COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANNE PERKINS IN THE GUARDIAN
"When terror
strikes, do something useful..."
I am sorry, Anne Perkins, but your words are meaningless
because we live surrounded with almost constant terror today.
And I do not mean (the still comparatively rare) events such
as Brussels.
Look at what the poor people in beautiful Syria have endured
for five years.
That is terror on a scale which dwarfs Brussels or Paris,
yet I don't read writers such as you saying anything about it.
Perhaps non-Europeans don’t count?
That serious terror in Syria is the work of Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, Israel, and America, with Britain and France sitting on the sidelines
applauding.
How about the horrors in Libya? A decent society smashed for
no good reason and never a tear shed.
There’s the grotesque situation now in Ukraine, induced
entirely by the United States.
How about the horrors in Yemen as David Cameron's friends in
Saudi Arabia bomb women and children?
And there’s the absolutely pitiless situation in Gaza?
Terror is everywhere, but the mainline press only describes
as terror those relatively few and smaller-sized events in Europe or America.
I believe that our quiet acceptance of what is taking place
in the world on a grand scale actually makes our journalists morally unfit to
comment upon such events as Brussels. At any rate, it leaves them totally
lacking in crucial facts around such events, and writing without facts is a
perilous business indeed.
So long as our governments either engage in, or tolerate,
the terrible things now going on in half a dozen places, there is likely to be
no end to what are essentially "blowback" events like Brussels.
You stop terror by stopping your own share of it.
