Playing the Political Victim card - Lesson 3

October 13, 4:29 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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Suspicious artsy-looking guys with a camera. Must be terrorists!
(Kaufman brothers Mikhail and David, Wikimedia Commons)

In the first two lessons on how to play the Shame & Blame Game in America's long running culture war you learned how to slap down the Race Card and the Sexist Card.

Those two cards have been shamelessly played face up and in your face for a very long time. But today's class concerns itself with a more recent addition to the deck: the Terrorist Card.

Terrorism has been defined in many ways by many folks, most famously by Homeland Security in an April memo identifying domestic terrorists as "rightwing extremist groups" that implausibly includes libertarians who are neither right- nor leftwing and the "alternative media" which would apparently include Examiner.com and, presumably, you, if you're not reading this in the mainstream media.

Before that, the general definition referred to people killing the innocent citizens of a government in order to induce that government to change its policies, as apposed to, say, a government killing its own innocent citizens to get the innocent citizens to change their policies.

Thus, people blowing up buildings with fertilizer bombs is an act of terrorism, but governments knocking down walls with tracked military vehicles and setting a religious compound ablaze, killing 76 people including over 20 children and two pregnant women, is not.

This, of course, is because terrorism is a word defined by governments rather than by people.

But ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks everything that used to be a crime in America became acts of terrorism instead.

Wantonly punching around on the internet in search of examples brings up this old chestnut from Watchblog's Democrats & Liberals Archives of 2003:

"Terrorism is as much a crime as drug trafficking or arms smuggling."

Note that drug trafficking and arms smuggling are "crimes" only because government made them crimes. Otherwise, they're simply acts of business. Someone wants to buy drugs or guns, someone else wants to sell drugs or guns, they hook up and swap dollars for merchandise. The libertarian formula is: no coercion, no intimidation, no fraud equals no crime equals no terrorism.

But it gets worse.

An article in the Great Falls Tribune conflates playground tormenters with terrorism in this passage: "Schools are places of bullying and terrorism, not just for teens who identify publicly as LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender], but also for those whom others perceive to be gay because of some physical or personality trait."

So the terrorist card can be played any time any kind of aggression occurs.

But then it gets even worse.

Reuben Powell, described by The Independent (UK), as "A white, middle-aged, middle-class artist" was doing what he's been doing for 25 years, sketching and photographing people and places around his London neighborhood when an officer jumped out of a police car and asked what he was doing. When Powell replied that he was photographing a building the officer searched and arrested him under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

So now an act of terrorism doesn't require either criminal or aggressive activity. The terrorism card can be played by any minion of any government body for any reason that the petty pipsqueak chooses to play it.

So facts be damned; we are all terrorists now.