Worldwide it was estimated in 2004 that 1.2 million people were killed (2.2% of all deaths) and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions. This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of death among children worldwide 10 – 19 years old (260,000 children die a year, 10 million are injured) and the sixth leading preventable cause of death in the United States (45,800 people died and 2.4 million were injured in 2005). In Canada they are the cause of 48% of severe injuries. (here).
Never mind. Cars don't kill people, people kill people.
Here's Carl Ungerer toting the stats in Islamists must be prevented from brainwashing kids:
One measure may be the cadence of terrorist attacks. So far this year, more than 7500 people have been killed in more than 5000 incidents across four continents. That is a significant improvement on last year, when more than 15,000 people were killed in more than 11,000 terrorist attacks. Despite a clear desire to do so, Osama bin Laden and his central al-Qa'ida leadership have been unable to replicate the mass-casualty atrocities of the 2001 airlines plot against the US, nor can they get their hands on a nuclear weapon. Can we therefore say that terrorism is a declining security threat and the situation is better than when hostilities began?
Golly, 7,500 in 2009, plays 1.2 million in 2004.
And you know I bet the motor car and associated vehicles have held up their end in subsequent years in the killing fields.
Should we now embark on a global war on the motor car? After all, the global war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida worked out terribly well.
Or should we just quieten down the rhetoric about the decade of global war on terror, a rhetoric which was supposed to have disappeared along with George Bush and his minions?
Because deep down I'm comfortable with treating terrorists as criminals deserving of the full force of the law. Shoot an abortion providing doctor, send the villain down for life; blow up a government building in Oklahoma, get done over American style; carry on in the name of Allah blowing up whomever or whatever, throw the book at them. Plot and scheme to do the same, but fail or get stopped in the attempt ... well we all know that adultery is in the heart of anyone who looks at a woman with lust, and so it is with those who plot and scheme to kill in the name of some stupid theology or ideology, so send them down as well.
Of course others prefer different kinds of bean counting. How about the US Department of defence receiving 161.8 billion dollars in 2007 for the war on terror, when in 2004 more Americans died from peanut allergies than from terrorist acts, and when in 2007, coronary heart disease killed some 450,000 Americans, and the government's allocation of funding for research was about three billion dollars (here)?
Sigh, what pedants. Urgent counter-action is required, and there's nothing like the drum beaters desperate to stroke up a bit more business for their kind:
Public opinion in Australia supports this view. An Australian Strategic Policy Institute survey on national security and defence last year found terrorism had dropped to 13th out of 14 touchstone issues at the 2007 election. Two-thirds of Australians think terrorism is now a part of everyday life.
Public opinion in Australia supports this view. An Australian Strategic Policy Institute survey on national security and defence last year found terrorism had dropped to 13th out of 14 touchstone issues at the 2007 election. Two-thirds of Australians think terrorism is now a part of everyday life.
Dearie me, how disturbing.What were the respondents thinking!
And to think that it was a terrorist assassination that sparked World War 1 (no, it didn't cause it but it certainly provided a spark). Could it be that terrorism has always been around, even back in the days when Julius Caesar got to say 'et tu Brute' and people were no doubt warning about the dangers of radical terrorists wielding daggers?
Let's consult the runes a bit more. There's nothing like a poll to bolster opinion and help in fear mongering:
Climate change is the new terrorism. But when we asked if the government was doing all it could to prevent a terrorist attack, the public's response was more equivocal. Only half thought the government was on the ball. Despite the investment of nearly $10 billion since 2001 in national security measures, 41 per cent of respondents said governments should be doing more. That there has not been a serious terrorist attack on Australian soil since the Sydney Hilton bombing in 1978 leads some to argue that the threat is so low, national security funding should be channelled elsewhere.
Oh dear, first the Olympics funding for gold star athletes under threat, and now the alarming notion that national security funding should be channelled elsewhere. And no actual attack since 1978. What we need is a decent terrorist attack, to stop all this talk of reallocating funding! Come on terrorists, play up and play the game.
Talk about complacency, and mind rot:
And in a crowded agenda where a growing number of issues including cyber security, energy security and organised crime compete for limited resources, the idea that we should be shifting the emphasis away from terrorism is gaining ground. This is not a view I share. The real danger is a growing sense of complacency over the nature and extent of the long-term threat from religiously motivated terrorism.
And in a crowded agenda where a growing number of issues including cyber security, energy security and organised crime compete for limited resources, the idea that we should be shifting the emphasis away from terrorism is gaining ground. This is not a view I share. The real danger is a growing sense of complacency over the nature and extent of the long-term threat from religiously motivated terrorism.
Thank the lord. Complacency about religion and its dangers! How truly alarming.
I've been increasingly worried about extremist Christians and the way their hard core views have been impacting on my part of the world. We need someone to watch over Pastor Danny and his kind very closely. As for Chairman Rudd, can we keep him under 24 hour watch ... and make that 365/24 for the mad monk as well (you can take off February 29th)?
Oh sorry, I think I got that wrong:
As Peter Clark of the British police said recently, "The current terrorist threat is of such a scale and intractability that we must not only defeat the men who plot and carry out appalling acts of violence. We must find a way of defeating the ideas that drive them."
The number of terrorist attacks across the world may have decreased, but the corrosive ideologies that drive international terrorism continue to gain traction from Somalia to the southern Philippines. And the focus of this ideological brainwashing is increasingly directed towards children. In Indonesia, the radical Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir is focusing its attention on schools, providing reading materials and instruction to teenagers advocating the overthrow of secular democracy and the introduction of Islamic law and a caliphate.
Yes, but um, surely we can give car drivers a little break? After all, they're only doing what comes naturally in the killing fields. Running over a lycra clad lout on the roads or a school kid is just all part of the risk of a domestic drive amongst fellow terrorists.
I keed, I keed, I'm seriously totally alarmed by car drivers and their corrosive intractable behavior, the result of ideological brainwashing of the worst kind, and nothing to do with the nature of the soil into which the seeds are thrown.
Sure you might think the Philippines and Somalia and such like places have difficult and intractable problems, to do with poverty and exclusion and prejudice, but let's start a cultural war to deal with the problem.
Oh dear, now you're going to ask exactly how Australian funding going to help settle and sort terrorism in those countries? Are we going to enter into a nineteen fifties style culture war that will see us set up alternative propaganda units - you know, in much the same way as the Americans tried in Vietnam, and then ended up in a wondrous war on communism, which didn't stop the dominoes from falling so much as throwing the whole damn game in the air, then watching as it came down broken.
Wait, I know, I'm still not feeling sufficiently alarmed yet, what I need is some fear mongering about the intertubes:
Although such organisations stop short of promoting violence, the radicalising link between propaganda and terrorism has been well-established.
As internet coverage expands, so too does the extremist message. Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia runs a sophisticated website that rivals global news organisations. Teenagers are the greatest users of the internet, and interactive social networking websites provide terrorist groups with new opportunities to recruit and radicalise.
Um, okay, but how about we flood the intertubes with pornography, so teenagers get new opportunities to be recruited and radicalised into sensuous sexuality? Oh wait, we've done that, and it's working ... but what's this, the bloody commentariat columnists want to filter the intertubes, by deploying the dead hand of Senator Conroy and his minions to ban content?
Well I guess we can filter the intertubes, and ban the religious radicals and drive them underground, and then we can really get that war going.
It is no surprise the terrorist organisation in Somalia is called al-Shabaab (the youth).
For the ideology to succeed it must constantly seek new recruits. As a new generation of terrorists is formed, the international community appears incapable of responding in a comprehensive, strategic way.
Strange? Pyramid selling as a model for growth. Should we ban Tupperware?
Or could it be fundamentalist Christians and Muslims are two ratbag peas in a pod of madness, and whenever anyone harps on about Islamic terrorism while not mentioning a totally useless and counter-productive war in Iraq, I tend to reach for my Glock.
Especially as the main game in the so called war on terror - the business of catching Al-Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden and treating them as the common criminals they are - was set to one side, fucked up, and continues to this day as an epic failure.
Golly, with the war on terror getting conflated with a war for oil, and a war on people certain Americans didn't like, how to keep the funding for the business of a war on terror thriving?
To date, the global war on terror has been split between 95 per cent military operations and 5 per cent ideological operations. That must be reversed, because it is winning the ideological war that will ultimately determine whether we succeed or fail against the present wave of religious terrorism.
Yep, it's back to the good old days of the nineteen fifties, and funding a culture war:
The relationship between intellect and power is an inherently neurotic one, and seldom has this neurosis been more successfully exploited than during the Cold War, when the CIA enlisted left-leaning intellectuals in the fight against the Soviet threat. As difficult as it may be to imagine, the organization believed, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism." And who better to fight the communists than those who had been betrayed by that "god that failed"?
With access to power, these intellectuals developed an intoxicating sense of relevance. Suddenly ideas were no longer simply ideas: They were a stockpile of powerful cultural weapons with which to wage the life-or-death battle for men's minds. "It's worth considering what these people had in common. They were all Christians, in a non-sectarian, T.S. Eliot kind of way," Frances Stonor Saunders quotes novelist Richard Elman in her fascinating new history, "The Cultural Cold War." "They believed in a higher authority, a higher truth which sanctioned their anti-Communist, anti-atheist crusade." (here for Robert Boynton's review of Saunders book).
With access to power, these intellectuals developed an intoxicating sense of relevance. Suddenly ideas were no longer simply ideas: They were a stockpile of powerful cultural weapons with which to wage the life-or-death battle for men's minds. "It's worth considering what these people had in common. They were all Christians, in a non-sectarian, T.S. Eliot kind of way," Frances Stonor Saunders quotes novelist Richard Elman in her fascinating new history, "The Cultural Cold War." "They believed in a higher authority, a higher truth which sanctioned their anti-Communist, anti-atheist crusade." (here for Robert Boynton's review of Saunders book).
When anybody starts talking about the funding for a new crusade, I reach for my Glock. You see, if you're well off materially - so that earth isn't a bad place to be, and heaven might even feel like a delusion - and there's the prospect of sex, along with shelter and food, people tend to settle down a bit.
But that doesn't stop them going a little strange - witness America, a relatively well off country, which is nonetheless profoundly strange and weird - and the one thing that's certain is that if you announce a war on their beliefs, and mount propaganda attacks on them, it's likely enough that they'll cling to them ever more fiercely.
So when Ungerer announces he wants perhaps ninety five percent spent on ideological operations, and five per cent on military operations (will that's certainly reversing the figures), he then immediately falls silent and the column ends. Just as he gets to the pointy, sticky end.
I guess we just hand over the money, and someone will work it out, and we'll start winning Olympic gold in our global war on terror.
Provided we sort out a few questions. Exactly what kind of ideological operations are we talking about? What ideological war will we be fighting? A war on religion? A war on extremist religion? A war on Islam? A war on fundamentalists? A war on religious terrorism of whatever stripe? A war on all kinds of extremism? A war to drive people like sheep into the middle ground? A war which will include fundie Christians along with fundie Muslims, along with fundie scientologists who do incalculable material and mental harm to their flock, along with mad fundie atheists of the Stalin Mao kind? A war on the industrial military establishment in the United States that thinks bombing people to death is a good way to convert them to democracy? And can a culture war be a war at all? Or is it just another stupid misnomer, and abuse of the word 'war', in much the same way as the original 'global war on terror' struck every imaginable wrong note that it could?
Well as a devoted secularist (which tends to flow from atheism), I'm all for a war on religious terrorism, and come to that I'm all for a war on religion.
But deep down I also know the idea is bunkum, and the war will fail, partly because it can't be a war, as the Jesuits and the Inquisition proved hands down, and that the way to enlightenment involves education, and material well-being. You're less inclined to blow up a building or torch a Merc if you happen to own one.
So when Ungerer talks about a comprehensive, strategic response, what he's saying in code is give the war on terrorism more funding, and send the money the way of valiant cultural warriors. Which is fine for the material well being of the cultural warriors but might not do much for the people inclined to extremism to make a point about their own living conditions ...
Yep, there's nothing like a cultural warrior to put the cap on the pavement and beg for government funding ...
Well jerk my chain, because in the end I'd rather fund a global war on cars and car drivers ...
Oh, and now for a statement of interests:
Oh, and now for a statement of interests:
Carl Ungerer is director of national security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Dorothy Parker is a loon and curator of loon pond.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.