PrintDecember 10, 2006
Breaking Down Our Will: Gaslighting America
J.R. Dunn's recent blog in American Thinker on the anti-anti-terror campaign, brought to consciousness my own unstated thoughts about the series of obviously staged aggressive assaults on our rational responses to provocative conduct suggesting terrorism.
I am not a psychologist, and undoubtedly one of the many outstanding psychologists and psychiatrists who blog could do a far better job on this than I, who rely largely on my own reading about prisoners, concentration camp inmates, abusive personal relations and similar such power imbalanced relations in which the human psyche is assaulted and surrenders.
But it seems to me, self-defense is as elemental a part of human existence as breathing, and when it is impaired, the person under attack will succumb by engaging in suicide or self-destructive conduct.
The movie "Gaslight" illustrates simply enough what I mean. A husband tries to make his wife go mad. He does this by setting up a series of threatening events-flickering lights and odd sounds in their home-which would normally inspire fear. Then he persuades her and others that these things never happened, that they are simply the product of an overactive imagination, and, later, symptoms of madness.
Much the same thing is happening nationally on a variety of levels, facilitated by the media's love of victims whose claims they rarely examine carefully, the air of multiculturalist nihilism in which we must pretend that all cultures and beliefs are equally valuable, and, most especially by the litigious climate in which we live.
How many tales of abuse have we learned of, where the assaults are preceded by a steady attack on the rationality of the victim? "Who do you believe me or your lying eyes" is a staple joke, but it well states the process.
In the pre-9/11 atmosphere Americans - even many in law enforcement-were lulled into such a false sense of security that our observations of what was going on were impaired. Our defenses were down, you might say.
Afterward, we became more alert to suspicious activity and less loathe to report it or, in the government's case, to respond to it.
The Lying Imams' story represents just another attempt to embarrass us or sue us into either returning to that prior state of mind. Either we succumb to it and end up defenseless and depressed about the possibility of taking rational measures to protect ourselves, or we reject it and fight back against such attempts.
I hope the airline if sued will respond with a countersuit, and passengers subjected to such aggressive assaults will consider consulting counsel to determine if they have a cause of action against the imams for intentional infliction of emotional distress and compensation for the inconvenience caused by their conduct.
And I hope that the rest of us have the wit to challenge in every way possible the repeated attempts to gaslight us.
