Putting Terrorism in Perspective, Dyer Style

Trust Gwynne Dyer to point out what we should have known all along - terrorism isn't the big deal our leaders like to paint it to be:

"Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued the obligatory statement that Britain faces "a serious and continuous threat" and that the public "need to be alert" at all times, but there were none of the efforts to pump up the threat, the declarations that civilization itself was under attack, that were standard issue when Tony Blair was running the show. Blair has gone off to bring the blessings of peace to the Middle East, and the British government is no longer compelled to seize on every passing event as evidence that it was right to invade Iraq.

"In almost all [European] countries, despite the efforts of some governments to convince the population that terrorism is an existential threat of enormous size, the vast majority of the people don't believe it.

"Whereas in the United States, most people do believe it. A majority of Americans have finally figured out that the invasion of Iraq really had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but they certainly have not understood that terrorism itself is only a minor threat. "We have a threat out there like we've never faced before," said actor, former senator and potential presidential candidate Fred Thompson last month–on Fox television, admittedly, but they wouldn't have called him a nutcase or laughed in his face on the other networks either.

"So how have Americans been persuaded that their duty and their destiny in the 21st century is to lead the world in a titanic, globe-spanning "long war" against terrorism?

"Inexperience is one reason: American cities have never been bombed in war, so Americans have no standard of comparison that would shrink terrorism to its true importance in the scale of threats that face any modern society. But the other is relentless official propaganda: the Bush administration has built its whole brand around the "war on terror" since 2001, so the threat must continue to be seen as huge and universal.

"Ridiculous though it sounds to outsiders, Americans are regularly told that their survival as a free society depends on beating the "terrorists." They should treat those who say such things as fools or deliberate liars, but they don't. So the manipulators of public opinion in the White House and the more compliant sectors of the U.S. media will give bigger play to the British bombings-that-weren't than Britain's own government and media have, and they will get away with it. "