Fear your neighbour, trust no-one.
Are our government right to ask the public to look out for terrorists? This is a poster the UK Government have seen fit to put around the place:
Does anyone think this is going to help more than it harms? Does anyone think it’s going to help at all?
I call shenanigans on it.
This does a lot to alienate ourselves from each other, to divide us as a society, and yet barely anything to ‘protect’ us. The chances of someone spotting a genuine terrorist, and then reporting them, and then there being a timely investigation, resulting in stopping an actual terrorist attack, are surely pie-in-the-sky chances. Meanwhile you’ve got another thing to fear and look to the government for to help.
This is irresponsible, and mindless brainwashing, it’s not helpful.
What did we do when the IRA was doing stuff left-right-and centre? We were not encouraged to fear each other then, when the threat was evident and real. But we are now, when there is arguably precious little evidence of anything ‘terrorist’ going on in our midsts. I think the talk about terrorism is way out of scale with the actual threat of it. And further, I think that it’s a pathetically ineffective way to tackle terrorism.
I could look for potential anything anywhere. But really, what’s the point? Look look - potential child molester! Look look - potential terrorist! Look look - potential drink driver! Does that help anyone? Are the chances in any way good that those suspicions are actually valid? I think not. This idiotic ‘fear everything’ thinking is why you can’t take a picture of your own kid in the playground. Because you’re not a loving parent wanting to store a memory - you’re a potential child molester. And really, which is more likely to actually be the case?
“Potential” is not enough. Fair enough if you are genuinly suspicious, but asking the general public to report anyone taking photos? Based on what? How generalised can this be? “Oh officer, he was taking a photo of a fire hydrant, it “seemed odd” to me. Who takes photo’s of fire hydrants? Quick he must be a pedo-terrorist!” Garbage, utter garbage.
I don’t think that the price of this type of ‘vigilance’ is worth it. Stopping terrorism is a job for specialists. The very point of them is to do that job without us knowing, so that we are not subject to the fear of terrorism. By informing everyone that terrorists want to blow us up, and that our neighbour might be one - that is doing the terrorists work for them.
Let people use their common sense rather than encourage them to be fearful and see bogeymen everywhere. The way to destroy a society is to make it fear itself and then let time do its thing. Which is how the government is playing right into the hands of ‘terrorists’. The bad guys (such as there are) win, without having to do a thing. They get to watch us implode under our own paranoia. Trading our freedoms for an intangible ’security’ from a bogey man that’s not even real.
We as a nation are jumping at our own shadows, and it’s the government that are acting as the story-teller around our collective campfire.
Here’s another
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- Wed, 5th Mar 2008 at 14:03 UTC
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skip to comment formThese posters were apparently created to highlight terrorism i London. Why, in that case, were they published repeatedly in my local paper? I'm miles away from London!
It annoys me because I take pictures all of the time; am I to expect to be held up by armed police purely for practising my skills? Am I going to be stopped in the street by have-a-go heros who think I'm a terrorist simply for having an interest in photography?
The whole 'situation' reminds me of an article I read on The Register (theregister.co.uk) about this guy who was held up by armed police, detained in a cell overnight and fingerprinted/DNA tested - all because a woman who thought his MP3 player was a gun.
We might as well all get in line to be tagged and tracked like cattle.