Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmachinery | Hacker News Reader

The motivation for fictitious wars against bogeymen is to empower and bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens.

Like the war on terror, the decades long war on drugs has been a roaring success.

View on HN

The war on terror and war on drugs are closely related enough (through expansion of powers and economic policies such as allowing police to purchase old military equipment) that I wonder if it’s worth even treating them as separate things.

The war on drugs has a lot more raids in the own territory while the war on terror has more bombings in foreign territory, so for now there are some major differences. However once using predator and reaper drones against citizens without any judicial oversight is normalized, that difference will be gone.

There are quite a few domestic impacts of the war on terror: domestic spying and the USA PATRIOT Act are two huge examples. In the context of "bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens" it's nearly identical to the war on drugs domestically.

In terms of domestic spying, it's hard to articulate any practical effect it's had though. People have certainly reacted to it (see the move to TLS everywhere, for example) but I can't actually think of any enforcement actions its linked to. There's almost certainly parallel construction out there, but compared to the war on drugs, which has lead to mandatory minimums, constant police harrassment, no knock warrants, etc, I'd have to concider the war on drugs the higher priority target for fighting.

I should have made my statement more carefully. I agree with you fundamentally; I see them as two heads of one beast, though.

Also to cause fear and panic to unite the population against a common enemy. Fear is the fundamental basis of government and control.

And now we have the War on COVID.

Uh... and how many virii have been illegally imprisoned? I'm not following.

I'm seeing the same happening for covid - governments and police using it as an opportunity to gain more control and power without real justification, only the excuse of "for health safety".

>The motivation for fictitious wars against bogeymen is to empower and bankroll law enforcement while diminishing the civil rights of citizens.

Thank you. This trend where people recast everything in the 20th century to be racially motivated (but can't provide any proof, because it's like complicated) is exhausting.

Just for the record, I wasn't trying to deny the racial element in drug 'warfare', which certainly exists (how deliberately is another matter).

And when people 'recast' things it's sometimes because new evidence emerges, or becomes more well known.

An example of that is in these comments, the interview by former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman made only in 1994, but probably still not that well known until this article from 2016:

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com