Politics & Power Quote by L. Neil Smith

Panic is the point of leverage this line refuses to hand over. L. Neil Smith opens by adopting the calm voice of a seasoned guide, then flips that calm into a warning shot: if you think today is uniquely dire, you are easier to herd, easier to sell emergency powers, easier to keep glued to the spectacle. The phrasing is deliberately managerial - "the first thing you need to know" - positioning the author as someone offering tools, not outrage. That posture matters because it preempts the accusation of hysteria even as it names "violent government excesses", a phrase loaded enough to indict without litigating details.

"Far from unprecedented" is the rhetorical hinge. Smith isn’t minimizing harm; he’s reframing it as pattern rather than anomaly. The subtext is libertarian (and distinctly Smithian): state violence isn’t a deviation from the system, it’s a recurring feature that reappears whenever fear makes the public pliable. By invoking precedent, he implicitly gestures to a grab-bag of American and global examples - surveillance expansions, crackdowns, wartime internments, police brutality, covert operations - without pinning himself to one case. That vagueness is strategic: it broadens the coalition of readers who can plug in their own evidence.

Contextually, this reads like post-9/11 political culture filtered through decades of anti-authoritarian science-fiction sensibility: history as a cycle of power grabs, "perspective" as resistance, and panic as the regime’s unofficial fuel. The intent isn’t comfort. It’s inoculation.