The Enemy Within: How Fear and Control Shape Our Lives

Reflections on Government Power, Neoliberalism, and the Real Threats We Face

(If you’ve received this article by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often continue to edit and correct typos after publishing the first version).

Image Source: Declassified UK

Yesterday I read somewhere in the UK media that our government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to conduct another test of its emergency alert system some time ‘later this year’. The previous one was two years ago.

I’ve learned also that if your phone happens to be locked when the alert goes off, you won’t be able to access any features until you check in with the government’s system by clicking on something in the alert text. I’m not sure what this entails, but as soon as I read this, I promptly went to my phone settings and disabled the emergency notifications, which according to the UK government’s website is the only way to ‘opt out’.

I’ve suffered from chronic tinnitus since early childhood, and I don’t need a very loud, piercing sound making things worse for me. I certainly don’t want it going off when I’m sitting with a client, concentrating on something, or relaxing. Apparently, it’ll still work even if your phone is on silent, so keeping the phone on silent is not a solution. You can keep the phone off, or in airplane mode but since we don’t know when the test will be carried out, we can’t plan in advance, which, of course, is intentional.

My first thought was to wonder why on earth they couldn’t find a better way to alert people without frightening the daylights out of them, and causing psychological and auditory damage. Most people with unresolved childhood trauma—around 50% of the general population—would find this experience re-traumatising. Babies and small children are especially sensitive to loud sounds and noises, which frighten and harm them. I can imagine this alert going off on a parent’s phone during a relaxing walk with their baby or toddler, or whilst having a tender moment with their child—playing, changing nappies, or bathing. I wonder what it might be like for a baby who’s in the middle of breastfeeding the moment the alert goes off. These are just some examples. Children of all ages will be affected negatively, not to mention animals whose hearing is orders of magnitude more sensitive than ours. Then I realised the real goal isn’t to warn people about some impending catastrophe, but to frighten people and keep them on their toes. This will be just a test. If ever a real catastrophe hit, by the time the alert sounds, I doubt it would save many people.

This experience with the alert system reminded me of another form of government control I knew intimately—one that shaped my understanding of how states use fear and surveillance to manage their populations.

I was born and raised in Israel, and from age sixteen, like everyone else, I was required to carry an ID card on me everywhere I went. Each person’s ID number is assigned to them at birth. When you turned sixteen, you went to the local office of the Ministry of the Interior, submitted your application, and the card would be available soon after. These days the applications are probably submitted online, and I know the cards are biometric. Getting your ID card is a matter of pride in Israel, like a rite of passage—an initiation into adult society. They now have ceremonies in Israeli secondary schools where they present these cards to young people. Getting your ID card is sold to them as a personal achievement, like passing your A-levels. How remarkable is the indoctrination that makes people spin a mechanism of state control into something like a personal achievement to be proud of and welcome?

The Israeli ID card contains every conceivable piece of personal information about you. The card shows your full name and ‘nationality’—which in my case was defined as ‘Jewish’. This item is the most important one on the ID card and the reason for its existence. The card also contains your address, date of birth, your parents’ names, the first name of your paternal grandfather, your gender, place of birth, and a current photograph. It’s illegal to leave your home without your ID.

For anyone who thinks an ID is just a benign and useful mechanism to help people avoid identity theft, let me share a quick story. When I still lived in Israel, my ex-husband’s parents told us one day that the previous day a neighbour had gone for an evening walk in the dark around the neighbourhood. He happened to be from a Yemenite background, so was darker-skinned and ‘Arab’-looking, as Yemenite Jews tend to be. At some point he was stopped by two police officers who asked for his ID card, but he didn’t have it on him. He was really close to home and had just wanted a quick walk, so hadn’t taken anything with him. The police officers were rough with him and asked him a lot of personal questions. He had to work really hard to convince them that ‘he wasn't an Arab’—Israel’s euphemism for ‘Palestinian’. He pleaded with them that he was Jewish, told them what he did for a living and that he lived just around the corner. Fortunately for him, they did eventually agree to walk to his home with him, and weren’t satisfied until they’d seen his ID card, which confirmed he was indeed Jewish’. For those who don’t know, the Israeli ID card of Palestinian citizens of Israel says ‘Arab’ under ‘Nationality’. If an ‘Arab’ was caught walking in the dark near a Jewish neighbourhood, he’d be in trouble whether or not he carried his ID card.

As Palestinians, Black UK citizens, African Americans, or immigrants in the US know, a simple case of mistaken identity can escalate rapidly and end up in death. The wrong expression on your face, one word out of turn, or refusing to be touched can be enough to lead to assault and murder by the authorities.

Our current safety from persecution is no guarantee—today’s protected group can become tomorrow’s target. No one is safe in societies where governments have too much power, including a Jewish man in Israel who in the minds of the authorities looks like an ‘Arab’. This story reveals a great deal about Israeli society—its innate paranoia, racism, its culture of ‘urgency and emergency’, its profiling practices, and its level of control over the population. In the UK there has been long-term resistance to an official government ID card. People argue, rightly, that there are plenty of ways to verify a person’s identity if necessary, and that ID cards can be misused by governments and authorities for control. The recent enforcement of the US REAL ID under Trump’s expanding authoritarianism should serve as a warning to everyone.

But what does an ID card have to do with the UK government’s alert system test? To me it’s about the lethal combination of fear and control.

The UK media have begun to throw about the words ‘World War III’ recently. The media have been implying a connection between this alleged upcoming war, and Russia and Iran, suggesting that we are at risk of some kind of invasion. I’ve been seeing articles telling UK citizens how to prepare for an invasion, and what to pack in a survival kit. I wonder if our government is hoping that the US’s direct attacks on Iran, and the crucial assistance it has provided for Israel’s vicious assaults on the country, will lead to terrorist attacks against the US and the UK. During COVID when face masks were mandated, I couldn’t help noticing that no one seemed worried at all about terrorism. I could not understand how it was possible that all the precautions about terrorism were thrown out so easily. With face masks everywhere, and compulsory, it would have been a heaven for terrorists if indeed a terrorist threat really existed. But nothing happened. Now that COVID is history, we are back to government-generated terrorism anxiety. The population cannot be allowed to relax. It must always be frightened of something.

Even if it’s not the Iranian state itself that sponsors any terrorism, I wonder if our governments are hoping that groups of individuals would be so incensed by US and UK behaviour—and their support of Israel—that they will decide to act on their own. Would we even know if a false flag operation took place? But if something does happen, our government could claim, without having to show any evidence, that hostile acts were sponsored by Iran or Russia.

I don’t like it when my government, or anyone in authority, tells me to be afraid. My reaction to anyone attempting to frighten me is immediate suspicion. There’s a profound difference between rationally offering evidence of a threat, and frenzied attempts to frighten people with nebulous, often contradictory information that doesn’t hold up to real scrutiny.

Iran was never a threat to Israel and it is not a threat to the US, the UK, or anyone. Russia did invade Ukraine. Setting aside the politics behind this for now, the invasion has been devastating and frightening for the Ukrainian people. But Russia invading Ukraine is far from Russia invading the UK or the US, or any other country for that matter. Putin has just announced a reduction in Russia’s military spending, and I’m guessing it’s because his attack on Ukraine has been depleting Russia's resources. It’s also his way of sending a clear message to NATO that Russia is not a threat. He really does understand Western psychology.

I don’t trust our government when it uses manufactured fear without evidence, and makes periodical noises about conscription that the media love passing on to the public. Fear gets people’s attention even more than sex, and we all know the media need our attention so they can sell advertising. As someone who comes from the Israeli police state, it feels like Israel—not Russia or Iran—is invading the UK. It has been doing so with its surveillance, and riot control technology, which it has always tested on Palestinians, with its toxic influence on UK politics, but most of all through exporting its paranoid psychology and its ‘urgency and emergency’ mindset. Fear is infectious, and Israel exports it strategically, knowing that anxious populations are easier to rally behind its settler-colonial ambitions. The results speak for themselves.

This brings me to what I see as the real threat we’re facing—not external enemies, but the system that governs our daily lives.

If we are facing a threat, it’s from our own governments, which appear to welcome this Israeli ‘invasion’ with open arms. No matter who’s in power—the Tories, Labour or, perish the thought, Nigel Farage—our true ruler is the religion of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism—that predatory capitalist system that most are unable to see beyond—does not thrive on peace or cooperation. It creates and thrives on alienation, competition, and ruthless social Darwinism, and it is fundamentally soulless and empty.

Neoliberalism exists only to benefit the predators in humanity. Depending on their place in the pecking order, everyone else gets whatever crumbs fall off predators’ metaphorical tables. Some crumbs can be substantial, but for most they are just enough to stay alive. There is nothing new here. Monarchies and feudal systems have always operated this way. Democracy was supposed to be the panacea to this, but neoliberalism crept in on us and ended up using our democratic institutions against us, no doubt hoping to dispose of them eventually. Neoliberalism is compatible with population control, and it thrives on anxiety, and constant warfare. Real democracy is neoliberalism’s worst enemy. What’s happening now in the US should be a warning to all neoliberalist societies.

A reader recently got angry about the email notices Substack sent when I posted my first podcast videos. He was annoyed that I was ‘pushing’ my ‘products’ and damaging the Earth—according to him every email releases a ‘puff of CO2’. He wan’t angry about what he thought I was ‘selling’ but the number of emails. I’m certain this individual is from the US, where everything is monetised. He didn’t hear me when I explained the podcast was free, that each email was about a different episode, and that I don’t send those emails, Substack does. He just couldn’t compute that anyone would do something for no monetary gain. Many in US society have no mental infrastructure for anything that isn’t a business transaction. I’m nauseated by the proliferation of advice about making money from everything—and of course, those offering the advice aren’t doing it for free.

US neoliberal imperialism is almost complete. Iran and Russia are just a thorn in the US’s side because they refuse to participate. I don’t mean to say that they’re therefore saints, but to portray these countries as posing an existential threat to every UK or US citizen is disingenuous and deeply manipulative. This fear mongering is intended to ensure that the entire population rallies behind our neoliberal overlords. When they start the next big war using whatever ludicrous excuses or lies they can come up with, and draped with the flag and dripping with fake patriotic zeal, they want the population to fall in line. They want ordinary people to be ready to sacrifice the lives and mental health of their sons and daughters when they call them to fight wars that no one needs or wants. I have seen the same thing in Israel, and I recognise it.

I left Israel over thirty-four years ago, and naively thought I got away from it all. But Israel’s toxic psychology has been spreading. Israel’s goal remains to eliminate all Palestinian presence from historic Palestine. A partnership with the US and other Western neoliberalist economies is perfectly compatible with settler-colonialism and genocide. This partnership is thousands of years old going all the way back to humanity’s ancient empires.

Our enemy is not outside of us. It’s in our wallets, our bank accounts, our pensions, our insurance policies, the supermarket shelves, the way we live, and in our government’s collusion with US neoliberalism. To disable it we need to refuse fear. We need to connect with people, buy locally, support small organic growers, cooperate, be generous, give things for free, and develop our community spirit. This is where our true resistance lies. We need to build this resistance and refuse to be distracted by war drums and government-manufactured fear.

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PS — The UK government emergency alert will not work on older operating systems or older phones. It means that if some disaster really struck and such an alert could save lives, only people who can afford advanced mobile phone models will benefit from it. I think if the UK government really had the welfare of the population in mind, it would enable alert access to everyone regardless of how advanced their phones happen to be…

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