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Friday, January 08, 2010

Crazy Talk in the Times of Terror

Given how many more Americans die each week at the hands of murderers than have died in the decade-long Global War on Terror, why is it that the abiding reality of murderous criminality has not inspired us to relinquish our civil liberties and the rule of law?

Actually, of course, Republicans do indeed whomp up fear of violent criminality to justify ever more intrusive surveillance at home and ever more draconian sentencing practices, even when the rate of violent crime is declining. But even so, the point remains that fear of terrorist violence that objectively kills fewer Americans than peanut allergies or deer crossing rural roadways is causing us to divert our entire national will into flabbergastingly costly literally unwinnable wars without intelligible missions across the globe, bankrupting our nation to no discernible purpose, all the while undermining our democratic ethos at home, accommodating free citizens to the ethos of martial law, state secrets, violations of civil liberties for reasons of state, invisible budget priorities, hierarchical chains of command.

Nobody would ever propose we dismantle the police and the criminal justice system even though every single day many Americans are failed by them, and yet the prospect of anyone, anywhere, however remote, being the victim of terrorist criminality seems to inspire an existential panic so sweeping that many Americans howl to embrace in the face of it the kind of authoritarianism they had been willing to fight to the death for generations.

Come to think of it, given how many more Americans have died in the illegal immoral wars and undeclared wars and occupations inspired by terrorism than have died at the hands of the terrorists themselves, why is it that the fear of death that seems to have inspired the Global War on Terror hasn't inspired a comparatively greater horror of the war itself that is so much deadlier than the terrorism that provoked it?

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