I often have the feeling these days that I’ve gotten stuck in some kind of Orwellian nightmare. We are locked in a foreign war fought on false pretexts, dividing the world into those who are with us and those who hate us. Basic freedoms, especially the right to criticise the government, have been greatly curtailed. The secret police tap phones and request records with impunity. The army of the self proclaimed land of the free tortures prisoners and maintains a camp where hooded inmates, incarcerated without trial or purpose, are led shackled around their exercise yard by brutal guards. Its spies abduct people without warning and fly them to distant camps for interrogation.
But what gives it all a dreamlike cast is the mute and unquestioning acceptance of the situation by the majority of the population. There is no outrage, no sense of the absurdity of it all. The media is cowed and compliant. The courts intervene to prevent votes being counted correctly, while the barons of industry steal from shareholders or take turns at the rich handouts provided by their government. Over it all hangs the stupefying enchantment of the lightning struck towers.
What is this paralysing “terror”, this malaise from which we all suffer? Apart from the one incident, burned into our consciousness and every public discourse, we are in no more danger than twenty years ago, and probably less danger than when our enemy was red and nuclear. Reason seems to have no power, so instead I’d like to propose a new terror to replace the old: a terror we can actually vanquish rather than a long war we cannot hope to win.
I propose a War on Pirates. Piracy, in the South China Sea, the Somalian Coast, the Gulf of Guinea, involves more than 400 attacks each year and a hundred dead or missing. It’s got ships, guns, sonic weapons, the dead of night. It probably doesn’t have parrots or eye patches, but it should have. I’m surprised it’s not on the news every day, but it could be. Quite seriously if we don’t count a certain oil war piracy is probably more of a danger to the average westerner.
And what about the terrorists? For a start we have to stop using the bogey-man word; let’s call them criminals, which they are. An organised criminal conspiracy with the aim of achieving political objectives by intimidation. Rather similar to the Mafia except political rather than financial in motivation. We got through the whole cold war without giving up everything we hold dear. Give the police the resources they need, but keep our freedoms. There seems no reason this wouldn’t work – it’s what we’re doing about the pirates, after all.