Many of you will recall the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, which aired in 1960. In that episode aliens land in a space ship and create mass hysteria in a neighborhood by simply turning the electricity off and on and controlling simple machines like lawn mowers. In the resulting chaos, the neighbors act out their paranoia, accusing each other of being enemies and in the end committing violent acts, including murder, against one another. The aliens conclude that defeating earthlings is really a simple matter that does not require special weapons, because it is easy enough to get them to destroy each other with their own fear and bigotry.
Rod Serling’s closing line from that episode was absolutely prescient:
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices — to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill — and suspicion can destroy — and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own — for the children — and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is — that these things cannot be confined — to the Twilight Zone.”