Truth Jihad: Jade Helm: “Terror management theory” run amok?

by Kevin Barrett, VT Editor

Fear is addictive. It unleashes an adrenaline rush, and adrenaline is the body’s natural amphetamine.

Fear pumps up the ego, makes it seek self-preservation at all costs, and gives it the explosive nervous energy to take strenuous action to save itself.

So fear is natural, and good…if you’re being chased by a bear, and if you can still think clearly enough to make the right choice between playing dead, climbing a tree, or running like hell.

But if you’re sitting in your chair hunched over a computer screen, fear probably won’t help you. Most likely it will just addle your brains and prevent you from thinking clearly enough to weigh all the alternatives – not just three simple ones as in the bear chase example – and discern which information is credible in order to develop a complex, nuanced, effective plan of action.

So the social controllers don’t just put fluoride in the water supply and nano-aluminum-barium-strontium in the air supply. They also inject fear-mongering into the information supply. As H.L. Mencken put it:

“The whole of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

“Terrorism” is one such imaginary hobgoblin. Though you are 30 times more likely to drown in your bathtub or be hit by lightning than to be killed by terrorists, the amount of adrenaline secreted by Americans in response to post-9/11 Pavlovian terror conditioning would fill a good size reservoir.

The use of imaginary hobgoblins has been refined down to a science. The name of that science is Terror Management Theory (TMT). According to TMT, all human culture and behavior is driven by unconscious fear of death. Anything that reminds people of their own mortality provokes anxiety, and that anxiety can be harnessed for political purposes.

Since terror is contagious – when we’re surrounded by fearful people, we ourselves are overcome by fear – it’s a great way to stampede people. Inject fear into a herd of humans, send a bogeyman to the south of the herd, and they will stampede wildly toward the north. It’s completely predictable, utterly mechanistic. Fear reduces people to the status of robots whose buttons can be easily pushed.

So when I see people acting fearful and stupid, I tell them to take a deep breath, relax, go meditate somewhere, wait till the fear dies down and your ego shrinks to manageable size, and then (and only then) will you be capable of any thinking worthy of the name.

Recently I have been seeing a whole lot of fear-addled responses to the Jade Helm exercises. While we should always be suspicious of military drills and exercises, which are sometimes used to launch false flags, suspicion is one thing and rampant delusional paranoia is another. And while we should be working strategically to get Posse Comitatus and the Constitution back, manufactured hysteria epidemics aren’t going to help.

Some folks are suggesting that a few openings and closings of Wal-Marts, Targets, and McDonalds means that Jade Helm is going to round us up and incarcerate us in retail outlets. If you ask them for evidence supporting this assertion, they say things like:

“I read it on the internet.”

The same people claim that the D-E in “JADE” stands for “dissident extraction.” Again, the source is “somebody posted it on the internet.”

The fearmongers also claim that since JADE HELM will be in the general vicinity of the Mexican border, and Canada will also be running military exercises, there must be a plan to lock down the borders as they “extract” the dissidents. Again, no actual evidence is presented supporting this improbable claim.

The whole JADE HELM panic is based on one document describing the exercises. Nothing in that document suggests that exercises involving 1200 people are going to impose martial law on a nation of 300 million. There is nothing about dissident extraction, or Wal-Martial Law, in those documents.

Another document cited by JADE HELM alarmists, dating from the early 1960s, expresses the author’s heartfelt desire for world peace. While I agree that this document is weird – an official government document that actually espouses PEACE?! – it is hardly alarming. On the contrary, it is deeply reassuring, if somewhat surprising, to realize that at least one sane person has worked for the US government during the past century. (Or maybe two, counting JFK during the final months of his life.) If you want an alarming government document about the threat of world peace, read Report from Iron Mountain.

Here at VT we have seen certain people go completely off the deep end about JADE HELM. They have gone from “sane paranoia” (realistic assessment of actual plots and threats) to “crazy paranoia” (egocentric delusional thinking, minus fact-checking and common sense).

As “paranoid conspiracy theorists” go, I believe I am relatively sane, because I don’t over-estimate my own importance and don’t feel a whole lot of fear. (Religion helps – I hate to imagine what it would be like doing this kind of work with a mechanistic-materialist worldview and no religious practice.)

So my sane-paranoid assessment of Jade Helm is as follows: Yes, there may very well be a devious plot at work, but it isn’t what you think. They aren’t going to use 1200 game-playing troops in a handful of southwestern states to impose martial law on the whole country. They aren’t going to lock us up in Wal-Mart. They aren’t going to lock down the borders.

Instead, Jade Helm is being used (and may have been designed) to inject fear into the populace. The tangible benefits of this manufactured fear epidemic include:

*Burning the alternative media. Already VT has been damaged by a schism provoked by fear and attendant ego-bloating. And it isn’t just VT. Average Joe Citizen sees all the JADE HELM hysteria and says, “Jeez, these kooks who imagine they’re going to be interned in Wal-Mart must be the same crazies who think 9/11 was an inside job, Boston and Sandy Hook and Charlie Hebdo were false flags, the Zionist bankster freemasons run everything…what a bunch of loons.”

*Polarization and confusion. The split between the Jade Helm fearmongers and those who don’t buy it splits the populace and spreads confusion and helplessness, preventing  opposition to post-9/11 neocon fascist bankster rule from rising up in a united front.

*Reduced critical thinking. Fear hinders clear thought, and clear thinking (and muddled thinking) are habits. If potential troublemakers can be addled with enough adrenaline to get them spreading urban legends about Wal-Mart internment camps, their whole approach to politics will be contaminated, their credibility will be shot to hell, and they’ll never convince the unconverted or organize a strategic uprising that could succeed.

*Support for authoritarian, psychopathic leadership. Fearful people tend to support authoritarian/psychopathic leaders who promise them safety. Anything that injects fear into the population ultimately works in favor of authoritarian psychopaths and against relatively sane leadership. That was the purpose of the false-flag terror crime wave called Operation Gladio, which imposed a “strategy of tension” on Cold War Europe via random massacres of civilians. The JADE HELM panic will ultimately work in favor of the neocons, who are authoritarian psychopaths trying to claw their way back into power. The free-floating fear injected into the herd via JADE HELM and scripted paranoia-inducing reactions from fake alternative media sources will create a public mind that is more receptive to neocon fearmongering about ISIS, “radical Islam,” Putin, Iran, China, and other imaginary hobgoblins. The neocons, who have been pushed back by the realists during recent years, are hoping to ride a tidal wave of fear back into power.

*Maybe even actual martial law through the back door.  Obviously 1200 troops in a few southwestern states won’t be imposing martial law themselves. But as former CIA Clandestine Services Officer Robert David Steele said on my radio show a few days ago, if the fearmongers succeed in stirring up an armed confrontation between militias and troops, all bets are off. A huge battle between militias and US soldiers would trigger the kind of national emergency that the neocons love to create in order to give themselves Special Powers via the State of Exception as theorized by their gurus Karl Schmitt and Leo Strauss.

So the bottom line is that FDR was right: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

How do we stop ourselves from reacting with fear (and the egocentrism and anger that accompany it)?

In my experience, the best antidotes to fear are prayer/meditation and laughter.

If you want to try Islamic prayer/meditation, here is a good introduction.

And if you want to laugh at the insanity of the world we inhabit – not just JADE HELM paranoia, but the larger militarized consumer culture that is the product of the dominant mechanistic-materialist-atheist worldview – read my humor pieces here at VT. The latest, in case you missed it, is:

DHS: “America Is Now Under Wal-Martial Law.”

A certain colleague whose name must not be mentioned here says I have “lost credibility with this insane satire.”

I think it’s the targets of my satire – the not just the fearmongers, but the Wal-Mart-loving American sheeple and their masters as well – who are insane.

Am I the last sane VT writer? The last sane man on earth?

Or is that the craziest delusion of grandeur of them all?

You be the judge.

And don’t worry, if we’re all locked up in a Wal-Mart Consumer Re-Education Camp next fall surrounded by Jade Helm troops, I will happily (?) admit I was wrong.

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Kevin Barrett

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.

He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.

He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.

Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.

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