You can’t have terrorism without terror.
I’m sure you’ve heard the news yesterday and today. With the wall-to-wall coverage on every news outlet, how could you not?1
So: Are you scared yet?
What to do about this terrorism problem? Ze Frank has the best answer I’ve heard in a long time:
Now, the way I see it, you can’t have terrorism without terror. The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk.. . .
As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself.
The full transcript is here, but do yourself a little favor and just watch the whole show. It will take three minutes of your life and it will be worth it.
The Democrats have been looking for a unified message on national security. This should be it. [tags]terrorism, war, democrats, ideas[/tags]
- The news even reached me in my cave of work/sleep where I only get about 10 minutes of news a day, so I know you heard about it.↩
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August 29th, 2006 at 7:22 am
[...] After the last “big scare” that got the western world all riled up about terrorism, Ze Frank pointed out that you can’t have terrorism w/out terror. Last week, network security pro Bruce Schneier said the same thing: Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that’s basically what’s happening right now. [...]