Workers Solidarity Movement

REMAIN INDOORS, TERRORISTS ARE COMING FOR YOUR FREEDOM

Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan has said Ireland is on alert for terrorist attacks and that sweeping zero-tolerance anti-terrorism legislation will be soon before the Dáil.

Enough hysteria. In Ireland we've prided ourselves for not indulging such wacky 'anti-terrorism' mania to the extent the US and UK have post-11/9. 'Terrorism' is an ill-defined nonsense term and this is as true as ever.
 

Where is the emergency legislation to halt the suicide epidemic in Ireland? 17 people were murdered in the horrendous Charlie Hebdo attack. Thousands die of suicide. What about emergency legislation to halt poverty? To stop people dying waiting for treatment in hospitals? How about emergency legislation to end the austerity agenda which is spreading fascism around Europe?

This list could go on longer than Charlie Flanagan's expenses, the point is that 'terrorism' is made to be The Big Threat because it is defined, in practice, as stuff the state doesn't do.

As Chomsky recently wrote in an article about the Charlie Hebdo attack: 'Terrorism is not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power'.

This is not to mention the Irish government's disgusting, cowardly complicity in US and UK imperialism by letting their warplanes use Shannon airport. Islamist nutcase Anjem Choudary remarked that this nullified our neutrality, and he is correct. And yet, Shannon will not be closed off to these warplanes. Our neutrality will not be asserted.

Instead vague 'anti-terror' legislation will be brought in. And we all know that never gets abused, because we can really trust the state to guarantee our freedoms, and 'terrorism' isn't arbitrary in the slightest.

As thousands of protesters in Greece - where unemployment is cripplingly high - chanted 'Terrorism is having to look for a job'. We live in a global system of structural violence. We live under the Tyranny of Want, as Wilde put it, a regimented world where humans are parts to be rented, where a miniscule fraction of the population controls nearly all the wealth, where states imprison us, beat us, censor us, steal our individuality and initiative. We are marginalised and disempowered for our gender and sex and race and sexual orientation and all manner of arbitrary characteristics.

This is terrorism.