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Fear mongering Towards Immigration in America

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Fear mongering Towards Immigration in America

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This article explains how the news and media was used to make people think immigration was a bad thing for the US. However, that is not actually the case. This was used to persuade people to think immigration is bad and should be avoided. It created a sense of fear towards it, when really there is no reason to have that fear.

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Two recent stories about heinous crimes allegedly committed by people living in the country illegally have again prompted immigration hard-liners to mischaracterize such migrants as a menace to public safety. The crimes at issue here are indeed serious, but the suspects' immigration status has little to do with their criminal acts.

One man in San Francisco stands accused of posing as a Lyft driver to rape female ride-hailers, and another man in Whittier has been charged with taking a chainsaw to his wife, who somehow managed to survive the horrific attack. The alleged rapist is from Peru; the alleged chainsaw-wielder is from Mexico, and had been deported back there 11 times since 2005, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told reporters.

To suggest that these men reflect the threat posed by people living in this country illegally, however, is just as ridiculous as suggesting that Timothy McVeigh illustrates the threat posed by Army veterans. A number of studies have found that immigrants - whether here legally or not - commit crimes at lower rates than do native-born Americans. In fact, one study of people living in Texas found that immigrants who are undocumented commit fewer crimes than legal immigrants.

Some hard-liners shrug off that reality and argue that an individual crime would not have occurred if the perpetrator had been kept out of the country. But that argument doesn't persuade. It echoes the death penalty advocates who say executions might not deter others from killing, but executing a convicted killer deters that particular person from killing again. That's no way to frame policy.

Violent criminals living in the country illegally shouldn't be here, and the government is right to track them down and seek their deportation. But holding up individual violent crimes as a broad indictment of immigrants does nothing to suggest a solution for the problem of illegal immigration. That the chainsaw assailant had been deported nearly a dozen times is evidence that border enforcement needs to be more effective (and no, a wall running the length of the border will not help). It is not evidence that people living here under the radar pose a public safety risk. The vast majority of immigrants, regardless of their legal status, are here trying to improve their lives and those of their families.

But such facts do not deter the hard-liners from using one-off criminal acts to tar immigrants, part of a continuum of xenophobia that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. The president's repeated characterizations of MS-13 gang members as invaders (many gang members are U.S. citizens) is, at best, demagoguery meant to inflame the passions of his nationalist followers. The president conveniently fails to mention that MS-13 arose here in the U.S. among Salvadoran refugees who fled a violent civil war that the U.S. was deeply involved in. Those refugees formed gangs in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities as protection from existing ethnic gangs there before returning to El Salvador to continue their criminal enterprise.
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The reality is that our country's identity and economy are inextricably tied to immigration. Granted, we've succumbed to bouts of xenophobia and racism in the past when deciding who is allowed to settle here. It wasn't that long ago that the U.S. heavily favored immigrants from northwest Europe and strictly curtailed arrivals from Asia, policies that changed with the 1965 Immigration Act. Regardless, for more than a half-century the U.S. has been the globe's top destination for immigrants, and about one-fifth of the world's immigrants now call the U.S. home.

Immigrants have founded some of our most successful and highest-employing companies. Six of last year's Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry and medicine are immigrants living and working in the United States. Since 2000, at least 33 of the 85 American Nobel winners were immigrants to this country. But immigrants exert influence far beyond the ranks of Fortune 500 executives and Nobel laureates. They include the people who plant and harvest crops, staff assembly lines, build and maintain houses, and work in or own restaurants. In short, they are crucial cogs in our economic engine.

A country has the right, of course, to determine who gets to cross its borders and how long they may stay. But the fear-mongering propelling the anti-immigrant attitudes from the White House not only rises from a blinkered sense of what America is as a country and a society, it imperils both.
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Editorial: Fear-mongering hides the obvious truth: America thrives as a nation because of immigration

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Two recent stories about heinous crimes allegedly committed by people living in the country illegally have again prompted immigration hard-liners to mischaracterize such migrants as a menace to public safety. The crimes at issue here are indeed serious, but the suspects' immigration status has little to do with their criminal acts.

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Fear mongering in Presidential Campaigns

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Fear mongering in Presidential Campaigns

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This article explains how trump used fear mongering during his campaign for the 2020 election. During his speeches he would address topics that would scare people. He also ignored issues that people needed comfort on and that lead to mistrust from voters.

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Trump's candidacy relies on the power of fear. It could be the only way for him to win.

Vlue / Shutterstock / Joe Raedle / Getty / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

People are scared," Donald Trump said recently, and he was not wrong.

Fear is in the air, and fear is surging. Americans are more afraid today than they have been in a long time: Polls show majorities of Americans worried about being victims of terrorism and crime, numbers that have surged over the past year to highs not seen for more than a decade. Every week seems to bring a new large- or small-scale terrorist attack, at home or abroad. Mass shootings form a constant drumbeat. Protests have shut down large cities repeatedly, and some have turned violent. Overall crime rates may be down, but a sense of disorder is constant.

Fear pervades Americans' lives-and American politics. Trump is a master of fear, invoking it in concrete and abstract ways, summoning and validating it. More than most politicians, he grasps and channels the fear coursing through the electorate. And if Trump still stands a chance to win in November, fear could be the key.

Fear and anger are often cited in tandem as the sources of Trump's particular political appeal, so frequently paired that they become a refrain: fear-and-anger, anger-and-fear. But fear is not the same as anger; it is a unique political force. Its ebbs and flows through American political history have pulled on elections, reordering and destabilizing the electoral landscape.

This week, Trump delivered a speech on immigration that depicted outsiders as a frightening threat. "Countless innocent American lives have been stolen because our politicians have failed in their duty to secure our borders," he said. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention similarly made clear the extent to which his message revolves around fear. "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life," Trump thundered. "Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally; some have even been its victims."

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Notes of uplift were few and far between in the convention speech, and commentators were duly shocked by its dark tone. (The conservative writer Reed Galen called Trump's convention "a fear-fueled acid trip.") Trump summons fear in the conventional way, by describing in concrete terms the threats Americans face. But he also, in a more unusual maneuver, summons fear in the abstract: There's something going on, folks.

The critics who accuse Trump of cheap fear-mongering may be failing to recognize that the fear percolating in society is real, and somewhat justified; politicians who fail to validate it risk falling out of step with the zeitgeist. They are likely right, however, that ratcheting up fear helps Trump. This is the way fear works, according to social scientists: It makes people hold more tightly to what they have and regard the unfamiliar more warily. It makes them want to be protected. The fear reaction is a universal one to which everyone is susceptible. It might even be the only way Trump could win.

If the normal categories hold in this election-the patterns of turnout, the states in play, the partisan and demographic divides-it is almost impossible for Trump to prevail. The current polls show him losing in just such a predictable way, dogged by his offenses against various groups. But fear, history shows, has the power to jar voters out of their normal categories.

Trump paints a fearful picture, and events validate his vision. This is what happened in the Republican primary: When back-to-back terror attacks hit Paris in November and San Bernardino in December, he pointed to them as proof that his warnings about Muslims were justified, and voters flocked to him, boosting and solidifying his polling lead in the final stretch before primary voting began. Trump's standing in the polls rose about 7 percentage points in the aftermath of the attacks, buoying him to the level it would take to win primary contests.

Now, Trump is again leaning into voters' unease. So far, it doesn't seem to be working, but events could yet change the equation; this is why many pundits and political scientists believe a large-scale terrorist attack on the eve of the election would redound to Trump's electoral favor-by validating the fearful vision he has espoused.

Trump supporters, recent polling has shown, are disproportionately fearful. They fear crime and terror far more than other Americans; they are also disproportionately wary of foreign influence and social change. (They are not, however, any more likely than other Americans to express economic anxiety.)

"I used to fly a lot, but now I don't get on an airplane unless I have to," Pat Garverick, a retired tech worker, told me at a recent Trump rally in Northern Virginia. "There's that little voice in the back of your head that says, 'Is this safe?' I try to stay away from crowds. There are so many people trying to hurt us or stir up violence."

Not all the Trump supporters I have asked in recent months say they feel afraid. One woman told me, "I'm not scared; I'm pissed off." Others cited less immediate fears: They say they are afraid for their country or their children's future. But many cited a visceral sense of insecurity. "I am terrified," confided Jonnianne Ridzelski, who I met at a Trump rally in Alabama in April. She had, she said, been making preparations for disaster, including stocking up on canned food.

What, exactly, was she afraid of? She couldn't say, and that was perhaps the most frightening thing of all. "I don't know what's going to happen," she said.

While anger makes people aggressive, prone to lash out, fear makes them cower from the unfamiliar and seek refuge and comfort. Trump channels people's anger, but he salves their fear with promises of protection, toughness, strength. It is a feedback loop: He stirs up people's latent fears, then offers himself as the only solution.

Frightened people come to Trump for reassurance, and he promises to make them feel safe. "I'm scared," a 12-year-old girl told the candidate at a rally in North Carolina in December. "What are you going to do to protect this country?"

"You know what, darling?" Trump replied. "You're not going to be scared anymore. They're going to be scared."

To the seasoned political practitioner, fear is a handy tool. "Fear is easy," Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican ad maker, told me recently. "Fear is the simplest emotion to tweak in a campaign ad. You associate your opponent with terror, with fear, with crime, with causing pain and uncertainty."

Wilson has plenty of experience. In 2002, he made a commercial that criticized Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, while showing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In 2008, Wilson made ads attacking Barack Obama by showing the incendiary statements of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. "I wanted to scare the living shit out of white people in Pennsylvania and Ohio," Wilson said. "Today, they would all be Trump voters, I'm sure."

Fear-based appeals hit people on a primitive level, Wilson said. "When people are under stress, the hind brain takes over," he said. Trump, Wilson believes, has expertly manipulated many people's latent fear of the other. "Fear of Mexicans, fear of the Chinese, fear of African Americans-Donald Trump has very deliberately stoked it and inflamed it and made it a centerpiece of his campaign," he told me.

A majority of Americans now worry that they or their families will be victims of terrorism, up from a third less than two years ago, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Nearly two-thirds worry about being victims of violent crime. Another poll, by Gallup, found that concern about crime and violence is at its highest level in 15 years.

Trump supporters are more concerned than most. According to data provided by the Public Religion Research Institute, 65 percent of Trump supporters feared being victims of terrorism, versus 51 percent of all Americans. Three-fourths of Trump supporters feared being victims of crime, versus 63 percent overall. Trump supporters also disproportionately feared foreign influence: 83 percent said the American way of life needed to be protected from it, versus 55 percent overall. Two-thirds of Trump supporters also worried that they or a family member would become unemployed, but this was not much different than the 63 percent of non-Trump supporters who had the same concern. Economic anxiety, while widespread in America today, is not a distinguishing characteristic of Trump supporters; other anxieties are.

Trump's audience of conservative-leaning voters may be particularly susceptible to fear-based appeals. Researchers have found that those who are more sensitive to threats and more wary of the unfamiliar tend to be more politically conservative. "The common basis for all the various components of the conservative attitude syndrome is a generalized susceptibility to experiencing threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty," the British psychologist G.D. Wilson wrote in his 1973 book, The Psychology of Conservatism. In other words, an innate fear of uncertainty tends to correlate to people's level of conservatism.

Subsequent experiments have confirmed this idea. In a 2003 paper reviewing five decades of research across 12 different countries, the psychologist John Jost and his collaborators found "the psychological management of uncertainty and fear" to be strongly and consistently correlated with politically conservative attitudes. (This "fear of threat," however, is not the same as anxiety in the sense of neuroticism, which correlates strongly with liberal political attitudes.)

In study after study, the characteristic most predictive of a person's political leanings is his or her tolerance for ambiguity. "The more intolerant of ambiguity you are-the more you seek control over your surroundings, certainty, clear answers to things-the more you tend toward conservative preferences," Anat Shenker, a liberal communications consultant and cognitive linguistics researcher, told me.

But it is not only conservatives who are susceptible to fear. Almost all of us exist somewhere on the continuum between the extremes of "totally averse to the unfamiliar" and "totally enthusiastic about the unknown." Experiments find that everyone's political views become more conservative when they are provoked to become more fearful. In one study, liberal subjects who had just been confronted with a threat immediately reported more conservative views on abortion, capital punishment, and gay rights.

If fear is strong enough, it can accomplish something exceedingly rare: It can override people's preexisting partisan commitments. This happened in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Political scientists say Republicans' success in the 2002 and 2004 elections can be largely attributed to Americans' increased fear of terrorism. "There is evidence from 2002 and 2004 that people's concern about terror was a very good predictor of their voting habits, even apart from partisanship," Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University and the author of The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes, told me. (Democrats, Gadarian notes, also use fear to push their agenda on issues with which they're associated, like climate change and health care.)

Shenker makes the case that the world is changing these days more quickly than any of us are inherently equipped to handle. "The modern condition of life is pretty much an assault on our brains," she told me. "We're experiencing change and ambiguity at a rate unprecedented in human history. Think about how long it took to get from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution. And now all of a sudden the climate is changing, women are becoming men, I'm talking to you on a little sliver of plastic and metal. We have change in every dimension faster than our brains have evolved to deal with it." In studying Trump voters on behalf of MoveOn.org, Shenker found that they responded strongly to the idea that he would bring order and control to a chaotic world.

Gadarian, the political scientist, said, "When people feel anxious, they want to be protected." Trump's policies, she pointed out, are a literal answer to this desire: protectionist economics; a wall that physically protects the country from outsiders. "How do you overcome the threat of terror, of crime, of immigration? You say, 'We will protect the country by building a wall.'"

Here is a case study in the power of fear in politics. Immigration reform has seemed ripe for bipartisan compromise ever since George W. Bush tried to pass it in during his second term. Majorities of voters consistently say they support allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens and oppose mass deportation. Yet the policy has been derailed by intense, concentrated, visceral opposition. Meanwhile, the reaction to mass migration has upended the politics of virtually every European nation, from Brexit to France to Scandinavia.

Frank Sharry, a proponent of immigration reform who heads the group America's Voice, has worked on the issue since the 1980s, but the rise of Trump forced him to revise his understanding. What had always seemed to him like a policy dispute now strikes him as something more profound and primal, he told me.

"Ten years ago, when [John] McCain and [Ted] Kennedy were working together on comprehensive immigration reform and George W. Bush supported it, I really thought this was a rational policy disagreement that was headed toward a logical compromise," Sharry told me recently. "Now, I see it as deeply cultural. It's racially charged, it's tribalism, it's us-vs.-them. It's a referendum on the face of globalization, on a moment of demographic and cultural change."

There are legitimate policy arguments against increasing immigration or legalizing the undocumented, but Sharry came to believe that they were not the drivers of opposition to the issue. Once you see fear as an axis, it resonates across any number of political debates. The fearful mind sees immigrants as an invasion force, refugees as terrorists, rising crime as a threat to one's family, drugs as a threat to one's children, and social change as a threat to one's way of life. Almost everyone is somewhat susceptible to fear's appeal; those naturally inclined to be conservative somewhat more so. But it takes a particular type of politician to push the buttons in human nature that activate these fears.

"Some people's sense of who we are as a country is threatened to the core," Sharry said. "Trump speaks to our id, something latent in all of us to different degrees. This is not a political campaign. It's an identity campaign."

Fear as a political force comes and goes, ebbing and flowing in American history. Politicians have always played to it: Lyndon B. Johnson's "Daisy" ad envisioned a Barry Goldwater presidency leading to nuclear war; Richard Nixon emphasized "law and order" as a counterweight to the riots of 1968; fears of crime-with racial overtones-produced the "Willie Horton" ad in 1988 and the lock-'em-up mania of the 1990s. Ronald Reagan's 1984 " Bear" ad-"There is a bear in the woods ... Isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear?"-was echoed by a 2004 George W. Bush ad featuring prowling wolves.

"Fear is present constantly in American politics," David Bennett, a historian and the author of The Party of Fear: The American Far Right From Nativism to the Militia Movement, told me. The most persistent fear in American life, he said, has been fear of outsiders.

"People need to displace and project their anxieties, their concerns about their own lives and the lives of people they care about, onto some other," he said. Often they are susceptible to politicians who tell them that "the wrong kinds of people are responsible for threatening them or their loved ones."

From colonial times to the early 19th century, the pervasive, virulent fear was of Catholics, who were seen as inferior, unassimilable, and in thrall to a foreign dictator (the Pope). The mass immigration of Irish Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s ratcheted up the panic and convulsed American politics, with the Whig Party collapsing and the anti-Catholic nativist Know-Nothing Party briefly becoming America's second-largest political party.

After the Civil War, a new influx of Italians, Slavs, and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe prompted a new nativist upsurge. By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had millions of members. But in the 1930s and 1940s, this wave of nativism largely subsided. What happened? "I argue that the nativists won," Bennett told me. New federal legislation in the early 1920s closed the "golden door" and shut off the spigot of migrants.

Many have argued that fear and nativism in politics are driven by people's economic insecurity, as struggling members of the majority find themselves in competition with immigrants for jobs and wages. But Bennett does not believe that to be the case. Nativism, he notes, was relatively low during the Great Depression, and rises in nativist sentiment haven't generally correlated with periods of economic strain. Rather, they have correlated with large-scale increases in foreign immigration, which natives tend to view as a threat to the nation's safety and culture. (Recent studies have also found a strong correlation between increases in anti-immigrant sentiment and increases in immigration.) It's not desperation that makes people turn on the other-it's diversity.

Right now, America's foreign-born population is at a historically high level due largely to the surge in Latin American immigration of the last couple of decades. But as some conservative writers have noted, with both the Republican and Democratic establishments officially pro-immigration and pro-diversity, people's anxieties about this fact had little expression in mainstream political discourse-until Trump came along.

Another form of fear also runs through American politics in the 20th century: the fear of foreign ideology, from anarchism to fascism to Marxism, that solidified into the Cold War fear of communism. Bennett believes that Trump has combined the fear of foreign ideology with fear of foreign immigration in a novel way, with his twin emphases on Islamist terror and Mexican migrants. This, he says, may be why Trump has done better than many fear-fueled politicians.

I asked Bennett if he believed appeals to fear had the power to realign American politics. "These fear-based movements have tended to be confined to the fringe, not take over major political parties," he said. But the fact that Trump is the Republican nominee makes him wonder whether that historical pattern still holds. "This is what's making me so nervous," he said. "I don't think we know."

There is a final punch line to the analysis of Trump as the candidate of fear. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is now campaigning on a fear-based appeal of her own-the fear of Trump.

Clinton's speech accepting her party's nomination presented her as the candidate of hopefulness and pluralism, a contrast to Trump's gloom and doom. But it also sought to sow alarm about the prospect of a Trump presidency, depicting him as erratic and thin-skinned, apt to start a war on a whim. "A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons," she said. At every turn, she and her aides have portrayed Trump as a "risky" choice with a "temperament" that could lead to dire consequences. It would not be surprising to see her campaign cut an updated version of the "Daisy" ad.

In research conducted for MoveOn, Shenker, the linguistics consultant, found that the idea of Trump as a threat was the most persuasive case against him among swing voters. "The single most damning case against Trump, across the various measurements and using his own words and actions as evidence, is that as President he would escalate the likelihood of catastrophic violent conflict from without and within, posing a serious threat to the future of the United States," her team wrote in a memo outlining their findings. This message, they noted, was far more effective than emphasizing Trump's "misogyny" or depicting his economic record as bad for working people.

But Shenker told me that she worries that the Clinton campaign has not done enough to offer a positive vision as an alternative to Trump's alarmism. "Every time Clinton says, 'Trump is dangerous,' what people are hearing is, 'The world is dangerous, it's dangerous, it's dangerous,'" she told me. "It just plays into the message of chaos." And the more chaotic the world feels, the more people may look to Trump for comfort.

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Donald Trump's Campaign Is Based on Fear

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Trump's candidacy relies on the power of fear. It could be the only way for him to win. People are scared," Donald Trump said recently, and he was not wrong. Fear is in the air, and fear is surging.

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How Russia was used to Instill Fear and Suspicion during US Election

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How Russia was used to Instill Fear and Suspicion during US Election

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This article explains how foreign countries can be used to spread information that may start fear and mistrust. In this case, Russia during the election four years ago was blamed for tampering with votes. Since people were unable to find confirmation about this in the moment, they were forced to question what they heard on the news and media. This mistrust lead people to fear the election process and people in office.

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Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's redacted report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. (Jon Elswick/AP)

Over the past three years, it has become conventional wisdom among many liberals that American democracy is under attack by foreign state actors. Russia in particular has been accused of dividing Americans through the spread of "disinformation" to engineer specific electoral outcomes - notably the election of Donald Trump. These calls have resurfaced with allegations that Russia may be trying to help Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

But rather than protecting American democracy, this sustained focus on foreign threats to our elections can harm it. Throughout American history, various political actors have delegitimized or suppressed internal discontent by blaming discord on the conniving of foreign actors. Whether cynical or well-intentioned, these arguments work to suppress the messiness and hard work of democracy in favor of a bland, compulsory nationalism. And blaming outsiders distracts attention from the very real domestic problems that make "disinformation" campaigns coherent in the first place.

The act of blaming outside actors for internal turmoil is a deeply rooted American tradition. In the antebellum South, slave owners insisted that the enslaved were happy and content under the kind, paternalistic guidance of their masters. But as rebellions, thefts and acts of vandalism made such pretenses increasingly untenable, slave owners forwarded a simple explanation: Northern abolitionists were riling up an otherwise contented local population. Blaming Northerners allowed the slaveholding elite to have their cake and eat it too - they could ignore the discontent among their enslaved property while simultaneously rallying the rest of the white South to close ranks behind them in opposition to alien agitators.

A similar strategy was used to undermine labor activism. Just two years after the Russian Revolution, as the American wartime economy converted back to peacetime, the United States saw a colossal wave of labor unrest from industrial workers radicalized by their exploitation. When dockworkers in Seattle went on strike in 1919, and a subsequent general strike encumbered the entire city, some Americans believed that workers' rights might finally be realized. They used patriotic language to compare the recently defeated German Kaiser to the "Kaisers of Industry" they were now fighting back home.

But business leaders made a concerted effort to depict all labor activities as the result of foreign agitation. They argued that native-born Americans could not possibly promote an anti-American activity like a strike; instead, they targeted immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as the source of labor unrest. The infamous Palmer Raids projected the idea that once the radical foreigners were gone, any labor unrest would subside. As the mayor of Seattle put it in his subsequent book "Americanism vs. Bolshevism," the rising tide of class conflict and, indeed most of the nation's problems, had a simple root cause: "unassimilated aliens."

Russians and communists continued to be particularly ubiquitous and malleable scapegoats, blamed for almost every conceivable instance of social unrest or protest in the 20th-century United States. In 1947, the powerful Southern congressman John Rankin declared that the "racial disturbances you have seen in the South have been inspired by the tentacles of this great octopus, communism, which is out to destroy everything." As the civil rights movement continued to grow in strength and militancy, segregationists routinely cited "outside agitators," or foreign influence, as the reasons African Americans "suddenly" were rebelling against the system of white supremacy.

Blaming foreign actors for domestic division reached its zenith during the second Red Scare, evident in Hollywood films about the perils of communism. The film "I Was a Communist for the F.B.I.," made at the height of McCarthyism, is particularly instructive. The film blamed foreign agitators for fomenting a labor strike in Pittsburgh and a riot by otherwise upstanding African Americans. These alien radicals even reveal, unwittingly, that they first developed this tactic of sowing racial division in the real-life Scottsboro case from the 1930s when nine black men were falsely accused of rape. "I Was a Communist for the F.B.I." rewrites history to suggest that this very real tragedy - a consequence of racial terror and domestic inequality - was simply a foreign machination.

The film went even further to model "good Americans" - good African Americans, good Jews and good workers - by suggesting that impatience, division or frustration were just foreign creations with no basis in the reality of American life. It worked. Though entirely a work of fiction, the film was so well received that it garnered an Oscar nomination for best documentary.

In its tendency to see foreign influence behind domestic disillusionment and anger, the current fixation on Russian disinformation sometimes echoes these histories. To justify her plan countering foreign disinformation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren's website suggests that Russian intelligence agencies worked to "polarize and disenfranchise particular groups - chiefly Black voters." Her presidential campaign cites a single report, by the Computational Propaganda Research Project, which focuses on attempts by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) to "misinform and polarize U.S. voters." But what examples of Russians targeting African Americans with disinformation does the report actually offer?

In a word: none.

According to the report, here is how IRA accounts targeted African Americans: They highlighted police brutality, slavery, racial discrimination and mass incarceration. They promoted Black Lives Matter. They upheld "positive themes of black affirmation and black beauty." They suggested Hillary Clinton cared more about votes than black lives. They suggested black people vote for Jill Stein. They promoted a voting boycott. Summarizing its own findings, the report concludes that the IRA efforts "sought to divert political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities faced by African Americans."

More than a simple disinformation campaign, this appears to have been an effort to tap into legitimate, preexisting "anger with structural inequalities" that have not been sufficiently addressed by "established political institutions." People are disillusioned with the establishment because it has failed them, and this is what political leaders should focus on, not the external actors fanning existing flames.

The problem in slavery wasn't the incursion of Northern abolitionist pamphlets - it was the treatment of people as property. In Seattle in 1919, it was not the nefarious plans of alien Italians, Russians and Jews - it was rapacious industrial capitalism. The issue with the civil rights movement wasn't that the Soviet Union was sowing division for the purpose of world domination - it was that African Americans were fighting for the rights guaranteed them by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

And the actual problem in our electoral politics is not the Russians. It is a long history of white supremacy and institutionalized racism that have been insufficiently addressed by established political institutions.

Trying to unite the nation by blaming its problems on foreign actors and outsiders promotes the status quo and undermines meaningful efforts at structural change. A real reckoning with the many different interests of the nation means understanding that all is not right with it and that, when people speak to this or act upon a recognition of that fact, we can't simply blame outside agitation. We can call that democracy. The reinvigoration of American democracy does not depend on purging it of all foreign influence. It depends on giving disaffected people a reason to have faith in the first place.

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Perspective | The problem with fearmongering about Russian electoral interference

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Over the past three years, it has become conventional wisdom among many liberals that American democracy is under attack by foreign state actors. Russia in particular has been accused of dividing Americans through the spread of "disinformation" to engineer specific electoral outcomes - notably the election of Donald Trump.

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North Korea and Kim Jong-un's  Fear Mongering

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North Korea and Kim Jong-un's  Fear Mongering

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Kim Jong-un uses fear mongering to intimidate his people and other countries. This tactic works to for him to keep people on edge. He creates an anxiety that causes people to feel uneasy about what he may do next. For example, when he threatens to launch a missile at the United States that could reach major cities. This fear also works well for him since it forces citizens in North Korea to obey his orders. He threatens people with extreme forms of punishment in order to keep his people in line. This article explains more on how he uses fear mongering to strengthen his power.

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North Korea's Kim Jong-Un Uses Fear Tactics For Regime Survival

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Kim Jong-un directly or indirectly follows the basic tenet of Machiavelli's The Prince: using fear for regime survival in N.Korea as long as possible.

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This article talks about how fear is used in the media.

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News is a money-making industry. One that doesn't always make the goal to report the facts accurately. Gone are the days of tuning in to be informed straightforwardly about local and national issues. In truth, watching the news can be a psychologically risky pursuit, which could undermine your mental and physical health.

Fear-based news stories prey on the anxieties we all have and then hold us hostage. Being glued to the television, reading the paper, or surfing the Internet increases ratings and market shares - but it also raises the probability of depression relapse.

In previous decades, the journalistic mission was to report the news as it actually happened, with fairness, balance, and integrity. However, capitalistic motives associated with journalism have forced much of today's television news to look to the spectacular, the stirring, and the controversial as news stories. It's no longer a race to break the story first or get the facts right. Instead, it's to acquire good ratings in order to get advertisers, so that profits soar.

News programming uses a hierarchy of if it bleeds, it leads. Fear-based news programming has two aims. The first is to grab the viewer's attention. In the news media, this is called the teaser. The second aim is to persuade the viewer that the solution for reducing the identified fear will be in the news story. If a teaser asks, " What's in your tap water that YOU need to know about?" a viewer will likely tune in to get the up-to-date information to ensure safety.

The success of fear-based news relies on presenting dramatic anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, promoting isolated events as trends, depicting categories of people as dangerous and replacing optimism with fatalistic thinking. News conglomerates who want to achieve this use media logic, by tweaking the rhythm, grammar, and presentation format of news stories to elicit the greatest impact. Did you know that some news stations work with consultants who offer fear-based topics that are pre-scripted, outlined with point-of-view shots, and have experts at-the-ready? This practice is known as stunting or just-add-water reporting. Often, these practices present misleading information and promote anxiety in the viewer.

Another pattern in newscasts is that the breaking news story doesn't go beyond a surface level. The need to get-the-story-to-get-the-ratings often causes reporters to bypass thorough fact-checking. As the first story develops to a second level in later reports, the reporter corrects the inaccuracies and missing elements. As the process of fact-finding continually changes, so does the news story. What journalists first reported with intense emotion or sensationalism is no longer accurate. What occurs psychologically for the viewer is a fragmented sense of knowing what's real, which sets off feelings of hopelessness and helplessness - experiences known to worsen depression.

An additional practice that heightens anxiety and depression is the news station's use of the crawl, the scrolling headline ticker that appears at the bottom of the television, communicating "breaking news." Individuals who watch news-based programming are likely to see one, two, or even three crawls scroll across the screen. The multitasking required to read the crawls and comprehend the actual newscast comes easy to some viewers, whereas others report feeling over-stimulated.

One could easily change the channel to interrupt the transmission of such information. However, crawls are not relegated to just news channels. Unlike the viewing experience of the past, crawls are now more prominent during entertainment programs and often serve as commercials for nightly newscasts or the upcoming weekly news magazine show. The crawls frequently contain fear-driven material, broad-siding an unsuspecting viewer.

It's been said that fear-based media has become a staple of popular culture. The distressing fall-out from this trend is that children and adults who are exposed to media are more likely than others to

Feel that their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe

Believe that crime rates are rising

Overestimate their odds of becoming a victim

Consider the world to be a dangerous place

News media needs to return to a sense of proportion, conscience, and, most important, truth-telling. Until that happens, help inoculate yourself against feeling overwhelmed by doing the following:

Consider limiting your exposure to media. Give yourself a set time once or twice a day to check in on local and global happenings.

Consider choosing print media for your information gathering rather than visual media. This can reduce the likelihood that you get exposed to emotionally laden material. Home pages on the internet can give you an overall sense of what's going on, as can headline news channels that update stories on the hour.

Remember that you have the power to turn off the remote, leave a website, or change the radio station. Don't let yourself be passive when you feel media is overwhelming you.

Know that other people will have a different tolerance for media stories and their details. If someone is expressing too much of a story for your own comfort, walk away or communicate your distress.

Consider having an electronic-free day, and let your senses take in the simpler things in life.

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If It Bleeds, It Leads: Understanding Fear-Based Media

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Managing depression requires you to mind your media intake.

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This article shows the effectiveness of fear mongering in advertising and how fear can make us want to buy one thing over another.

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Listerine was launched in the 1880s as an antiseptic liquid mainly meant for application on wounds or areas likely to be infected. One important area where it could be applied was to clean infections in the human mouth - A delicate and constantly wet area, where the other creams, bandages won't work. Listerine was marketed to dentists for this reason. Though the product had potential, it could not penetrate the market and was always on the edge of survival till the 1920s.

In the 1920s, Listrine decided to change their communication -they targeted fear psychology of consumers - Listerine focussed on one fear - Human Relationships - halitosis - BAD BREATH.

They changed their ads as

Their video ads ran like this -
Look at this, Martin's have been happily married for years, but something has gone wrong these days....Halitosis or Bad Breath is no help to a happy home...... Jane has a pretty face, Men notice her lovely figure, but men never linger along. Jane has one big minus in her report card-Halitosis or Bad Breath .....
And the Listerine Brand took off .....Sales quadrupled.

Quaker Oats was a pioneer in many marketing, advertisement techniques - Quaker Oats 1917 Ad - Focussing on fear psychosis - Food scarcity, Health, Not being energetic

Quaker Oats in 1899 advertisement - Targeting the fear of child's development

Tooth-paste - In the late 1920s, a new brand was fighting tooth and nail to gain market share -Pepsodent - They too targeted fear psychosis - The team targeted the tooth's cloudy film. The fact was that this same naturally occurring membrane film has always covered people's teeth(regardless of what you eat and how often you brush) all the time and had not bothered anyone. (Anybody could remove the film by running your finger over the teeth or rigorously swirling the water around your mouth) and the team told consumers that this film was the one that made tooth appear dull, ugly and invited decay.

In one of the ads, Pepsodent says, "Millions of women are using the new method of teeth cleansing and you could see the pretty teeth everywhere.Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Use Pepsodent" - The brand used "Social Proof - Fear" psychology technique too.
Pepsodent for children - Neglect them and your child may pay the penalty in later life ...
Another brand threatening the women ....How worse could a brand go?
"The concept of a product/service had simply changed from those early days - A product simply meeting the needs of a consumer would not survive in the long run- The product or service should evolve to meet user's changing aspiration - His or her aspiration is to overcome fears and the greed present in his or her mind. (A user's choice of food is not just for nutrition - He wants to be in control of his own health, his confidence, presentation of himself to others)."
Every human is controlled by two masters - Greed and Fear. Once the basic needs of a customer are met, brands are forced to target 'consumer emotions' in order to have a sustainable competitive advantage. Businesses that target Greed or Desires sell premium or luxury products/services. A business that targets Fear sells "Control over their own life". Out of all the emotions, fear sells better. It is a powerful motivator. Fear is part of our automatic mind and at times, it is out of control of our rational mind.

Brands, these days, communicate the fear inexplicitly. Direct communication does not help. Brand offerings are no more communicated in terms of saved money or earned money or in terms of wasted time or more free time, but simply in terms of 'more control' and 'less chaos' in life.

Keep in mind that there are different types of fear - Brands target multiple fears or focus on a single fear - The general consumer fears are a)fear of not being able to stand out from the crowd, unique identity, b)fear of future - They would like to perceive future better than the past, c)fear of dependency- need to act independently, freedom, d)overcoming the fears of height or any other limitation -thrills, e) fear of conflicts, threats, f) fear of not belonging to a group, community, g) fear of environmental safety, h) fear of failures, i) fear of missing out, j) peer pressure.

Horlicks claims that they make children grow taller, do better at schoolwork, become faster at sports and stronger -indirectly customizing the product on parent's fears.

Bournvita - There is a belief that the taller you are, the easier the life is. Brands target this 'fear of peer pressure" in children.

Baby safety helmet for toddlers - a decade back, we never had a product like this. The material also needs to be organic - Organic, healthy, sustainability - So, the bamboo material is used to build the helmet.

Baby Oil, Baby Soap, Baby shampoo, Baby powder, Baby Band-aid - everything indirectly targets fear. Pampers changed their communication from 'dryness' 'Snug Fit' to 'Good sleep for baby' and 'Sound health for baby' - the major fear/concerns of a mother.

Toothpaste category - Colgate has too many varieties - building on every consumer fear in that segment - Freshness, Stronger teeth, Fresh breath, Whiter teeth, fighting Cavities, germs, healthy gums, plaque, tartar, gingivitis, stain, longer hours protection, sensitivity(Fear of not able to eat cold or hot items), enamel protection, enamel repair, sugar acids, sweet tooth. It appears that Colgate focusses on the 'next fear' than the 'next need'.

Febreze targeted the fear of clothes smelling bad even after washing - Air fresheners targeted the fear of smell inside the home - Bathroom cleaners, Vessel cleaners, Sanitizers do not talk about cleaning anymore, but about the killing of germs. Their communications have changed.

Vacuum cleaners indirectly focus their product features on consumer's fears - lengthy cord, 360-degree rotation to avoid knee, wrist, hand, back pains, cleaning corners, cleaning steps, protection system to avoid scratching or damaging floors, walls, doors, servicing, cleaning.

Warranties - Brands make more money through extended warranties and annual maintenance contracts - A business thrives on fear. A water purifier costs around Rs.20000 and an AMC of Rs.5000 per year. Most of the products provide a 2-year warranty and an extended warranty of an additional two years and the probability of component failure is very minimal during those periods. Extended warranties are a major additional revenue source for many retailers and brands.

Athletic shoe manufacturers target the fear of causing injury to the foot.

Skin care and anti-ageing products target the fear of growing old - They could locate new fears - Dry Skin, Age Spots, Uneven skin tones, Appearance of skin.

Wellness products, Organic natural products targeting the fear of unhealthy lifestyle.

Mobile phone brands targeting the "Fear of Missing Out" by introducing the local languages in communication. Facebook, Whatsapp target the same fear.

FedEx 's advertisements earlier targeted fear of package arriving safely, arriving on time. Now, these are not fears anymore - One of their recent ads is targeting the fears of small businesses, e-commerce.
Everyone is fearful of something - Part of every purchase made by the consumer is based on some sort of fear. It does not matter what product or service you are selling, you can still tap 'Fear' emotion to increase your market share, or launch a new variant or add new value proposition of your product/service.
Small to Medium Threat, Recurrent Incident, Limited Consequence - "Slovic et al published an article in 1977. He states, "People buy more insurance if the events have a moderately high probability of inflicting a relatively small loss than against a low probability of inflicting a higher loss". Consumers can be easily influenced by the high probability of a hazard than by the magnitude of the consequences. People are not inclined to protect themselves against very low probability threats. "

The product examples mentioned above all have a high probability of happening, but consequences are of lesser magnitude - We could convince people easily, nudge them to try our products. In all the above examples, fear may appear unwarranted or the fear would not create major consequences. Most of us go for extended warranties on buying a new car, but the failure rate of any components are rare and breakdown may happen one in every thousand cars. Take the example of mosquito liquid repellents - I do not know whether it works effectively. But most of us use them. We keep buying refills. It is mostly used in places where mosquitoes are fewer in numbers. Even if you get dengue, you cannot go and sue them, as they would blame the environment. You rely on this product when the magnitude of fear is minimal or manageable.

Rogers' Protection Motivation Theory (1975) proposes that people protect themselves based on four factors: the perceived severity of a threatening event, the perceived probability of the occurrence, or vulnerability, the efficacy of the recommended preventive behaviour, and the perceived self-efficacy. As we have seen earlier, the threat we choose should have small to medium severity, and the perceived frequency of occurrence could be high - Example for the frequency of occurrence, every night we need to face mosquitoes, every 8-10 hours you would feel a film on your teeth.

Coping with the Threat - To make users cope with the threat - we need to design a product or service that is trouble-free, comfortable, uncomplicated, familiar to use ( the perceived self-efficacy) and make it easily available, accessible. ( availability of coping response(The solution - product or service)).

Triggers - We need some fear triggers in the environment so that we could make consumer link our product to the situation - Example, the film over teeth in the case of Pepsodent, the fear of dengue, malaria diseases(reports in media) in the case of mosquito liquid repellents, dry skin, spots in the case of skincare and the list could go on.

Traditional marketing advises you to "Find a need and fill it." Now, "if you are not able to find the need, then discover the next fear or threat in your consumer's mind.

Conclusion - Targeting fear, brands build long-term relationships. Example, brands use extended warranties to remain in touch with the customers, help future repurchases, build a loyal customer base, strengthen brand image - sometimes, it is a win-win situation for both customers and the brand.

Lea Dunn and JoAndrea Hoegg in Journal Of Consumer research wrote, "Interpersonal research has shown that when people feel scared, they are more likely to seek out an affiliation with others (Sarnoff and Zimbardo 1961; Schachter 1959). For example, individuals who experience a fearful event together (e.g., a natural disaster, terrorist act, etc.) display solidarity and group cohesion and demonstrate stronger attachments with those who were present during the experience (Fried 1963; Moore 1958; Tyhurst 1951). If the experience of fear can lead to emotional attachments to other individuals, it may also be that it can lead to emotional attachments to brands". Consumers who feel a strong attachment to a brand will be more loyal and less price sensitive.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON -
21 KEYS to SUCCESS in BUSINESS -A Guide for Every ASPIRING ENTREPRENEUR by Shah Mohammed M. References - The power of habit by Charles Duhigg, article by Tom Oakley from marketingagenda.com, Articles by Slovic et al, The New Science of Customer Emotions by Scott Magids, Alan Zorfas, and Daniel Leemon, Impact of brand on emotional attachment by Lea Dunn and JoAndrea Hoegg, 121mcv.co.uk/resources/wants-needs-desires-fears, Playing to win by AG Lafley, Nudge by Richard Thaler, Do It Marketing By David Newman.

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The Examples Of 'Fear Appeal' In Advertising -Emotional Branding.

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Listerine was launched in the 1880s as an antiseptic liquid mainly meant for application on wounds or areas likely to be infected. One important area where it could be applied was to clean infections in the human mouth - A delicate and constantly wet area, where the other creams, bandages won't work.

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This article talks about the way in which fear affects how our brains behave and includes examples of those influences.

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Fear mongering (or scaremongering) is the use of fear to influence the opinions and actions of others towards some specific end. The feared object or subject is sometimes exaggerated, and the pattern of fear mongering is usually one of repetition, in order to continuously reinforce the intended effects of this tactic, sometimes in the form of a vicious circle.
Uses Campaign advertisements
Probably the best-known example in American politics is the Daisy television commercial, a famous campaign television advertisement beginning with a little girl standing in a meadow with chirping birds, picking the petals of a daisy while counting each petal slowly. When she reaches "9", an ominous-sounding male voice is then heard counting down a missile launch, and as the girl's eyes turn toward something she sees in the sky, the camera zooms in until her pupil fills the screen, blacking it out. When the countdown reaches zero, the blackness is replaced by the flash and mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

As the firestorm rages, a voice-over from President Johnson states, "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die". Another voice-over then says, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home".
Product advertisements
New Zealand politician Nick Smith accused Ken Ring of scaremongering in 2011: "Frankly what Mr Ring is doing is no better than people crying fire without cause in a packed stadium or picture theatre." - March 2011

Advertisers have also entered the arena with their discovery that "fear sells". Ad campaigns based on fear, sometimes referred to as shockvertising, have become more and more popular in recent years. Fear is a strong emotion and it can be manipulated to steer people into making emotional rather than reasoned choices. From car commercials that imply that having fewer airbags will cause your family harm, to disinfectant commercials that show bacteria lurking on every surface, fear-based advertising works. While using fear in ads has generated some negative reactions by the public, there is evidence to show that "shockvertising" is a highly effective persuasion technique, and over the last several years, advertisers have continued to increase their usage of fear in ads in what has been called a "never-ending arms race in the advertising business". Author Ken Ring was accused of scaremongering by New Zealand politician Nick Smith. The Auckland seller of almanacs made predictions about earthquakes and weather patterns based on lunar cycles, and some of his predictions were taken seriously by some members of the public in connection with the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand.

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Fear mongering (or scaremongering) is the use of fear to influence the opinions and actions of others towards some specific end. The feared object or subject is sometimes exaggerated, and the pattern of fear mongering is usually one of repetition, in order to continuously reinforce the intended effects of this tactic, sometimes in the form [...]

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This video is an example of fear mongering that is trying to get Lynden B Johnson Elected. It goes so far as to imply that if you don't vote for him, you will be nuked.

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This article talks about the effect of fear mongering on people's psyche and how it effects their day to day lives from a psychological point of view.

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What happens when the news cycle starts to feel too heavy? It turns out that what we hear and see being reported, could be negatively impacting how we view the world...

The news cycle: it's inescapable. Whether we chose to get our updates from newspapers, television reports, online, or social media, if we want to keep up with current events, there's no avoiding it. Yet have you stopped to think about how it could be affecting you, and your view of the world?

There's no denying it, 2020 has been a tough year. The news cycle has been dominated by injustice, riots, and a global pandemic unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes. While it's been a heavy few months in the headlines, according to one sociology concept, the news could actually be affecting each of us more than we might think.

What is mean world syndrome?

First coined in the 1970s by Dr George Gerbner, mean world syndrome revolves around the idea that we each develop a cognitive bias where, over time, we start to see the world as more dangerous than it actually is. Thought to develop due to long-term, moderate to heavy exposure to violence-related content through mass media (such as news reports and television shows), those who are affected may experience increased feelings of fear, anxiety, general pessimism, and even feel a heightened state of alertness thanks to the perception of threats around them.

What we see, hear, and read - whether it's something we know to be true, such as a news report, or something we know is fiction, such as a drama or horror movie - can have a huge influence on our overall beliefs and attitudes about the world around us, and our place in it. The way in which the same piece of information is framed - through cleverly angled photography or video footage, or carefully chosen words - can create an entirely different view of the same set of events.

Since the theory was first proposed, numerous studies have supported the hypothesis, with findings highlighting the emotional toll that violence-related content can have on us. But is there anything that we can do to help combat these negative effects, without cutting ourselves off from the latest news?

How can it affect us?

When something begins to make us feel anxious, uneasy, or even fearful, it can be easy to try to dismiss it as 'just in our heads' - yet for many, these feelings can have real, physical symptoms. We spoke to Beverley Hills, counsellor and lead partner at The Practice, to find out more.

"The all-pervasive media keeps us in a constant state of alert, from entertainment to the news. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated production values, our brains sometimes find it confusing to tell the difference between exciting fact and thrilling fiction. We get caught up in a cortisol loop, and begin to believe that dangers exist all around us in real life.

"Mean world syndrome plays right into our innate fears: fear of the unknown, fear of death, FOMO (fear of missing out). It triggers our self-protective fight, flight, or freeze instinct, whereby the body is flooded with hormones and chemicals originally designed to put us on alert in order to save us from the very real big bad world out there in the days before civilisation. Our instincts are there to help defend us from harm, and are the reason we may feel at unease with the unfamiliar."

When our fight, flight, or freeze instincts are triggered, we often cannot choose how we will react - our bodies do so automatically. We can't blame ourselves for how we instinctively respond to situations of high stress, anxiety, or trauma. But what can we do to help take back control of how we are thinking, feeling, and reacting to the constant stream of negativity and bad news we see in the media?

Some questions we can ask in order to challenge ourselves are: is this thought fact or fiction? What real evidence is there that these thoughts will come true?

How to combat it

"One of the ways to combat mean world syndrome is by challenging the way we think," says Beverley. "The first thought that pops into our head is what we call 'automatic thinking'. This is our conditioning, whether those thoughts, or messages, were given by an attachment figure or the media, it was a repetitive message that played on our fear and it stuck.

"Some questions we can ask in order to challenge ourselves are: is this thought fact or fiction? Am I thinking all-or-nothing thoughts? What real evidence is there that these thoughts will come true? Speaking with a counsellor may also be useful, as they can help to not only unravel these thoughts, but the right therapist can also help identify where they came from, thereby demystifying them."

Another good option is to ensure there is balance to your social media streams, by also following positive news outlets, or those that give a broader view of current events. Carefully selecting our news sources can help to balance out the negativity that can be rife, and provide you with some much needed uplifting news and events to act as a buffer.

The important thing to remember is, that while it's good to be aware of what's happening in the world, the saturation of negative news, and the way stories can be portrayed, is often overwhelming. To protect your mental wellbeing, and ensure you see a more rounded view of events, we need to hunt out and savour the positive moments, too.

Newsfeed positivity

* Take stock of who you're following on social media. Is your feed filled with good vibes, or knee-jerk reactions to negative headlines? Don't be afraid to mute or unfollow people if they aren't right for you at the moment.

* Pick your sources carefully. Online news platforms like Positive News and the Good News Network provide a daily dose of positivity without cutting you off from the latest headlines. If print media's more your thing, The Happy Newspaper or Happiful magazine are available via subscription or in stores across the country.

* Be kind to yourself. We all go through bad patches. It's OK to put yourself first. If things are feeling too heavy, take a break from the media and come back when you're in a stronger place. Your wellbeing should always come first.

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The news cycle: it's inescapable. Whether we chose to get our updates from newspapers, television reports, online, or social media, if we want to keep up with current events, there's no avoiding it. Yet have you stopped to think about how it could be affecting you, and your view of the world?

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1. Heightened Fear of Police in Recent Years

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1. Heightened Fear of Police in Recent Years

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In more recent years, there have been a lot of news stories that have blown up regarding police attacking and killing people of color seemingly without a cause. Some examples of this that were all over the news and incited protests in their respective areas were the death of Eric Garner in July of 2014, the shooting of Michael Brown in August of 2014, the shooting of Tamir Rice in November of 2014, the shooting of Philando Castile in July of 2016, the shooting of Alton Sterling in July of 2016, the shooting of Breonna Taylor in March of 2020, and the death of George Floyd in May of 2020. Because of these incidents, the problem of racism in the police force of our country has been brought to light, and the movement "Black Lives Matter" was started in order to combat this problem as well as other problems of racism in the United States. However, in recent years, this problem of racism within members of the police has been blown out of proportion, to the point where many people of all races are starting to believe that there aren't any good cops out there, meaning it's becoming a more and more popular belief that all cops are racist. This is a serious issue as not only are the worst cops being made to represent cops as a whole, but it incites violence and hate toward all cops, which in turn causes more hostile situations in which people could get hurt; cops or otherwise. Social media in particular, as well as blogs all over the internet and some professional news sources, are responsible for the spread of this harmful ideal, in which they pass these cops that have committed heinous actions against people of color as representing all cops and thereby increasing the fear of cops in all people, especially those of color, by portraying them all as inherently evil, violent, and racist.

I provided a link to an article that talks about an example of this anti-cop movement in New York back in late 2019.

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Around 1,000 protesters marched through downtown Brooklyn Friday alleging police brutality in the subways. They chanted familiar slogans - "No justice, no peace/F - - k these racist police," and called for violence. Choruses of "punch a cop in the face/every nation, every race," were echoed by large banners reading, "Ante Up! Punch that cop!" Cop cars were tagged "NYPD KKK," and eggs and garbage were thrown at a police cruiser.

The "#FTP" (f - - k the police) action was inspired by two recent incidents where police made arrests on subway platforms. In one, an early-morning melee spilled underground, and cops were filmed using force to break up the fighting and subdue people resisting arrest; one teen shoved a cop and was punched in the face; he's suing the city for $5 million.

In another, police swarmed Adrian Napier, whom they believed was carrying a gun; they found no weapon but arrested him for jumping the turnstile. The incident, captured on video, received national attention.

"Officers should be working to de-escalate," former HUD Secretary Julian Castro commented, "not putting dozens of lives at risk over $2.75." But Napier was apprehended after fleeing the police and escaping into the subway; his arrest was not precipitated by jumping a turnstile.

These incidents took place in the context of a campaign against fare evasion, which has accelerated dramatically following the announcement that local prosecutors would no longer pursue "theft of service" charges against arrestees. Arrests for turnstile-jumping are down about 40 percent since last year. The NYPD now largely writes tickets for the violation, reserving arrest for serial evaders.

Part of Friday's protest included a mass refusal to pay subway fares, with scores of people clambering over the turnstiles in protest against the "criminalization of poverty" - i.e., enforcement of fare collection. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, "Ending mass incarceration means challenging a system that jails the poor to free the rich. Arresting people who can't afford a $2.75 fare makes no one safer and destabilizes our community."

But almost nobody goes to jail for fare evasion. The Mayor's Office for Criminal Justice reports 32 jail admissions for fare evasion in the first three months of 2019. Over that same period, 992 people got arrested for fare evasion, and another 18,000 received summonses for theft of service. So a minuscule fraction - about 0.2 percent - of people stopped and charged with jumping turnstiles wound up in jail, likely repeat offenders.

Outrage about fare enforcement exploded after Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced he would hire 500 new police officers to patrol the subways. As he prepares to run a reformist campaign against District Attorney Cyrus Vance in 2021, Manhattan Assemblyman Dan Quart introduced a bill that would cap the penalty for fare evasion at the cost of the fare, in order to "lessen the burden on poor people and prevent them from being unnecessarily tangled up in the criminal-justice system."

Quart calls fare evasion "an economic decision" and decries the "long-term, adverse effects" that result from involvement with the criminal-justice system - that is, with breaking the law. Lowering the penalty for theft to restitution of the value stolen eliminates any incentive not to steal.

A rising and vocal element among the activist Left favors free transit as a measure for economic and racial justice; certainly the hundreds of people who marched in Brooklyn believe that there should be no fare. Echoing elected officials such as Ocasio-Cortez, one protester commented, "The police have been extremely violent toward black kids for skipping the $2.75 fair when they make millions of dollars off the MTA's funds."

Many New York officials stayed silent on Friday's mass lawbreaking and calls for violence against police. Yet in less than two months, New York's new criminal-justice reform laws will take effect. Thousands arrested for serious charges will no longer be eligible for even temporary incapacitation but will be issued desk appearance tickets and sent on their way; only the most violent criminals will even be considered bailable.

The city is contemplating enticing people with baseball tickets or gift cards to show up for their court dates. New York appears all too eager to write some new, dark chapters in a war on civility and public order.
Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal, from which this was adapted.

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Politicians must stand up to NYC's anti-cop movement, or we're in trouble

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Around 1,000 protesters marched through downtown Brooklyn Friday alleging police brutality in the subways. They chanted familiar slogans - "No justice, no peace/F - - k these racist police," and called for violence. Choruses of "punch a cop in the face/every nation, every race," were echoed by large banners reading, "Ante Up!

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Terrorism is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims". This means that, by definition, terrorism is a political tool used to instill or heighten fear in a group of people with the goal of causing them to react a certain way. An example of this comes from the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, in which a terrorist group called al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in New York City with the believed political goal of scaring the United States into withdrawing it's military and civilian personnel from the Holy Land; which consists of Israel, Palestine, part of Syria, part of Jordan, and part of Lebanon. Osama Bin Laden, the former leader of al-Qaeda and an organizer of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, proclaimed in November of 2002 that al-Qaeda's motives for the attacks were because of the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, US support of Israel, sanctions against Iraq, and US involvement in acts of aggression against Muslims in Somalia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Qana massacre in Lebanon. As a result, we can infer that they blamed our actions for 9/11 in an attempt to scare us into going back on the actions they said led them to do it. Of course, the outcome was very different, as George W. Bush, our acting president at the time, used the 9/11 terrorist attacks to feul the war on terrorism, which ultimately just led to more US military involvement in many countries in the Middle East.

I included a link to a Wikipedia page that talks a lot about why 9/11 occurred and how Bin Laden tried to influence the United States to change their actions using fear and violence. I apologize for the picture that pops up for the link and any negative emotions it may insight.

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The September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States were a terrorist act carried out by 19 hijackers of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Motives for the attacks were stated before and after the attacks in several sources. Additionally, Osama bin Laden declared a holy war against the United States, and two fatwā were released by bin Laden and others in 1996 and 1998.

In Osama bin Laden's November 2002 "Letter to America", he explicitly stated that al-Qaeda's motives for their attacks include: Western support for attacking Muslims in Somalia, supporting Russian atrocities against Muslims in Chechnya, supporting the Indian oppression against Muslims in Kashmir, support for Israel in Lebanon, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, US support of Israel, and sanctions against Iraq.

The U.S. government took the position, as often repeated by the Bush Administration, that terrorists attacked the United States because "they hate us for our freedoms." For example, President George W. Bush in a speech to Congress nine days after the attacks said: "They hate right what we see in this chamber--a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms--our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

Before the attacks, Al-Qaeda issued proclamations that provide insight into the motivations for the attacks: one was the of August 1996, and a second was a shorter fatwa in February 1998. Both documents appeared initially in the Arabic-language London newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. Three years before the September 11 attacks, Al-Qaeda released a Fatwa, stating "We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson." The Fatwa also complains against the presence of the US in Saudi Arabia and support for Israel. After the attacks, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have published dozens of video tapes and audio tapes, many describing the motivations for the attacks. Two particularly important publications were bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America", and a 2004 video tape by bin Laden. In addition to direct pronouncements by bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, numerous political analysts have postulated motivations for the attacks.

In his November 2002 "Letter to America", bin Laden described the United States' support of Israel as a motivation:

The expansion of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.

In 2004 and 2010, bin Laden again repeated the connection between the September 11 attacks and the support of Israel by the United States. Support of Israel was also mentioned before the attack in the 1998 Al-Qaeda fatwa:

[T]he aim [of the United States] is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

In the above-mentioned 2002 "Letter To America", bin Laden laments the immoral behavior that has become the norm in the United States as a motivating factor in his decision to launch the attacks:

The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you. (a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.

On 6 August 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 661, which imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, providing for a full trade embargo, excluding medical supplies, food, and other items of humanitarian necessity (these to be determined by the Security Council sanctions committee). After the end of the Gulf War and after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, the sanctions were linked to removal of weapons of mass destruction by Resolution 687.

In the 1998 fatwa, Al Qaeda identified the Iraq sanctions as a reason to kill Americans:

despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million ... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. ... On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies-civilians and military-is an individual duty for every Muslim ...

In the 2004 Osama bin Laden video, bin Laden calls the sanctions "the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known".

After the 1991 Gulf war, the US maintained a presence of 5,000 troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. One of the responsibilities of that force was Operation Southern Watch, which enforced the no-fly zones over southern Iraq set up after 1991, and the country's oil exports through the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf are protected by the US Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain.

Since Saudi Arabia houses the holiest sites in Islam ( Mecca and Medina), many Muslims were upset at the permanent military presence. The continued presence of US troops after the Gulf War in Saudi Arabia was one of the stated motivations behind the September 11th attacks and the Khobar Towers bombing. Further, the date chosen for the 1998 United States embassy bombings (August 7) was eight years to the day that American troops were sent to Saudi Arabia. bin Laden interpreted Muhammad as banning the "permanent presence of infidels in Arabia".

In 1996, bin Laden issued a fatwa calling for American troops to get out of Saudi Arabia. In the 1998 fatwa, Al-Qaeda wrote: "for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples." In the December 1999 interview with Rahimullah Yusufzai, bin Laden said he felt that Americans were "too near to Mecca" and considered this a provocation to the entire Muslim world.

Conflict in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon and the Philippines

Clause 1B and 4 of Osama bin Laden's manifesto state that:

"You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon. . . We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines."

Political analysts have inferred some motives for the attacks that were not explicitly stated by Al-Qaeda, such as globalization and a desire to provoke the United States.

Elliot Neaman stated that the connections Walt and Mearsheimer and others, including many German intellectuals, make between 9/11 and Israel are ahistorical. He argues that the Palestinians themselves have often pointed to their betrayal by one Arab leader after another since the founding of the state of Israel, and further that bin Laden is no exception, as he never showed any concern for the Palestinian cause until he came under the influence of Ayman Al-Zawahir and decided to use the Palestinians as a means to gain the favor of militant Muslims. Al-Qaeda and Hamas continue to have a fraught relationship, and have been argued to have different goals in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, argue that 9/11 terrorist attacks are purely religious. They are seen as "a sacrament ... intended to restore to the universe a moral order that had been corrupted by the enemies of Islam." It is neither political or strategic but an "act of redemption" meant to "humiliate and slaughter those who defied the hegemony of God."

Raymond Ibrahim, as a researcher at the Library of Congress, found a significant difference between Al Qaeda's messages in English directed to a Western audience and al Qaeda's Arab messages and documents directed to an Islamic audience. The Western-directed messages listed grievances as grounds for retaliation employing the "language of 'reciprocity.'" Literature for Islamic audiences contained theological motivations bereft of references to the acts of Western nations.

Bernard Lewis is the best-known exponent of the idea of the "humiliation" of the Islamic world through globalization. In the 2004 book The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, he argues animosity toward the West is best understood with the decline of the once powerful Ottoman Empire, compounded by the import of western ideas, as seen in Arab socialism, Arab liberalism and Arab secularism.

During the past three centuries, the Islamic world has lost its dominance and its leadership, and has fallen behind both the modern West and the rapidly modernizing Orient. This widening gap poses increasingly acute problems, both practical and emotional, for which the rulers, thinkers, and rebels of Islam have not yet found effective answers.

In an essay titled " The spirit of terrorism", Jean Baudrillard described 9/11 as the first global event that "questions the very process of globalization".

Some Middle East scholars-such as Michael Scott Doran and Peter Bergen-have argued that 9/11 was a strategic way to provoke America into a war that incites a pan-Islamist revolution. Doran argued that the attacks are best understood as being part of a religious conflict within the Muslim world. In an essay, Doran argued that bin Laden's followers "consider themselves an island of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity". Doran further argued that bin Laden hoped that US retaliation would unite the faithful against the West, sparking revolutions in Arab nations and elsewhere, and that the Osama bin Laden videos were attempting to provoke a visceral reaction in the Middle East aimed at a violent reaction by Muslim citizens to increased US involvement in their region.

Bergen argued that the attacks were part of a plan to cause the United States to increase its military and cultural presence in the Middle East, thereby forcing Muslims to confront the idea of a non-Muslim government and establish conservative Islamic governments in the region.

U.S. President George W. Bush did in fact declare a War on Terror, which resulted in the loss of control of Afghanistan by the Al-Qaeda-allied Taliban. Despite criticism that the Iraqi government had no involvement with the September 11 attacks, Bush declared the 2003 invasion of Iraq to be part of the War on Terror. The resulting backlash and instability enabled the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the temporary creation of an Islamic caliphate holding territory in Iraq and Syria, until ISIL lost its territory through military defeats.

Robert Pape identified 315 incidents, all but 14 of which they classified as part of 18 different campaigns. These 18 shared two elements and all but one shared a third: 1) A foreign occupation; 2) by a democracy; 3) of a different religion. Mia Bloom interviewed relatives and acquaintances of suicide terrorists. Her conclusions largely support Pape's, suggesting that it is much more difficult to get people to volunteer for a suicide mission without foreign occupation.

1. * bin Laden, Osama (August 1996). "bin Laden's Fatwa". PBS NewsHour. Archived from the original on 2014-04-19.

2. ^ * bin Laden, Osama (February 1998). "bin Laden's Second Fatwa". PBS NewsHour. Archived from the original on 2013-11-28.

3. * Plotz, David (2001) ^ What Does Osama Bin Laden Want? Archived 2016-11-15 at the Wayback Machine, Slate

4. ^ bin Laden, Osama (November 24, 2002). "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'". The Observer. Archived from the original on 2014-10-08.

5. ^ George W. Bush, "Address to Joint Session of Congress," 20 Sept. 2001, whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

6. ^ "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'". 24 November 2002. Archived from the original on 2014-10-08 - via The Guardian.

7. "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'". The Guardian. 24 November 2002. Archived from the original on 2014-10-08.

8. bin Laden's taped broadcast from January 2010, where he said "Our attacks against you [the United States] will continue as long as U.S. support for Israel continues. ... The message sent to you with the attempt by the hero Nigerian ^ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is a confirmation of our previous message conveyed by the heroes of Sept. 11". (Quoted from "bin Laden: Attacks on U.S. to go on as long as it supports Israel", Haaretz, online here Archived 2016-12-16 at the Wayback Machine).

9. cf. ^ Rubin, Michael (December 2001). "Sanctions on Iraq: A Valid Anti-American Grievance?". 5 (4). Middle East Review of International Affairs: 100-115. Archived from the original on 2012-10-28.

10. "US pulls out of Saudi Arabia". BBC News. 2003-04-29. Archived from the original on 2010-01-06.

11. ^ Yusufzai, Rahimullah (September 26, 2001). "Face to face with Osama". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on January 19, 2008.

12. See Elliot Neaman "The War That Took Place in Germany; Intellectuals and September 11th", ^ German Politics and Society (Fall, 2002)

13. ^ Raymond Ibrahim (September 21, 2007). "The Two Faces of Al Qaeda". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on April 24, 2019.

14. ^ Alex P. Schmid (January 2014). "Al-Qaeda's "Single Narrative" and Attempts to Develop Counter-Narratives: The State of Knowledge" (PDF). International Centre for Counter-Terrorism - The Hague. pp. 5-6. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-03.

15. ^ The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Bernard Lewis. 2004

16. ^ Bergen, Peter (2006). The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader. New York: Free Press. p. 229. ISBN 0-7432-7891-7.

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Motives for the September 11 attacks - Wikipedia

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The September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States were a terrorist act carried out by 19 hijackers of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Motives for the attacks were stated before and after the attacks in several sources. Additionally, Osama bin Laden declared a holy war against the United States, and two fatwā were released by bin Laden and others in 1996 and 1998.

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3. George W. Bush's Fearmongering Campaign

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3. George W. Bush's Fearmongering Campaign

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Former President George W. Bush ran a fearmongering campaign in the United States throughout his 8 years in office. Most students in the US know this campaign to have included using the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to try to convince the American people that a war against terrorism in Iraq was necessary, as Bush had been pushing for military force in Iraq prior to 9/11 but a majority of people were against this idea. Also, with fear of terrorism in the United States at an all-time high, he used this fear to enact the Patriot Act which allowed the federal government significantly more freedom in how they gather personal information on people in the US. In 2008, during Bush's second term in office, he tried to pass another bill that would have granted even more power to the federal government to gather personal information on Americans and he again used the 9/11 terrorist attacks to try to justify this, saying that the US at that time faced terrorist threats that would make 9/11 "pale by comparison". Ultimately, it can be seen numerous times throughout his presidency that he used 9/11 to increase people's fear of terrorism so that he could push for support of the war in Iraq and numerous other countries with "known terrorists", occupy foreign nations that could either provide resources or some sort of other advantage to the US, and increase the government's power over its people.

This article I included talks about a specific example of Bush's fearmongering as well as talking about his overall use of fearmongering.

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President Bush's speech before a captive audience of 740 troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina Tuesday night was a repellant spectacle. It combined the pack of lies that the country has heard over and over again for nearly four years with appeals to backwardness, ignorance and fear, all intended to quash the mounting popular opposition to the war in Iraq.

Filled with non sequiturs and self-contradictory arguments, the speech asserted yet again that the unprovoked US invasion and occupation of Iraq were in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and that Iraq remained the frontline in the "global war on terror."

Is it really necessary to answer these bogus claims yet again? These were the arguments the administration attempted to sell to the American people before the invasion, manufacturing phony intelligence about meetings between Iraqi agents and Al Qaeda that were debunked well before the first troops were sent in.

Once again Bush employed the injunction that we not forget "the lessons of September 11." But what are those lessons? No Iraqis were involved in the 9/11 attack, and there was no link between the organizers of that crime and the regime in Baghdad. If there is anything to be learned, it is that the Bush administration seized upon the hijack-bombings-or allowed them to take place-as a pretext for executing longstanding plans to conquer Iraq and its vast oil wealth.

The central justification given when the war was launched-the alleged threat from Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction"-went entirely unmentioned in Bush's half-hour address.

Bush now casts the war and the continuing occupation of Iraq as a struggle for freedom and democracy. But his speech testified to the disintegration of democratic processes within the United States itself.

He appeared before massed troops, under discipline to sit through his lies and stupidities. He addressed the nation not from the Oval Office, as a democratically elected leader, but from Fort Bragg, so as to project the image of a war-time "commander-in-chief." Under Bush, this designation has been transformed from an affirmation of civilian control over the military to a byword for militarism and an imperial presidency answerable neither to the law nor the populace.

The basic assumption of those who wrote the speech was that the American people are nothing but fools who can be endlessly manipulated. In an attempt to dissuade the majority of Americans from their well-founded conclusion that the war should never have been launched and withdrawal should begin, Bush claimed "we have made significant progress" over the past year.

He chose the date of his speech to coincide with the first anniversary of what was proclaimed the "handover of sovereignty" to an Iraqi regime headed by a former CIA agent. This was but one of numerous "turning points" that produced only growing resistance and carnage. Since that date, more than 900 US troops have been killed, along with uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians.

The number of daily attacks and the number of US troops killed over the past month both stand at nearly double what they were a year ago. For the Iraqi people themselves, the conditions of life are worse now than they were a year ago. Violence is endemic, with the US occupation forces and their Iraqi puppets controlling nothing outside of Baghdad's heavily fortified "Green Zone."

Less power is being generated today than a year ago, with most people having electricity for only six to eight hours a day. Clean water and adequate sanitary facilities are lacking, producing widespread illness, particularly among children. And at least 40 percent of the population remains unemployed.

Added to these horrendous conditions is the oppression of foreign occupation, with Iraqis deprived of all essential democratic rights-including the right of life itself-by an all-powerful US military force. There is no "sovereignty" under conditions in which 140,000 American troops are deployed in Iraq.

These are the conditions that have given rise to mass resistance which the American military has proven powerless to stop.

Bush's attempt to dismiss this resistance as the work of "foreign fighters" and "ruthless killers converging on Iraq" is ridiculous. The American military now runs a vast prison system in Iraq, holding well over 10,000 so-called "security detainees." Out of these, barely a few hundred are non-Iraqis.

As for the "foreign fighters," Bush noted that they "have come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya." These are countries whose people share with the Iraqis common language, culture and history of anti-colonial struggle. If they are "foreigners," what are the US troops?

Describing the enemy that the US occupation army confronts in Iraq, Bush declared: "They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of warfare or morality."

He could well have been talking about his own government, which launched an illegal war of aggression that has claimed an estimated 100,000 Iraqi lives. It has used bombs, missiles and napalm against civilian targets, and reduced Fallujah, a city of 300,000, to ruins. On a daily basis it carries out raids, killing innocent civilians and detaining others.

To justify these crimes with a load of Manichaean rubbish-presenting US imperialism's dirty colonial war as a struggle for "good" against "evil"-is to appeal to everything that is backward, ignorant and fearful in America.

"We fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand," Bush said. If Iraq is where people are "making their stand," it is because it is their country, and they will never accept its conquest.

Bush made the unlikely claim that the bloody catastrophe in Iraq is inspiring people throughout the Middle East. If anything, the events there have provoked mass revulsion and outrage in the region. Bush sought to claim credit for elections in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon, though votes in the former have been taking place for several years, and in the latter for decades.

There was, underlying the specious claims of progress and vows to "complete the mission," a definite strain of desperation. Bush has often chosen to use soldiers as extras in his televised performances, but this time his audience was somber, interrupting his speech with restrained applause just once-and then at the prompting of a White House advance man. No doubt, back-to-back tours in Iraq and the prospect-enunciated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld-of a dozen more years of fighting has dampened enthusiasm within the ranks.

The speech concluded with an appeal for American youth to consider a "military career"-a bit of hustling for the military that was prompted by a disastrous decline in recruitment, posing before the Pentagon the potential shipwreck of the all-volunteer army.

At the same time, Bush invoked the need for "sacrifice," without ever spelling out what he meant. He suggested merely that Americans fly the flag on the 4th of July to show their support for the troops. Nowhere in his speech did he acknowledge that nearly 1,750 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, or that his administration has expended approximately $200 billion on the war.

The clear implication, however, was that the killing and dying, and the squandering of vast sums will continue indefinitely. The speech constituted a warning. The American ruling elite is not about to accept another Vietnam. It has no intention of allowing popular opposition to force an end to the war.

This is not to deny the existence of divisions within the political establishment over the conduct of this war. The Democrats have emerged as the faction pushing for more decisive action and criticizing the administration for mismanaging the war effort. No less than the Republicans, they are committed to "completing the mission" in Iraq, i.e., subjugating its people by military force and assuring US hegemony over the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

The Democrats' chief foreign policy spokesman Senator Joe Biden praised Bush for speaking to the American people on Iraq, declaring, "Unless we regain their support, we're in real trouble." He repeatedly warned that there are not enough US soldiers on the ground, and suggested that more force is needed to do the job.

While the mass media interrupted their prime time schedules to broadcast Bush's speech, some commentators expressed concerns afterwards that the president had failed to supply any new arguments or policies to reverse the sharp decline in support for the war. This failure is not a matter of poor speechwriting. Like it or not, the administration confronts an objective reality in Iraq where everything it has asserted or predicted has been refuted by events.

In concluding his remarks, Bush declared, "When the history of this period is written, the liberation of Afghanistan and the liberation of Iraq will be remembered as great turning points in the story of freedom." On the contrary, when the history of these events is written, the US interventions will be cited as turning points in the resurgence of naked imperialist aggression on a scale not witnessed since the fall of Germany's Third Reich.

The decisive issue posed by the eruption of American militarism is the need for the building of a political movement against war, independent of the Democrats and Republicans and based on the American working people. Such a movement must begin with the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq. It must reject the entire fraud of the "war on terror," and insist that all those who conspired to launch the war in Iraq be held responsible both politically and criminally.

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Bush at Fort Bragg-fear-mongering, lies and desperation

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President Bush's speech before a captive audience of 740 troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina Tuesday night was a repellant spectacle. It combined the pack of lies that the country has heard over and over again for nearly four years with appeals to backwardness, ignorance and fear, all intended to quash the mounting popular opposition to the war in Iraq.

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4. George H.W. Bush's Infamous "Willie Horton" Ad

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4. George H.W. Bush's Infamous "Willie Horton" Ad

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In 1988, during his campaign for the presidency, George H.W. Bush released a commercial about his and Michael Dukakis's (the Democratic candidate for presidency at the time) positions on crime and the death penalty. The ad states that George H.W. Bush is in favor of the death penalty, and that Dukakis is not only not in favor of the death penalty, but as the governor of Massachusetts, he also supported the idea that this add called "weekend passes" in which criminals could leave the jail on furlough to go back home periodically. The ad talks about how a criminal named Willie Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murdering a boy in an armed robbery by repeatedly stabbing him, received furlough via Dukakis's crime plan as governor 10 times, and during his last furlough away from jail, he ended up kidnapping a couple and raping the woman repeatedly in front of her boyfriend, then proceeded to stab the boyfriend to death. This ad targeted the public's fear of criminals and having something horrible like what Willie Horton did happen to them or someone they love. It is widely believed that the significant increase in Bush's lead in the election following this ad was largely in part due to Dukakis's flawed view of how to handle crime that was exposed in this ad and shown as the cause of Horton's second heinous crime spree.

I have included a link to the ad on YouTube.

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5. North Korea and the Fear of Nuclear War

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5. North Korea and the Fear of Nuclear War

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On October 9, 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test under their leader Kim Jong-Il. Some surrounding nations such as China were only informed of the test about 20 minutes prior to it happening. Such inconsideration for surrounding nations as well as the idea of a nation testing the working condition of their nuclear arms was clearly a sign to the rest of the world that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was making an indirect threat of nuclear war on any nation that might threaten them. Such nuclear tests as this increased the fear of nuclear war in the US due to the known dmaage that can occur from even a single unclear warhead and also due to the already existing fear of nuclear war as a result of the Cold War and the arms race the US had with Russia. Because the needs for building a nuclear arsenal are really only to be able to do as much damage to another nation as quickly as possible, the idea that North Korea instilled in people around the world that they are still actively testing their nuclear arms to prepare for a day when they are needed sparked a fear in people that nuclear war could occur within their lifetime, and North Korea may be the ones to do it should a nation threaten them or declare war on them for any reason. With all this in mind, it is most likely that such tests having been made public and announced only minutes before they were to occur were used as a deterrent to discourage other nations from acting unfavorably toward North Korea using fear of nuclear war.

I have included the Wikipedia page about all the nuclear weapons tests North Korea has held.

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North Korea has a military nuclear weapons program and, as of early 2020, is estimated to have an arsenal of approximately 30-40 nuclear weapons and sufficient production of fissile material for 6-7 nuclear weapons per year. North Korea has also stockpiled a significant quantity of chemical and biological weapons. In 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Since 2006, the country has been conducting a series of six nuclear tests at increasing levels of expertise, prompting the imposition of sanctions.

North Korea showed an interest in developing nuclear weapons since the 1950s. The nuclear program can be traced back to about 1962, when North Korea committed itself to what it called "all-fortressization", which was the beginning of the hyper-militarized North Korea of today. In 1963, North Korea asked the Soviet Union for help in developing nuclear weapons, but was refused. The Soviet Union agreed to help North Korea develop a peaceful nuclear energy program, including the training of nuclear scientists. Later, China, after its nuclear tests, similarly rejected North Korean requests for help with developing nuclear weapons.

Soviet engineers took part in the construction of the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center and began construction of an IRT-2000 research reactor in 1963, which became operational in 1965 and was upgraded to 8 MW in 1974. In 1979, North Korea began to build a second research reactor in Yongbyon, as well as an ore processing plant and a fuel rod fabrication plant.

North Korea's nuclear weapons program dates back to the 1980s. Focusing on practical uses of nuclear energy and the completion of a nuclear weapon development system, North Korea began to operate facilities for uranium fabrication and conversion, and conducted high-explosive detonation tests. In 1985 North Korea ratified the NPT but did not include the required safeguards agreement with the IAEA until 1992. In early 1993, while verifying North Korea's initial declaration, the IAEA concluded that there was strong evidence this declaration was incomplete. When North Korea refused the requested special inspection, the IAEA reported its noncompliance to the UN Security Council. In 1993, North Korea announced its withdrawal from the NPT, but suspended that withdrawal before it took effect.

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the U.S. government agreed to facilitate the supply of two light water reactors to North Korea in exchange for North Korean disarmament. Such reactors are considered "more proliferation-resistant than North Korea's graphite-moderated reactors", but not "proliferation proof". The Agreed Framework was undermined by a Republican Congress during Clinton's presidency, as Congress denounced the agreement with North Korea, imposed new sanctions on North Korea, and hindered the Clinton administration from providing the supplies to North Korea that were part of the Agreed Framework. Implementation of the Agreed Framework foundered, and in 2002 the Agreed Framework fell apart, with each side blaming the other for its failure. By 2002, Pakistan had admitted that North Korea had gained access to Pakistan's nuclear technology in the late 1990s.

Based on evidence from Pakistan, Libya, and multiple confessions from North Korea itself, the United States accused North Korea of noncompliance and halted oil shipments; North Korea later claimed its public confession of guilt had been deliberately misconstrued. By the end of 2002, the Agreed Framework was officially abandoned.

In 2003, North Korea again announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2005, it admitted to having nuclear weapons but vowed to close the nuclear program.

On October 9, 2006, North Korea announced it had successfully conducted its first nuclear test. An underground nuclear explosion was detected, its yield was estimated as less than a kiloton, and some radioactive output was detected. On January 6, 2007, the North Korean government further confirmed that it had nuclear weapons.

On March 17, 2007, North Korea told delegates at international nuclear talks that it was preparing to shut down its main nuclear facility. The agreement was reached following a series of six-party talks, involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the United States begun in 2003. According to the agreement, a list of its nuclear programs would be submitted and the nuclear facility would be disabled in exchange for fuel aid and normalization talks with the United States and Japan. This was delayed from April due to a dispute with the United States over Banco Delta Asia, but on July 14, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors confirmed the shutdown of North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor and consequently North Korea began to receive aid. This agreement fell apart in 2009, following a North Korean satellite launch.

In April 2009, reports surfaced that North Korea has become a "fully fledged nuclear power", an opinion shared by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. On May 25, 2009, North Korea conducted a second nuclear test, resulting in an explosion estimated to be between 2 and 7 kilotons. The 2009 test, like the 2006 test, is believed to have occurred at Mantapsan, Kilju County, in the north-eastern part of North Korea. This was found by an earthquake occurring at the test site.

In February 2012, North Korea announced that it would suspend uranium enrichment at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center and not conduct any further tests of nuclear weapons while productive negotiations involving the United States continue. This agreement included a moratorium on long-range missile tests. Additionally, North Korea agreed to allow IAEA inspectors to monitor operations at Yongbyon. The United States reaffirmed that it had no hostile intent toward the DPRK and was prepared to improve bilateral relationships, and agreed to ship humanitarian food aid to North Korea. The United States called the move "important, if limited", but said it would proceed cautiously and that talks would resume only after North Korea made steps toward fulfilling its promise. However, after North Korea conducted a long-range missile test in April 2012, the United States decided not to proceed with the food aid.

On February 11, 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey detected a magnitude 5.1 seismic disturbance, reported to be a third underground nuclear test. North Korea has officially reported it as a successful nuclear test with a lighter warhead that delivers more force than before, but has not revealed the exact yield. Multiple South Korean sources estimate the yield at 6-9 kilotons, while the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources estimates the yield at 40 kilotons. However, the German estimate has since been revised to a yield equivalent of 14 kt when they published their estimations in January 2016.

On January 6, 2016 in Korea, the United States Geological Survey detected a magnitude 5.1 seismic disturbance, reported to be a fourth underground nuclear test. North Korea claimed that this test involved a hydrogen bomb. This claim has not been verified. As described below, a "hydrogen bomb" could mean one of several degrees of weapon, ranging from enhanced fission devices to true thermonuclear weapons.

Within hours, many nations and organizations had condemned the test. Expert U.S. analysts do not believe that a hydrogen bomb was detonated. Seismic data collected so far suggests a 6-9 kiloton yield and that magnitude is not consistent with the power that would be generated by a hydrogen bomb explosion. "What we're speculating is they tried to do a boosted nuclear device, which is an atomic bomb that has a little bit of hydrogen, an isotope in it called tritium," said Joseph Cirincione, president of the global security firm Ploughshares Fund. The German source which estimates for all the North Korea's past nuclear test has instead made an initial estimation of 14 kt, which is about the same (revised) yield as its previous nuclear test in 2013. However, the yield estimation for January 2016 nuclear test was revised to 10 kt in the subsequent nuclear test from North Korea.

On February 7, 2016, roughly a month after the alleged hydrogen bomb test, North Korea claimed to have put a satellite into orbit around the Earth. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe had warned the North to not launch the rocket, and if it did and the rocket violated Japanese territory, it would be shot down. Nevertheless, North Korea launched the rocket anyway, claiming the satellite was purely intended for peaceful, scientific purposes. Several nations, including the United States, Japan, and South Korea, have criticized the launch, and despite North Korean claims that the rocket was for peaceful purposes, it has been heavily criticized as an attempt to perform an ICBM test under the guise of a peaceful satellite launch. China also criticized the launch, however urged "the relevant parties" to "refrain from taking actions that may further escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula".

A fifth nuclear test occurred on September 9, 2016. This test yield is considered the highest among all five tests thus far, surpassing its previous record in 2013. The South Korean government said that the yield was about 10 kt despite other sources suggesting a 20 to 30 kt yield. The same German source which has made estimation of all North Korea's previous nuclear tests suggested an estimation of a 25 kiloton yield.

In 2017, North Korea test-launched two ICBMs, the second of which had sufficient range to reach the continental United States. In September 2017, the country announced a further "perfect" hydrogen bomb test.

The Korean Central News Agency claims that the "U.S. has long posed nuclear threats to the DPRK" and "the U.S. was seized by a foolish ambition to bring down the DPRK", so it "needed a countermeasure". North Korea has been suspected of maintaining a clandestine nuclear weapons development program since the early 1980s, when it constructed a plutonium-producing Magnox nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. Various diplomatic means have been used by the international community to attempt to limit North Korea's nuclear program to peaceful power generation and to encourage North Korea to participate in international treaties.

In May 1992, the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) first inspection in North Korea uncovered discrepancies suggesting that the country had reprocessed more plutonium than declared. IAEA requested access to additional information and access to two nuclear waste sites at Yongbyon. North Korea rejected the IAEA request and announced on March 12, 1993, an intention to withdraw from the NPT.

By 2002, the United States believed North Korea was pursuing both uranium enrichment technology and plutonium reprocessing technologies in defiance of the Agreed Framework. North Korea reportedly told American diplomats in private that they were in possession of nuclear weapons, citing American failures to uphold their own end of the Agreed Framework as a motivating force. North Korea later "clarified" that it did not possess weapons yet, but that it had "a right" to possess them, despite the Agreed Framework. In late 2002 and early 2003, North Korea began to take steps to eject International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors while re-routing spent fuel rods to be used for plutonium reprocessing for weapons purposes. As late as the end of 2003, North Korea claimed that it would freeze its nuclear program in exchange for additional American concessions, but a final agreement was not reached. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003.

On October 9, 2006, North Korea demonstrated its nuclear capabilities with its first underground nuclear test, detonating a plutonium based device with an estimated yield of 0.2-1 kilotons. The test was conducted at Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site in North Hamgyong Province, and U.S. intelligence officials later announced that analysis of radioactive debris in air samples collected a few days after the test confirmed that the blast had taken place. The UN Security Council condemned the test and announced the imposition of Resolution 1718.

On January 6, 2007, the North Korean government further confirmed that it had nuclear weapons.

In February 2007, following the six-party talks disarmament process, Pyongyang agreed to shut down its main nuclear reactor. On October 8, 2008, IAEA inspectors were forbidden by the North Korean government to conduct further inspections of the site.

On April 25, 2009, the North Korean government announced the country's nuclear facilities had been reactivated, and that spent fuel reprocessing for arms-grade plutonium has been restored.

On May 25, 2009, North Korea conducted its second underground nuclear test. The U.S. Geological Survey calculated its origin in proximity of the site of the first nuclear test. The test was more powerful than the previous test, estimated at 2 to 7 kilotons. The same day, a successful short range missile test was also conducted.

In May 2010, the North Korean government claimed to have successfully performed nuclear fusion. Although the claim was largely dismissed at the time, a 2012 analysis of radioisotopes suggested that North Korea may have performed two nuclear tests involving fusion. The paper was met with skepticism, as subsequent analysis of seismic data suggested no tests took place. In 2014, a study using seismic data found evidence for nuclear testing but a 2016 study once again dismissed claims of nuclear testing, suggesting that the seismic data was indicative of a minor earthquake.

On February 12, monitors in Asia picked up unusual seismic activity at a North Korean facility at 11:57 (02:57 GMT), later determined to be an artificial quake with an initial magnitude 4.9 (later revised to 5.1). The Korean Central News Agency subsequently said that the country had detonated a miniaturized nuclear device with "greater explosive force" in an underground test. According to the Korea Institute of Geosciences and Mineral Resources, the estimated yield was 7.7-7.8 kilotons. Other researchers estimate the yield to have been 12.2 ± 3.8 kilotons.

In December 2015, Kim Jong-un suggested that the country had the capacity to launch a hydrogen bomb, a device of considerably more power than conventional atomic bombs used in previous tests. The remark was met with skepticism from the White House and from South Korean officials.

First claimed North Korean hydrogen bomb test

On January 6, after reports of a magnitude 5.1 earthquake originating in northeast North Korea at 10:00:01 UTC+08:30, the country's regime released statements that it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. Whether this was in fact a hydrogen bomb has yet to be proven. Experts have cast doubt on this claim. A South Korean spy expert suggested that it may have been an atomic bomb and not a hydrogen bomb. Experts in several countries, including South Korea have expressed doubts about the claimed technology because of the relatively small size of the explosion. Senior Defense Analyst Bruce W. Bennett of research organization RAND told the BBC that "Kim Jong-un is either lying, saying they did a hydrogen test when they didn't, they just used a little bit more efficient fission weapon - or the hydrogen part of the test really didn't work very well or the fission part didn't work very well."

Aftermath of claimed North Korean hydrogen bomb test

On March 9, 2016, North Korea released a video of Kim Jong Un visiting a missile factory. The international community was skeptical, IHS Jane's Karl Dewey said that "It is possible that the silver sphere is a simple atomic bomb. But it is not a hydrogen bomb." Furthermore, he said "a hydrogen bomb would not only be in two parts but also be a different shape".

Nations across the world, as well as NATO and the UN, spoke out against the tests as destabilizing, as a danger to international security and as a breach of UN Security Council resolutions. China, one of North Korea's allies, also denounced the test.

First nuclear warhead test explosion

On September 9, 2016, a 5.3 seismic tremor was detected by seismograms in surrounding countries, after which North Korea confirmed it conducted another nuclear test. North Korea stated that this test has enabled them to confirm that its warhead can be mounted to a missile and to verify the warhead's power. It was previously doubted that North Korea could pair the nuclear warhead and missile together, but South Korean experts started to believe that North Korea can accomplish this goal within a few years[failed verification ] after the September 9 nuclear test.

On February 18, 2017, China announced that it was suspending all imports of coal from North Korea as part of its effort to enact United Nations Security Council sanctions aimed at stopping the country's nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program. On March 6, 2017, North Korea launched four ballistic missiles from the Tongchang-ri region towards the Sea of Japan. The launch was condemned by the United Nations as well as South Korea. The move prompted US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to embark on a diplomatic mission ten days later to Japan, South Korea and China, in an effort to address the heightened international tension in the region. On April 13, 2017, White House representative Nick Rivero was quoted saying the United States was "very close" to engaging in some sort of retaliation towards North Korea.[citation needed ] President Trump commented on North Korea by saying they will fight the war on terrorism no matter the cost.

On April 15, 2017, at the yearly major public holiday also known in the country as the Day of the Sun, North Korea staged a massive military parade to commemorate the 105th birth anniversary of Kim Il-sung, the country's founder and grandfather of current leader, Kim Jong-un. The parade took place amid hot speculation in the United States, Japan, and South Korea that the country would also potentially test a sixth nuclear device, but failed to do so. The parade did publicly display, for the first time, two new intercontinental ballistic missile-sized canisters as well as submarine-launched ballistic missiles and a land-based version of the same.

On April 16, 2017, hours after the military parade in Pyongyang, North Korea attempted to launch a ballistic missile from a site near the port of Sinpo, on the country's east coast. The missile exploded seconds after launch.

Later that month, after a visit to Washington by the top Chinese leader, the US State Department announced that North Korea was likely to face economic sanctions from China if it conducted any further tests.

On July 4, 2017, North Korea launched Hwasong-14 from Banghyon airfield, near Kusong, in a lofted trajectory it claims lasted 39 minutes for 930 km (578 mi), landing in the waters of the Japanese exclusive economic zone. US Pacific Command said the missile was aloft for 37 minutes, meaning that in a standard trajectory it could have reached all of Alaska, a distance of 6,690 km (4,160 mi). By targeting the deep waters in the Sea of Japan, North Korea was ensuring that American or Japanese divers would encounter difficulties when attempting to recover Hwasong-14's engine. Equally, North Korea was not attempting to recover any re-entry debris either, which South Korea pointed out is an indication that this first launch was of an ICBM which was far from ready for combat. As of July 2017, the U.S. estimated that North Korea would have a reliable nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by early 2018. On July 28, North Korea launched a second, apparently more advanced, ICBM, with altitude around 3,700 km (2,300 mi), that traveled 1,000 km (620 mi) down range; analysts estimated that it was capable of reaching the continental United States.

Aerospace engineer and weapons analyst Dr. John Schilling estimates the current accuracy of the North's Hwasong-14 as poor, at the mooted ranges which threaten US cities. Michael Elleman points out that July 28, 2017 missile re-entry vehicle broke up on re-entry; further testing would be required. On August 8, 2017 The Washington Post reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency, in a confidential assessment, stated that North Korea has sufficiently miniaturized a nuclear warhead to fit inside one of its long-range missiles. On August 12 The Diplomat reported that the Central Intelligence Agency, in a confidential assessment from early August, has concluded that the reentry vehicle in the July 28 test of Hwasong-14 did not survive atmospheric reentry due to apogee of 3,700 kilometers which caused structural stresses in excess of what an ICBM would have had in minimum energy trajectory. The CIA also concluded that North Korean reentry vehicle is likely advanced enough that it would likely survive reentry under normal minimum energy trajectory.

On September 3, 2017, North Korea claimed to have successfully tested a thermonuclear bomb, also known as a hydrogen bomb. Corresponding seismic activity similar to an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 was reported by the USGS, making the blast around 10 times more powerful than previous detonations by the country. Later the bomb yield was estimated to be 250 kilotons, based on further study of the seismic data. The test was reported to be "a perfect success" by North Korean authorities.

On November 20, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that North Korea was re-listed by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism. Japan and South Korea welcomed the move as a method of increasing pressure on North Korea to negotiate about denuclearization.

On November 28, 2017, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile in the first such launch from the country in more than two months. The missile, believed by the U.S. Military to be an ICBM, was launched from Sain Ni and flew roughly 1,000 km (620 mi) before landing in the Sea of Japan.

After North Korea claimed that the missile was capable of "carrying [a] super-heavy [nuclear] warhead and hitting the whole mainland of the U.S.", Kim-Jong-Un announced that they had "finally realized the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force", putting them in a position of strength to push the United States into talks.

In August 2019 Japan has upgraded its estimate of North Korea's nuclear weapons capability in an upcoming annual Defence White Paper, saying it seems Pyongyang has achieved the miniaturization of warheads. The defence report will maintain Japan's contention that North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs pose a "serious and imminent threat" to its security after recent meetings between Donald Trump and the North's leader, Kim Jong-un, failed to make progress on denuclearisation.

North Korea's plutonium-based nuclear reactors are located at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, about 90 km north of Pyongyang.

One Soviet-supplied IRT-2000 research reactor, completed in 1967. Uranium irradiated in this reactor was used in North Korea's first plutonium separation experiments in 1975. Nevertheless, the primary purpose of the reactor is not to produce plutonium and North Korea has had trouble acquiring enough fuel for constant operation. The U.S. Department of Energy estimated that this reactor could have been used to produce up to 1-2 kg of plutonium, though the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee said that the amount was no more than a few hundred grams.

A newer nuclear reactor with a capacity of 5 MWe. This gas-graphite moderated Magnox type reactor is North Korea's main reactor, where practically all of its plutonium has been produced. A full core consists of 8,000 fuel rods and can yield a maximum of 27-29 kg of plutonium if left in the reactor for optimal burnup. The North Korean Plutonium Stock, Mid-2006, is estimated to be able to produce 0.9 grams of plutonium per thermal megawatt every day of its operation. The material required to make a single bomb is approximately four to eight kilograms. Often, North Korea has unloaded the reactor before reaching the maximum burnup level. There are three known cores which were unloaded in 1994 (under IAEA supervision in accordance with the Agreed Framework), 2005, and 2007.

In 1989, the 5 MWe reactor was shut down for a period of seventy to a hundred days. In this time it is estimated that up to fifteen kilograms of plutonium could have been extracted. In 1994, North Korea unloaded its reactors again. The IAEA had these under full surveillance until later being denied the ability to observe North Korean power plants. Under normal operation, the reactor can produce about 6 kg of plutonium per year although the reactor would need to be shut down and the fuel rods extracted to begin the plutonium separation process. Hence, plutonium separation stages alternate with plutonium production stages. Reprocessing (also known as separation) is known to have taken place in 2003 for the first core and 2005 for the second core.

Two Magnox reactors (50 MWe and 200 MWe), under construction at Yongbyon and Taechon. If completed, 50 MWe reactor would be capable of producing 60 kg of plutonium per year, enough for approximately 10 weapons and 200 MWe reactor 220 kg of plutonium annually, enough for approximately 40 weapons. Construction was halted in 1994 about a year from completion in accord with the Agreed Framework, and by 2004 the structures and pipework had deteriorated badly.

Fuel reprocessing facility that recovers uranium and plutonium from spent fuel using the PUREX process. Based on extended Eurochemic reprocessing plant design at the Mol-Dessel site in Belgium. In 1994 its activity was frozen in accord with the Agreed Framework. On April 25, 2009, North Korean news agency KCNA, reported the resumption of reprocessing of spent fuel to recover plutonium.

On March 12, 1993, North Korea said that it planned to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and refused to allow IAEA inspectors access to its nuclear sites. By 1994, the United States believed that North Korea had enough reprocessed plutonium to produce about 10 bombs with the amount of plutonium increasing. Faced with diplomatic pressure after UN Security Council Resolution 825 and the threat of American military air strikes against the reactor, North Korea agreed to dismantle its plutonium program as part of the Agreed Framework in which South Korea and the United States would provide North Korea with light water reactors and fuel oil until those reactors could be completed.

Because the light water reactors would require enriched uranium to be imported from outside North Korea, the amount of reactor fuel and waste could be more easily tracked, making it more difficult to divert nuclear waste to be reprocessed into plutonium. However, the Agreed Framework was mired in difficulties, with each side blaming the other for the delays in implementation; as a result, the light water reactors were never finished. In late 2002, after fuel aid was suspended, North Korea returned to using its old reactors.

In 2006, there were eight sites identified as potential test explosion sites for current (and future) tests according to a statement by the South Korean Parliament. These sites are distinguished from a number of other nuclear materials production facilities in that they are thought to be most closely identified with a military, or potentially military purpose:

1. Hamgyong Bukdo (North Hamgyong) Province - two sites:

Chungjinsi - Nuclear fuel storage site, military base and unidentified underground facility

Kiljugun - Extensive military buildup with motorized troop formations and construction of new advanced underground facility - Site of May 25, 2009, Nuclear Test.

Phunggyere - Site of October 9, 2006, Nuclear Test

2. Chagangdo Province - one site: Kanggyesi - Production center of North Korea's advanced equipment and munitions since 1956. Also, extensive intelligence of highly advanced underground facility.

3. Pyongan Bukdo (North Pyongan) Province - four sites:

Yongbyonsi - 2 Sites - Location of Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center, and the facility's Experimental Test Explosion facility and two unidentified underground facilities. In addition, there is a gas-graphite reactor, HE test site, nuclear fuel fabrication site, nuclear waste storage site

Kusungsi - Between 1997 and September 2002, approximately 70 test explosions of North Korean munitions took place. Also, existence of underground facility

Taechongun - 200MWe Nuclear Energy Plant construction site. Location of unidentified underground facility and nuclear arms/energy related facilities known to exist

4. Pyongan Namdo (South Pyongan) Province - one site: Pyongsungsi - Location of National Science Academy and extensive underground facility whose purpose is not known.

North Korea possesses uranium mines containing an estimated 4 million tons of high-grade uranium ore.

Prime minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan allegedly, through Pakistan's former top scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, supplied key data, stored on CDs, on uranium enrichment and information to North Korea in exchange for missile technology around 1990-1996, according to U.S. intelligence officials. President Pervez Musharraf and Prime minister Shaukat Aziz acknowledged in 2005 that Khan had provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea. In May 2008, Khan, who had previously confessed to supplying the data on his own initiative, retracted his confession, claiming that the Pakistan Government forced him to be a "scapegoat". He also claimed that North Korea's nuclear program was well advanced before his visits to North Korea.

Highly enriched uranium (HEU) program was publicized in October 2002 when the United States asked North Korean officials about the program. Under the Agreed Framework, North Korea explicitly agreed to freeze plutonium programs (specifically, its "graphite moderated reactors and related facilities"). The agreement also committed North Korea to implement the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, in which both Koreas committed not to have enrichment or reprocessing facilities. The United States argued North Korea violated its commitment not to have enrichment facilities.

In December 2002, claiming North Korean non-compliance, the United States persuaded the KEDO Board to suspend fuel oil shipments, which led to the end of the Agreed Framework. North Korea responded by announcing plans to reactivate a dormant nuclear fuel processing program and power plant north of Pyongyang. North Korea soon thereafter expelled United Nations inspectors and announced a unilateral "withdrawal" from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In 2007, a Bush administration official assessed that, while there was still a "high confidence" that North Korea acquired materials that could be used in a "production-scale" uranium program, there is only a "mid-confidence" level such a production-scale uranium (rather than merely plutonium) program exists.

Construction of the probable first uranium enrichment facility started in 2002 at a site known as Kangson/Chollima by US intelligence, and could have been completed and developing or operating initial gas centrifuge cascades in 2003. The facility was suspected by US intelligence for many years. The Pyongsan Uranium Mine and Concentration Plant in Pyongsan is reported to be where uranium ore is turned into yellowcake.

On August 8, 2017, the Washington Post reported recent analysis completed the previous month by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency which concluded that North Korea had successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit in missiles and could have up to 60 nuclear warheads in its inventory.

By 2019 the DIA estimated that North Korea had accrued a stockpile of 65 weapons' worth of fissile material and that the country was producing as much as twelve weapons' worth of fissile material annually. U.S. intelligence also assessed that North Korea had built around 30 fissile material cores for use in nuclear weapons, including four-to-six two-stage thermonuclear weapons.

On August 7, 2017, Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has visited North Korea nuclear facilities many times on behalf of the U.S., estimated that North Korea's stockpile of plutonium and highly enriched uranium was probably sufficient for 20 to 25 nuclear weapons. He assessed that North Korea had developed a miniaturized warhead suitable for medium-range missiles, but would need further tests and development to produce a smaller and more robust warhead suitable for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and re-entry into the atmosphere. He considered the warhead as the least developed part of North Korea's plans for an ICBM.

In February 2019, Hecker estimated that North Korea's stockpile of weapons-grade material was sufficient for 35 to 37 nuclear weapons.

For 2013, the Institute for Science and International Security gave a mid-range estimate of 12 to 27 "nuclear weapon equivalents", including plutonium and uranium stockpiles. By 2016, North Korea was projected to have 14 to 48 nuclear weapon equivalents. The estimate was dropped to 13 to 30 nuclear weapon equivalents in 2017, but was increased to as much as 60 equivalents later in August of the same year. (For uranium weapons, each weapon is assumed to contain 20 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium.)

In its "Nuclear Notebook" on North Korean nuclear capabilities, published in January 2018, FAS estimated that North Korea had sufficient fissile material for 30 to 60 nuclear weapons. However, the report stated that North Korea had assembled 10 to 20 warheads at most, with most of those warheads likely being single-stage fission weapons with yields of 10 to 20 kilotons.

In June 2020, the institute's annual report stated that through January 2020 North Korea had added 10 nuclear weapons to the previous year's estimated stockpile of 20 to 30 weapons.

North Korea began to develop its own chemical industry and chemical weapon (CW) program in 1954, immediately following the end of the Korean War. However, substantial progress was not made until the 1960s, when Kim Il-sung "issued a 'Declaration for Chemicalization' whose aim was to further develop an independent chemical industry capable of supporting various sectors of its economy, as well as support chemical weapons production" and established North Korea's Nuclear and Chemical Defense Bureau.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, North Korea received Soviet and Chinese aid in developing its chemical industry. In 1979, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency believed that North Korea "had only a defensive CW capability." It is unclear when North Korea "acquired the capability for independent CW production"; estimates range from the 1970s to early 1980s. However, by the late 1980s, North Korea's CW capabilities had expanded; the South Korean Ministry of National Defense reported in 1987 that the North "possessed up to 250 metric tons of chemical weapons" including mustard (a blister agent) and some nerve agents. In 2009 the International Crisis Group reported that the consensus expert view was that North Korea had a stockpile of about 2,500 to 5,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, sarin (GB) and other nerve agents. The South Korean Ministry of National Defense had the same estimate in 2010. In 2014, the South Korean Defense Ministry estimated that "the North had stockpiled 2,500 to 5,000 tons of chemical weapons and had a capacity to produce a variety of biological weapons." In 2015, the U.S. Department of Defense reported to Congress that North Korea's CW program "likely possesses a CW stockpile" and likely had "the capability to produce nerve, blister, blood, and choking agents." The report also found that "North Korea probably could employ CW agents by modifying a variety of conventional munitions, including artillery and ballistic missiles. In addition, North Korean forces are prepared to operate in a contaminated environment; they train regularly in chemical defense operations." The report indicated that North Korea "continues to develop its biological research and development capabilities" and "may consider the use of biological weapons as an option, contrary to its obligations under the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention."

North Korea is a signatory to the Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use of chemical weapons in warfare. North Korea is also a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Although the nation has signed the BWC, it "has failed to provide a BWC Confidence-Building Measure declaration since 1990." North Korea is not a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). It is one of four countries that have not ratified the CWC (the others are Israel, Egypt, and South Sudan).

After the 2010 bombardment of Yeonpyeong (in which North Korea attacked Yeonpyeong Island with conventional weapons, killing a number of civilians), the National Emergency Management Agency of South Korea distributed 1,300 gas masks to South Koreans living in the western border (a flashpoint for conflict); the agency also distributed another 610,000 gas masks to members of the South Korean civil defense corps, which numbers 3.93 million. The agency also announced the renovation of underground emergency shelters. Gas masks are effective against some chemical agents, but not against blister agents such as mustard gas, Lewisite, and Phosgene oxime, which North Korea is thought to have in its stockpiles. In October 2013, South Korea and the United States "agreed to build a joint surveillance system to detect biochemical agents along the demilitarized zone" and to share information.

Also in 2015, Melissa Hanham of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies released an analysis of a photograph of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un visiting the Pyongyang Bio-technical Institute, a factory supposedly for the production of bacillus thuringiensis of use in pesticides. Hanham's analysis concluded that the factory actually produces weaponized anthrax. Hanham noted that pesticide production factories are "an old and well-used cover for a biological weapons program" and an example of dual-use technology. A number of other experts agreed that "the photos most likely show an operational biological weapons facility." The North Korean government denied the allegations; an official spokesperson for the National Defence Commission, through the official Korean Central News Agency, challenged the U.S. Congress to inspect the Institute and "behold the awe-inspiring sight of the Pyongyang Bio-technical Institute."

North Korea possesses various types of chemical weapons, including nerve, blister, blood, and vomiting agents, as well as some biological weapons, including anthrax, smallpox, and cholera.

In 2017, Kim Jong-nam, the estranged elder half-brother of Kim Jong-un, was assassinated with VX nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia by suspected North Korean agents.

The identified stockpile is between 2,500 and 5,000 metric tons of chemical weapons. It is one of the world's largest possessors of chemical weapons, ranking third after the United States and Russia.

In the 1960s, DPRK first received shipments of short-range ballistic missiles from its main ally, the Soviet Union. The first weapons of this kind to be delivered were the tactical FROG-series. In the late 1970s or early 1980s, the DPRK received several longer range Scud-B missiles from Egypt (which in turn received those missiles from the USSR, Bulgaria and Poland). The USSR had refused to supply Scuds to North Korea, but North Korea has produced missiles based on its design. A local production basis was established, and the first modified copy was named Hwasong-5. With time, more advanced types of missiles were developed. Eventually North Korea equipped itself with ballistic missiles, capable of reaching Japan. In the 1990s, North Korea sold medium-sized nuclear capable missiles to Pakistan in a deal facilitated by China.

North Korea's ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction to a hypothetical target is somewhat limited by its missile technology. In 2005, North Korea's total range with its Nodong missiles was estimated as 900 km with a 1,000 kg payload. That is enough to reach South Korea, and parts of Japan, Russia, and China. The Hwasong-10 is a North Korean designed intermediate-range ballistic missile with range capabilities of up to 2,490 km (1,550 mi), and could carry a nuclear warhead.

In an online interview published in 2006, the Japanese Ministry of Defense's analyst Hideshi Takesada argued that North Korea's desire of unification is similar to North Vietnam, and warned of the possibility of North Korea's compulsory merger with South Korea by threats of nuclear weapons, taking advantage of any possible decrease in the U.S. military presence in South Korea, after North Korea deploys several hundred mobile ICBMs aimed at the United States. In 2016, Israeli analyst Uzi Rubin said that the missile program had demonstrated "remarkable achievements".

Report on North Korea by United Nations Panel of Experts with information's disclosed by various member countries that the status of its ballistic missile program as comprehensive and autonomous with guidance system being indigenous, demonstrated by recent test of an short range ballistic missile similar to Iskander and demonstrating depressed trajectory as such.

In January 2020, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John E. Hyten said "North Korea is building new missiles, new capabilities, new weapons as fast as anybody on the planet."

There is evidence that North Korea has been able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead for use on a ballistic missile. Whether North Korea has technology to protect their missiles upon re-entry is unknown. Some analysts suggest North Korea's new missiles are fakes. Various North Korean rocket tests continued into the 2010s, for example in 2013, in 2014, and in 2016. North Korea performed no tests of medium-range missiles sufficiently powerful to reach Japan in 2015, but South Korea's Yonhap news agency believes that at least one missile fired during North Korea's March 2016 missile tests is likely a medium-range Rodong missile. North Korea appeared to launch a missile test from a submarine on April 23, 2016; while the missile only traveled 30 km, one U.S. analyst noted that "North Korea's sub launch capability has gone from a joke to something very serious". An August 2016 North Korean missile test of a Rodong missile that flew 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) landed about 250 kilometres (160 mi) west of Japan's Oga Peninsula, in international waters but inside Japan's exclusive economic zone, prompting Japan to condemn the "unforgivable act of violence toward Japan's security".

As of 2016, North Korea is known to have approximately 300 Rodong missiles whose maximum range is 1,300 km (800 mi).

Hwasong-5 - initial Scud modification. Road-mobile, liquid-fueled missile, with an estimated range of 330 km. It has been tested successfully. It is believed that North Korea has deployed some 150-200 such missiles on mobile launchers.

Hwasong-6 - later Scud modification. Similar to the Hwasong-5, yet with an increased range (550-700 km) and a smaller warhead (600-750 kg). Apparently this is the most widely deployed North Korean missile, with at least 400 missiles in use.

- larger and more advanced Scud modification. Liquid-fueled, road-mobile missile with a 650 kg warhead. First production variants had inertial guidance, later variants featured GPS guidance, which improves CEP accuracy to 190-250 m. Range is estimated to be between 1,300 and 1,600 km.

is also known as Scud-ER in rest of the world is further development of Hwasong-6 with range of (1000-1000+ km) and is capable of hitting Japan.

- believed to be a modified copy of the Soviet R-27 Zyb SLBM. Originally believed to have been tested as the first or second stage of Unha, but debris analysis showed that the Unha used older technology than it is believed the Hwasong-10 uses. Also known under the names Nodong-B, Taepodong-X, Musudan and BM25, predicted to have a range of 2,500-4,000 km. A DoD report puts BM25 strength at fewer than 50 launchers.

Hwasong-11 - a short-range, solid-fueled, highly accurate mobile missile, modified copy of the Soviet OTR-21. Unknown number in service, apparently deployed either in the late 1990s or early 2000s (decade).

Pukkuksong-1 - a long-range, solid-fueled, SLBM. Also called the KN-11 by the Defense Department. Possibly derived from the Chinese JL-1 SLBM.

Pukkuksong-2 - a long-range, land based development of the solid fueled Pukkuksong-1. Also known as the KN-15.

- a medium-range, liquid-fueled, mobile missile. First tested in May 2017. also known as KN-17 outside of Korea, South Korean experts estimate range of 5000 to 6000 km based on successful test conducted in May.

- Also known as the KN-20, a long-range, road transportable ICBM, tested on July 4 and 29, 2017, estimated range is 6,700-10,000 km (4,200-6,200 mi) John Schilling estimates the current accuracy of the North's Hwasong-14 as poor at the mooted ranges which threaten US cities (which would require more testing to prove its accuracy). Michael Elleman has pointed out that the NHK video which captured the descent of the reentry vehicle (RV) shows its failure to survive reentry. If the RV had survived reentry, the video would have shown a bright image all the way to impact in the sea. However a recent CIA assessment notes that North Korea's ICBM reentry vehicles would likely perform adequately if flown on a normal trajectory to continental U.S. targets.

- 13,000 km range, successfully tested on November 28, 2017.

- 700 km range, Successfully tested on May 4, 2019. Similar to 9K720 Iskander.

- Road-mobile ICBM. Also called the Hwasong-13 (HS-13). Maximum range >5,500 km (3,400 miles). The US Defense Department estimates at least 6 KN-08 launchers are in deployment. A modified version, the KN-14, was unveiled at a parade marking the 70th anniversary of the Workers Party of Korea. The missile development was halted due to engine problems.

In April 2009, the United Nations named the Korea Mining and Development Trading Corporation (KOMID) as North Korea's primary arms dealer and main exporter of equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons. The UN lists KOMID as being based in the Central District, Pyongyang. However, it also has offices in Beijing and sales offices worldwide which facilitate weapons sales and seek new customers for North Korean weapons.

KOMID has sold missile technology to Iran and has done deals for missile related technology with the Taiwanese. KOMID has also been responsible for the sale of equipment, including missile technologies, gunboats, and multiple rocket artilleries, worth a total of over $100 million, to Africa, South America, and the Middle East.

North Korea's military has also used a company called Hap Heng to sell weapons overseas. Hap Heng was based in Macau in the 1990s to handle sales of weapons and missile and nuclear technology to nations such as Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan's medium-range ballistic missile, the Ghauri, is considered to be a copy of North Korea's Rodong 1. In 1999, intelligence sources claim that North Korea had sold missile components to Iran. Listed directors of Hap Heng include Kim Song in and Ko Myong Hun. Ko Myong Hun is now a listed diplomat in Beijing and may be involved in the work of KOMID.

A UN Security Council sanctions committee report stated that North Korea operates an international smuggling network for nuclear and ballistic missile technology, including to Myanmar (Burma), Syria, and Iran.

Several countries have bought North Korean ballistic missiles or have received assistance from North Korea to establish local missile production.

Egypt

Egypt has received technologies and assistance for manufacture of both the Hwasong-5 and Hwasong-6, and may have provided guidance systems or information on longer-range missiles to North Korea from the Condor/Badr program.

Iran

Iran was one of the first countries to buy North Korean missiles. Iran has established local production for the Hwasong-5 (Shahab-1), Hwasong-6 (Shahab-2) and the Rodong-1 (Shahab-3). Iran also possesses 19 land-based BM25 Musudan missiles, according to a leaked, classified U.S. State Department cable,[232] Iran designated the Musudan as Khorramshahr. This nuclear-capable missile is currently under development and failed its two known flight tests.[233][234][235]

Pakistan

North Korean entities continued to provide assistance to Pakistan's ballistic missile program during the first half of 1999 in return for nuclear weapons technology.[236] Such assistance was critical to Islamabad's efforts to produce ballistic missiles. In April 1998, Pakistan flight-tested the Ghauri MRBM, which is based on North Korea's Nodong missile. Also in April 1998, the United States imposed sanctions against Pakistani and North Korean entities for their role in transferring Missile Technology Control Regime Category I ballistic missile-related technology.[237]

Syria

Syria originally obtained the Scud-B from North Korea. North Korea may have assisted Syria in development of the Scud-C and/or the Scud-D. As of 2013, Syria relies on foreign assistance from multiple countries, including North Korea, for advanced missile components and technologies.[238] In 2018, a United Nations report alleged that North Korea had been sending technicians and material to Syria to assist in its chemical weapons program, including acid-resistant tiles, valves, and thermometers.[239]

United Arab Emirates

25 Hwasong-5s were purchased from North Korea in 1989. The UAE Union Defence Force were not satisfied with the quality of the missiles, and they were kept in storage.[240]

Vietnam

Vietnam reportedly ordered Hwasong-5/6 missiles in 1998-99, but it is unclear if this deal was fulfilled.[241]

Yemen

Yemen is known to have bought Scud missiles from North Korea in the 1990s-a total of 15 missiles, conventional warheads and fuel oxidizer.[242]

Libya

Libya during the rule of Muammar Gaddafi had been known to receive technological assistance, blueprints and missile parts from North Korea.[243]

Nigeria

In January 2004, the Nigerian government announced that North Korea had agreed to sell its missile technology, but a month later Nigeria rejected the agreement under U.S. pressure.[244]

In the 1990s, the United States negotiated the Agreed Framework to freeze North Korea's nuclear weapons program while pursuing the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. This broke down when North Korea's clandestine uranium enrichment program came to light in 2002, after which China convened the Six-party talks to negotiate a step-by-step process to denuclearization. The Six-party talks stalled after multiple North Korean nuclear and missile tests, leading to increased international Sanctions against North Korea, including a series of sanctions resolutions imposed by the United Nations Security Council. In 2018, Presidents Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Donald Trump of the United States held a series of summits with Kim Jong-un which led to declarations in favor of the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

On October 31, 2018, lawmaker Kim Min-ki of South Korea's ruling Democratic Party of Korea issued a statement revealing that officials from South Korea's National Intelligence Service had observed several of North Korea's nuclear and missile test sites and that they were now ready for the upcoming international inspections. Kim also stated that the now inactive North Korean Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site and the Sohae Satellite launching ground were included in these observations. The visit by the intelligence officials was in tandem with the September 2018 Pyongyang Agreement, which saw North Korean leader Kim Jung-Un agree to close Sohae and allow international experts to observe the dismantling of the missile engine testing site and a launch pad. The international experts will also be allowed to witness the dismantling of other North Korean nuclear and missile test sites as well. Yongbyon, the main nuclear facility in North Korea, has also been inactive during the past year as well, but has not yet completely closed.

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2. ^ Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance, Arms Control Association (updated August 2020)

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17. Glenn Kessler, ^ Far-Reaching U.S. Plan Impaired N. Korea Deal Archived May 20, 2017, at the Wayback Machine: Demands Began to Undo Nuclear Accord, The Washington Post, p. A20, September 26, 2008.

18. ^ De Geer, Lars-Erik (2012). "Radionuclide Evidence for Low-Yield Nuclear Testing in North Korea in April/May 2010" (PDF). Science & Global Security. 20 (1): 1-29. doi:10.1080/08929882.2012.652558. ISSN 0892-9882.

19. ^ Zhang, M.; Wen, L. (November 19, 2014). "Seismological Evidence for a Low-Yield Nuclear Test on 12 May 2010 in North Korea". Seismological Research Letters. 86 (1): 138-145. doi:10.1785/02201401170. ISSN 0895-0695.

20. ^ Kim, Won‐Young; Richards, Paul G.; Schaff, David P.; Koch, Karl (December 20, 2016). "Evaluation of a Seismic Event, 12 May 2010, in North Korea". Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. 107 (1): 1-21. doi:10.1785/0120160111. ISSN 0037-1106.

21. ^ "Miao Zhang and Lianxing Wen (2013) "High-precision location and yield of North Korea's 2013 nuclear test"" (PDF).

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23. Sang-Hun, Choe. "^ China Suspends All Coal Imports From North Korea Archived April 25, 2017, at the Wayback Machine", The New York Times, February 18, 2017. Retrieved July 10, 2017.

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26. Broad & Sanger NYT (31 July 2017) "Success of North Korean Missile Test Is Thrown Into Question" Archived August 1, 2017, at the Wayback Machine

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29. Joo, Seung-Hoo (2000). ^ Gorbachev's Foreign Policy Toward the Korean Peninsula, 1985-1991: Power and Reform. E. Mellen Press. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-7734-7817-6.

30. Albright, David; Berkhout, Frans; Walker, William (1997). ^ Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities, and Policies. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. p. 303. ISBN 978-0-19-828009-5.

31. Busch, Nathan E. (2004). ^ No End in Sight: The Continuing Menace of Nuclear Proliferation. University Press of Kentucky. p. 251. ISBN 978-0-8131-2323-3.

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33. ^ Pabian, Frank V.; Makowsky, Peter; Buck, Irv (November 2, 2018). "North Korea's Uranium Mining and Milling Operations Continue at Pyongsan". 38 North. Pyongsan is believed to be where North Korea turns ore into yellowcake, an intermediate step in the processing of uranium after it has been mined but before fuel fabrication or enrichment.

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44. https://undocs.org/en/S/2019/691

45. "Japan: North Korea missile launch an "unforgivable act of violence"". July 27, 2016. Archived from the original on August 4, 2016.

46. ^ "Facts about North Korea's Musudan missile". AFP. GlobalPost. April 8, 2013. Archived from the original on April 9, 2013. IHS Jane's puts the estimated range at anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres ... potential payload size has been put at 1.0-1.25 tonnes.

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Federation of American Scientists guide to North Korean chemical weapons

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Second nuclear test conducted by North Korea on May 25, 2009

Nuclear Files.org Information on the North Korean nuclear program including links to source documents

Annotated bibliography for the North Korean nuclear weapons program from the Alsos Digital Library

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North Korean International Documentation Project Contains primary source documents related to the DPRK's efforts to obtain nuclear technology dating back to the mid-1960s

TIME Archives A Collection of stories regarding North Korea's Nuclear Program

Chung Min Lee, "The Evolution of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis: Implications for Iran", Proliferation Papers, Paris, IFRI, Winter 2009

Norris, Robert S. and Kristensen, Hans M., "North Korea's nuclear program, 2005", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2005

Normalizing Japan: Supporter, Nuisance, or Wielder of Power in the North Korean Nuclear Talks - An analysis of Japan's role in the Six-Party Talks by Linus Hagström.

North Korea: Economic Sanctions

Chronology of U.S. - North Korean Nuclear and Missile Diplomacy

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IISS North Korea's Ballistic Missile Programme

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Nuclear North Korea - Reuters (Updated September 3, 2017)

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North Korea and weapons of mass destruction

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North Korea has a military nuclear weapons program and, as of early 2020, is estimated to have an arsenal of approximately 30-40 nuclear weapons and sufficient production of fissile material for 6-7 nuclear weapons per year. North Korea has also stockpiled a significant quantity of chemical and biological weapons.

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The media for the past decade has been focusing on the negative aspects of the news. A lot of the things that we see on our news channels are scary, and tend to make us feel like we don't want to leave the house. This article goes into how the news uses our psychology against us to make the fearful things we see on the news to be even more scary. In the article one of the main points that are made is " if it bleeds, it leads." That quote is said several times and the author's really try to show that the media really wants to show fear because people would rather watch a train wreck than a story about puppies.

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News is a money-making industry. One that doesn't always make the goal to report the facts accurately. Gone are the days of tuning in to be informed straightforwardly about local and national issues. In truth, watching the news can be a psychologically risky pursuit, which could undermine your mental and physical health.

Fear-based news stories prey on the anxieties we all have and then hold us hostage. Being glued to the television, reading the paper, or surfing the Internet increases ratings and market shares - but it also raises the probability of depression relapse.

In previous decades, the journalistic mission was to report the news as it actually happened, with fairness, balance, and integrity. However, capitalistic motives associated with journalism have forced much of today's television news to look to the spectacular, the stirring, and the controversial as news stories. It's no longer a race to break the story first or get the facts right. Instead, it's to acquire good ratings in order to get advertisers, so that profits soar.

News programming uses a hierarchy of if it bleeds, it leads. Fear-based news programming has two aims. The first is to grab the viewer's attention. In the news media, this is called the teaser. The second aim is to persuade the viewer that the solution for reducing the identified fear will be in the news story. If a teaser asks, " What's in your tap water that YOU need to know about?" a viewer will likely tune in to get the up-to-date information to ensure safety.

The success of fear-based news relies on presenting dramatic anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, promoting isolated events as trends, depicting categories of people as dangerous and replacing optimism with fatalistic thinking. News conglomerates who want to achieve this use media logic, by tweaking the rhythm, grammar, and presentation format of news stories to elicit the greatest impact. Did you know that some news stations work with consultants who offer fear-based topics that are pre-scripted, outlined with point-of-view shots, and have experts at-the-ready? This practice is known as stunting or just-add-water reporting. Often, these practices present misleading information and promote anxiety in the viewer.

Another pattern in newscasts is that the breaking news story doesn't go beyond a surface level. The need to get-the-story-to-get-the-ratings often causes reporters to bypass thorough fact-checking. As the first story develops to a second level in later reports, the reporter corrects the inaccuracies and missing elements. As the process of fact-finding continually changes, so does the news story. What journalists first reported with intense emotion or sensationalism is no longer accurate. What occurs psychologically for the viewer is a fragmented sense of knowing what's real, which sets off feelings of hopelessness and helplessness - experiences known to worsen depression.

An additional practice that heightens anxiety and depression is the news station's use of the crawl, the scrolling headline ticker that appears at the bottom of the television, communicating "breaking news." Individuals who watch news-based programming are likely to see one, two, or even three crawls scroll across the screen. The multitasking required to read the crawls and comprehend the actual newscast comes easy to some viewers, whereas others report feeling over-stimulated.

One could easily change the channel to interrupt the transmission of such information. However, crawls are not relegated to just news channels. Unlike the viewing experience of the past, crawls are now more prominent during entertainment programs and often serve as commercials for nightly newscasts or the upcoming weekly news magazine show. The crawls frequently contain fear-driven material, broad-siding an unsuspecting viewer.

It's been said that fear-based media has become a staple of popular culture. The distressing fall-out from this trend is that children and adults who are exposed to media are more likely than others to

Feel that their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe

Believe that crime rates are rising

Overestimate their odds of becoming a victim

Consider the world to be a dangerous place

News media needs to return to a sense of proportion, conscience, and, most important, truth-telling. Until that happens, help inoculate yourself against feeling overwhelmed by doing the following:

Consider limiting your exposure to media. Give yourself a set time once or twice a day to check in on local and global happenings.

Consider choosing print media for your information gathering rather than visual media. This can reduce the likelihood that you get exposed to emotionally laden material. Home pages on the internet can give you an overall sense of what's going on, as can headline news channels that update stories on the hour.

Remember that you have the power to turn off the remote, leave a website, or change the radio station. Don't let yourself be passive when you feel media is overwhelming you.

Know that other people will have a different tolerance for media stories and their details. If someone is expressing too much of a story for your own comfort, walk away or communicate your distress.

Consider having an electronic-free day, and let your senses take in the simpler things in life.

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If It Bleeds, It Leads: Understanding Fear-Based Media

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Managing depression requires you to mind your media intake.

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While the Red Scare started around 1917 after the first World War, it really flared up in 1945 after WWII. President Truman and a lot of the Us government were scared of Communism uprooting all that America stood for, and the Russians approach to spread it in the US. J. Edgar Hoover was the longtime director of the FBI and often investigated communist activity. They thought that communism and the Russian were going to lead to another war, and nuclear warfare.

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Table of Contents

1. First Red Scare: 1917-1920

2. Cold War Concerns About Communism

3. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

4. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

5. Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

6. Red Scare Impact

The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Communists were often referred to as "Reds" for their allegiance to the red Soviet flag.) The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. Federal employees were analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, investigated allegations of subversive elements in the government and the Hollywood film industry. The climate of fear and repression linked to the Red Scare finally began to ease by the late 1950s.

First Red Scare: 1917-1920

In the United States, labor strikes were on the rise, and the press sensationalized them as being caused by immigrants bent on bringing down the American way of life. The Sedition Act of 1918 targeted people who criticized the government, monitoring radicals and labor union leaders with the threat of deportation.

The fear turned to violence with the 1919 anarchist bombings, a series of bombs targeting law enforcement and government officials. Bombs went off in a wide number of cities including Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, D.C., and New York City.

The first Red Scare climaxed in 1919 and 1920, when United States Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer ordered the Palmer raids, a series of violent law-enforcement raids targeting leftist radicals and anarchists. They kicked off a period of unrest that became known as the "Red Summer."

Cold War Concerns About Communism

Did you know? FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was quick to equate any kind of protest with communist subversion, including the civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover labeled King a communist and covertly worked to intimidate and discredit the civil rights leader.

Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

The information obtained by the FBI proved essential in high-profile legal cases, including the 1949 conviction of 12 prominent leaders of the American Communist Party on charges that they had advocated the overthrow of the government. Moreover, Hoover's agents helped build the case against Julius Rosenberg (1918-53) and his wife, Ethel Rosenberg (1915-53), who were convicted of espionage in 1951. The Rosenbergs were executed two years later.

Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

Public concerns about communism were heightened by international events. In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear bomb and communist forces led by Mao Zedong (1893-1976) took control of China. The following year saw the start of the Korean War (1950-53), which engaged U.S. troops in combat against the communist-supported forces of North Korea. The advances of communism around the world convinced many U.S. citizens that there was a real danger of "Reds" taking over their own country. Figures such as McCarthy and Hoover fanned the flames of fear by wildly exaggerating that possibility.

As the Red Scare intensified, its political climate turned increasingly conservative. Elected officials from both major parties sought to portray themselves as staunch anticommunists, and few people dared to criticize the questionable tactics used to persecute suspected radicals. Membership in leftist groups dropped as it became clear that such associations could lead to serious consequences, and dissenting voices from the left side of the political spectrum fell silent on a range of important issues. In judicial affairs, for example, support for free speech and other civil liberties eroded significantly. This trend was symbolized by the 1951 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dennis v. United States, which said that the free-speech rights of accused Communists could be restricted because their actions presented a clear and present danger to the government.

Red Scare Impact

Americans also felt the effects of the Red Scare on a personal level, and thousands of alleged communist sympathizers saw their lives disrupted. They were hounded by law enforcement, alienated from friends and family and fired from their jobs. While a small number of the accused may have been aspiring revolutionaries, most others were the victims of false allegations or had done nothing more than exercise their democratic right to join a political party.

Though the climate of fear and repression began to ease in the late 1950s, the Red Scare has continued to influence political debate in the decades since. It is often cited as an example of how unfounded fears can compromise civil liberties.

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Red Scare: Cold War, McCarthyism & Facts | HISTORY

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The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War era.

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Woodrow Wilson and Fear Based Propaganda

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Woodrow Wilson and Fear Based Propaganda

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This article talks about Woodrow Wilson's propaganda during his presidency that took place during WWI. Wilson used his propaganda to make the people fearful of the Germans, as he was. He feared that if the German's won the war it the world would no longer be "safe for democracy", so he used the power he had, his propaganda, in order to instill fear in the American people.

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"Fake news" has become an all-too-familiar phrase since Donald Trump introduced it into the vernacular during his bid for the presidency in 2015-16. Yet the term has a long history, mostly under the name "propaganda." Today the term is generally defined as lies and misinformation meant to benefit its purveyors. I operated under this same assumption when I began the research for my book Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity during World War I. Depictions of Germans as rampaging beasts, broadsides warning of the Kaiser's spies peering around every corner, and Woodrow Wilson's own promise that dissidents would be met "with a firm hand of stern repression" at first appeared to me as cynical, Machiavellian means of manipulating a largely isolationist American populace to act in ways contrary to their will and interests.

Although there is a grain of truth in this, what I discovered is that this assessment actually explains very little about propaganda and why it often appears to work. By considering propaganda at face value, as at least the genuine thoughts and feelings of its creators, one can better understand its nature and intent. In the case of the United States during the First World War, no individual better reflects the nature and intent of propaganda than Woodrow Wilson.

Despite portrayals of Wilson as laser-focused on his crusade to make the world "safe for democracy," the war raised critical concerns about his own country's security. Germany's seeming invincibility in the first weeks of August 1914 appears to have troubled Wilson greatly. On two occasions at the end of that month, the president related to trusted confidants his fear that a German victory would so endanger the nation's security that "it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation." What would happen to democracy if America were forced to militarize for its own protection?

Wilson's anxiety over an overwhelming German bully did not fade after the U.S. entered the war, as evidenced by his occasional hands-on approach to the work of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the administration's propaganda office. A fitting example is his editing of a speech CPI chairman George Creel was to deliver in July 1918. The address was nothing short of demagogic. A decades-long German conspiracy had been afoot both inside the United States and Europe. Millions of Germans immigrants came to America to undermine its democratic traditions and defenses, while the German Kaiser plotted to establish colonies in the New World that could act as future launching points for an invasion of the United States. In fact, Germany's ultimate aim in the Great War was the subjugation of the United States. In a short note attached to the modified draft of the address, Wilson informed Creel that he "ha[d] taken the liberty of making some alterations in this paper....As altered, I think it is all right."

Yet perhaps more important than such dystopic and conspiracy-laden representations of the past, present, and possible future is the motivations of men like Wilson and Creel for uttering them. In their minds, they were not spreading falsehoods and half-truths. To them, as Wilson had shown and Creel would reassert on numerous occasions from 1918 to the 1940s, their propaganda was grounded in truth. By educating the American people of the importance of sacrificing in order to defeat Germany-for the sake of their own security-Wilson and Creel believed they were serving the public good.

Their demagoguery was quite impactful in large part because it tapped into pre-existing stereotypes of Germans and other non-Anglo immigrants. Wilson and Creel's fearmongering propaganda helped stir up a wartime culture of intolerance, which manifested as vigilante violence against German-Americans and wartime dissenters, the creation of a surveillance state, and heavy-handed laws curtailing free speech. It is unlikely that such an oppressive climate would have arisen without a critical mass of the population interpreting propagandists' "truths" as genuine statements of fact.

As during the first World War, insularity, narrowness, and xenophobia from some of today's leaders and many media outlets have weakened - not strengthened- the current American body politic. Accepting present-day nativist propaganda as genuine expressions of ideology, paranoia, and fear allows us to better understand the scope of this challenge and the potential consequences of leaving it uncontested. A competition between competing visions of America and American identity is playing out before us, just as it did in 1917-18. The mission of nativism's opponents is not merely to convince others that their facts are wrong. That may be the easy part. The task is to convince them that they are mistaken about their fundamental beliefs about their country and themselves.

Zachary Smith teaches writing and rhetoric in Birmingham, Alabama. He earned his PhD in history from the University of Georgia. Smith is the author of Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity during World War I.

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The Relative Nature of "Fake News": Woodrow Wilson's Fearmongering and the Battle for "Truth"

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"Fake news" has become an all-too-familiar phrase since Donald Trump introduced it into the vernacular during his bid for the presidency in 2015-16. Yet the term has a long history, mostly under the name "propaganda." Today the term is generally defined as lies and misinformation meant to benefit its purveyors.

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The History of Presidents Using Fear to Sway Candidates

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The History of Presidents Using Fear to Sway Candidates

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This video from 2016 talks about how politicians have moved towards using fear as a main contributor in their campaigns. They give examples like LBJ and his claim that voting Barry Goldwater into office was going to cause a world wide nuclear holocaust. They also connect it back to the 2016 election, and how President Trumps approach was to make you fearful of the immigrants and muslims, and then tell you that he can fix that problem by building a wall. This all connects to a quote that the reporter says during the interview on behalf of candidates actions during an election, "I have to convince you that there is a problem, and that I am the answer".

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Beverly Gage, as you pointed out, this is not one party or another. This is kind of as old as politics.

And just in the last cycle, a lot of people took Hillary Clinton to task for the 3:00 a.m. ad that she had against Barack Obama. It was just pictures of kids sleeping in their beds, and it was, it's 3:00 a.m., the red phone, so to speak, in the White House is ringing. Do you know who is going to answer that phone? Are you sure who you're going to vote for now is going to make that decision?

I guess in politics and almost in sales, it is almost a natural thing. I have to convince you that there is a problem and, B, that I am the solution. Right?

How do we figure out when we cross over that? And it's also pretty natural in politics to want to tear the other candidate down, but without necessarily going into this other space that we seem to be in today?

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The history of politicians going way beyond the facts to court fear

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Political candidates' rhetoric often gets heated, even inflammatory on the campaign trail. But when does it cross the line into the offensive or fear-mongering? Hari Sreenivasan gets a historical perspective from presidential historian Michael Beschloss and Beverly Gage of Yale University.

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The President has continually used Twitter as a platform to spread fear and his many opinions

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The President has continually used Twitter as a platform to spread fear and his many opinions

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Ever since he was elected in 2016, President Trump has become even more famous for his Social media following, especially Twitter. This is due to the fact that he started his saying that everything was "Fake News", and also because a lot of these tweets just don't make sense. Recently, with the election and all of the protesting, Trumps Twitter has taken a turn. If you scroll through this you can find that he uses his power and following to scare people into voting for him, by showing video clips, and retweets of violence from some of the extremists towards people.

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Tweets by realDonaldTrump

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How Germany used fear-mongering during World War II

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How Germany used fear-mongering during World War II

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This article explains how the Nazi party used fear tactics in World War II. They used fear-mongering to throw off both those living in Germany and those outside of Germany. Hitler made public announcements stating that he wanted to resolve tensions peacefully. However, he was telling the military something very different. He wanted to make people believe he was willing to negotiate, while really he was planning an attack on Poland. He also spread false information about the Jewish population. He blamed them for the start of the war and created a fear towards them from the rest of the country. These false allegations created an awful stereotype for Jewish people, not only making them fear for their livelihood, but making other people fear them.

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German troops parade in Warsaw to celebrate the defeat of Poland, October 5, 1939. - US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

Eighty years ago, on September 1, 1939, Germans awoke to news informing them that Polish troops had attacked Germany. At 5:40 a.m., Adolf Hitler took to the airwaves to alert the German armed forces that "the Polish state has rejected his efforts for the peaceful regulation of neighborly relations" and, instead, had taken up arms. Germans in Poland, he proclaimed, are being persecuted with "bloody terror, driven from home and farm." In order to put an end to Poland's "unacceptable violations of Germany's borders," he had no choice but to resort to "force against force."

Later that day, Hitler expanded upon these themes in his address to the Reichstag, his Nazi-only, rubber stamp parliament. He presented himself as a longtime advocate of peace. Poland, instead of negotiating for a peaceful settlement of their differences, had repeatedly violated the German border, carried out economic warfare against the German city of Danzig, and treated the ethnic Germans in Poland, including women and children, in a "bestial and sadistic" way. While castigating Poland for its abuse of minorities, Hitler bluntly stated that minorities living in the German Reich were not persecuted. He then promised not to wage a fight against women and children but only against military targets, and he pledged to honor and guarantee the neutrality of other European states. Because of his love for peace, he announced that a non-aggression pact had been signed with the Soviet Union, stipulating that Russia and Germany would never again go to war.

In hindsight, his claims were clearly outlandish lies, geared to masking Nazi Germany's pre-meditated invasion of Poland, its rapid rearmament, and brutalities against its own Jewish population. The German occupation of Poland that followed was one characterized by violence against the local population, including women and children. Nor was the signing of the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union a serious effort to guarantee peace between the two ideologically different states; in Hitler's mind, it was purely a temporary expedient to allow for the invasion of Poland without threat from the Soviet Union.

As the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, it is important to reflect on the role propaganda played in these events as well as some of the consequences. By manipulating the population's emotions with fear-mongering and hate, the Nazis helped to facilitate war and ultimately genocide.

The Nazi messaging in the lead-up to war was a propaganda tour de force designed to deceive both domestic and foreign audiences. Even in late August 1939, politicians in England and France still believed that war could be averted because Germany seemed willing to negotiate. What people didn't realize is that Hitler, while publicly professing his interest in peace, was preparing to attack Poland. To facilitate the last objective, he had to come up with a plan that would justify military action without portraying Germany as the aggressor.

On August 22, 1939, Hitler informed his military leadership that he would provide a "propagandistic reason for starting the war, regardless of whether it is believable or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards, if he spoke the truth or not. "

Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and Otto Dietrich's Press Office instructed the German media to run headline stories that stoked fear of Poland's intentions. Chief among these were exaggerated claims of Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans living in western Poland. German newsreels carried emotionally charged images and interviews of ethnic German refugees who had fled across the border because of Polish violence. German journalists were given the following directives in those late August days: "Don't write about the flood of peace proposals and offers of negotiation, at least not all the details," and "The language of the atrocity reports may not be relaxed in any way." Newspaper headlines screamed that "All Poland in War Fever" and that Polish anti-aircraft had fired at a German plane carrying a major German official. Because all of Germany's newspapers, whether independent or controlled by the Nazi Party, were required to follow the instructions from the Press Office, Germans received only a distorted picture of the real political situation in the east.

At the same time as Germans were being fed a steady diet of disinformation, Hitler instructed his SS leaders, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, to engineer phony attacks on German border locations in order to precipitate war with Poland. Germany's military intelligence office was to provide Polish uniforms, while the SS would supply the bodies for the uniforms. On the night of August 31, the SS commandos went into action, launching attacks on several German installations, including the Gleiwitz radio station. As part of the deception, the SS murdered concentration camp prisoners who had been dressed in Polish army uniforms and left their corpses in the vicinity of the staged attacks. A German known locally for his pro-Polish views was shot in the head and left at the radio station as proof of an insurrection by Poles. The world would not discover that these events were staged until nearly six years later - after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the trial of the major German defendants before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Like all clever propagandists, Hitler sought to mask his true intentions by appealing to the moral high ground. He understood that many, if not most, Germans did not want to go to war again; World War I had cost the nation some 2 million dead. And indeed there was no uproar of enthusiasm when German troops invaded Poland. What made it palatable to the civilian population was to paint Germany as the victim of foreign machinations and violence. By staging the phony attacks on the German borders, the Nazis provided "proof" of their victimhood and used it in tandem with the claim that Germany was encircled by enemies in the east and west. To further preserve Germany's image as the victim, the Propaganda Ministry directed the German press not to refer to the invasion of Poland as war, but only as a military intervention. Only when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, were newspapers permitted to use the term because the onus of blame could be placed on the western allies and Poland.

When German troops occupied Poland, they carried out brutal reprisals against Poles for allegedly killing ethnic Germans following the invasion. While acts of violence against ethnic Germans did occur, Nazi propagandists grossly exaggerated the numbers to justify murder as well as the marking of Polish forced laborers later brought to Germany.

In their campaign against Europe's Jews, the Nazis used with equal skill the propaganda techniques deployed in the lead-up to war. Months before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave his so-called "prophecy speech" on the sixth anniversary of his appointment as German chancellor (January 30, 1939). In it, he warned the world, "If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

Hitler continually referred back to his "prophecy" during the war, purposely changing its original date to September 1, 1939, to coincide with the invasion of Poland.

The Nazis depicted the Jews as the true instigators of war, who pulled the strings of Allied statesmen, and thus an existential threat to European civilization, and to Germany in particular. Even as Berlin collapsed around him and some 6 million Jewish men, women, and children already had been killed in the Holocaust, Hitler kept lashing out against this imaginary Jewish conspiracy.
Steven Luckert, PhD, is senior program curator in the Levine Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Nazi Propaganda and the Outbreak of World War II

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Eighty years ago, on September 1, 1939, Germans awoke to news informing them that Polish troops had attacked Germany. At 5:40 a.m., Adolf Hitler took to the airwaves to alert the German armed forces that "the Polish state has rejected his efforts for the peaceful regulation of neighborly relations" and, instead, had taken up arms. Germans in Poland, he proclaimed, are being persecuted with "bloody terror, driven from home and farm."