The terrorists really have won

A recurring theme in the blogosphere is that our reaction to the terrorist threats is disproportionate and fundamentally subversive of our social structure and freedoms. This is usually cast in terms of the rollback of civil liberties, the denial of natural justice and the overweening ambitions of the present Administration in the United States, and possibly also Britain. But it happens here in Australia too.

Here is a case in which an Australian who trained with Al Quaeda, but took no part in terrorist activities, was arrested in Pakistan and tortured for a confession, was acquitted due to the tainted nature of the evidence against him, being restricted in his freedom because of untested and secret allegations by the Federal Police and the Attorney General. Why? Because he is a "threat" to Australian citizens, so they say. And they are planning to restrict the rights and freedoms of others as well. It's as if the Magna Carta never existed.

Our society fought hard against this sort of authoritarian paternalism for centuries to establish our rights before the law. There are rules to the rule of law that prohibit governments from taking liberties away for political (and this is truly political), practical or convenient reasons, which are being slowly but surely eroded by governments and instrumentalities that find it useful to bolster their own positions. There's a word for this kind of government: fascism.

Now I don't like the automatic leftist claim that anyone who does anything the left doesn't like is a fascist, but there's meat on this claim. Democractic liberal societies are based on the notion, well established in history, that control over the citizenry by governments for any reason, no matter how well intentioned, leads to corruption and injustice. For that reason we have a balance of power spread between the judiciary, the legislature and the instruments of government, all accountable to the ballot. But what we are seeing is the perversion of this because of a hysteria about an abstract threat. Whereas in Britain, under the threat of IRA terrorism, eventually they came out the other side with their rights intact and injustices addressed under the traditional rule of law and democracy, we are seeing precedents set that will fundamentally destroy our civil order. And why? Because a few insurgents do evil things? Insurgents will always do evil things - the anarchists in the 19th century did this, and they will do this long after the Wahabist threat is past. Do we really want to set up an ongoing ability for the police to corrupt the law, for politicians to cause fear and loathing against minorities, and for court protections to be overturned by bureaucrats, because of the actions of a minority?

More people die from road accidents, cigarettes, and fatty foods than from all the terrorist actions combined, in the west. So is it really sensible to make the international travel system unworkable, to racially profile hundreds of thousands of citizens, and to cause unending ethnic unrest, because of a few? If so, then the terrorists truly have won, and the vultures of the political parties who support this are the only beneficiaries. I fear for the world my children will live in.