“It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
C G Jung, ‘The Undiscovered Self’
I feel a rant coming on …
The two houses of the British parliament are playing ping-pong with the government’s Terrorism Bill over a clause attempting to outlaw the glorification of terrorism. Whether or not it succeeds in becoming law, we’re told that a new offence to prevent indirect encouragement of terrorism is planned regardless.
This seems supremely ironic in view of the fact that the most prominent and obvious candidate to be immediately arrested and prosecuted under this legislation the moment it hits the statute books is the very man who’s so energetically promoting it. After all, what’s the invasion of a foreign nation on the basis of a lie but indirect – well OK, pretty direct as it happens – encouragement of terrorism? What is legislation which attempts to suppress the symptoms while blatantly ignoring the cause but indirect encouragement of terrorism?
The entire justification for this whole house of cards hinges on a critical event in September 2001 for which there are an extraordinary number of anomalies, illogicalities, and unanswered questions in the official version of events. Where there is a marked reluctance to address questions about the way those steel-framed buildings came down (a steel-framed building never yet having been destroyed by fire), and including a third building that wasn’t even hit by anything, in a manner so far unique to buildings collapsed by controlled demolition; about the pools of molten steel at the bases of their supporting columns still red hot weeks later; about the seismic record that shows massive shocks in the bedrock immediately before the buildings fell; about the obscene haste with which all material evidence was cleared from the site and immediately exported for reprocessing. These are questions which might well be asked in the context of the phrase on page 51 of the September 2000 PNAC report Rebuilding America’s Defences which has become the policy blueprint for the Bush administration and which states “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” … which itself needs to be seen in the light of evidence suggesting the Roosevelt government’s complicity in the original event.
Surely it must be clear that the only effective protection from terrorism is ethical and moral government which arises from a heart-felt conviction that human rights are inviolate and the fundamental and primary motivation of every action of government? As ever there seems to be this exclusive focus on ultimates, how things appear on the surface, ignoring underlying causes and motivation. Ultimates you can spin whatever way you want. Any and all rationalisations can be made to sound plausible, but most of them need a large degree of untwisting to arrive at a true reflection of the underlying state.
Totalitarian regimes are all too easy to see for what they are when you’re looking at them from the outside. Far less easy to spot when they’re setting up shop on your own doorstep masquerading as “democracy”. Little by little, all under the guise of “protecting” the citizenry of this country, we are allowing our rights and liberties to be systematically shredded every bit as thoroughly as the Bush administration are savaging the US Bill of Rights. It seems that the ones glorifying terror are the ones in suits and ties sitting in our legislatures. The ones on the streets waving placards are no more than a token and largely impotent reaction to it.
Our rights and liberties are what generations of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic have fought and died to protect. How ironic that we should allow ourselves to be so thoroughly spooked by our own governments that we happily give them up, and create lame justifications to excuse turning a blind eye to the unanswered questions about the events of 9/11 and to the human rights abuses taking place in Guatánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
And to think I used to wonder at how the German people let Hitler get away with what he did. Now it seems all too dreadfully clear.
As Henry Porter wrote recently in The Observer:
“We have failed to grasp that when we do not protest and demand an end to atrocities committed in our name, something trips in the deep-brain cynicism of the governing psyche, which takes heart from the passivity it finds and devises more ways to control and enforce its will. It is no coincidence that the abuse of rights on foreign fields has led now to the suspension of rights at home; no accident that our plausible Prime Minister spits out the words ‘civil liberties’ as he bristles with the high purpose of his protective mission.”
“In the Garden of gentle sanity may you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.”
Chogyam Trungpa
