Schneier on Security

Kendal • May 28, 2006 10:38 PM

Reds Under the Bed!?

This is an example of what happens when a country’s well-oiled propoganda machine is running out of control. Even those who should know better than making ad-hoc attempts at spotting terrorists fall prey to the machine.

What we’re experiencing here is the fallout from being in a ‘War on Terror.’

Think about this;
– What does it mean to have a war on a noun?
– How does that then become an avenue for loose justification of war-related activities, (eg, Person ‘A’ comes from country ‘B’ who attacked us, country ‘C’ is known to harbor terrorists, maybe ‘B’ and ‘C’ are somehow linked by terror, lets go to war with ‘C’.)?
– How does this become an argurment to infringe on rights, when the lawmakers and leaders tell us that our rights and the war on terror are purchased from the same bank account, or are at two ends of the same scale?
– What impact does the war on terror have when we are told (indirectly) that every citizen is enlisted?

There’s a psychological vacuum when fighting an unknown, unseen enemy, who may be your neighbor, who could strike at any time, who ‘hates our way of life.’ Anybody and everybody clings to any skerrick of tangible evidence of the enemy. In a war against the wind, a swaying tree is not the enemy, nor is a ceiling fan.

If you want to go to war on the wind, you have to know about what produces and sustains it, where it comes from, where it’s likely to blow. We haven’t seen any government come out with a study into why ‘they’ hate us, why ‘they’ hate our way of life, or even what ‘they’ really want to achieve by terrorising us.

Never mind the spin, Devlin has fallen prey to the same fears we all have, and clutched tightly to an empty hope, thinking that he’d found a tangible proof to justify an intangeble war.

Until western governments start out on a search for the reasons behind terrorism, we’ll all be sucked into the psychological vacuum Devlin finds himself in, and it won’t stop, and it will never go away.