After watching the people of Paris reclaim their city, followed by our cowardly reaction to the terrorists in San Bernardino, it occurred to me that the reaction in Paris is exactly what should be happening here. Over there, despite the attacks, they are demonstrating against the state clamping down on civil liberties, showing the terrorists that they aren’t afraid, that they will meet them in the streets.. Over here we are cowering under our beds over an attack by two people that killed 14. We could learn a lot from the French besides how to cook veal and that might surprise many of us. We have always prided ourselves on how we protect our civil liberties and here, with one violent but not numerically significant act, many of us are willing to give up our rights over an event whose death toll is insignificant when measured against what we gun down on our own every day of the year.
So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the fact that the specter of terrorism has cast a spell of fear over a significant part of the American public and that the political Right has invoked that fear for political gain. The aftermath of 911 brought fear to the fore in our time as it did during WWII, three quarters of a century ago. Fear makes us do things that we would not consider under other circumstances. This is obvious when we regard the over-the-top reaction in this country to the Muslim refugees fleeing Syria and seeking safety here. In WWII we interned thousands of Japanese/American citizens because of fear. We patrolled our beaches at night fearing an invasion by a Nazi force that didn’t have a navy to do the job,
Now we see the victims of ISIS as the perpetrators of the ISIS message. We have fools like Marco Rubio and Chris Christie making statements about not giving refuge orphans. We have 31 governors saying that they will not accept Syrian refugees.
Why do these politicians say stuff like that? Well, some of them actually believe themselves, but mostly they are playing to a particularly ignorant and cowardly base that wants to hear it. Wants to believe that their governors will protect them. Everyone who knows anything about government knows that governors have nothing to say about who moves into their state, so that was just rhetoric for a particularly dumb, bigoted and cowardly audience.
The cowardly rhetoric we hear from the Right has brought about much of the violence that we see today; acid attacks, attempted bombings, people like Robert Lewis Dear, the terrorist who invaded the Planned Parenthood office. This in effect makes those who create this kind of propaganda either for political advantage or twisted moral outrage, the real evil behind the active terrorists. They are even more responsible than the well-intentioned but misled perpetrators.
Every time some political sleaze makes a speech attacking Planned Parenthood, he is potentially creating an incident of domestic terrorism, especially if he is following the lying example of a Carly Fiorina.
Mike McCaul who heads the House Homeland Security Committee won’t admit that the killings at Planned Parenthood are actually a form of terrorism. It’s this kind of clown in this kind of position, that is causing many of the problems in this country.
When asked about how we can protect ourselves from domestic terrorism, McCaul speaks to an increase in funding for a program that already spends billions, instead of dealing with the root causes of the problem, which are loose political speech, morally reprehensible ideals and the greed of the weapons oligarchs.
The reality is that foreign terrorists in this country have to take a distant back seat to our own homegrown terrorists, men like Robert Lewis Dear. This guy is not just a simple nut; he is very definitely a terrorist. Why do I say that?
It’s about how we delineate between a nut and a terrorist even while understanding that one person can be both. A nut has a perceived personal grudge, not always real, and the ability to do damage. A terrorist has an other-directed goal, sometimes as unreal as that of the crazy person, but it is a goal that he or she is trying to accomplish. The nut will tell you that God told him to do it or will generate some irrational personal grudge as the basis for his actions. The terrorist will give you a political reason, not always reasonable or logical, why he acted.
Robert Lewis Dear is a terrorist. He did not act under the direction of God but with an other-directed goal provided by those who have a vendetta against Planned Parenthood. He had heard from “reliable sources”,(Read Carly, her lips are moving so she’s lying, Fiorina) that the monsters at Planned Parenthood were killing babies, tearing their bodies apart and selling the parts. He was acting on that same twisted information when he attacked. He is a classic terrorist. He is also a wife beater, an animal abuser and a peeping tom, someone who should obviously, if you are the NRA, be encouraged to legally own a weapon of war. The gun he carried was not a hunting rifle or a target gun; it was undeniably a weapon of war, whose sole function was to kill people.
So why is this small time criminal, now a big time terrorist, allowed to have such a weapon? Mainly because the manufacturers of these kinds of weapons are richer, more powerful and better equipped to defend their ability to sell them than the average citizens are to protect their children. It’s fascinating that Homeland Security has compiled a “No Fly” list that is supposed to protect the general public from persons who might be a danger to life and limb on a plane; i.e. terrorists.
Every intelligent person knows that most people on the “No Fly” list are no real danger to anyone but are on that list for a combination of political or security reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism, but in a world that is acting bizarrely over the potential of foreign terrorists coming over here and killing us, that should still be a reason to be extra careful. So how come people on the “No Fly” list, are still able to buy guns without special scrutiny? Because gun manufacturers want to sell more guns and you don’t have the clout to stop them. They pay our sleazy congress a great deal of money to make sure of that.
So here is the average American Right Wing patriot cowering behind his triple locked door brandishing his own AK47, worried that his home is going to be invaded by turban wrapped terrorists from the refugee program when what he should really fear is the last tourist off the plane from Europe that just landed at Dallas airport and who the government has no trace of’; and not even a record of his arrival. Even more frightening should be the home grown terrorist with no way to trace him and no way to restrict his access to all the weaponry he needs to kill Americans.
Of course the upshot of all this Muslim terrorist fear is that every Mexican in the country can breathe a huge sigh of relief that the white people have finally found a bunch of brown people to fear more than them.
But the question still remains, who are terrorists and who are not. Since 911 including the murders in San Bernardino there have been 40 deaths in this country attributed to Muslim terrorism and 46 deaths attributed to American terrorism; people like Robert Lewis Dear. So that makes 86 terrorist deaths in 15 years or less then 6 deaths a year. What the hell is that when compared to the 30,000 gun deaths a year we inflict on ourselves? What kind of idiot is terrified of six deaths but ignores 30,000, and more important why?
The “why,” is simple. It’s because we are the most brainwashed nation in the world. Not only do we watch and listen to more advertising propaganda than is healthy, we actually believe a lot of it. That’s why the politicians and their masters in the weapons industry can sell us on the idea that we need more weapons to protect us from those foreign terrorists and even from our own government, because that’s the kind of bullshit they are spreading all over your mind. They are doing it for their own profit but by doing it they are creating a huge lie that is already far more destructive to this country and all the people in it than any foreign terrorist group could hope to be.
That lie is that the government is against you and just wants to take you over. Don’t get me wrong, there is some small segment of truth to this as there is to every believable lie, but it’s only because the government, like any huge bureaucracy has too many parts for all of them to work correctly.
The real problem is that a significant segment of our citizenry really believes that the threat from foreign terrorists is bigger than the threat from the weapons industry, the blood sucking billionaires that Ike Eisenhower referred to, 60 years ago as the Military/industrial complex.
Sure there are people around the world who want to kill us. That has always been true, it will always be true, and it can’t be ignored, but we can’t really base either our foreign or our domestic policy on that threat, because if we do, we will have surrendered to their threats and we will have let them win.
If we are to continue to be successful as a world leader it behooves us to develop a foreign policy based on military might and non-invasiveness. We must make it deadly clear that we are so strong that to incite us to anger is to beg for annihilation. Concurrently, we must also make it clear that we have no territorial goals, that we are content with what we have and that we do not covet what our neighbors have. This has, historically, not been the case.
Domestically we must realize the threatening position in which we have placed ourselves with regard to the incitement to violence. Somehow we must remove all but the simplest hunting weapons from our society and along with that we must come to realize that, short of war, domestic terrorism, no matter what the face, is far more dangerous and destructive than any reasonable threat of foreign terrorism will ever be.