| Hedra42 said: In isolation, this brings up some salient points. However, they're largely irrelevant to the discussion you replied to about the safety of living in London compared with places where terrorist attacks and/or gun crime are the norm. And while Teeqoz didn't mention other types of violent crime in his argument, he is right that there does need to be a greater sense of perspective when looking at terrorist incidents in the west. We shouldn't forget that the attention given to this most recent attack in London has enabled far-right elements to celebrate it, and islamists to use it as propaganda to justify their cause. Likewise, it's a reasonable assumption that the intense coverage of the earlier incidents in Westminster, Manchester and London Bridge probably incited this most recent one. That doesn't mean coverage should be suppressed or the issues ignored. Atrocities need to be reported, and they need to be talked about, don't get me wrong. But blowing it out of proportion only plays into the hands of terrorists on both sides. I don't pretend to have the answer on how to perform that balancing act, but when I see the latest headlines sometimes, I have to wonder. For example, this morning, there have been live updates on BBC about a man being tasered for waving a shoehorn about outside a mosque at 1.am. I mean, live updates? For a shoehorn? Really? Would this have even made the news had the van attack not happened? Would it have been covered if the shoehorn had been waved outside a supermarket instead? Would the guy with the shoehorn even have bothered, had he not read about the van attack? Perspective is important, and is so easy to lose. |
The problem is that terrorism is getting so bad that it does actually justify the media coverage that it is recieving, it's just that the media coverage of terrorism refuses to address the route cause, namely: the actions of our corrupt leaders and elites. I have a problem with people acting as though terrorism is just another aspect of living in a big city, like gang violence, domestic abuse, etc... It's not, but those in power want us to think that this is the case. For the better part of a century our societies were largely free from terror and yet if you look at recent trends, each year terrorism is getting worse and worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack#/media/File:Suicide-attacks-cpost-bigger-font.JPG
And it is not just a western phenomenon. Terrorism is actually so bad in the middle east that many peaceful Christian and Muslim minorities who have lived in certain regions for hundreds of years are basically completely gone (many have been killed and the rest forced to evacuate). We can keep saying that terrorism is a part of life but how do you know that we aren't becoming like the frog that slowly boils to death in a pot of water without noticing the gradual increase in temperature along the way.
The fact is that we have elites on the left who are advocating open borders which is disasterous for national security since most terrorist attacks can be traced back to the Islamic State which is a foreign faction whose members directly benefit from uncontrolled border travel (in both directions) to carry out their acts. On the right, we have a bunch of elites who are bent on wars to overthrow stable governments such as Syria which creates the perfect conditions for ISIS to thrive in the first place. Both of these activities started getting out of hand over the past 15 years, coincidentally at roughly the same time as we start to see terrorism spike. How long until we wake up and realize that our entire political elite (both the left and the right) along with multi-national corporations are actively betraying us and are starting to treat us the same way that North Korea and Venezuela's leaders treat the people of their countries by destroying societies to advance their own petty interests.
We need to wake up and start challenging the establishment everywhere. The power structure wants us to accept the increasingly poor health of our society and go back to sleep. The fact is that we cannot trust the establishment to take care of us anymore, we need to start pushing back hard, stop trusting what we hear in the media and understand that if we don't start taking care of ourselves and take a personal stake managing the affairs of our countries it will be game over for us very soon.
