The terror weasel word
Thanks to Servant for providing this snippet from a Robert Fisk lecture. It was one Fisk gave in Canada but is almost word for word the same given in most of his recent lectures. See the audio page for one such .mp3 link to a recent lecture he gave. Here’s the direct link to more quotes courtesy of Ressentiment.
Fisk:
Terror, terror, terror, terror. That word terrorism is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary. The excuse and reason and moral purpose for state sponsored violence. Our violence. Which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East even more outrageously and promiscuously.
Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. Terrorism has become a full stop. A punctuation mark. A phrase. A speech. A sermon. The be all and end all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and killing on a large scale.
Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report. The soap opera of the devil. Served up on prime time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by right wing commentators of the American East Coast. And I’m sorry to say by many of my American colleagues.
I got a Fisk CD from AK press the other day. He really has quite a bit of knowledge on the mid east
That’s excellent Graeme. If he visits your town, he’s worth attending too.
Thanks for the plug, Ann. The transcript is here and has many many more such pull-quotable gold nuggets of pure Fisk.
Fisk loves the language. He’s like a dare devil sometimes, attempting things that would make us mortals faint to contemplate. Cadence is our friend.
Thanks for the direct link, Serv. Forgot you had more there and that many of your posts are a treasure trove … Open Sesame! :P Shazam …
This is one of many recent discussions at Winter Patriots site regarding the use of “Terror Alerts” to mind control the public.
Click on his banner and scroll down looking for the hand grenade for other discussions.
Some are quite humorous!
Oops – I didn’t realize how far down those stories had gone.
Look through the December archives and for the hand grenaeds and stories about the liquid bombers busted in England.
The silliness started Here
Oh – check the comments at those stories!
:) Thanks BB, great link. People are getting the wool pulled over their eyes big time. Great to read the funny stuff especially!
We all laugh about how dense Americans can be, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m the one of the most dense people I know and it took me forever to find the clues. It wasn’t until Mark Bruzonsky and Robert Fisk mapped out the entire history of empire in the ME that I began to get the Israel joke. I don’t mean to be crude – but if someone were going to stick something that large up my ass, there’d be more than a few towers down. Somehow us Americans think it’s okay to do unto others and then split before they figure out what’s happening. Sometimes it just makes me ashamed to be one.
But there’s hope. If a dummy like me can wake up I know anybody can do it.
In all fairness I think that’s how its been consciously propagated as it suits the status quo: i.e. its sneakily put in the ‘too-hard’ basket as if it has a complexity that’s somehow beyond the grasp of ordinary people. Of course, that’s not the case as we all know.
As a personal aside, despite having a ME background, during my undergraduate degree I steered clear of ME politics units. I did everything but.
It was only afterwards that I educated myself and began to read voraciously and engaged with parents, cousins, friends and so on with it, and, as Serv put it so well, “got” the Israel joke in all its cruelty.
There’s hope for us all.
I was thrilled to see my cartoon used for this. You have no idea how much grief this particular cartoon has caused me. It is one of the few that I have been able to piss people off with (here in the USA). I get a lot of satisfaction knowing that!
Wow… loved the “terror, terror, terror” progression. He was spot on! terror is The soap opera of the devil.
David, my profound thanks. I love your cartoons, and with many, including this one, it hit an immediate “Yes!” register of resonance. You’ve got to know its effective if it pissed people off!
Poetry Man, it takes a poet to recognize the lyricism in that progression ;)
Great cartoon, and apt words from Fisk. Also your readers may be interested (or disgusted, or both) to read this story from The Independent on a recent “swan song” speech by Blair. It seems that dissidents are now being deemed responsible for everything from the continued occupation of Palestine to the disaster in Afghanistan.
Hello Curtis. Great link.
OFF TOPIC:
Ann – the latest widget you added causes PPGG pages to hang my browser from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. Makes me thing very long and hard about moving between topics or clicking comments links.
I’ve been to a couple of other sites that have implemented it and it causes a slight hickup but not a noticable hang. So I’m not just picking on you. It’s probably some other widget on your page that’s contending for CPU time.
Unfortunately – while java script is completely multi-threading and multi-tasking – the HTML in which it is embedded thread bound to a single process. Therefore the browser has to wait to allow all java scripts to run before it can render the page.
I am not a luddite.I am just one of those people with a $400 graphics card who hates to see it valuable nanoseconds wasted loading anything.
Serv., thanks for the valuable feedback. I think it was the Snap preview feature (lets you preview the originating page when your cursor hovers over an embedded link) that WP had introduced. I’ve just disabled it. Hopefully things improve as of now — can you confirm?
Following up: Yes, thank you Ann. That must have been it. Pages load nice and quickly now.
Curt, thanks also for the link. That ridiculous speech shows B-liar has completely lost it. Blaming (not to mention criminalizing) domestic dissent has all the hallmarks of the creeping fascism to which we have been increasingly subject. You and I and others know the corporate MSM has been for the large part compliant and complicit with the bellicose war aims of the state, hardly challenging of it.
I am greatly encouraged by the second half of the article wherein Blair’s “delusional ramblings” are unpacked and shown up for the empty waffle they are.
There’s a lot of crap he claims, to cite just one:
UN-backed?! The ill-advised, immoral and illegal invasions were hardly “UN-backed”, the puppet governments installed hardly “democratic” and this war criminal is hardly fit for office.
Too right we don’t have the stomach for the fascism, killing, greed, war profiteering, McDonaldisation and McDonnellisation (a la McDonnell Douglas) of the world.
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