Fear Is Your Business
The war against humanity by means of fake pandemics was already rehearsed with swine flu — back then, the subject was taken up by rappers.
“Profiteure der Angst” was the title of a documentary produced by Arte in 2009, which showed that the alleged dangerousness of the so-called swine flu was a grand staging by the pharmaceutical industry. While the production remained something of an underground tip until 2020, it experienced an unexpected revival at the beginning of the Corona years at the latest, for the protagonists and mechanisms of swine flu and the C-terror were nearly identical. The title “Profiteure der Angst” had always been very apt. Frightening people in order to make capital out of it? A perverse and sick view of the human being.
The song “Angst ist deren Business” was performed by the German reggae and dancehall singer Nosliw, likewise in 2009. The song’s title and its year of release suggest that Nosliw might have known the Arte film. The system-critical track appeared on his album “Heiss & Laut” and grapples critically with fear as an instrument of political domination, with the constant barrage of shock scenarios and the sowing of insecurity across every channel.
They come with none but the best intentions
To be our saviours
With weekly doses and with tablets
And we go home with even more dread
And they earn
Themselves silly off their medicine
They know our neuroses
Hear the prayers
But all of it just for good cash.
Fear is a primal human sensation. Like all sensations, it has a fundamental justification, or better said, a use: fear warns us of danger.
Fear of danger, however, is always concretely tied to a particular thing or situation and is accordingly not a permanent state. Yet what exactly we regard as a danger can, through the Orwellian language games of the brave new science, be adjusted without limit and abstracted into ever-new contexts. And so, during the Corona years, the danger lurked one moment in the door handle, then in Grandma, then in the grandchildren, and then again in wicked, filthy cash.
The result is that the theme of fear increasingly creeps into our lives through every crack, wholly out of proportion, and takes up far too much space, until the exceptional state of fear has become a permanent condition.
None of this is new, and it has been studied for decades; the author Naomi Klein described the systematic use of fear as an instrument of politics at length in her 2007 work “Schock-Strategie,” subtitled “Der Aufstieg des Katastrophen-Kapitalismus.”
Nosliw’s “Unsere Angst ist deren Business” is not only about the fearmongering of grand world politics, but also about the assault on the right to lead a happy and contented life with modest means. Anyone who does not happen to fear a world war or the loss of their economic existence is at least supposed to harbour doubts about their body, about the quality of their circle of friends, or about their own intellectual abilities.
Nosliw – who was around 35 years old when the song was released – recognises this too, when he says:
They make cash off our hope
Off our dreams
Off the fear of missing our chances
The dread of forever being alone
Of spiritual bankruptcies
The dread of really hard times.
But if fear is a primal sensation, has the human being not always been steerable through it? Do messages of fear take hold better today than in the past? What has changed? The questions are justified, and we find answers to them in globalisation and in the possibility of shaping brains through the mass media. By the Second World War at the latest, communication had become a globally marketed industrial product; images are part of hybrid warfare and are in some cases placed deliberately in order to evoke desired moods among the population.
Of course the fear of Islamic terror after September 11 was, in itself, already a great illusion, yet the fear effect was successfully achieved. Mere stagings are enough for that. A population, once thrown into fear, accepts almost any political means to feel apparently safe from that fear again. This blueprint was successfully applied once more at the start of the Corona years with the “images of Bergamo.”
We’re afraid of China and Soviets, of war and McDonald’s
Of reckless gambling and of the sinking dollar
Afraid to the marrow of Al Quaida, afraid of Bin Laden
We’re scared of the Lehman Brothers and afraid of the States.
These words come from the second part of the track, where Nosliw’s singing is joined by a rap section. It is Olli Banjo who takes the floor here. In the 2000s, Olli Banjo was one of the most eloquent and innovative German hip-hop artists. While the singer Nosliw’s success always remained modest, Olli Banjo used to play at the well-known Splash festival, graced the cover of the legendary JUICE magazine, and, on his so-called sparring albums, could secure any German rap artist as a featured guest with a snap of his fingers. He can look back on a long tradition of explicitly system-critical lyrics, which delighted me again and again as a young person shaped by hip-hop.
During his golden period, lyrics like those on “Angst ist deren Business” were what one expected from him, but for many years now things have grown fairly quiet around the rapper, and Corona, too, did not re-politicise Olli Banjo or bring him back to rapping to any greater extent. Given the many disappointments one had to cope with, especially in the supposedly socially critical hip-hop scene during the Corona years, I am not all that sad about it.
Of course I would have wished for an old idol of mine to raise his voice against injustice, vaccine apartheid and perpetual propaganda, but I am already glad that he did not directly brand me a social parasite.
And so, with “Angst ist deren Business,” we are left with a clever rap song. That, too, has great value. And if I may dream, then I would wish that the singer Nosliw and the rapper Olli Banjo had quietly harboured the same thoughts as I, and simply wanted to be left in peace – without fear, without psychological terror, without soiling their pants.
Listen & Watch
Audio version of this article
