Counter Terrorism Quotes

The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest--it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [...] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something--for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder.

This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.

Do not fear those who operate in the shadows

The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies

Few would argue against safe-guarding the nation. But in the judgment of at least one of the country's most distinguished presidential scholars, the legal steps taken by the Bush Administration in its war against terrorism were a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and traditions: more significant than John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, than Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Collectively, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the Bush Administration's extralegal counter-terrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.

I know everything I need to know about you," she countered, taken aback. "You do?" he asked, and peered at her, eyes intent. "You do, You have that look in your eyes from the forest, when you called me a monster." He came within a meter or two of Rey, and she wondered what would happen if she refused to move and they intersected. Would she find herself in his mind again, and have to endure his presence in hers? Could they actually touch, across a galaxy? "You are a monster," Rey said, remembering the terror of her paralysis on Takodana. She stared back at him -- and found his. eyes full of hurt. Hurt -- and conflict. "Yes, I am," Kylo said, and there was no menace in his voice -- only misery.

When ‘all is permitted’ in the fight against terror, a counter-terrorist starts to become indistinguishable from the initial terrorist. Furthermore, all the terrorists in the world think they are counter-terrorists, merely responding to a prior act of terror. They are not the only ones: it is always possible, and easy, to find a prior violence that supposedly justifies our present violence. But, on this way of reckoning, war will never end.

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valour. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labour and of those who - one word - love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. Far in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended. He saw that he was looking at his own face in the counter glass before him. Sweat glistened on his temples and his face was contorted. One eye was opened wider than the other. The left eye delved narrowly into the past while the right gazed wide and affrighted into a future of blackness, error, and ruin. And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.

I regret being the cause of your having to endure further gossip, but I felt you must be apprised before you actually married that murderous Scot!” He sneered the word “Scot” again, and in the midst of all her turmoil and terror that foolish thing raised Elizabeth’s hackles. “Stop saying ‘Scot’ in that insulting fashion,” she cried. “And Ian-Lord Thornton-is half-English,” she added a little wildly. “That leaves him only half-barbarian,” Wordsworth countered with scathing contempt.

or even mid September 1793, when Terror—the policy of intimidation—was officially declared "the order of the day" and the Law of Suspects was passed, which made it far too easy for a citizen to be suspected and imprisoned for counter-revolutionary sympathies or even for apathy, and which greatly expanded the powers of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide... And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine's numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there's a gap in the numbers.

In my work with hundreds of women over the past few years a theme has emerged: women’s desperate, unquenchable desire to step into their power, countered by the fear of what will happen if they do. The longing to express the riches inside them, wrestling with the deep terror of being burned by the judgement, hatred or rejection of strangers or loved ones if they do. This fear of being burned is an oddly female one. It is a fear which keeps us small and scared… but seemingly safe. From the outside this can seem like an overreaction. Both the need, and the fear. But women, it seems, have an innate knowing of what it means to burn… and be burned. They know the dangers in their bones. And it makes them wary.

You revolutionists' the other continued, with leisurely self-confidence, 'are the slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in the defence of that convention. Clearly you are, since you want to revolutionize it. It governs your action, too, and thus neither your thought nor your action can ever be conclusive. (...) 'You are not a bit better than the forces arrayed against you -- than the police, for instance. The other day I came suddenly upon Chief Inspector Heat at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. He looked at me very steadily. But I did not look at him. Why should I give him more than a glance ? He was thinking of many things -- of his superiors, of his reputation, of the law courts, of his salary, of newspapers -- of a hundred things. But I was thinking of my perfect detonator only. He meant nothing to me. He was as insignificant as -- I can't call to mind anything insignificant enough to compare him with -- except Karl Yundt perhaps. Like to like. The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolutions, legality -- counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game -- so do you propagandists.

When 'all is permitted' in the fight against terror, a counter-terrorist starts to become indistinguishable from the initial terrorist.

I thought of all the hours that i has spent at passport and visa counters, and the stark terror that an immigration officer's frown could still send through me.

terrorism is adamant. Fight against requires endurance, specific Counter-terrorism, Intelligence and swift operation

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight. "I can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself -- for they had to contain all voices within them, had to be all things and nothing. They had to have the ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land. "The old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero's battle with a fabulous beast -- the beast that is in the hero." "The storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and incantations before their people did in reality, they became the repositories of the people's wisdom and follies. Often, conscripted by kings, they became the memory of a people's origins, and carried with them the long line of ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries, the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things, the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes for wars, causes of victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods. They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change." "These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity's truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly." "They risked their sanity and their consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of the interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination." "And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing around us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our way through the dark descending nights ahead -- I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them to be whole again.

Excellent,” says Gray, rubbing his hands together, a gleam in his eye. “The last person to sing gets to buy the drinks.” Ivy grins wide. “You’re on, Cupcake. I’m going to sing the house down.” We all pause, our gazes darting back and forth as a certain sense of terror falls over the table. Ivy sees us and slaps her palm onto the table. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. I know what you twats are thinking! If I suck at dancing, I’ll suck at singing? Well, I don’t. I’m awesome.” Awkward silence ensues, and she snorts. “What? You think I don’t know I suck at dancing? I just don’t give a shit.” She glares at Gray, though there really isn’t any anger in the look. “So you can stop dancing like an ass now.” A strangled sound leaves him. “You knew?” “Of course.” She tosses a lock of her hair over her shoulder. “You’re too coordinated on the field, and you kind of forget to suck when you do those victory dances.” He gapes at her for a long second, then gives a bark of laughter. “I fucking love you, Special Sauce.” With that, he hauls Ivy into his lap and kisses her. Fi, however, finally snaps out of the trance she’s been in since Ivy confessed. “You sneaky shithead,” she shouts over the music. “All these years I’ve been covering for your craptacular dancing, and you knew!” She shakes a fist. “I swear to God, Ivy Weed…” “Oh, please,” Ivy counters. “You pretend you suck at baking so you don’t have to cook for family holidays.” Fi sniffs, looking guilty as hell. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ivy leans in, her eyes narrowed. “Midnight cookie baking ring a bell, Tink?” Fi’s cheeks flush, and she studies her nails with undue interest while muttering something about traitor sisters under her breath. “Those are for PMS cravings and nothing more. I was baking under duress.

The silence in the room was deep as the night itself. Biff stood transfixed, lost in his meditations. Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valour. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labour and of those who - one word - love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended . . . suspended between radiance and darkness, between bitter irony and faith . . . And would he just stand here like a jittery nanny or would he pull himself together and be reasonable? For after all was he a sensible man or was he not?

For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against ‘terror’ and ‘extremism’ that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving the necessary platforms and resources to counter the vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing the vast network – the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis – as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it.

How then should the state deal with terrorism? A successful counter-terrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on clandestine actions against the terror networks. Second, the media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The theatre of terror cannot succeed without publicity. Unfortunately, the media all too often provides this publicity for free. It obsessively reports terror attacks and greatly inflates their danger, because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports on diabetes or air pollution. The third front is the imagination of each and every one of us. Terrorists hold our imagination captive, and use it against us. Again and again we rehearse the terrorist attack on the stage of our mind – remembering 9/11 or the latest suicide bombings. The terrorists kill a hundred people – and cause 100 million to imagine that there is a murderer lurking behind every tree. It is the responsibility of every citizen to liberate his or her imagination from the terrorists, and to remind ourselves of the true dimensions of this threat. It is our own inner terror that prompts the media to obsess about terrorism, and the government to overreact. The success or failure of terrorism thus depends on us. If we allow our imagination to be captured by the terrorists, and then overreact to our own fears – terrorism will succeed. If we free our imagination from the terrorists, and react in a balanced and cool way – terrorism will fail.

Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens. Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In

Far from being ‘an effective counter-force to the fanatics’,[46] apathy plays in their favour: for under these conditions, ‘fanatics’ may easily be the only ones capable of mobilising public opinion. The prevalence of greyness brings out colours — whatever they may be. When political life is in decline, violence and terrorism appear as the only means of striking an anaesthetised public opinion with no power over legal procedures. Apathy is a real gift to extremism.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

The trick here is arbitrary word assignment: that is, any violence engaged in by ourselves or our friends is ipso facto retaliation and counter-terrorism; whatever the enemy does is terrorism, irrespective of facts.’10 We might say, then, that the golden rule of state violence is: terrorism is what they do, and counter-terrorism is what we do. As Orwell himself observed in his essay, ‘Notes on Nationalism’: ‘Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by “our” side.

I don't like to make mistakes. Which is why I haven't been with a man before now." He as thrown off balance so quickly and completely, he coud hear his own brain stumble. "Well,that's...that's wise." He took one definite step back, like a chessman going from square to square. "It's interesting that makes you nervous," she said, countering his move. "I'm not nervous,I'm...finished up here, it seems." He tried another tactic, stepped to the side. "Interesting," she continued, mirroring his move, "that it would make you nervous,or uneasy if you prefer, when you've been...I think it's safe to use the term 'hitting on me' since we met." "I don't think that's the proper term at all." Since he seemed to be boxed into a corner,he decided he was really only standing his ground. "I acted in a natural way regarding a physical attraction. But-" "And now that I've reacted in a natural way, you've felt the reins slip out of your hands and you're panicked." "I'm certainly not panicked." He ignored the terror gripping claws into his belly and concentrated on annoyance. "Back off, Keeley." "No." With her eyes locked on his, she stepped in.Checkmate. His back was hard up against a stall door and he'd been maneuvered there by a woman half his weight.It was mortifying. "This isn't doing either of us any credit." It took a lot of effort when the blood was rapidly draining out of his head, but he made his voice cool and firm. "The fact is I've rethought the matter." "Have you?" "I have,yes,and-stop it," he ordered when she ran the palms of her hands up over his chest. "You're hearts pounding," she murmured. "So's mine.Should I tell you what goes on inside my head,inside my body when you kiss me" "No." He barely managed a croak this time. "And it's not going to happen again." "Bet?" She laughed, rising up just enough to nip his chin. How could she have known how much fun it was to twist a man into aroused knots? "Why don't you tell me about this rethinking?" "I'm not going to take advantage of your-of the situation." That,she thought,was wonderfully sweet. "At the moment,I seem to have the advantage.This time you're trembling,Brian." The hell he was.How could he be trembling when he couldn't feel his own legs? "I won't be responsible.I won't use your inexperience.I won't do this." The last was said on a note of desperation and he pushed her aside. "I'm responsible for myself.And I think I've just proven to both of us,that if and when I decide you'll be the one, you won't have a prayer." She drew a deep, satisfied breath. "Knowing that's incredibly flattering." "Arousing a man doesn't take much skill, Keeley. We're cooperative creatures in that area." If he'd expected that to scratch at her pride,and cut into her power,he was mistaken. She only smiled,and the smile was full of secret female knowledge. "If that was true between us, if that were all that's between us, we'd be naked on the tack room floor right now." She saw the change in his eyes and laughed delightedly. "Already thought of that one, have you? We'll just hold that thought for another time.

In the present state of the world, not only are many people destitute but the majority of those who are not being haunted by a perfectly reasonable fear that they may become so at any moment. Wage-earners have the constant danger of unemployment; salaried employees know that their firm may go bankrupt or find it necessary to cut down its staff; businessmen, even those who are reputed to be very rich, know that the loss of all their money is by no means improbable. Professional men have a very hard struggle. After making great sacrifices for the education of their sons and daughters, they find that there are not the openings that there used to be for those who have the kinds of skills that their children have acquired. If they are lawyers, they find that people can no longer afford to go to law, although serious injustices remain unremedied; if they are doctors, they find that their formerly lucrative hypochondriac patients can no longer afford to be ill, while many genuine sufferers have to forgo much-needed medical treatment. One finds men and women of university education serving behind the counters in shops, which may save them from destitution, but only at the expense of those who would formerly have been so employed. In all classes, from the lowest to almost the highest, economic fear governs men’s thoughts by day and their dreams at night, making their work nerve-wracking and their leisure unrefreshing. This ever-present terror is, I think, the main cause of the mood of madness which has swept over great parts of the civilized world.

America sucks at information warfare, absolutely sucks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Democracies are marketplaces of ideas. We stand for freedom, liberty, human rights, and peaceful protest, so stopping one thing, like the violent views of terrorists or nefarious Russian influence of homegrown Americans, gets quite tricky. American values and those of other Western democracies are their greatest strength when shared and promoted—and a major vulnerability in the eyes of those who seek to exploit them. Suppressing ideas undermines American values. And so countering bad ideas, like those that fuel terrorism or authoritarianism, proves vexing, as we tend to believe that the remedy to be applied is more speech, even though we are not entirely sure what to say, how to say it, or who should say it.

Well, what happened to your scruples in the woodcutter’s cottage? You knew I thought you’d already left when I went inside.” “Why did you stay,” he countered smoothly, “when you realized I was still there?” In confused distress Elizabeth raked her hair off her forehead. “I knew I shouldn’t do it,” she admitted. “I don’t know why I remained.” “You stayed for the same reason I did,” he informed her bluntly. “We wanted each other.” “I was wrong,” she protested a little wildly. “Dangerous and-foolish!” “Foolish or not,” he said grimly, “I wanted you. I want you now.” Elizabeth made the mistake of looking at him, and his amber eyes captured hers against her will, holding them imprisoned. The shawl she’d been clutching as if it was a lifeline to safety slid from her nerveless hand and dangled at her side, but Elizabeth didn’t notice. “Neither of us has anything to gain by continuing this pretense that the weekend in England is over and forgotten,” he said bluntly. “Yesterday proved that it wasn’t over, if it proved nothing else, and it’s never been forgotten-I’ve remembered you all this time, and I know damn well you’ve remembered me.” Elizabeth wanted to deny it; she sensed that if she did, he’d be so disgusted with her deceit that he’d turn on his heel and leave her. She lifted her chin, unable to tear her gaze from his, but she was too affected by the things he’d just admitted to her to lie to him. “All right,” she said shakily, “you win. I’ve never forgotten you or that weekend. How could I?” she added defensively. He smiled at her angry retort, and his voice gentled to the timbre of rough velvet. “Come here, Elizabeth.” “Why?” she whispered shakily. “So that we can finish what we began that weekend.” Elizabeth stared at him in paralyzed terror mixed with violet excitement and shook her head in a jerky refusal. “I’ll not force you,” he said quietly, “nor will I force you to do anything you don’t want to do once you’re in my arms. Think carefully about that,” he warned, “because if you come to me now, you won’t be able to tell yourself in the morning that I made you do this against your will-or that you didn’t know what was going to happen. Yesterday neither of us knew what was going to happen. Now we do.” Some small, insidious voice in her mind urged her to obey, reminded her that after the public punishment she’d taken for the last time they were together she was entitled to some stolen passionate kisses, if she wanted them. Another voice warned her not to break the rules again. “I-I can’t,” she said in a soft cry. “There are four steps separating us and a year and a half of wanting drawing us together,” he said. Elizabeth swallowed. “Couldn’t you meet me halfway?” The sweetness of the question was almost Ian’s undoing, but he managed to shake his head. “Not this time. I want you, but I’ll not have you looking at me like a monster in the morning. If you want me, all you have to do is walk into my arms.” “I don’t know what I want,” Elizabeth cried, looking a little wildly at the valley below, as if she were thinking of leaping off the path. “Come here,” he invited huskily, “and I’ll show you.” It was his tone, not his words, that conquered her. As if drawn by a will stronger than her own, Elizabeth walked forward and straight into his arms that closed around her with stunning force. “I didn’t think you were going to do it,” he whispered gruffly against her hair.

As Churchill predicted, the full might and fury of the Nazis were turned on Britain. The dreaded massive bombing of the Luftwaffe, which had terrorized other nations into surrender, failed to break the British. Hitler was stopped for the first time. Britain, though lacking the military forces to launch a major counter-attack, nevertheless stalled the Nazi timetable of conquest, thus buying time, not only for itself but also for an almost completely disarmed United States to begin preparing itself militarily for the ordeal ahead. Many nations, forces, and events contributed to the final victory over Germany and Japan. But what made it all possible was that Britain withstood the fire and blast of war and refused to surrender, even when the situation looked hopeless. It was indeed their finest hour. Freedom survives in the world today because of it.

Cannabis, the sensation that had reignited in America and helped bring hemp’s recreational usage back to prominence in a quiet, steady British counter-culture, had helped dispel much of the prejudice, entitlement and arrogance that had eluded the careful eye of Simon’s mother, undermining her care during the once-restlessly energetic yet gentle soul’s dedicated mothering of the studious boy. It took root in his thoughts and expectations. Bravado and projection replaced genuine yet understated confidence; much of that which had been endearing in him ceased to be seen, to his mother’s despondency. A bachelor of the arts, the blissfully apathetic raconteur left university, having renounced his faith and openly claiming to feel no connection, either socially or intellectually with the student life and further study. Personal failures and parental despair combined to sober the-21yr old frustrated essayist and tentative poet. Cannabis, ironically sought following the conclusion of his stimulant-fuelled student years, had finally levelled him out, and provided the introspection needed to dispel the lesser demons of his nature. Reefer Madness, such insanity – freely distributed for the mass-consumer audience of the west! Curiosity pushed the wealthy young man’s interest in the plant to an isolated purchase, and thence to regular use. Wracked by introspection, the young man struggled through several months of instability and self-doubt before readjusting his focus to chase goals. Once humorous, Reefer Madness no longer amused him, and he dedicated an entire afternoon to writing an ultimately unpublished critique of the film, that descended into an impassioned defence of the plant. He began to watch with keen interest, as the critically-panned debacle of sheer slapstick silliness successfully struck terror into the hearts of a large section of non-marijuana smoking people in the west. The dichotomy of his own understanding and perception only increased the profound sense of gratitude Simon felt for the directional change in which his life was heading. It helped him escape from earlier attachments to the advantage of his upbringing, and destroyed the arrogance that, he realised with shock, had served to cloud years of his judgement. Thus, positive energy led to forward momentum; the mental readjustment silenced doubts, which in turn brought peace, and hope.

I’m going to sleep now,” she said in a strangled voice. “Alone,” she added, and his face whitened as if she had slapped him. During his entire adult life Ian had relied almost as much on his intuition as on his intellect, and at that moment he didn’t want to believe in the explanation they were both offering. His wife did not want him in her bed; she recoiled from his touch; she had been away for two consecutive nights; and-more alarming than any of that-guilt and fear were written all over her pale face. “Do you know what a man thinks,” he said in a calm voice that belied the pain streaking through him, “when his wife stays away at night and doesn’t want him in her bed when she does return?” Elizabeth shook her head. “He thinks,” Ian said dispassionately, “that perhaps someone else has been taking his place in it.” Fury sent bright flags of color to her pale cheeks. “You’re blushing, my dear,” Ian said in an awful voice. “I am furious!” she countered, momentarily forgetting that she was confronting a madman. His stunned look was replaced almost instantly by an expression of relief and then bafflement. “I apologize, Elizabeth.” “Would you p-lease get out of here!” Elizabeth burst out in a final explosion of strength. “Just go away and let me rest. I told you I was tired. And I don’t see what right you have to be so upset! We had a bargain before we married-I was to be allowed to live my life without interference, and quizzing me like this is interference!” Her voice broke, and after another narrowed look he strode out of the room. Numb with relief and pain, Elizabeth crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up under her chin, but not even their luxurious warmth could still the alternating chills and fever that quaked through her. Several minutes later a shadow crossed her bed, and she almost screamed with terror before she realized it was Ian, who had entered silently though the connecting door of their suite. Since she’d gasped aloud when she saw him, it was useless to pretend she was sleeping. In silent dread she watched him walking toward her bed. Wordlessly he sat down beside her, and she realized there was a glass in his hand. He put it on the bedside table, then he reached behind her to prop up her pillows, leaving Elizabeth no choice but to sit up and lean back against them. “Drink this,” he instructed in a calm tone. “What is it?” she asked suspiciously. “It’s brandy. It will help you sleep.” He watched while she sipped it, and when he spoke again there was a tender smile in his voice. “Since we’ve ruled out another man as the explanation for all this, I can only assume something has gone wrong at Havenhurst. Is that it?” Elizabeth seized on that excuse as if it were manna from heaven. “Yes,” she whispered, nodding vigorously. Leaning down, he pressed a kiss on her forehead and said teasingly, “Let me guess-you discovered the mill overcharged you?” Elizabeth thought she would die of the sweet torment when he continued tenderly teasing her about being thrifty. “Not the mill? Then it was the baker, and he refused to give you a better price for buying two loaves instead of one.” Tears swelled behind her eyes, treacherously close to the surface, and Ian saw them. “That bad?” he joked.

Democracy’s brand was also damaged by America’s reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001. George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 dealt a twin blow to Western democracy’s allure. The first came in the form of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for spying on American citizens and gave the green light to multiple dilutions of US constitutional liberties. That imperative was then extended to America’s relations with any country, democratic or not, which pledged to cooperate in the ‘war on terror’. Autocrats such as Putin and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf went from pariahs to soul brothers almost overnight. When the Bush administration said ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it was referring to the opening of ‘black sites’ where the CIA could waterboard terrorist suspects, and the no-questions-asked exchanges of terrorist lists against which there was little prospect of appeal – a practice known in international law as refoulement. This gave undemocratic regimes an excuse to logroll domestic opponents onto the international lists, with devastating effects on political rights around the world. In the decade after 9/11, the number of Interpol red notices rose eightfold.3 Such practices belied Bush’s democratic agenda. For example, it robbed the US of the moral standing to criticise the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-backed body of central Asian autocracies that today operates its own refoulement exchanges of political dissidents in the name of counter-terrorism. The Bush administration’s approach was also geopolitically shortsighted. Just as the West’s support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America’s Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world’s current democratic recession. That is certain to deepen under Trump.

advance US global interests. This memo, from policy aide Brian Hook to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, explicitly reminds Tillerson to make sure to treat allies and adversaries differently when it comes to expressing human rights concerns.1 As Hook explains to Tillerson: In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights. It is not as though human rights practices will be improved if anti-American radicals take power in those countries. Moreover, this would be a severe blow to our vital interests. We saw what a disaster Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood turned out to be in power. After eight years of Obama, the US is right to bolster US allies rather than badger or abandon them. One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently—and better—than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies. The classic dilemma of balancing ideals and interests is with regard to America’s allies. In relation to our competitors, there is far less of a dilemma. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically. Meanwhile, Hook criticizes the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter which he sees as an outlier amongst US presidents in the postwar era: President Carter upended Cold War policies by criticizing and even undermining governments, especially in cases such as Nicaragua and Iran. The results were unfortunate for American interests, as for the citizens of those countries. Carter’s badgering of American allies unintentionally strengthened anti-American radicals in both Iran and Nicaragua. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote in 1979 criticizing Carter’s foreign policy, “Hurried efforts to force complex and unfamiliar political practices on societies lacking the requisite political culture, tradition, and social structures not only fail to produce the desired outcomes; if they are undertaken at a time when the traditional regime is under attack, they actually facilitate the job of the insurgents.

There is Irish Spring, but there is no fall soap.

By the end of 2004, U.S. operations in Iraq had been rough enough to antagonize the Sunni population without imposing the draconian methods armies habitually employ to control a population. In the spring of 2006, the coalition was losing on the two major fronts that accounted for most of the fighting. In Anbar to the west, al Qaeda controlled the population; in Baghdad to the east, Shiite death squads were driving our the sunnis, while al Qaeda's suicide bombings continued. Yet, the conditions had already been set for a turnaround without precedent in combating an insurgency. In less that three years, two giant institutions steeped in 200 years of traditions-the Army and Marines-adopted new doctrines and turned around a losing war. This was equivalent to GE and Ford starting afresh in new business lines and turning a profit in three years. A lack of soldiers is frequently cited as the basic flaw after the invasion. This is mistaken. There were 140,000 soldiers, plus 100,000 contractors in support roles, in Iraq in 2003. Adding troops would not have accomplished much because the two-headed command...lacked a plan, a counterinsurgency doctrine, and proper training. With the Pentagon's agreement, Bremer had disbanded the Iraqi Army, and the Iraqi police were ineffective. More American troops operating alone under a doctrine of attack and destroy would have exacerbated the rebellion.

He reached out, ran his finger down the fine, ultra-smooth flesh of her cheek and knew he had never touched anything so soft. I dare you. The memory of her pretty pink lips forming those words had his lips quirking. He leaned close, feathered her hair from her ear and whispered, “Never dare me.” She jackknifed in the bed. Her eyes flew open, and a scream of pure terror erupted from her lips with such a suddenness that he couldn’t counter it. He cursed, jumped for the window, grabbed the rope he’d secured beside it, and in the time it took for her screams to die he was on the ground and running. Damn. Guess he shouldn’t have warned her, he thought with a smile. But he had. And he hoped, for her sake, she remembered it.

Los Angeles Times titled “No Leaders of al Qaeda Found at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” quoted government sources who said that there were “no big fish” in custody there, and the island’s nearly six hundred detainees were not “high enough in the command and control structure to help counter-terrorism experts unravel al Qaeda’s tightknit cell and security system.”18

Congress, representing the voice of the people, should use every tool available to prevent the president from subverting the rule of law. When the president usurps the legislative power and defies the limits of his authority, it becomes all the more imperative for Congress to act. And Congress should use those powers given to it by the Constitution to counter a lawless executive branch—or it will lose its authority. If

All former counter-insurgency officers categorically denied having perpetrated torture during the Terror. In the case of at least one such research participant, anecdotal evidence from mutual contacts suggested otherwise. It is impossible to tell who, if any, of the former counter-insurgency officers featured in this chapter perpetrated torture during the Bheeshanaya. Eliciting confessions is not the aim of this book. My interest lies, instead, in exploring the ways in which ‘perpetrators’ of violence remember and reconstruct their disturbing pasts, and how they come to terms with it in the present.

A key finding is that violence is remembered, given meaning and lived with in the present, in ethical terms. As we have seen from the stories belonging to former insurgents and former state counter-insurgency officers, the mediation of violent memories is fundamentally an ethical exercise for those who have participated in violence. It entails a reconstruction of one’s experiences in moral terms, in ways that enable ‘perpetrators’ to continue living with their unsettling pasts in the present. Memories of violence are morally tendentious, rather than being abstract and objective recollections of a recorded past. Shaped by the changing socio-political and moral contexts of recall, memories of violence are continuously reworked in the present, with profound implications for notions of the self and sociality.

The portrayal of counter-insurgency officers in moral and heroic terms, a division of the world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and a rationalisation of the counter-insurrection characterised their alternative ‘truth’. Through their stories, former counter-insurgency officers engaged in a reworking of the past and a retrospective refashioning of the self, in order to alter their relationship to that past and make it more conducive to life in the present. Their narrative reconstructions allowed them to imbue their morally troubling experiences with meaning, and to find ways of coming to terms with their actions in the aftermath of terror.

The pervert is the clumsy artist trying desperately for a counter-illusion that preserves his individuality-but from within a limited talent and power: hence the fear of the sexual role, of being gobbled up by the woman, carried away by one's own body, and so on. As F. H. Allen-an earlier follower of Rank-pointed out, the homosexual is often one who chooses a body like his own because of his terror of the difference of the woman, his lack of strength to support such a difference. In fact, we might say that the pervert represents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity. Perversions represent an impoverished and ludicrous claim for a sharply defined personality by those least equipped by their early developmental training to exercise such a claim. If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their nature. As we saw above, the childhood experience is crucial in developing a secure sense of one's body, firm identification with the father, strong ego control over oneself, and dependable interpersonal skills. Only if one achieves these can he "do the species role" in a self-forgetful way, a way that does not threaten to submerge him with annihilation anxiety.

refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity, his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence, with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when my boys first reached for me. This world best invite more than the story of the children bleeding on crisp fall days. Tamir’s death must be more . . . than warning about recklessness & abandoned justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is why I hate it all, the protests & their counters, the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood? But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many brothers already call their tomb.

Alan Morgan, stared in disbelief at the centerpiece. “It’s perfect,” he said. “I need to stop thinking about apps that are going to change the world. Obviously the technology of the future is whatever frequency you and Megan are on.” “I’m not sure we’re on the same frequency,” Drew said. “This note doesn’t sound like her. ‘Sorry I can’t make it to your dinner. Something came up. Talk soon, Megan.’ That’s not her at all. Do you think she’s been kidnapped?” “Yes. This is exactly what kidnappers do.” “Don’t be sarcastic.” “No, really. I’m sure the ransom note will be along any minute.” Drew crossed his arms and started sulking. “Don’t sulk,” Alan said. “That’s my job. I’m the old man who’s turning thirty. Poor me.” “Poor me,” Drew said. “If she sent this note, it’s not a good sign.” “Since when does a polite apology spell trouble?” “When it comes from a girl who doesn’t do polite apologies.” “Maybe she’s changed. People change,” Alan said. “You don’t actually believe that, do you?” “No,” Alan said. “She’s probably going to dump you.” Drew didn’t want to admit it, but he’d been thinking the same thing ever since she’d gone silent on the phone. “You’ve still got me,” Alan said. “I’m going to be single forever,” Drew said. “We’re both going to be single forever,” Alan said. “Just the two of us, living in this big house we bought with our blood money.” “You have to stop saying that, or people will think we’re running a crime syndicate.” Alan went over to the fridge and opened it. “You get the crackers, and I’ll liberate one of the cheese plates,” Alan said. “Why?” “Because it’s too early to open the wine, and we need something to ease our sorrows. Me, turning thirty, and you over getting dumped by a girl before we even had a chance to terrorize Mom.” “I’m not sure it’s too early to open the wine,” Drew said. “What about letting it breathe?” “Is that a real thing?” Alan put the marble cheese board on the polished granite counter between then and flung back the clear plastic wrap. “I thought that was just something Mom said to excuse her afternoon drinking.

The likelihood of being killed by terrorism is extremely low, yet we have instituted actions to counter terrorism that significantly reduce our quality of life. As a recent example, X-ray body scanners could increase the risk of cancer to a degree greater than the risk from terrorism—the same sort of counterproductive overreaction as the one to spiders. This does not imply that we should let spiders, or terrorists, crawl all over us—but the risks need to be managed rationally.

Helen stayed on that wood floor, her knees curled toward her chest, as though she could hold herself together that way when everything inside felt like it was exploding. How she hated these episodes. The first time one had happened to her so many years ago, she had thought it was a heart attack, but now she knew all too well the sensation of her organs rebelling. It forced her body to shake furiously against her will. Hot tears coursed down her cheeks, and she couldn’t seem to produce a single positive thought to counter her panic. That was my only chance! What am I going to do? What am I going to do!? How long she lay there, she did not know. When Helen finally came back to her senses enough to notice the world around her, she saw that the light through the window had shifted to a sunset glow. Breathe. Just breathe, she commanded herself. It was then that her gaze caught on a rectangle of cream paper stuck under the kitchen drawers. How had she missed it? She knew she had swept thoroughly.

Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protestors endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don’t want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought—from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run.

One of the six components of every endogroup is an existential threat from external forces. Another is an identity which enables exclusive membership. An empire which includes everyone cannot be exclusive or have plausibly threatening external forces. If there is no external threat, the equally inherent human tendency to egalitarianism creates a counter force which will dismantle any endogroup power structures created in times of emergency.

Then, when enough customers had been refused, the terror of the situation becoming apparent to the underpaid and overworked staff, Caleb would walk up to the counter to push things over the edge, to organize the angry customers, to overtake the Chicken Queen. “It’ll be a thing of beauty,” Caleb told his children. “I don’t want to do this,” Annie said. “Yes, you do,” Caleb responded. “I’m not well,” Annie said. “Buster is not well.” “This will make you better,” Camille said. “We’re a family again. This is what we do.

A society like the Italian, the very disorder of which renders the action of the State useless and ridiculous, is not without its charm and helps us to grasp this political truth: the principal task of the State today is to justify its own existence. To do so, it has to annihilate society's capacity to survive by itself. Surreptitiously undermining all forms of spontaneous regulation, deregulating, desocializing, breaking down the traditional mechanisms of bodies and antibodies, in order to substitute its artificial mechanisms - such is the strategy of a State locked in a subtle struggle with society - exactly like medicine, which lives off the destruction of natural defences and their replacement by artificial ones. In Rome, Niccolini manages to counter the obsessive fear of terrorism with a cultural revival. To the Romans who no longer dare go out in the evenings he offers festivals, performances, poetry galas. He brings culture down into the street. He combats the terrorist festival with the cultural, advertising festival. He will be criticized for wasteful expenditure, but the only way to fight terrorism is not to create 'solid' institutions, but to put upon the stage a culture that is as sacrificial, eccentric, and ephemeral as the terrorist acts themselves. One festival against the other. If terrorism is a sort of murderous advertising campaign which keeps our imagination on tenterhooks, it can be countered only by a piece of even more effective advertising.

The depths of terror are inseparable from the extension of farce. The terror of the Good much more than of Evil, which only follows like a shadow. The parody of the sacred union is taking hold everywhere, under the sign of a full preventive war against the slightest infectious molecule - but also against the least anomaly, the least exception, the least singularity. The biting irony of this counter-terror, of white terror, is that it establishes a vast autoimmune syndrome, self-destruction through excess protection, which leads to crimes against humanity under the sign of the expulsion of Evil, crimes committed by humanity to get rid of itself completely, to cast itself out of an unlivable setting.

balding man in his late 50s. He had a large round gut and pudgy little fingers. Luke knew his story. He was a desk jockey, a man who had come up through the government bureaucracy. On September 11, he was at Treasury running a team analyzing tax evasion and Ponzi schemes. He slid over to counter-terrorism when Homeland Security was created. He had

The SIS was an agency that didn't exist. The primary focus of the group was counter-terrorism.

Ah. Well, I’m not sure we should be discussing such things. Let’s just say it’s a joint effort. I’m sure it has to do with oil, and money. And, of course, cooperation with your government’s counter-terrorism efforts. It benefits both our countries to work together on these things. Either way, I promise you, in a few years, no one will even remember. Everything will have changed. Everything but the fighting.

The process occurs in the U.S. and globally. Thus, many analysts have found other names for such surplus populations suffering exploitation. Comparative literature theorist Rob Nixon writes of “remaindered humans” as the compacted left-overs “on whom neoliberalism’s inequities bear down most heavily.”[72] Mike Davis has discussed them as what the system sees: mere “global residium.”[73] Annu Jalais in India references these groups as neoliberalism’s “dispensable peoples.”[74] Global developmental agencies building megadams (usually funded by the World Bank) create what Thayer Scudder termed “developmental refugees.”[75] Yet, as all these authors stress—and this will be a main point of this book’s Part Two as it develops a “counter-theatrics to state terror”—these groups are agential; they persist and can animate resistance in unexpected ways.

What most likely is upon us is not a revolutionary terror, but a counter-revolutionary terror implemented by disgusted revolutionaries.

Eighty-one percent of the terror groups (fifty-five out of sixty-eight) of the current terror groups present on the US Department of State's Foreign Terrorist Organization list. The Canadian government maintains the Public Safety Canada's list of terrorist organizations. It lists fifty-five terror groups, of which forty-four are Islamic (80 percent). These Islamic groups vary along ethnic, racial, linguistic, economic, political, and geographical lines but are united by a common religious ideology. Several databased and websites keep track of documented terror attacks around the world. These include the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, Wikipedia, and the Religion of Peace website. The latter maintains a running counter of the number of Islamic terror attacks since September 11, 2001. As of July 19, 2019, there have been 35,339 Islamist terror attacks in nearly 70 countries.

The more daily life is eroded, routinized and interactivized, the more we must counter this trend with complex, initiatory sets of rules. The more reality becomes reconciled with its concept in an objectless generality, the more we must seek out the initiatory rupture and the power of illusion. If we cannot make the world the object of our desires, we can at least make it the object of a higher convention - which, precisely, eludes our desire. Any illusion, any initiatory form, involves a severe rule. Any created object, visual or analytic, conceptual or photographic, has to condense all the dimensions of the game into a single one: the allegorical, the representative (mimicry), the agonal (agon), the random (alea) and the vertiginous (ilinx). Recomposing the spectrum. A work, an object, a piece of architecture, a photograph, but equally a crime or an event, must: be the allegory of something, be a challenge to someone, bring chance into play and produce vertigo.

groomed, and fed the family dog for years." A very common occurrence. "Reason for leaving last job: Pushed aside so the vice president's girlfriend could steal my job." Not a great experience then? "Previous experience: Self-employed -- a fiasco." And a poodle when it comes to modesty. "I am a pit bull when it comes to analysis."  Yeah and I am the Queen of England. "I am the king of accounts payable reconciliation." Travelling hobo. "Work history: Bum. Abandoned belongings and led nomadic lifestyle." Perhaps you need a mop for the floor? "I like slipping and sliding around behind the counter and controlling the temperature of the food." Sshhh, people maybe listening. .."Reason for leaving last job: The owner gave new meaning to the word 'paranoia.' I prefer to elaborate privately." It just has. "My ruthlessness terrorized the competition and can sometimes offend." Don't we all. "I love dancing and throwing parties." Wow, that quick. "I am quick at typing, about 25 words per minute.

The system is premised on a rhetoric of a war on Muslim “terrorism” that the Chinese state has imported from the US and its allies post–September 11, 2001. As recently as 2017, Xinjiang authorities hosted British counter-terrorism experts as part of a diplomatic exchange called “Countering the root causes of violent extremism undermining growth and stability in China’s Xinjiang Region by sharing UK best practice.” In the Chinese context, countering violent extremism—something that British experts refer to simply as Prevent—is premised on detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims deemed “untrustworthy” in camps and prisons, and placing still other Muslim adults in jobs far from their homes.

Trauma not only resists meaning, but it interrupts and damages the very means for meaning-making by inducing this aphasic self whose linguistic horizons have been significantly compromised. Consequently, I not only may be unable to put the event into words but may lack the means to even recognize what happened to me. In this manner, trauma dissimulates itself through its diminishing effects. The extermination camp survivor exemplifies such effects. Here is a case in which trauma induces a “saturated phenomenon of suffering.” Such an event is “so intense, so durable, and so all-encompassing” that this suffering becomes “a world unto itself.” In this sense, trauma can be said to deliver a new world. However, it is not an expansive one, opening us to a broader terrain. Instead, it forecloses upon “the shared world,” creating an “abyss” between my prior world and the one now inhabited. Concurrently, there is a “denegation of the carnal” and receding “from the public space.” This phenomenon remains thoroughly and invariantly “unsayable.” Others, in turn, may exacerbate this departure from my previous world by being unable or unwilling to bear my broken discourse. My trauma leads others to turn away in horror as I become their abject. As such, trauma moves in a counter-direction from the shared event and, principally, the erotic phenomenon. There is no futurition, no compossibles, no co-naissance—only a receding of the future as possibility fades in a diminishing hope that ultimately leads me to the indifference I thought I could evade through the possibility of love. Trauma begins in terror but ends in apathy.

The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows: Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror. Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage. Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government. Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West. Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.

Ideology without grievances doesn't resonate. Grievances without ideology aren't acted upon.

Once you establish the principle that you withdraw to escape terrorism, terrorism will chase you,” I countered

madrassas copying megachurch outreach tactics

he could never stop it, unless Government implemented proper counter measures similar to the US. Those measures would in fact stop most of terrorism in its tracks, but would be against human rights, what a joke, we can’t stop terrorists blowing up and killing and maiming others because it would be against their rights, what a crazy world this has become.

Counterinsurgency rests on the assumption that the enemy has significant support in the communities from which it recruits. The aim of counterinsurgency strategy is to deny the enemy any propaganda victories that can further fuel its recruitment. Insurgents must be isolated from their targeted host communities. This requires a combination of psychological, physical and economic warfare, all with the aim of undermining the insurgents’ ideological, operational and financial capabilities. From: Maajid Nawaz's article titled, 'How to Beat Islamic State', December 11th, 2015

For instance, was it wise for Tony Abbott to announce to the House that the federal police had set up counter-terrorism units to intercept would-be jihadis at Sydney and Melbourne airports and that other airports would follow later? Or was it a premature disclosure that tipped off terrorists to escape detection by using Brisbane or Adelaide instead?

would be surprised if they tried ramming a truck loaded with explosives into one of the Olympic venues. We’ve learned how to deal with that sort of attack. Remember the suicide attacker last year who went after the Turks’ building in Baghdad. All he did was ram into a concrete blockade, blow himself up, and shatter a lot of windows. Their methods are changing as we learn to counter them.

Global summits are necessary to discuss and strategise, but will never be the platform that will uproot the seeds of hatred, intolerance, polluted beliefs and passionate convictions that fuel whatever we term terrorism. The excelling leader should be thinking of dealing with the soil and the seed, how do you make sure the soil is not polluted and how do you counter the retrogressive seed that is being planted?

A second important difference between the international environment that shaped Western states and the one that is now shaping post-colonial Middle Eastern states is that many in the latter category can trade petrodollars (or strategic rents) for Western arms, which artificially increases the ability of the rulers to coerce the ruled.[8] At the turn of the century, the Middle East already spent more of its GDP per capita on defence than any other region. Between 1999 and 2008, that spending increased by another 34%.[9] With this difference in mind, it is unrealistic to insist, as Western diplomats and leaders have done following the removal of Mubarak, that transitions from dictatorships to fledgling democracies must be orderly. This is particularly unrealistic given that the international weapons trade, the international reliance on oil and the Western tendency to view the region through a lens of counter-terrorism objectives have all helped to sustain these regimes, but cannot realistically be altered by those who take to the street in protest.

The counter terrorist units received very little attention till terrorism in Punjab blew up on the face of its creators. The Operations Cells, specialised in combating indigenous terrorism, were put on the rails around 1986, after Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Specialised cells to combat ISI operations in India and Pakistan sponsored Islamist terrorism had taken shape only after the Bombay serial bomb blasts in 1993. The political infrastructure and its intelligence edifices responded very slowly to the emerging geopolitical needs.

This Uzbek novel gives the reader two for the price of one. The ‘frame’ novel is documentary fiction, a reconstruction of the last months of its main protagonist, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, as he spend most of 1938 in an NKVD prison during Stalin’s Great Terror, in which three quarters of a million innocent citizens were shot, and several million sent to be worked to death in the Gulags. In Uzbekistan, as in other republics of the USSR, the terror was even worse than in Moscow, for it virtually eliminated, on spurious charges of spying and counter-revolution, not just the Communist Party and local government elite, but much of the country’s intelligentsia and trained professionals.

A counter-theatric to state terror is an effective militant practice toward this end. This is “radical love” in the sense foregrounded by Cornel West, which bases its challenging love of the enemy not just upon the enemy’s needs, but upon an advocacy and fight for “the unloved,”[4] for the oppressed who need effective techniques and institutions of justice into which they can be liberated.

Such a liberating transformation in and against Lockdown America is “spectral,” to use a term from my previous writings.[5] By that I mean that the counter-theatric to state terror makes demands. It is a spectral haunting of the suffering present. It makes demands and cultivates expectations that often make repressive powers tremble. For the repressed, though, this specter is laden with promise and hope. What does this spectral liberation look like?

A day before the November 2015 Paris attacks, President Obama was feeling a little more hopeful about the war against the Islamic State. Noting that the caliphate hadn’t made any significant territorial gains in some time, Obama said it had been “contained.”23 As we know now, this contention was obscenely countered the very next day. Terrorism has also come of age with the millennial generation. The Islamic State of today is miles from the Al Qaeda it grew out of. Its supporters aren’t coming from Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan anymore. They’re living in Belgium, France, Britain, and, as we saw with the attacks in San Benardino and Orlando, even the United States. They’re not refugees or illegal immigrants. They’re legal, passport-carrying, Western-born or naturalized citizens of our countries. So what does bombing them do now? The more you bomb over there, the more the appeal grows over here. And there’s proof of that from the last three wars: the Islamic State itself is the visible result. ISIS isn’t just a geographical entity. There are kids sitting across Western countries, right here in our cities and neighborhoods, being inspired and groomed by the group’s wide-ranging social media expertise and slickly produced propaganda videos as we speak. These kids are not coming here from Syria. They’ve always been here.