Oh, for the love of...

[catsidhe]

I don't know who scares me more, the evil fucks who kill people with bombs, or people like this guy.

The evil fucks are like wounded snakes: at least they are honest in their purpose. OK, so their purpose is evil, but it's not like we don't know what their intentions are.

Faris QC, though, wants to suspend all civil rights for anyone accused of 'terrorism', to intern anyone who might commit such an action, to deport any non-citizen (and retract citizenship and then deport any naturalised citizen) - thus making them Someone Else's Problem, to institute an ID card (because malevolant people never carry false papers, and anyway, ID papers don't do anything to stop the Sleepers he is so paranoid about), and generally declare war on those who he deems to be Islamic with Malice Aforethought.

And then he as much as says that if the Islamic community don't go along with his little scheme, then they are as good as traitors themselves (and have presumably put enough suspicion upon themselves to be interned, deported, &c &c). Seriously; the subtext of several of his comments are that the Islamic Community had better start handing over people right now, if they don't want to 'disappear' into internment en masse.

He explicitely compares the current spate of terrorism with WWII. This is bullshit. I'll repeat that, just to make it clear:
Comparisons of Islamic Terrorists, even Al Qa'eda, with Nazi Germany are complete fucking bullshit.

Let me count the ways:

• WWII had an exit condition: everyone knew what had to happen in order for the war to be over. Europe and Asia had to be reconquered, Germany, Italy and Japan had to be occupied and purged of the Nazis, Fascists and Nihon-no-whackos, reconstruction had to be carried out so that the surviving Germans, Italians, Japanese, and everyone else didn't get overwhelmed by righteous revenge fantasies. The War on Terror has no exit condition, nor can it. Who do you invade? At current showing, you invade any random Islamic country you have a grudge with. If there was no link to the terrorists you should be fighting, then either invent one, or just claim that of course there was a link, and bluff. There is by definition no way to know when you have defeated the terrorists, save by a Big Brother awareness of everyone's thoughts. It is the Eternal War, to make the war against Eurasia/Eastasia look like a sandpit fight.
• Hitler had the hope of actually succeeding in his stated goals: to Take Over The World, and to kill fuckloads of people. bin Ladin is claimed to want a worldwide Shari'a theocracy. His chances of succeeding in this is slightly less than fuck-all. His only chance of success is to kill innocent people in groups and encourage various governments to impose an autocratic regime so onerous that Shari'a looks like a good thing. This only works if you let him. Faris QC and his mates are bin Ladin's wet dream.
• In WWII, everyone knew who their enemy was, and where they were. Now, the real Enemy is a vanishingly small group of complete and utter evil fundamentalist bastards, who could be, and are, just about anywhere. Now, the two ways of dealing with this are
  1. Wait until they stick their heads out, then chop them off, or
  2. Shoot everything that moves until it stops moving.
  Faris has chosen the latter. Who cares if they are guilty of anything? Who gives a shit if they want to be guilty of anything? What matters is that there is a possibility that they might, in the future be guilty of something, and their friends, family and acquaintances are suspect by association.

Paging messers Orwell and Kafka?

Seriously, take a look at these comments.

Fucking hell, these people vote.

Comments

[baralier.livejournal.com]

He's also probably of the opinion that no-one who WASN'T guilty would ever be imprisoned as a terrorist suspect.

Reminds me of Clarke and Dawe (http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1404424.htm).

[usuakari.livejournal.com]

In WWII, everyone knew who their enemy was, and where they were. Now, the real Enemy is a vanishingly small group of complete and utter evil fundamentalist bastards, who could be, and are, just about anywhere.

Not quite true. Historically there was a pretty damn high level of paranoia all through the Allied world during WWII. Think of the 'Loose lips sink ships'-type posters and the exciting internment camps that anyone who looked like they might be Japanese or German got put into. There were daily reports of alleged sabotage plots by sympathisers and 'fifth columnists' everywhere. tooticky's poster-boy Gustav Weindorfer had that experience while living at Cradle Mt. in Tassie during the war years. Certain locals were sure that he was a German spy (despite being Austrian and allegedly publicly unhappy with the state of affairs in his birthplace) and that he had secret radio transmitters up there and everything.

After that we got the Cold War, where while the enemy was clearly the Soviet Block, they were simultaneously stupid and cunning. And everywhere. Everywhere I tell you! Do you think that FarisQC and co. are really any different from those people paranoid about the Australian Communist Party in the 60's, or the careful and reasoned actions of Sen. Joe McCarthy?

Very little has changed. None of it is good, but none of it is new either. It's why I tend to react to shit like this with resignation rather than major surprise (although, admittedly, the US interning hundreds of it's own citizens in a dockside warehouse for a day or three simply because they happened to be walking down a street when the RNC was on did startle me a bit).

The commenters are scared and angry. People do stupid things and fail to think when that happens. I think they're all fuckwits too, but I can understand them. I'm inclined to think that the 'War on Terror' should be about encouraging people to get over their fears and get on with living real life, rather than continually worrying about towel-heads under the bed. It's true, we may die from terrorist actions one day, and it will be a tragedy, but it's equally true that we may be struck by lightening or have a satellite fall on us. Blair and various others have said the right thing IMHO, saying that changing our lives to ones of fear and paranoia is 'losing' to terrorists. Someone might want to remind Peter Faris and his commenters of that.

What matters is that there is a possibility that they might, in the future be guilty of something, and their friends, family and acquaintances are suspect by association.

Add Phillip K. Dick to that list as well...