A ceremony that shows this government's real weakness

[Briar]

In this course of this article, Simon Jenkins has some very thoughtful things to say about the whole "war on terror" farce and the damage done by its self serving rhetoric.


A ceremony that shows this government's real weakness

By turning private grief into a state occasion, we have granted terrorism not just a tactical victory; we have given it leverage

Simon Jenkins

...

...we have not only granted terrorism a tactical victory, by turning what might have remained a private grief into a state occasion. We have also granted it leverage. In Blair's words, we have let it "change the rules of the game". In this game, the winner is terrorism and the loser is the freedom it seeks to undermine.

In a posthumous essay published this month, the philosopher Bernard Williams calls forth the "liberalism of fear". This liberalism is not some erudite debate about rights and duties. It is a Hobbesian defence of weakness against power. It sees the abuse of power under all regimes, democratic and authoritarian, with equal trepidation, since "agents of all sorts of government will behave lawlessly and brutally ... unless they are prevented from doing so". Freedom from fear is thus the highest freedom. The liberal's duty is not utopian, merely to contain power.

Terrorism is the exploitation of fear. The bomber seeks to instil terror and thus to induce government into an equal and opposite repression. Each has an interest in exaggerating the potency of the other, in generating a "fear multiplier" to extend its reach. Nothing so distinguishes a strong government from a weak one as its awareness that this is dangerous. A liberal government does not hold the ring between fear and liberty. It defends liberty from fear in all its forms. It shuts down the bomber's echo chamber.

I sense that the prime minister and his colleagues have not the slightest sensitivity to this argument. They are the echo chamber. They nationalise grief and accord terrorism the respect of ceremony.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1606331,00.html

[leveymg]

1. More than anything else, Leo Strauss was Hobbesian, and the neocons

are Straussians.

[Briar]

2. As "The Power of Nightmares"

demonstrated convincingly.