Amazon also finds ISBN 0520238052, ISBN 0520238052, .... Let us know what you find out... either here, under Conspiracy theories, or in reviews at Amazon. Good reading ... --Macrakis 22:13, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

What about War of the Worlds and the Alien and Sedition Acts? Neutralitytalk 16:47, May 15, 2005 (UTC)