biblio-excerptise:   a book unexamined is not worth having

Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

Wole Soyinka

Soyinka, Wole;

Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

Random House Trade 2005, 145 pages

ISBN 0812974247

topics: |  essays | terrorism


developed from the prestigious Reith Lectures, March 2004.
... if the world changed on September 11, 2001, then it also changed in 1988,
when Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and a year later, when a
UTA passenger flight exploded over Niger. Also the result of sabotage, that
last-named disaster was greeted by worldwide silence and "swallowed with
total equanimity by African heads of state."

Decades ago, the idea of collective fear had a tangible face: the
atom bomb. Today our shared anxiety has become far more complex and
insidious, arising from tyranny, terrorism, and the invisible power of the
"quasi state."

From Niger to lower Manhattan to Madrid, this invisible threat has erased
distinctions between citizens and soldiers; we're all potential targets
now. ... In the place of completely thought-through prescriptions, Soyinka
offers generalities...


amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at] gmail.com) 17 Feb 2009