Attitudes to Terrorism

On a weekend late last year, I went into Cardiff to do some shopping. On the end of the high street stood two armed police. I know they were armed because they had their rifles on display. Lots of people were looking at them, some seemed in disbelief and some seemed anxious. There was a football match on later, and that's apparently the only excuse they needed. If you want trouble, the worst thing you can do is provoke it. Violent people are provoked by intimidation and the thought of violence. What were they thinking?

Guns on display unnecessarily. Bag searches. Security cameras. Notices on streets, threatening you of consequences to actions that you wouldn't have thought of had the notices not educated you. It all serves to put innocent people on edge, creating paranoia and panic. At best, all of these things make the perpetrators accessories to terrorism. At worst, it makes them terrorists themselves, regardless of whether their aim is to subdue or to provoke, and regardless of whether they had foreseen the consequences of their actions.

If this is seen by nation states as the way forward to tackle terrorism, the terrorists have won. This approach is an obscure form of "if you can't beat them, join them:" This argument is that people need to be terrorised in order to protect them from terrorists. Such steps are necessarily at the sake of civil freedom and liberty. Even accepting the not-quite-paradoxical argument that you need to control people to give them freedom, using terrorist tactics (intentional or not) cannot be the answer. (Or if it is the answer, the very concept of society (and social freedom) is fatally flawed and should be abolished, which admittedly would remove terrorists' main target.)

So what is the right course of action? Anyone sane would have to agree that something needs to be done to curtail the influence of bad people, such as terrorists. The answer simple. I'll split it into two parts.

First, let people know how ridiculously unlikely it is that they will be affected by terrorism. (That is, at least by terrorists; governments are much more of a nuisance in this department.) There are more pressing, more prevalent things to worry about, such as dangerous driving, disease and the increasing prevalence of supermarkets and mindless TV, and the effect on women of and women's magazines. There are more likely things to get you killed, and even they are very low risk: You just have to be careful.

Terrorism isn't any worse now than it used to be. In fact, the situation has improved. Governments spend more money averting it. People are more vigilant. In the last few decades, many prominent terrorist groups - the IRA and al Qaeda and ETA are three obvious examples - have been subdued or eradicated completely. People always point to the Twin Towers. But that was a one-off - and it happened in another country, a long way away! Why are we associating it with our country, for gods' sakes? Numerous mass shootings occur over there as well. Why aren't we equally worried about that? Why one specific thing but not the others? It isn't rational.

Second, terrorism is here to stay. There will always be terrorists, and sometimes, on rare occasion, they'll do something bad. So get people to accept terrorism as a fact of life - the inevitability that it is - rather than making them worry about it. Whereas caution is a positive thing, worry gets us nowhere, except depressed, and it drags people, and society, down. People stop trusting each other, they become more suspicious, they stop communicating, and this makes a bad situation worse. It leads to misunderstanding and eventually hatred. In other words, people stop functioning like the social animals that humans naturally are.

Terrorism occurs, bombs explode, people die. It sounds flippant, but I know and agree it's a huge tragedy, and such things are the necessary price of a free society. So when on the extremely rare occasion terrorist events happen, we should mourn, move on and get on with it. The situation can be controlled more appropriately (and equally well) if governments take greater steps to improve the secret services, so that they can do their job without sacrificing free society and meddling with the average person's life. And I see very little of that happening. Instead, they've taken the easy option and decided to treat everyone as a potential killer.

If people accept rather than worry about the unlikely doings of terrorists beforehand, if they're correctly mentally prepared about something over which they can't do much about anyway, then there can't be terror. Terrorists, as a consequence, can't win. In a country where the phrase, "keep calm and carry on" is once again an ubiquitous cliché, why has no-one actually realised what it means?