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Show The world held hostage What's scary about the current wave of terrorism is not simply the way it slaughters the innocent. Nor the way it points up the powerlessness of the powerful. No, the real danger is the wave of paranoia that terrorists leave behind. Well, why shouldn't we be paranoid? people are asking. Consider the victims: The U.S. Marines snugly asleep in their Beirut barracks. The American woman riding a bus in Jerusalem. The Londoners shopping in Harrod's. And all the nameless souls who just happened to be walking past the American Embassy in Lebanon or Kuwait. Fair game, all of them, in this lunatic war by desperate men. Scaring us, breeding suspicion and hate, that's the fun of the game for terrorists. In such a climate of fear tensions mount and individual liberties are in peril. Visitors to Washington are sickened by the city's new look. Concrete barriers are everywhere. Security guards seem to outnumber the local police. Doors that used to open freely, welcoming tourists, are now locked and guarded. The Pentagon has closed its underground tunnels. Anti-aircraft rockets are said to be hidden on the White House grounds. The capital of the free world looks ready for a Martian invasion. Newspeople say they can find no hard evidence of threats or plots calling for these frenzied precautions. Some are blaming the "bunker mentality" of the White House. It's the same paranoia, they say, that dispatched dis-patched the fleet to waters off Nicaragua without congressional approval. ap-proval. It's also paranoia that keeps the Marines in Lebanon, and 6,000 Army troops in Honduras. "If they can't have a war, they're going to have war games," says a veteran correspondent. correspon-dent. The fear in Washington, Newsweek reports, "is as puzzling as it is palpable." Minor officials responsible for the barriers and barred gates say they are merely carrying out orders. But nobody offers any firm evidence as to ; bomb threats or terrorist plots uncovered. Historically, it is in such a climate of fear that the liberties of the citizenry are lost. Already this erosion of freedom is apparent in the capital. Legitimate news is being withheld, reporters complain. Scholars are finding that the freedom of Information Informa-tion Act no longer guarantees a researcher's right to know. More than 300 top-level government employees have received ominous forms loyalty oaths of a sort-guaranteeing sort-guaranteeing never to write or talk about anything that transpires in the course of government business. Vir tually nobody has signed the oath, according to the latest tally. Sometimes one suspects that something some-thing in the terrorist mentality is contagious. "Terrorists are evil because be-cause they believe that their opponents are totally evil and need to be not just fought but completely smashed and eliminated," writes Dr. Frederick Hacker, noted psychiatrist and authority author-ity on terrorism. To his trained eye, a terrorist is not simply a man driving a load of dynamite through a locked gate. He is the classic "out-group" crying for help and warning of "an underlying sick condition in the society." Terrorists deliberately create fear, hoping to paralyze their enemies into a state of submission. And what sort of people are terrorists? The "classically paranoid," say the doctors. And the fundamentalists, whatever their religion. relig-ion. Even in this country we see rigidity and hostility in fundamentalist Protestants, in any creed that proclaims, pro-claims, "We're right and God is on our side." Sometimes the creed is fundamentalist fundamental-ist only in a political sense, but the fear and the anger are always there. Case in point: the Reagan administration. The paranoia is fundamental to all else. 1983 Harriet Van Home Distributed by Special Features Syndication Sales |