Illusion said:
I understand, I was thinking about terrorism in terms of the form that we are seeing today but you are correct we have had terrorists in some form or another probably since the beginning of time and I did forget about the 20th century conflicts in places like Ireland. That said, look at how the numbers in your graph have dropped off towards the end of the 20th century. Do you think that European societies managed to accomplish this by just accepting terrorism and saying that more people die from dog bites? I don't know UK history, but I suspect that the people asked some very difficult, uncomfortable and likely, at the time, politicall incorrect questions about the root cause of those conflicts and then moved forward to address the problems. Why is is politically incorrect for us to question policies such as open borders? Why do countries like Japan and Poland (who have not adopted liberal policies on immigration) not have issues with radical Islamic terror right now? The problem is only going to get worse as long we continue to tow the line of political correctness. You cannot deny that the power structure does not want us to question their responsibility for the current terrorist crisis and they lump all of their critics under the homogeneous label of "racist" to end the debate. While the media and our leaders talk about terrorist attacks they will not speak the root cause of terror which is their own irresponsibility towards the citizens that they are sworn to protect. You can see the line inching back up to the levels of the 1970's in your graph. Addressing this problem will require that we move outside of our comfort zone and admit some pretty difficult realities about things we accepted as true all of our lives (just like the Catholics and Protestants had to do in Ireland). Are we willing to question political correctness or will we let that line continue to move upward? Maybe we should actually try listening to speeches from people like Trump to see if they are actually racist, rather then just trusting the mainstream media to tell us the truth. |
Check Hedra42's reply as he covers a lot of what I was going to say. I will add that UK /Ireland situation was exacerbated when the government took a more hardline approach, not too disimilar from what you're advocating from people like Trump. What did happen was a less militant approach; a dialogue was opened and a fractious peace esatablished which is harder to do in today's situation (I'm not sure where you'd even start with the likes of ISIS).
I agree people need to start looking out of their comfort zone but your immigration argument is also rather backward as the vast majority of terrorists in the West are home-grown, so stopping immigrants from certain countries is next to useless. If you want to prevent terror at home then you need to prevent radicalisation which tends to happen online or in the dark web. This means spending more money on counter-terror agents to pose online and having more analysts to trace and shut down sites/users that are acting to brainwash people into mass murderers. More also needs to be done to ensure all citizens living standards are at a decent level as poverty plays just as large a role in how likely someone is to go looking for answers in all the wrong places.
Lastly, Poland is in the EU so they do actually have "open" borders. They've had some arguments over how many refugees they're willing to accept, but assylum seeking is a completely different matter as they should be tracked far closer than normal immigrants.
