ANDREA MITCHELL (from a Clapper interview): What the president said in part was, "You can't have a 100% security and then you have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society."
The War on Terror is worldwide. It is war on everybody, and even those in the "homeland" can't be exempted from "inconvenience" -- i.e. loss of civil rights. Deprivation of civil liberties is an inevitable (and intended) part of a country at war. The bogus "war on terror' is no exception. You can't have one without the other.
An excellent analysis of this condition is Randolph Bourne's "War is the Health of the State" which is as valid now as when it was written in 1918. excerpts:
The moment war is declared . .The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained.
War becomes almost a sport between the hunters and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without. The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against the heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A white terrorism is carried on by the Government against pacifists, socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder unofficial persecution against all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the enemy. War, which should be the health of the State, unifies all the bourgeois elements and the common people, and outlaws the rest.
In this great herd machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push toward military unity. Any difference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse toward crushing it.
So the 'War On Terror' is the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment