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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

A thought that is worth possibly spreading: despite protests to the contrary, terrorism does not pose an existential threat. Governments use terrorism to justify almost anything, on the basis that if they don't then the terrorists will destroy everything.

This is ridiculous. They're criminals, and should be treated as such. This modern security state is ridiculous.

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I've never been a fan of John Kerry, but it really bugged me that no one took him seriously during the 2004 election, when he said that terrorism is a police matter, not a military one. Terrorism is murder, plain and simple.

You declare war on a country, not a tactic, and you have to fight against an enemy who is capable of eventually saying "I surrender".

but the best conflicts to get involved in are the ones where nobody will ever win, as evidenced by arguing with stupid people on the internet.

I disagree, I won this argument a long time ago.

Didn't take too long after the fall of the Berlin Wall to get to that state did it?

To me it is fairly simple. The Soviet threat went away, and the big intelligence agencies were left with not a lot to do. So a new enemy was born: Arabs, Muslims and Terror. Perfect scary enemies for pliable populations. I think the "war on drugs" also fills the Soviet void too.

My big worry with all this is that the US and West in general go too far and it genuinely becomes a religious world war. Hard for me, as some one who doesn't do religion, not to see this as christians vs muslims. Bush called it a "crusade" and claimed his god told him what to do, after all. Interesting too that Blair, the UK PM who backed Bush, immediately turned to the cathoilics once he left office, presumably for the forgiveness of his conscience.

Lastly, terrorists are no real threat at all, numbers and money wise. We in the UK had the IRA for decades, and frankly the damage they did, while devastating to individuals, was very low. Interestingly we always resisted the notion that it was a war. We felt that legitimised the IRA.

Note to Amerians: the IRA terror ended by NEGOTIATION. Not a military victory. We could still be fighting them today. Note also that AMERICANS were instrumental and vital in that negotiated peace. So you chaps do know other ways, peaceful ways, intelligent ways.

Yes, it's funny how badly perspectives have been skewed. The USSR was a much more serious threat. Either they could've participated in a nuclear war leading to billions of deaths, or precipitated a land war in Europe that would have led to mere tens of millions of deaths the old-fashioned way.

Terrorists simply don't have that kind of destructive capacity. It requires a modern industrial state; they don't have that. And once a modern industrial state is acquired, governing elites are curiously reluctant to sacrifice it on the altar of pure ideology.

So why more money is spent on terrorists than communists is a bit of a mystery to me.

> So why more money is spent on terrorists than communists is a bit of a mystery to me.

That's because terrorism is used as an excuse to further push the Power of the State.

That, and because terrorism works: it causes terror, and people want to be protected from this terrifying threat, even if in reality it's not a very big threat.

As the US is the only country to actually use a nuclear weapon against another, the long-view of the empire's historical narrative would be interesting to see.

If the USA was really interested in saving the most lives possible, it would use War on Terror funds to do cancer research instead. Instead, it likes having the excuse to issue legislation such as the Patriot Act.

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