Might there be a tourrorist somewhere, maybe under a neighbors bed, even ...
Witches, Communists, and
Terrorists Evaluating the Risks and
Tallying the Costs
By John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart
T
he risk from terrorism, like
that from witches and domestic Communists in the past,
has been massively exaggerated, but
it has only very rarely been explained
or even examined by those who are
appalled at the security system those
exaggerations have spawned.
In contrast, as with the hunts for
witches and Communists, the chief
challenge to the domestic counter terrorism system in the United States
is at what might be called the “periphery.”
Thus, concerns are raised about
prosecutorial misconduct, the potential entrapment or misidentification
of suspects, and the legality of the
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention
facility. These are entirely legitimate
concerns, of course, but ones likely to
be ineffective in front of judges anxious to set deterring sentences and juries composed of frightened citizens.
No defense of civil liberties is
likely to be terribly effective as long
as people believe the threat from terrorism is massive, even existential.
To undo, or even modify, the security system that has burgeoned in
the United States during the last ten
years, those who oppose it must attack not simply the consequences of
the system, but also the premise that
furnishes its essential engine.
“Threats” of the Past
Between about 1480 and 1680, hundreds of thousands of people, the
vast majority of them women, were
executed in Europe, mostly by being
burned at the stake. This took place
after they had confessed, generally
(but not always) under torture, to
such crimes as eating babies, flying on broomsticks, and copulating
with devils. Notes historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper (in The european
WiTch-craze of The SixTeenTh and
SevenTeenTh cenTurieS (1969)), one
square in a German town “looked
like a little forest, so crowded were
the stakes,” and during an eight-year
reign one prince-bishop “burnt 900
persons, including his own nephew,
nineteen Catholic priests, and children of seven who were said to have
had intercourse with demons.”
During this long period, a few
people tried to debunk the process—
and some were tortured and executed
themselves because of such heresy.
But their attacks on it were ineffectual because they went after the consequences of the system, not its premise:
that witches exist and that they are a
key element in an ongoing battle on
earth between God and the Devil.
Let us flash forward. In his fascinating 2000 book Communazis, Alexander
Stephan describes the U.S. government’s surveillance of a group of émigré
writers during and after World War
II. None was found to pose much of a
subversive threat,and the surveillance
never led to real persecution—indeed,
few of the writers noticed they were
being watched. Instead, what impresses
Stephan is the essential absurdity of the
situation, as huge numbers of government employees intercepted and catalogued communications, meticulously
recorded comings and goings, and
sifted enterprisingly through trash bins,
exhibiting a “combination of high efficiency with grotesque overkill”—and
all, of course, “at taxpayers’ expense.”
At the time, critics of this process, like those for the witch craze,
focused almost entirely on the potential for civil liberties violations.
But no one, it seems, attacked the
premise of the system—that Communists were everywhere and posed
a severe threat. More specifically, at
no point during the Cold War does
it appear that anyone said in public
“many domestic Communists adhere
to a foreign ideology that ultimately
has as its goal the destruction of
capitalism and democracy and by
violence if necessary; however, they
do not present much of a danger, are
actually quite a pathetic bunch, and
couldn’t subvert their way out of a
wet paper bag. Why are we expending so much time, effort, and treasure over this issue?”
In fact, despite huge anxieties
about it at the time, there seem to
have been few, if any, instances in
which domestic Communists engaged
in anything that could be considered
espionage after the Second World
War. Moreover, at no time did any
domestic Communist ever commit
anything that could be considered
violence in support of the cause.
Nonetheless, the fear of domestic
Communism and the consequent
costly anti-Communist surveillance
system persisted for decades.
Thus,
in 1972, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in full perpetual motion mode opened 65,000 new files as
part of its costly quest to ferret out
Communists in the United States.
The pursuit died out only when international Communism collapsed
at the end of the Cold War.
Terrorist Risks Assessed
Something comparable has now happened..
http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller//ABAFIN.PDF
