Terrorism

[pmb]

Every now and then, I get pissed off enough about the news to go on a ranty tear about it. Read this or not at your pleasure.

I feel like I'm living in some kind of imaginary dystopia that I will wake up from - this is Pottersville or Bifftown or something. Terrorism is not scary. Nuclear war is scary. Terrorism is only scary if you don't evaluate risk well and your government helps make you afraid. And terrorists seem to be pretty incompetent. You know what's really creepy? Police states leveraging modern surveillance technologies to monitor everyone without oversight while at the same time making it illegal for people to look back. So what is bringing this all to a head?

The fact that our representatives are rolling over and trying to make it legal suspend habeas corpus and torture suspects for information and then try them in tribunals where they can't see the evidence against them makes me seriously scared. The fact that they only want to do this to foreign nationals is no comfort because a) those are people too, and b) this administration has maintained their right to strip US citizens of their citizenship (in contravention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which we are a signatory). I think one of the main reasons that people aren't up in arms about this crap is that it just seems so unbelievable - most people wince a bit at stuff like this but generally think of America as A City Upon a Hill, and that's a hard belief to shake. But c'mon people - let's at least agree on some facts:

1. The president illegally authorized the collective wiretapping of every phone in America despite being told that it was illegal by BOTH of the other branches of government
2. The president, in direct contravention to the Geneva conventions, has established a third category of person for whom he says there exist no rules
3. We're embroiled in a war in Iraq with no short or medium-term goals, and no strategy to reach the long term ones.
4. We've pretty much LOST the war in Afghanistan. (Afghanistan? Yup, it's still a shooting war over there, except the Taliban is back in power and heroin production is way way up)
5. Every other country resents us for throwing our weight around, even our oldest friends. The UK, with whom we've maintained a "special relationship" for so long has actually decided to force their Prime Minister to resign because he went along with us.
6. Terrorists don't "hate freedom", they hate specific US policies. Those policies may or may not be things that, when looked at in the light of day, we actually think are good ideas. Not acknowledging this fact means that we will forever be playing wack-a-mole with suicide bombers and never understanding why.
7. Terrorists aren't soldiers - they have no army, no country, and no chain of command. (Perhaps they are then CRIMINALS, and should be dealt with as such?!?)
8. Secret jails with secret "not torture we promise" chambers extracting evidence from guilty-unhtil-proven-innocent suspects are really creepy and, if necessary, should be dealt with sub-rosa and not openly endorsed.
9. By focusing on Iraq we've dropped the ball on the GWOT/GSAVE/permanent struggle with Eurasia (fortunately Oceania is our ally) and Osama Bin Laden is still at large

With a track reord like this, why are people trying to give the executive branch MORE power? How much of this would fly if a *gasp* DEMOCRAT were doing it? Is it that people think that 24 is real and that Jack Bauer will save them and that he needs to be allowed to torture? Do people really think that the right way to bring freedom to the world and safety to ourselves is by eliminating freedoms and our sense of safety domestically?

meme alert: "The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact" is going to be used in an attempt to justify the elimination and curtailment of the rights enumerated therein. The proper response is either: "The Declaration of Independence IS a suicide pact" or "We will not walk in fear, one of another [...] if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men".

I'm genuinely worried about how far this could go, especially if there is a Republican majority after this November, as there probably will be. Republicans need to decide who really stands for them and who is a fascist. According to David Brin, the Democrats did this with communism in 1947, and it would be really nice to see Republicans toss out the Neocons in 2006. But right now Karl Rove is explicitly planning an October Surprise and we seem to already be conducting operations in Iran, so it looks like business as usual.

Does anyone else get an "après moi le deluge" feeling about the way politics are being conducted? Short-term fixes, terror alerts correlated with spikes in opponents' popularity, massive expansion of executive powers, massive increase in secrecy, torture, wars based on lies, huge deficits, ignoring and distorting science, exposing CIA operatives for political gain, and claiming that to disagree with these policies is to agree with the terrorists. It seems like something has to give, but I've been waiting for years and it's still holding up.

How much longer can this hold up? What will the flood hold? Any thoughts?

Comments

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Right, but they got that outrage and violence from a preexisting mob that was whipped up for other reasons. When you've got a bunch of people bought into your crazy shit, you can get them stirred up about almost anything that is tangentially related. We have to figure out how and why they have bought into the crazy shit, and how we can prevent this in the future. And we need to figure out how to stop these crazy people from having the power of the mob on their side.

In Europe, it's pretty easy - Muslim immigrants are treated like shit, because the countries that are traditionally lily white are now getting a little brown, and Muslimm immigrants seem to take 2 generations to fully integrate and become Dutch or Danish or Swedish or whatever, so people are freaking out that Holland is going to become like Saudi Arabia and making racist laws. There is a ≥35% unemployment rate for young muslim immigrants in Europe, which creates an underclass that gets stepped on. And there is nothing like persecution to make people band together into a crazy mob.

In the Middle East things are messed up because things have always been messed up, and modernism is coming into conflict with traditional tribalism and is freaking people out, and especially in Saudi Arabia because Wahabbi (sp?) islam is the variant taught in the public schools, people have no framework for dealing with it except to assume that everyone different is an enemy.

And islamic terrorists hate the US because we are the biggest guy in town, and because by helping Israel (something that is probably a good thing, although many of the settlements seem nontenable just from a population dynamics standpoint) we look like we are helping their enemies and because we have army bases in their country, because our relationship with Saudi Arabia is profoundly messed up.

So we have two problems: a mob that's already whipped up and perhaps arguably DOES "hate freedom", and we have the reasons that caused the mob to form. The mob will dissipate if we take away its reasons for existing, although that could take some time. But pretending that "our freedom" is why that mob exists is, quite frankly, stupid.

And if I'm wrong and they do "hate our freedom" and that's the root cause, then they won't hate us for much longer if things continue on their current track...

[zudini.livejournal.com]

I think you may have stumbled onto the secret, ingenious plan that is actually being implemented behind the scenes.

1. They hate our freedom.
2. They attack what they hate. Therefore,
3. To ensure our safety, the gov't must remove our freedom.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I was almost convinced by your point about root causes vs. exacerbating causes, until I started enumerating my reservations, and now I'm unconvinced again :).

It is a good point, but I'm uncomfortable pegging all of the causes of the angry mob existing to "things that other people have done". After all, the meme that appeals to them could be "nonviolent resistance", rather than "convert by the sword", and I believe it is for reasons of culture or genetics or who the cult leaders are in their region that it is the latter. And that is not the fault of external causes, that is the fault of a poisonous culture of violence. Compare to India or China's reaction to being stomped on - say, the Falun Gong or Gandhi. Islam seems much more prone to violence than other cultures.

You do have a good point that the root causes of the mob's formation and energy are other people's fault, even if some of the flare-ups are caused by reacting to the exercise of freedom. But can we really blame the manner and type of their reaction on those root causes? Not every religion/ethnic group riots violently when it gets made fun of - even if it is a downtrodden underclass.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

You think there wasn't violence in India? There were MANY riots. Ghandi tried nonviolence because he saw that the violent uprisings only encouraged England to grind down tighter on what they viewed as a savage land. And a series of extremely violent riots did eventually act as the straw that broke the camel's back over there.

China? Falun Gong is strange, and the whole story is not known. But neither side is viewed as non-Chinese. A better example is probably the Boxer Rebellion, which, again, was plenty violent.

I can't think of an ethnic group that was downtrodden and unable to pursue their objections through legal systems that didn't turn violent, eventually. Perhaps Jews in Europe before the US was founded is an example, but if so it's a hard one to pick apart and learn from - jewish history in Europe vs jewish as an ethnic group vs Judaism as a religion vs jewishness as a culture is a whole bag of worms that won't be unwrangled here.

Returning to the idea of root causes, it's tough to overestimate how much the whole Israel-Palestine thing bothers people in the middle east. When we were in Tunisia there was a big benefit album that had just come out - kind of reminiscent of similar albums by US artists in support of Africa ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_World , Graceland, etc.). There's a lot to blame on both sides, but I was surprised that I hadn't heard anything about these peaceful arty expressions of Palestinian support over in the US. The fact that it exists suggests to me that there's a lot more discontent than we are led to believe. Also, (prior to invading Iraq, post 9/11) people in conversation (male Muslim Tunisian Arabs by and large) were generally sympathetic to the US except on issues involving Israel. It was very disconcerting.

[(Anonymous)]

I find it hard to believe that the Israel-Palestine issue is really bothering people in the Middle East. From what I've heard, compared to Western countries, ME countries give less money to Palestinian government and have put less work into coming up with a real peace plan.

I'm more inclined to believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict is something like the drug war or illegal aliens in USA. A big red flag to wave around, to get people riled up about somebody else, to distract from the more local problems. In this way, starvation in Africa is a good comparison.

All politics is local. Many Arab governments delibrately stir up anti-Americanism to blame America for their own countries problems. There is, in my mind, a better then average chance that the whole Muhammed Cartoon fiasco was kicked up by Muslim groups trying to flex some political and economic muscle. Comparable stuff happens on the Western side.

What this means for terrorism is that terrorists in one of the various terrorist groups may start out as downtrodden angry youthes, but they are being guided by a violent political machine looking out for its own ends. Iran's hand in Hezbollah, and their recent power play is a great example of this.

As for our local issue of this country, Bush has not really changed tactics since 04, when he was re-elected because the other guy "looked French". The logical conclusion is that the majority of the country is more conservative then you, or too dumb to understand politics.

~Pete, the Boston one