Terror, Terror Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink!
I am so tired of all this talk of terror and the repercussions it is having on our civil liberties, both here in the US and around the globe. The number of people killed in terror attacks, world-wide in any given year, pales in comparison with the number of children who die of hunger each year (5 million) or people who die from contaminated drinking water (2.2million), or who die in car crashes in the US each year (40,000 people) or who die (35,000) or are injured (100,000) by hand guns in the US each year. These numbers are, in many cases orders of magnitude higher than any US casualties caused by foreign terrorists and I don’t see people in the US or its government making the kind of fuss about these things that they are about the mythical 'War on Terror'. Want to know why? I’ll tell you. There’s no money to be made in doing anything about these things. There is, however, a lot of money, tens of billions in fact, to be made combating 'terror'. Just talk to the CEO’s and stockholders of companies like Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and the like.
Money is not the only thing to gain here. With the downfall of the Soviet Empire in the Reagan days, there just has not been a really good “enemy” conservative politicos could scare their constitutents with; and every politician knows that nothing brings out the vote like good old fashioned fear: fear of death, fear of losing your job, fear of people different than you, fear of the unknown. You name it. Although there had been many other terrorist activities carried out by foreigners (and US citizens) which caused US casualties and injuries before 9/11 (like the bombing of the USS Cole, the first bombing of the Trade Towers, the bombing of the Murrow Building by Timothy McVeigh, the lynching of black people by the Klu Klux Klan not so long ago, among others), we did not see the kinds of requests for 'war powers' or hear the kind of 'war' rhetoric that is so prevalent now or have the whole-sale erosion of civil liberties that we now see with the so-called 'Patriot Act'.
As terrible as 9/11 was, the way it has been used to terrify the US public and get them to feel the only way they can be safe is to cede all of their liberties and civil rights to 'big brother', is even more terrible. Our civil liberties, those things that allow us to hear, speak, and pursue the truth, and what used to be our fierce protection of them used to be what set us apart from other countries and in large part made our country the best place in the world. I now see in this country what I would call the 'brown-shirting' of America, driven by the White House, but acquiesced to by the Congress. As Goebbels, one of Hitler’s main architects of the Third Riech, said “…..'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.'
An interesting book just came out - Monsters to Destroy : The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin by Chernus, Ira. It shares some of these sentiments and is worth a look.
Money is not the only thing to gain here. With the downfall of the Soviet Empire in the Reagan days, there just has not been a really good “enemy” conservative politicos could scare their constitutents with; and every politician knows that nothing brings out the vote like good old fashioned fear: fear of death, fear of losing your job, fear of people different than you, fear of the unknown. You name it. Although there had been many other terrorist activities carried out by foreigners (and US citizens) which caused US casualties and injuries before 9/11 (like the bombing of the USS Cole, the first bombing of the Trade Towers, the bombing of the Murrow Building by Timothy McVeigh, the lynching of black people by the Klu Klux Klan not so long ago, among others), we did not see the kinds of requests for 'war powers' or hear the kind of 'war' rhetoric that is so prevalent now or have the whole-sale erosion of civil liberties that we now see with the so-called 'Patriot Act'.
As terrible as 9/11 was, the way it has been used to terrify the US public and get them to feel the only way they can be safe is to cede all of their liberties and civil rights to 'big brother', is even more terrible. Our civil liberties, those things that allow us to hear, speak, and pursue the truth, and what used to be our fierce protection of them used to be what set us apart from other countries and in large part made our country the best place in the world. I now see in this country what I would call the 'brown-shirting' of America, driven by the White House, but acquiesced to by the Congress. As Goebbels, one of Hitler’s main architects of the Third Riech, said “…..'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.'
An interesting book just came out - Monsters to Destroy : The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin by Chernus, Ira. It shares some of these sentiments and is worth a look.
