Fear and Terror

From Jill Lepores' new book, New York Burning:Liberty ,Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan ; "In March and April of 1741, a series of ten fires erupted in Lower Manhattan...Slaves, together with some down trodden whites, were found to have conspired to burn down the whole city and murder the whole white population, ..the slaves were to become the Masters. The defendants had no representation ...confessions were extracted at the stake.Arrests were made:152 blacks and twenty whites.Thirty black men were hanged or burned at the stake; two white men and two white women were hanged.The bodies of two supposed ringleaders,one black and one white, were gibbeted,the corpses left to rot for weeks on public display. One resident called the episode the 'Bonfire of the Negroes'."

They took their "War on Terror" pretty seriously back then,and their "Patriot Act"( there were revolutionary rumblings going on as well), as does Cheney and some fervent right- wing bloggers (Tran- Sient, Goesh et al). "The decorative wrapping on the conspiracy theory was that the whole uprising..was a papist plot with blacks acting as the Popes minions." Are there other examples in the historical record of over zealous prosecution by an overly empowered authority, using fear to inspire state terror? Only about a hundred but these lessons are lost on the wingers who are supposed to be such brave defenders of individual liberty.I am terrified that an innocent (myself ,for instance) could be caught up in a sweep, sent to a classified ,undisclosed location, held indefinately and tortured. If this does not worry you ,you are either naive, have lost your moral bearings or both.

Then there is the archetypal, sub-conscious terror of Blacks On The Rampage. Compare the American response to uprisings in the ghetto ( after Rodney Kings beating where eighty blacks were killed and hundreds wounded, the recent looting in New Orleans,etc.) to that of the French. We Americans are obviously less confident about the durability and strength of the threads holding the fabric of our society together and collectivly in denial about the roots of extreme disenfanchisement.