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Monday, December 28, 2009

Every Time You Treat Terrorists As Warriors Rather Than Criminals, They Win

There's a serial killer on the loose in a major American city, so of course we bomb the cozy bourgeois neighborhood in which he was last reported seen. What, that doesn't make sense?

A troubled teen tries but fails to set off a bomb in a suburban American mall, so of course we set up roadblocks at the entrances to every mall in America to search the cars and fingerprint and DNA-swab all would-be shoppers so they don't bring in bombs, too. What, that doesn't make sense?

Can't you hear them bloviating on Fox about how domestic crime isn't a police matter, it's WAR! Can't you see them shaking their pudgy white fists and decrying that defenders of conventional police departments pointing to dropping rates of violent crime are living in a pre-9/11 mindset? Do you even know how many rapes, murders, carjackings, home robberies took place on that fateful day? You bleedin hearts and artists let em get away with murder, let me hammer em to-dee!

What, doesn't it make sense to insist that advocates of public police departments following established police procedures attentive to the concerns of the communities they would serve and protect and the civil rights of all with whom they come into contact are Soft on Crime because they don't send tanks into the streets? That they are Un-Serious about Crime because they don't declare martial law across the nation? That they fail to grasp the Criminofascist Menace because they refuse to overthrow the Constitutional Republic and institute a totalitarian security state in its place, you know, for kids?

Of course, I realized even in the midst of writing it that this effort at a reductio fails, inasmuch as the War on Drugs, the hysteria about terror trials and terrorist criminals behind bars in American prisons, ongoing right-wing cheerleading for dismantling civil liberties in exchange for costly ineffective intrusive security theatricals, and the ongoing swelling of our racist prison-industrial complex all more or less literalize the analogy already anyway (not to mention the fact that I am far more worried about the ways in which police departments already fail to live up to the standards against which I am trying to set the insane analogy of a declaration of war on ourselves because of the incidence of domestic crime).

Look, terrorism is a tactic of asymmetrical conflict in which always only a minuscule minority are willing to participate or to condone (as is also true of any violent conduct), and as such it will never vanish nor will it ever be otherwise than a criminal act for which police are the proper respondents.

Provide populations with stakes in their societies (ideally universal healthcare, basic income, free education and access to knowledge, but, hell, howzabout simply no taxation without representation for a start?) and malcontents who would turn to violent resistance will be easily exposed and their threat diffused. Continue to exploit, abuse, disregard, and humiliate societies and you incubate both violent resistance in a minority but more crucially acquiescence to that violence by the still non-violent majority.

If terrorists are warriors, and America is committed to a Global War on Terror, then America has committed to a war on the whole world for all time that has no chance of success in a single one of its declared aims. Also, since America is now and ever more an ignorant bankrupted backwater, we can't even pull off the masquerade of engaging in such a planetary War on Everything anyway.

I would say it is hard to imagine anything more stupid than the War on Terror, but given our War on the Biosphere on which we literally depend for our survival, not to mention the War on (some) Drugs, the War on Having a Healthcare System, the War on Gay Marriage, the War on Christmas, the War on Profanity on the Tee Vee, and so on the truth is that everything everywhere seems pretty much equally stupid according to the shit for brains public discourse that suffuses the corporate media and preoccupies so many of our Congressional Millionaires.

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