Fear of the walking dead: The American Police State takes aim

Sunday, May 15, 2016 by: Natural News Editor
Tags: zombie apocalypse, police state, American government

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(NaturalNews)

"Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it's indistinguishable from the purest paranoia."^[1]— Terrence Rafferty, New York Times

The zombies are back. They are hungry. And they are lurking around every corner.

In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback has declared October "Zombie Preparedness Month"^[2] in an effort to help the public prepare for a possible zombie outbreak. (Story by John W. Whitehead, republished from Rutherford.org.)

In New York, researchers at Cornell University have concluded that the best place to hide from the walking dead is the northern Rocky Mountains region.^[3]

And in Washington, DC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit "that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door."

The undead are also wreaking havoc at gun shows^[4], battling corsets in forthcoming movie blockbusters such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, running for their lives in 5K charity races,^[5] and even putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills^[6] arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The zombie narrative, popularized by the hit television series The Walking Dead,^[7] in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they're not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans, plays to our fears and paranoia.

Yet as journalist Syreeta McFadden points out, while dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties, now they reflect our reality,^[8] mirroring how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Fear the Walking Dead—AMC's new spinoff of its popular Walking Dead series—drives this point home by dialing back the clock to when the zombie outbreak first appears and setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own experiences of the past year ("a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and ... rapid social entropy"). Then, as Forbes reports, "the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors."

Forbes found Fear's quick shift into a police state to be far-fetched, but anyone who has been paying attention in recent years knows that the groundwork has already been laid for the government—i.e., the military—to intervene and lock down the nation^[9] in the event of a national disaster.

Recognizing this, the Atlantic notes: "The villains of [Fear the Walking Dead] aren't the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threat—but Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe."

We've been so hounded in recent years with dire warnings about terrorist attacks, Ebola pandemics, economic collapse, environmental disasters, and militarized police that it's no wonder millions of Americans have turned to zombie fiction as a way to "envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports." As Time magazine reporter James Poniewozik phrases it, the "apocalyptic drama lets us face the end of the world once a week and live."

Here's the curious thing, however: while zombies may be the personification of our darkest fears, they embody the government's paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.

Read the rest of the article at Rutherford.org.

Sources:

[1] NYTimes.com

[2] Kansas.com

[3] LiveScience.com

[4] Money.CNN.com

[5] DesertSun.com

[6] PostBulletin.com

[7] Mcall.com

[8] TheGuardian.com

[9] PSMag.com