1hundredsixty8

“Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Do you wake each morning and wonder if this will be the day you will be a victim of terrorism? The day you may be blown to pieces by a suicide bomber, or gunned down in a mass shooting?  Do you worry that ISIS terrorists will enter the country disguised as refugees from the Syrian conflict? Are you living in fear?

Is that what’s troublin’ you, Bunky?

In the aftermath of the terror attacks in Mali, Beirut, Paris, and the mass shooting in San Bernardino, the level of wide-eyed fear among Americans seems to be growing. The four-year civil war in Syria, coming in the aftermath of the US misadventure in Iraq, has given rise to the mass psychosis known as the Islamic State. It is a continuing perplexity to know which group is fighting whom: The Assad regime, ISIS (also known as ISIL or Daesh), Sunnis, Shias, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the US, France, Britain, and Russia. The seemingly-endless conflict has resulted in hundreds of thousands civilian casualties and displaced millions of people.

As a consequence of the war, a major refugee crisis has spilled beyond Turkey, Greece and the Balkan states into Europe. While the Europeans- most notably Germany*- have attempted to accommodate the influx, one reaction has been a wave of xenophobia in Europe and the US. Donald Trump has called for banning all Moslem immigrants; other politicians want to permit only Christian refugees from Syria into the US. Terrorists, we are told, can slip into the country simply by mingling with the legitimate refuge-seekers. We, who have more guns in private hands than any other population on the planet, are very afraid.

U! S! A!   U!S! A!

The Protection Racket

In the old days, the Mafia perfected the protection racket: Go around one night and break the windows of some neighborhood business. Come by the next day and offer the business owner “protection’ from the vandals. In effect, the gangsters were simply levying a tax on local businesses. The criminals knew that fear was an effective tool to ensure compliance: The businessman saw the extortion as a cost of doing business, no different than paying a security company to protect his property.

Our modern-day politicians have refined the protection racket to high art. Think of the hyperbole attendant to terrorism, of which the run-up to the Iraq war is an example. Inciting fear in the public allowed the passage of the Patriot Act, a great limitation on civil liberties. It allowed the creation of a huge Federal security bureaucracy centered in the completely new Department of Homeland Security. The anti-terrorism and security complex diverts large amounts of taxpayer dollars into the hands of the private sector. The WMD fiasco and the constant bleating by Cheney and the neo-con chorus about the dangers posed to us by Sadaam allowed the government to wage a largely unfunded and purposeless war. The outcome of that sad adventure has been chaos in the Middle East. We are witness to the near-collapse of the artificial states created by the British and the French after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in WWI. The Sunni Saudis and Shia Iranians are waging the proxy wars in Yemen and Syria. In the guise of aiding the international effort to defeat ISIS, Turkey has increased efforts to crush its rebellious Kurdish minority.  

There are some American politicians, warmed by the heat of the upcoming elections, who make bellicose pronouncements about defeating ISIS and clamor for a greater US military role. They rationalize this twist on the protection racket by pointing out that it is far better to defeat the terrorists “over there” and not have to fight them here.  I assume that their memory loss includes forgetting the thousands of Americans killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan without a substantive outcome- unless, of course, you count the emergence of ISIS.

The billions of tax-payer dollars spent, however, were good for business. Wasn’t that really the point?

*Germany, facing negative population growth, is motivated to increase its population of workers and consumers.