On Terrorism

Recent attacks in London only confirm what I've believed for many years about terrorism. Governments place a high value on terrorism, because it gives them justification for repressive and heavy-handed policies that many people in the government have wanted all along. Terrorists aren't trying to directly change things -- they're interested in polarization of opinions. And governments want the same thing: polarization allows them to use fear to control.

Governments value terrorism

Terrorists have handed governments a valuable gift on a silver platter. Fear! When people are afraid, they will give up most anything -- money, power, freedom -- in order to eliminate their fear. And governments know how to use this fear. All kinds of new policies and resources are springing up -- some of them perfectly legitimate, others purely opportunistic.

The "war" on terrorism allows us to suspend freedoms -- habeous corpus, privacy, speech, etc. -- in the name of "fighting" the war. These terms are much easier to sell than the more complex concepts such as cooperation, communication, accommodation, etc. Make no mistake about it -- this "war" will last for a hundred years. No matter how many terrorists are brought to justice, no matter how many changes happen in the Middle East, no matter how terrorists attacks are ultimately reduced: the "war" is too convenient, too valuable, and too necessary to the real power brokers for them to give it up.

Anti-terrorism is big business! In the U.S. we've created an entire branch of the government that owes its existence to the continued threat of terror. They will need it for a long time, probably longer than the real threat exists. We are creating a cadre of civil servants whose careers depend on having an "enemy" to fight. If the terrorists are rounded up, these people will be out of a job, and no one will thank them for it. Emails go out inviting contractors to seek a portion of the "tens of billions of dollars in Homeland Security funding", including gas masks for rural police departments and other churning of dollars without any perceptible change in the threat level.

To be fair, governments don't have much choice. If they really ignored these attacks, or refused to change in response to them, people will accuse the government of not caring, of not taking appropriate measures, etc. Every new measure, every new law, every new procedure, plays right into the hands of the perpetrators, and rewards them for their actions.

Think about what the end of the "war" on terrorism would mean. It would mean abolishing the (now no longer necessary) Department of Homeland Security and its USD 100 billion budget. It would mean opening up the streets of Washington DC so that people could once again drive in front of the White House. It would mean allowing foreigners to fly to the U.S. without being monitored by a possibly-faulty computer system to identify them. Does anyone actually believe that any of these things will ever happen in the next hundred years?

Polarization is the goal

Almost every action by governments serves to further the goal of the terrorists themselves. The terrorists' goal is not to effect change directly -- they know they cannot do that. Their goal is POLARIZATION! Every terrorist act makes people angry. They want you to be mad. Angry people take very strong positions. Terrorists really don't care which side you're on - what matters is that people in the middle who value communication, compromise and peace are forced to choose one side or the other without any equivocation. Every politician's statement about how a particular event "strengthens our resolve" plays right into the hands of the ones terrorizing us.

So if these terrorist events make you mad, make you feel like doing whatever it takes to stop them (e.g., suspending civil liberties, individual freedom, monitoring communications), you are doing exactly what the terrorists wanted you to do.

The freedoms you give up now will NEVER be regained. Once we're used to not having them, the next generation won't even miss their absence. Watch little children going through airport security -- taking off their shoes, submitting to the metal-detecting wand, putting their little colored purses through the x-ray machine. They'll never know what they were missing.