On responses to terrorism

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Apparently it's conventional wisdom that bombing Daesh/ISIS in Syria and Iraq is an appropriate counter to the attacks in Paris.

This is regrettable in my opinion because it shows how irrational and primitive policy has become (or always been?) in the Western world:

How could bombing a civil war faction on another continent possibly be a counter to French and Belgian nationals committing mass murder in France?

Can there be any doubt that they could do exactly the same if said civil war faction was gone?

To think of Daesh/ISIS as one hostile clan that attacked our hunter-scavenger clan's cave and killed a few people there before our hunter-warriors at the cave killed the attackers appears to be the most intuitive and thus the most powerful interpretation of events.

Too bad it's also a wrong one. The killers were from the own clan, and had merely communicated with some other hunter-gatherer clan which subsequently claimed the kills as its own success.

Is a clan war a promising strategy for increasing security at the own cave?

Sadly, Hollande grossly failed as a leader and went all-caveman and the other clans reluctantly (symbolically) stood by him, everyone is now at a tribal war against that really, really distant Daesh clan that already made more than enough enemies to doom itself anyway. 

On top of that, terrorism is almost entirely propaganda, and very little action. Its damage done is almost entirely in the (over-)reactions, hardly any damage is done directly. 14 people were killed by mass murderers recently in the U.S. - a mere flea bite to a nation of about 320 million people. Tobacco alone accounted for about a hundred times more deaths that day and on every day since, and will likely continue to do so every day for the foreseeable future.

I don't care about those 14 deaths, or the 130 in Paris. Without mass media, I wouldn't have learned about it, much less felt it. I'm not scared that easily.

Many - probably including you, dear reader - now think that I'm heartless or in some other way despicable for not caring.

I hand this accusation back to them (and probably you) a hundredfold, for I'm almost certain they/you didn't care about the more than 2,000 victims of Big Tobacco in the Western World on that day, or every day since.  It's primitive caveman thinking that leads us to pay excessive attention to what amounts to a flea bite.

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Back to action and propaganda. What's an appropriate response hostile party that's 99% propaganda and 1% action so far as it concerns you? It's certainly not 80% action and 20% propaganda - knowing full well that any of our action only fuels their propaganda.

Yet that's what Hollande, his allies and notably the vast majority of U.S. president wannabes intend or already do.

They grabbed their flintstone hand axes, their wooden clubs and charged towards that distant clan. Or more accurately, they told some others to do so, themselves preferring to sit on comfortable pelts next to the camp fire, awaiting the stories of brave combat.

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This leaves one question:  What consequences should be drawn from looking at the mass murderers as members of the own society?

Again, the dominant (most publicised) reaction appears to be caveman-level aggressiveness. The difference is merely that the offending clan is being considered as part of the own tribe and thus some limiting norms have to be observed (unless you're a wannabe U.S.president, apparently).

The central question is thus whether to uphold those (civilisational) norms or not. To not uphold them leads straight to nazi-level discrimination against minorities in my opinion.

Legally, there are few categories of people:

(1) innocents

(2) presumed innocents suspected of having committed a crime

(3) convicted criminals still enduring the punishment

(4) convicted criminals who already endured their punishment

Effort such as "no-fly lists" or the "Gefährder" talk in Germany add an unofficial 5th category: Those who are considered hostile, but not found to be hostile (or criminal) in a due process.

Frankly, I advise against ANY such efforts* because the actual effect of terrorism, the action part, is truly negligible compared to the severity of demolishing civil rights that protect us all. I'm not hysterical enough in face of terrorism to trade substantial freedom for unproven and negligible, likely not even merely subjective, security gains. There's not much real security to be gained because the actual damage done by terrorism is very little anyway, and all the terror hysteria only decimates the subjective (perceived) security.

Terror hysteria serves certain bureaucracies and politicians, not the population.

The Western world with its countries of millions of people needs more sophisticated policy, politics and national discourse than a stone-age hunter-gatherer clan. Sadly, we don't have it when it comes to terrorism.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: I'm nevertheless fine with airport-run security using an non-government list of people descriptions that leads to more intense security inspection if not addition of non-government onboard security personnel when met by an airline customer.

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