Bob Ellis on terrorism. Quote: The Liberals aren’t doing this very well. If they were serious they would have arrested every young man at Numan Haider’s funeral and asked him if he was a terrorist. They’d be searching the backpacks and briefcases of every young black-bearded man on every suburban train. Most terrorist attacks are on trains, for obvious reasons — you can leave a device in a suitcase on a train, and detonate it remotely — yet day by day no trains are searched, and Parliament House is for some reason flooded with coppers. No Parliament House has undergone a terrorist attack since the first Guy Fawkes Night in 1605, yet this myth of an imminent explosion in such a place continues. And more obvious places, like the Harbour Tunnel, the Opera House on an opening night, the Art Gallery during the Archibald judging, St Mary’s Cathedral during Christmas Mass, Opera in the Park, the Sydney-to-Surf Race, go unpoliced. The reason is, the Liberals aren’t serious about it. They only want to give an impression of being on the case, of being the party that better protects us when we’re in danger, though Labor has won three wars, the Liberals lost four (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) and helped start one so disastrous the world will never recover from it; the WMD war, that is. And they’re so bad at protecting us they let a man dressed as Osama Bin Laden get into the vicinity of George Bush’s hotel. They’re looking for their ‘Falklands Moment’ like Thatcher in 1982. They want a faraway war they can be praised for, and a ‘Gotcha!’ headline they, and Murdoch, can brandish down the ages. And they want, like W, traitors here at home, and a proclamation — ‘You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists’ — that divides, and upsets, and revolts, and frightens the world. They’re wrapping themselves in the flag, as frantic robues do when nothing else they is working. ‘Patriotism,’ as Dr johnson famously noted, ‘is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ But even this tactic is failing them, and hour by hour they’re looking sillier. Or am I wrong? SEE ellistabletalk/2014/09/27/propaganda-studies-7-the-story-so-far/
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 22:13:56 +0000