If you fervently wish for and pretend you are in a crisis for long enough, you will eventually create a crisis. We’re not quite there yet, and Britain is determined that we not get there.
The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.
Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”
The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”
London is not a battlefield, he said.
“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”
His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the “war on terror” language has officially been ditched.
The sooner we ditch it, the sooner we’ll be on the road to national mental health.
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April 17, 2007 – The phrase “war on terror” has been dumped from the British government’s vocabulary, according to up-and-coming International Development Secretary Hilary Benn.
Benn, speaking at New York University – not far from the site of the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing – said that the term only inflates the expectations of small groups of extremists, and distorts the current struggle against political and religious violence.
“We do not use the phrase `war on terror’ because we can’t win by military means alone,” he said. “And because this isn’t us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.”
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And, adds Philip Coyle of the Center for Defense Information, and a former U.S. assistant defence secretary, “for the first six years of Bush’s presidency it paid off politically to make a crusade of the war on terror. Now, day after day, people are seeing it hasn’t worked.”
The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism
● Gordon Brown Bans War on Terror ◊ by BooMan
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Hopefully, “Homeland” will go to the same place that Germany’s “Fatherland” and “Mother Russia” went. But, of course, it’s all this dookie as part of the hocus pocus to get people to stop thinking and just react.
I don’t like that word “Homeland” either whatever happen to the United States of America.
Well you certainly have to be hopeful that we will eventually wean ourselves from the dependency on this false paradigm. But, unfortunately, even with a Democratic President I fear that we will still be subject to the inanity of this monumental misnomer for the foreseeable future. It is such a loaded term and has been associated for so long to the vision of the burning and collapsing Twin Towers that it might well take years to purge it from our national subconscious, even after it becomes passe. Having such a convenient, easily reachable and all encompassing phrase hanging on our collective sleeves has served very well the interests of both the Democratic and Republican war enablers and their friends in the corporate war machine.
It will not disappear without a fight. I think it is probably safe to say that there will come a point where the United States government, the neocons and the affiliated profit-makers on war will be the only ones left on the planet flogging this horrible lie. They want it. They need it. It is a prerequisite for the perpetuation of their eternal state of war and the continual lining of their coffers. Until war is not profitable, I’m afraid the phrase will live on.
Edwards has disavowed the term ‘war on terror’ calling it a bumper sticker slogan of bushco. He also said it has been used to take away many of our basic freedoms all in the name of the so called war on terror.
I think it was in one of the debates that the moderator asked everyone to raise their hand if they believed there was a ‘war on terror’…with Clinton shooting up hand immediately and Obama apparently reluctantly raising his hand while Edwards said no.
At least if Edwards became president we wouldn’t have to hear that inane phrase over and over and over again.
Unfortunately, while Edwards might eschew the phrase, it would undoubtedly still be blathered endlessly by the media and all those who need there to be a “war on terror”. If having a President who doesn’t say it was any guarantee we could put it to bed for good, hell, I’d find a way to vote for him twice!
Unfortunately you’re right..the media has been extremely and absolutely complicit in perpetrating this fearmongering phrase and keeping the general public cowed into believing we really are at ‘war’.
The media reinforces the “war on terror” meme because that’s what they’ve been told to do. I could be naive, but if there was an administration in place headed by a President who declared from the Capitol steps on January 20, 2009 that you can’t have a war on an emotion, if the administration completely purged the phrase from its lexicon, and if the media were offered the carrot of access to the White House and the stick of being shut out, I think they’d fall in line pretty quickly.
I don’t suppose it’d be easy, but few things that are worthwhile are.
Does this mean that the war on terror is over? Glad I was here to see it happen.
That language is not a pr campaign, or a political tactic–it’s a very specific legal device intended to maximize our President’s war powers, in a pretty much endless way. So the chances that Bushco will stop using it are slim and none.
McVay was a terrorist. The people who burned abortion clinics on Christmas day are terrorists. And yes, the (at least) two guys who conspired to kill Bhutto, plus the security guards who became AWOL, are terrorists too.
But Kerry was right. This is a police action, not a war.
Donald Rumsfeld: : “At the present time — we’ve used the phrase ‘global war against terror,’ which I find not perfect. I think that it is really a long struggle, as opposed to a war, which implies armies, navies, air forces and Marines contesting each other. It is irregular, it’s asymmetric, and it is not against terrorism per se; it is against these violent extremists who use terrorism, but they also could use other things.”
http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3823
Rummy again: ” I guess I don’t think I would have called it the war on terror. I don’t mean to be critical of those who have or did or — and certainly I’ve used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? I say it because the word “war” conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War, and it creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within the 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. And it isn’t going to happen that way.
“Furthermore, it’s not a war on terror. Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and impose their — in the hands of a small group of clerics, their dark vision on all the people that they can control.
“So ‘war on terror’ has a problem for me, and I’ve worked to try to reduce the extent to which that’s used, and increase the extent to which we understand it more as a long war or a struggle or a conflict, not against terrorism but against a relatively small number, but terribly dangerous and lethal, violent extremists.”
http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3824
and George Bush: They can’t stand the thought of a free society in the midst of a part of the world that’s just desperate for freedom. These people don’t like freedom. You know why? Because it clashes with their ideology. We actually misnamed the war on terror, it ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world. (Laughter.)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040806-1.html