anti-terrorism measures
- - | 07.03.2005 12:24 | Terror War
As the ‘anti-terrorism’ bill goes before the Lords, a scrambling Labour government is pulling out all the stops to try and avert large scale pre- election damage to the party.
Health Secretary John Reid is quoted as saying "I don't think there will be any further major concessions, because we have to protect people in this country. The other parties have, quite frankly, to make their minds up and then explain their position to the people of this country."
In a well publicised News of the World article yesterday, ex Chief of the Metropoliton Police, Sir John Stevens, spoke up in favour of the government proposals, claiming there were ‘up to 200 al qaida “terrorists” on the streets of Britain’.
Sir John commented: "The main opposition to the bill, it seems to me, is from people who simply haven't understood the brutal reality of the world we live in and the true horror of the terrorism we face."
Neither Reid nor Stevens felt compelled to mention that the ‘brutal reality’ of Islamic terrorism is directly tied to the war in Iraq and western colonisation of the Middle East. By keeping the nation in the dark about this cause and effect, the governement and its supporters are failing to protect the people of this country.
Continued support for the US crusade right across the Middle East continues to make the UK a focus of Islamic anger. To pretend otherwise, as do Reid and Stevens, is for them to show that they “simply haven't understood the brutal reality of the world we live in”. Or that they are happy to deny it.
In a well publicised News of the World article yesterday, ex Chief of the Metropoliton Police, Sir John Stevens, spoke up in favour of the government proposals, claiming there were ‘up to 200 al qaida “terrorists” on the streets of Britain’.
Sir John commented: "The main opposition to the bill, it seems to me, is from people who simply haven't understood the brutal reality of the world we live in and the true horror of the terrorism we face."
Neither Reid nor Stevens felt compelled to mention that the ‘brutal reality’ of Islamic terrorism is directly tied to the war in Iraq and western colonisation of the Middle East. By keeping the nation in the dark about this cause and effect, the governement and its supporters are failing to protect the people of this country.
Continued support for the US crusade right across the Middle East continues to make the UK a focus of Islamic anger. To pretend otherwise, as do Reid and Stevens, is for them to show that they “simply haven't understood the brutal reality of the world we live in”. Or that they are happy to deny it.
- -
Comments
Hide the following comment
Doublethink
07.03.2005 17:54
Doublethink
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Doublethink means, according to George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:
the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
Orwell's novel chronicals his free thinking protagonist's struggle in a totalitarian society. Though the novel is most famous for its pervasive surveillance of daily life, Orwell also envisioned that the population could be controlled and manipulated through the alteration of everyday language and thought. The techniques he described were called "newspeak" and "doublethink".
Doublethink was a form of trained, willful blindness to contradictions in a system of beliefs. In the case of Winston Smith, Orwell's protagonist, it meant being able to work at the Ministry of Truth deleting uncomfortable facts from public records, and then believing in the new history which he himself had written.
A classic example from the book:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Over the years since Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, the term has grown to be synonymous with relieving cognitive dissonance by simply ignoring the contradiction between two worldviews. Some schools of therapy such as cognitive therapy encourage people to alter their own thoughts as a way of treating different psychological maladies. See cognitive distortions.
frank