Comments on: Panic!

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:23:26 +0000

Do you think it's fair to make fun of spammers, Jakob? After all they have no brains.

By: Jakob

Jakob — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:09:41 +0000

"Worried about the knock-out blow, Mr. Jones? Take two Snibbo™ brand natural vitamins, try some deep meditation, and come and see me in the morning..."

By: Alex Long

Alex Long — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:39:57 +0000

I also suffer from panic attacks and i can manage it by deep and slow breathing. i also practice meditation.. *

By: Airminded · The Germans are coming!

Airminded · The Germans are coming! — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:51:06 +0000

[...] Via Museum of Hoaxes, the Nazi air marker hoax — though it seems to me that it was not a hoax in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather an honest misinterpretation. And taking into account the role of the press in the story’s rise and fall, it looks a lot like what I’d call a defence panic. [...]

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:22:48 +0000

Very interesting! I'm always looking for precursors and analogues, so I may have to look into that at some stage. Sounds a lot like the "Great Fear" during the French Revolution, when townsfolk feared a completely imaginary alliance between foreign invaders, brigands and the nobility. The dust raised from herds of sheep being driven to market would be interpreted as armies on the march, and so on.

I suppose thereâ€™s nothing new about panics in general, but air panics seem to be different because fear of new technology plays a big part.

Actually that part's not new, since the 1840s (at least) technology was a major driver of defence panics (see these quotes, for example). Not too surprising, I guess, it's an industrial revolution thing. So I'd argue in part that the coming of flight just changed the form which the panics took. But only in part :)

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 13:53:13 +0000

The press did have a lot to do with it. There was a big explosion of newspapers in the early 1640s because censorship broke down. They tended to print wildly exaggerated or made-up stories of all the terrible things the Irish rebels were doing. Oral rumours also played a role: refugees were mistaken for bloodthirsty invaders (some things never change!) and people ran off in terror spreading the word that "the Irish are coming".

I suppose there's nothing new about panics in general, but air panics seem to be different because fear of new technology plays a big part.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 07:07:40 +0000

Sounds like a ripping yarn!

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:53:05 +0000

I just noticed that someone googled for "air pirates of the Congo" and hit my blog. Curiously, though, far from the sort of stuff that would fit that description on my blog, the closest match seems to be a 1935 childrens' book of the same title by one "G. Gibbard Jackson".

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 14:26:01 +0000

Jess:

Sexton Blake, LOL. I do look at some of the anarchist-type stuff like Hartmann the Anarchist and Outlaws of the Air but don't have the space to get into them very deeply. Good clean fun, though.

Chris:

Yes, of course. As I said, there were plenty of panics to go around: 1848, 1852, 1852-3, 1854, 1859, 1871, 1881-2, 1884, 1888, 1900. Napoleon III was just one of many!

Gavin:

Thanks, definitely out of my area! Would be interesting to know how the scare developed. The press is crucial in my period for that process; I suppose newspapers were just starting to flourish around the 17th century.

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 11:07:22 +0000

And if you want to go back even further, you could include anti-catholic hysteria in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially the Irish rebellion in 1641: that resulted in widespread beliefs that the Irish were going to invade England, or even that they already had!