financeguy
ONE love, blood, life
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2314418,00.html
Extract:-
"There is now a library of books on “terrorology”. My only quarrel with Carr is that he does not extend his thesis into the psychosis of counter-terror. He does not contrast, for instance, the studied bravery of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher (both survivors of assassination attempts) with the politics of fear exploited by Bush and Tony Blair since 9/11. The essence of terrorism is not death and destruction as such but the fear induced by their dissemination. Terrorism is not, as Blair maintains, an ideology but merely a weapon. Talk of defeating it makes no more sense than talk of defeating guns.
Yet as a weapon, terror is sophisticated. It is “1% bang and 99% publicity”. It depends on exploiting two responses prevalent in democracies, media exaggeration and political overreaction. Countering it involves inverting those responses: downplaying threats, minimising publicity and maintaining Giuliani’s “business as normal”. There is a world of difference between citing the perpetrator of an outrage and giving him weeks of publicity at full volume (and then celebrating his anniversaries). There is a difference between reporting a bomb and reporting every madcap headline-seeker. Nor are politicians any better. In 1997, an American defence secretary went on television with a bag of sugar and announced that, if it were anthrax, “it would destroy at least half the population” of Washington. Whose game was he playing?
I am with Carr in believing that the chief risk today is not of Muslim terrorists undermining western democracy but of the West doing so itself by absurdly overstating that risk. Editors who blazon every rumour on their front pages, politicians who hold weekly press conferences on “international threat levels” and policemen who boast their tally of menaces averted are the arms salesmen of terror. Obsessed by the chimera of “absolute security”, they seem comfortable only with a perpetual state of emergency. Such people are terrorism’s accomplices.
No known terrorist group merits the accolade of “threat to western civilisation”. Such talk is born of James Bond out of clinical paranoia and shows how debased is modern political analysis. But as long as politicians and journalists invite the world’s madmen to such a feast, they will come. "
I would not go quite so far as Simon Jenkins in his implication claim that merely commemorating anniversaries of terrorist atrocities actually emboldens the terrorist, but it is certainly refreshing to read an analysis like this in the mainstream media.
Extract:-
"There is now a library of books on “terrorology”. My only quarrel with Carr is that he does not extend his thesis into the psychosis of counter-terror. He does not contrast, for instance, the studied bravery of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher (both survivors of assassination attempts) with the politics of fear exploited by Bush and Tony Blair since 9/11. The essence of terrorism is not death and destruction as such but the fear induced by their dissemination. Terrorism is not, as Blair maintains, an ideology but merely a weapon. Talk of defeating it makes no more sense than talk of defeating guns.
Yet as a weapon, terror is sophisticated. It is “1% bang and 99% publicity”. It depends on exploiting two responses prevalent in democracies, media exaggeration and political overreaction. Countering it involves inverting those responses: downplaying threats, minimising publicity and maintaining Giuliani’s “business as normal”. There is a world of difference between citing the perpetrator of an outrage and giving him weeks of publicity at full volume (and then celebrating his anniversaries). There is a difference between reporting a bomb and reporting every madcap headline-seeker. Nor are politicians any better. In 1997, an American defence secretary went on television with a bag of sugar and announced that, if it were anthrax, “it would destroy at least half the population” of Washington. Whose game was he playing?
I am with Carr in believing that the chief risk today is not of Muslim terrorists undermining western democracy but of the West doing so itself by absurdly overstating that risk. Editors who blazon every rumour on their front pages, politicians who hold weekly press conferences on “international threat levels” and policemen who boast their tally of menaces averted are the arms salesmen of terror. Obsessed by the chimera of “absolute security”, they seem comfortable only with a perpetual state of emergency. Such people are terrorism’s accomplices.
No known terrorist group merits the accolade of “threat to western civilisation”. Such talk is born of James Bond out of clinical paranoia and shows how debased is modern political analysis. But as long as politicians and journalists invite the world’s madmen to such a feast, they will come. "
I would not go quite so far as Simon Jenkins in his implication claim that merely commemorating anniversaries of terrorist atrocities actually emboldens the terrorist, but it is certainly refreshing to read an analysis like this in the mainstream media.
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