polite_gandalf wrote on Jun 11
th, 2014 at 12:18pm:
Karnal wrote on Jun 11
th, 2014 at 12:14pm:
Ah yes, but we do not want an inclusive and tolerant Islam, isn't it.
We want a brutal and militant Islam as a relentless and constant threat to Our Way Of Life.
Exactly. We need an "other".
Herbie's UK Daily Mail would be lost without one.
Just as we would be lost without Herbie's daily UK Daily Mail panic attacks.
The knuckleheads are smart. They know the purpose of the "threat" is to maintain the threat itself. Herbie has even argued to bring back the death penalty for Muslim drug smugglers so that we can justify the existence of the death penalty.
The threat is not drug smuggling or crime or anything specific. When shown that drug smuggling is at a historic low, or that targeting supply-chains are a more effective way of erradicating drugs, Herbie argues for the death penalty as a way of culling Muslims.
Arguing that such laws could "cull" more non-Muslims than Muslims is pointless. In the US, the hightened security laws following Sept 11, along with the establishment of an entire department of Homeland Security, has been used against more non-Muslims than anyone else. Homeland Security is now just a way to monitor people's phone calls and internet use without a court order.
Citizens will only support such surveillance with a hightened threat. To create such a solution (the death penalty, state surveillance, etc.), you need a problem. Other ways of dealing with the "problem" are not discussed, or considered irrelevant given the risks posed.
The reintroduction of torture by the US was justified with the ticking timebomb scenario. This scenario has been posed in countless movies and TV shows in the last decade. There is no evidence, however, of lives being saved using information gathered through torture. The US military will neither confirm or deny this. The reintroduction of torture was the end-game, not the detonation of any time bombs.
And this is the point. State-sanctioned death, surveillance, torture, and even the illegal invasion of sovereign states, are ends in themselves. To justify our implimentation of these ends, we need a relentless and never-ending threat. Always, absolutely, never ever.
Y's solution speaks volumes - not only does Y argue that we should ban all Muslims, or anyone who identifies as a Muslim, the ones who insist on following their religion should be detained "in the desert for decades". To justify banning religions, imposing religious descrimination and the indefinite incarceration of religious groups (and overturning the Constitution without a parliamentary vote), Y posts his 1200 year old religious quotes and 2003 photos of legal Muslim protests.
As the old boy asserts; it's correlation not causation. For the old boy, the Muslims are simply embematic of a general "tinted" problem, a problem of "values" propagated by the tinted races that they should have the same rights as whites, when they are, by every measure imposed by the old boy, qualitatively inferior. For the old boy, the problem is the theme of post-colonialism and the reaction of the tinted races to white hegemony over the past two centuries; an issue that merely correlates with a majority of tinted and white-skinned people on either side. For the old boy, the threat is the billions of tinted people at risk of being captivated by "ideologies" like Islam and joining to form a "global caliphate" against the West.
However, even the old boy is aware that this is no threat at all. The "threat" is just something you allude to when you're proposing the solution; erradicating the tinted races, for example, by invading their countries and banning them from settling in Australia.
The underlying theme to all these arguments is the belief that the West has gone soft and needs to toughen up. Reinstate the death penalty, remove laws against vilification and descrimination, reinstate the White Australia Policy, impose zero limits on detention without trial, and on the international front, a foreign policy of zero tolerance - invade first and ask questions later, cut ties with neighbours such as Indonesia, withdraw from all international forums and organization such as the UN.
This is why we need a threat. The threat in itself is amorphous. It can be no threat at all. But without it, there would be no justification for the argument that we should return to the Dark Ages.
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