Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Neeum Zawan wrote:
> > What Wikileaks scandals represent a state of affairs that is worse now
> > than when you were younger?

> More like the response to it. When Nixon was called out, we went after the 
> President, not the newspapers. I don't remember people threatening Deep 
> Throat with being locked up in solitary without a trial, or being shipped 
> off to a foreign country military base to be tortured to death.  Pinko 
> commies got blackballed, not disappeared into torture centers.

  This whole phenomenon happening in the US after the 9/11 attacks,
the whole "war on terror", gradually taking away people's rights to
privacy, things like the Patriot Act and so on, is quite saddening.
They demonstrate that the ultimate goal of the terrorists was achieved:
To instigate fear.

  One of the major principles of the US has always been "never submit to
terrorist demands". If I understand this correctly, the idea is that if
you start conceding some demands, it will only cause a slippery slope
where the terrorist demand more and more, and it will be hard to stop
the vicious cycle.

  The same idea could be restated as "never submit to fear of terrorism".
The most basic goal of terrorism is to instigate fear, and if you succumb
to it, the terrorist will have won, and it will only result in a similar
slippery slope, where the fear itself can be abused to cause even more
fear, with no end in sight. Once you start fearing the terrorists, there's
no end to the vicious cycle that follows.

  Degrading your own citizen's privacy and enacting draconian "anti-terrorist"
laws that bypass basic human and civil rights, is succumbing to the fear.
This is a sad state of affairs.

  (Not that Europe hasn't succumbed to the same fear as well. It's just
that the symptoms are slightly different. One could best describe these
symptoms as a "battered wife syndrome" at a multinational level.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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