From Dan Sanchez at antiwar.com:
From Paris to San Bernardino
When I first learned of the recent attacks in Paris, a chill went down my spine. “No,” I thought, “This is all happening too fast.”
I was terrified. I was not terrorized, mind you. What happened in Paris was tragic, of course. But I was not so ignorant and innumerate as to think the kind of violence it represented was a statistically significant direct threat to myself and my loved ones. I was fully cognizant that, even with the recent uptick in terror attacks, the probability of my family ever being caught up in one was vanishingly minuscule. I am more likely to be felled by a deer or a bolt of lightning than by a jihadist’s Kalashnikov.
What terrified me was the response of all the people who are incapable of such a proportional perspective: those who saw the news from France and panicked, thinking “I’m next!” As distant as it was, the Paris attacks unleashed in America a surge of fear and of calls for greater police powers, as well as an attendant wave of anti-Muslim hate and war lust.
And as sophisticated and urbane as the French are reputed to be, they too let irrational terror wash over them. And under its sway, they permitted the State to run rampant over life and liberty. The public attitude was distilled by a young French citizen whose message to her government was, “Do whatever you want, but keep me safe.” With this mandate, France escalated its pointless and terrorist-breeding bombing of civilian-filled Syrian towns. And at home, as Truth in Media reported:
“…the French government declared a state of emergency based on a rarely used 1955 law that allows the state to conduct warrant-less searches of private property, impose curfews, restrict public gatherings and movements of people, confiscate weapons at will and take over the press.”
As always, the statist public perversely responded to terrorism drawn upon their heads by their government’s foreign militancy by sanctioning more such militancy. And it perversely rewarded that government for its abject failure to prevent the attacks with more resources, powers, and responsibility.
On top of arrest sweeps and threatening to close mosques, the French government’s emergency powers were invoked to place activists under house arrest in order to squelch completely unrelated protests. This demonstrated vividly that war is indeed the health of the State, and war-spawned terrorist attacks are like an adrenaline shot for domestic tyranny.
When I saw these responses, it fully sank in just how surrounded my family and I are by human livestock and just how acutely dangerous that position is. I realized that, when an attack of that scale and shock-value again happens on American soil, the pack-minded multitudes all around me will deafeningly bay for war. And the herd-minded hundreds of millions will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.
To continue reading: Nothing to Fear But the Fearful Themselves
