Because the usual suspects (aka. our own governments) will use this as an excuse for more domestic surveillance and to fund the police state more.
This is the ACTUAL effect on most ordinary westerners lives. Your odds of being killed by an “Islamic Terrorist” are very low if you live in the West (infinitesimal). But the freedom you will lose will be real freedom.
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Lisa Simeone
Bingo.
Mary McCurnin
Only the corporate state can protect you now.
Lisa Simeone
“A Message From the Dispossessed”
by Chris Hedges
“. . . We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it . . . .”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_message_from_the_dispossessed_20150111
Lisa Simeone
“The cartoons of the Prophet in the Paris-based satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo are offensive and juvenile. None of them are funny. And they expose a grotesque double standard when it comes to Muslims. In France a Holocaust denier, or someone who denies the Armenian genocide, can be imprisoned for a year and forced to pay a $60,000 fine. It is a criminal act in France to mock the Holocaust the way Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_message_from_the_dispossessed_20150111
V. Arnold
@ Lisa Simeone
January 12, 2015
Indeed, the hypocrisy is blatant and in our face. I am most assuredly not Charlie Hebdo (agree with your assessment).
Hedges is usually on point; and Muslims are the new niggers ( I hate that word, but as a tool, it’s spot on for what’s going on) of the world.
Breathe and take the time to see what is what; there is much chicanery and obfuscation in our face.
Only rational, non-emotional enquiry, will out what’s really going down and Hedges is a good metric.
Lisa Simeone
Oh, forgot to include this sentence:
“Charlie Hebdo, despite its insistence that it targets all equally, fired an artist and writer in 2008 for an article it deemed to be anti-Semitic.”
alyosha
@Lisa, thanks for the link to Chris Hedges. It’s powerful writing, especially the conclusion:
Lisa Simeone
And Greenwald, as usual, also nails it:
IN SOLIDARITY WITH A FREE PRESS: SOME MORE BLASPHEMOUS CARTOONS
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/solidarity-charlie-hebdo-cartoons/
Monster from the Id
Mr. Hedges errs ever so slightly.
The privileged could survive in an egalitarian order.
They scramble madly to continue their dominion.
Lisa FOS
Lisa Simeone: sadly …yep. Flip side of the statement “the US needs to smash some shtty country up against the wall every 10 years or so to show we mean business”….to:
“We need to have a Muslim terrorist attack every few years or so to justify turning every country into a Hitler/Stalin/Mao/etc wet dream”…..
Note that ‘white Christian’ terrorist attacks get …basically zero publicity, what’s the difference between Paris and a bomb attack at a US abortion clinic …zero, except what the politicians and media say. I lived in London during much of the height of the IRA attacks and they were seriously scary, they made the current ‘Muslim terroist’ attacks look like idiots. Worse they got smart and then went for the ‘real deal’ property…a van then a couple of billion pounds of damage, yep they did a 9/11 without anyone dying….Fortunately, in the very end, we did a political settlement. Anyone talk about it now?
So all these are ‘agendas’ to justify other things (basically more military/national security/etc spending and population control) , if Muslim populations in western countries were all immensely rich and powerful and politically connected …we’d be picking on Romanies…..Note, of all Muslims, Saudi Arabians, who are rich, powerful and politically connected…are left totally alone.
Oh my I have become so, so cynical. A real ‘Maskirovka ‘ operaton.
Apneaman
I don’t buy any of the recent fanciful false flag scenarios, they are not needed. The ignorance, apathy and double standards of the majority of western citizenry renders it unnecessary. Am I supposed to believe that without the recent attacks, TPTB would have halted their further plans for surveillance and intimidation? Is anyone under the impression that they make their security/surveillance decisions based on voter wishes? The security state is literally out of control. Moreover, blow back from imperialism is the rule; expect more. The western powers are simply copying the corporate “Disaster Capitalism” strategy by not letting a tragedy go to waste – “Disaster Propaganda”.
Ian Welsh
I didn’t say a word about false flag. This is just “letting no crisis/disaster go to waste.”
Apneaman
Not you Ian, but the implication and outright claims all over the web are hard not to notice. It is no small number and that type of paranoid group think has been harnessed for great evil more than once in the last 100 years. Our need for all powerful agency seems just as great as the medieval man, except instead of witches, demons, and the wrath of god we have the ,Illuminati’s, Bilderberg Groups, and hyper competent U.S. security agencies behind everything. Unintended consequences do not exist.
Lisa FOS
Don’t forget the 3rd option, ‘looking the other way’, when a terrorist operation is known about and, because it suits an agenda, is allowed to happen. I have a horrible suspicion that this has happened in the past (what did Mossad know about the 9/11 people) and I suspect that it will happen again in the future.
Part of that agenda may, of course, simply be ‘the cost of doing business’. If you are funding/supporting/etc monsterous nutjobs to attack somewhere else (eg Syria) then the policy ‘elites’ might just accept the cost of some domestic ‘pain’. Though naturally they won’t miss the chance of ever greater powers and larger budgets for the ‘national security’ apparatus.
Another is simply the fragmentation and infighting between the various parts of the NS system, hoarding information from each other and so on. For example: one part grooming someone for operations overseas, who then goes feral and attacks at home, naturally this is held from another part of the ‘system’ that might have stopped him.
And so on….
Spiffsome
Speaking of ‘no crisis going to waste’, here’s our Attorney General using the attack as justification for heavier surveillance in Australia:
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jan/12/data-retention-bill-an-urgent-priority-to-counter-terrorism-george-brandis-says
This man is employed to defend the rule of law, and is supposedly a Conservative. God help us all.
Apneaman
A lot of the growth and plans of the security state was in the pipe well before 9/11. I remember reading James Bamford’s, “Body of Secrets” shortly after it came out (April 24, 2001). Ironically, he talks about some real false flags. The security state employs more people and spends more money than ever and uses the most advanced technology, yet cannot even keep most of their activities a secret. The not very secret, secret police. They are the ultimate in bloated, corrupt, ineffectual, overly complex 21st century bureaucracies. They have no goal but to continue to exist and are only good at destroying lives. Diminishing returns for late/last stage industrial capitalism at 1 trillion a year in the U.S. alone. Similar story in all the other western countries; most nation states for that matter. Surveillance states, of some degree, are the rule; our governments have always kept tabs on malcontents, real or imagined. It’s gotten out of control because the world is out of control. We are in overshoot and facing multiple predicaments; the 3 E’s if you like. It’s a dark vision, but I think we are witnessing and experiencing the death throes of industrial civilization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets
Mary McCurnin
‘no crisis going to waste’ yet creating criminals out of anyone who isn’t fooled by the bullshit.
Guest
For example: one part grooming someone for operations overseas, who then goes feral and attacks at home, naturally this is held from another part of the ‘system’ that might have stopped him.
And so on….
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
For examples that might fit that description, I can only think of the Chechen bomber brothers (one being a son in law of a CIA former poobah and nephew of another guy with connections) and their friend that got assassinated in FBI custody.
Are there others out there I have missed?
I was reading Digby earlier and she had a post about flash bang grenades being used just to serve warrants. One example of a raid on a old lady selling beer and nachos without a license being SWAT teamed on a Sunday morning after she came home from church. It really reminds me of the movie Brasil. All those decades ago, I thought that stuff was a over the top, and now it looks almost realistic.
Lisa FOS
Guest : That was the case that made me think of it. But if it has happened once that we know about, then it sure as heck has happened other times too.
Apneaman: Oh so true. If you read ‘Most Secret War’ by Prof R.V. Jones about his time as head of Scientific Intelligence in WW2 you see that huge numbers are irrelevent (his dept was 5 people and pulled off some of the most amazing intelligence coups of the war) and almost certainly counter productive. A small team of smart and talented people will do far better.
The best example of total stupidity was just after 9/11 here in Australia. There was a guy over in Western australia, who had gone for military training in Afghanisatan (he wanted to be a mercenary). He voluntarily went to ASIO (our MI5 and stands for Amazingly Stupid Incompetant Organisation) offering them info on the camps and people there. Now remember, when he did his training it wasn’t illegal to do that sort of thing, we hadn’t even invaded Afghanistan then..
Now a smart (think R.V Jones) organisaton would have gone “you beauty” and got all the info they could get off of him, maybe even persuaded him to go back and get more, at least thanked him for the info .. and kept it totally secret .
They arrested him and splashed it all over the papers…hence warning those in the training camps that they had been blown (maybe they thought those people couldn’t read a newspaper or something). No wonder the old KGB used to run rings around these people, collective IQ of about my shoe size.
Now ASIO is far, far larger now and I’d expect far, far more incompetent. You can extroplate to all the other ‘letter’ organisations as well…and have lots of fun coming up with much more accurate names for them from their initials (FBI is so obvious, my Competely Idiotic Arseholes I contend is also a far better and more accurate name).
Lisa Simeone
Is this what people call freedom of speech?
Dieudonné arrested over Facebook post on Paris gunman
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/dieudonne-arrest-facebook-post-charlie-coulibaly-paris-gunman
Irony and hypocrisy abound.
Lisa Simeone
And it continues. Some of these people have already been convicted; some are minors:
Days After Free Speech Rally, France Arrests 54 People for Offensive Speech
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/14/days-after-free-speech-rally-france-arrests-54-people-offensive-speech
Lisa FOS
Elsewhere I mused about whether or not the French Govt would be smart or stupid/complicit after the attacks.
Well the news is in and it isn’t the ‘smart’ option. Putting all those troops out to guard synagogues is an amazing ‘own goal’ in messaging and propaganda given the number of attacks on mosques. Now if they had guarded both then it have been very sensible, which combined with some soothing words from politicians would have been a clever political move as well.
Not to be, so the unspoken message to the French Muslims and everywhere else is “you are the enemy to be guarded against and all you nut job anti-Muslims …go for it”. Unreal, talk about shouting their hypocrisy from the roof tops. There is not even a pretence or a fig leaf at even handedness.
cripes
It is legitimate to ask whether the official version is accurate and to ask the degree of involvement of governments in terra events.
Since there exist numerous, undisputed examples of government-engineered flase flag, blow back, collusion, entrapment/setup and looking-the-other-way events, we should understand it as a continuum of spook duplicity in which decades have been devoted to nurturing and promoting for empire’s schemes.
Honestly, The church committee exposed this 40 years ago.