By Paul Rosenberg, FreemansPerspective.com
There was a shooting earlier this week in DC. The details are still sketchy as I write this, but it appears that a deranged man decided to kill other people for some reason. In response, the usual talking heads will be debating whether this is actual TerrorTM or merely something like it. But the T-word will be spoken in the same grave way we speak of cancer – a thing to be dreaded above all else.
Certainly this shooting was a horrible, tragic thing – especially for the families involved. But that said, any talk about an “age of terror” is utter crap.
Terror is NOT worse now than it was before 9/11 – it’s just that we’ve been bombarded with fear for more than a decade, creating a culture-wide residue that poisons every mind it touches. In actual fact, you are eight times more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist. Does that mean that we should all have a collective panic attack and beg for anti-police police?
Now here’s the truth they don’t want you to know: You are taught to fear because fear makes you easy to manipulate. If someone is making you afraid, they’re also making you into an easy mark – a sucker.
Think of how many things people have accepted from governments just because they were afraid. Things like complete online surveillance, crotch searches at airports, random searches on the highways, and so on. Do you think those would have been accepted in 1920? Of course they wouldn’t, because people hadn’t been sufficiently frightened at that time.
The Facts About Terrorism
The fact is, there has been terror in every age of human history. Our time is not unusual at all. A small but consistent percentage of people are always crazy enough to kill strangers and blow things up.
Let me give you some proof from a single year:
- March 6: A bomb being assembled by terrorists explodes, killing 3.
- April 8: 47 children are killed by (peacetime) bombs from a neighboring country.
- May 4: Soldiers kill four American college students.
- May 8: A huge mob of construction workers in New York attacks protestors.
- May 14: Police fire on a crowd at a college, killing 2 and injuring 12.
- June 9: A bomb explodes at New York police headquarters.
- July 12: Two canisters of tear gas are thrown into the British House of Commons.
- August 7: Terrorists take a judge hostage in California, then kill him.
- September 1: An assassination attempt on the King of Jordan.
- September 6: Terrorists hijack four airplanes on flights to New York.
- October 5: Terrorists kidnap a British diplomat.
- October 10: Terrorists kidnap a Canadian Minister. He is found dead a week later.
- November 25: Terrorists seize the headquarters of Japan’s Defense Forces.
- November 27: An assassination attempt on the Pope.
- December 3: A major government caves and releases 5 terrorists.
- December 4: Spain declares martial law.
- December 7: A Swiss ambassador is kidnapped.
- December 13: Martial law is declared in Poland.
Can You Guess The Year?
Think it was in some terrible period of history? Maybe one of the worst years during World War Two?
It was 1970.
But you don’t have any horrible, scary feelings about 1970, do you? That’s because you were never taught to have them – unlike the endless fear that has been promoted to you in recent years.
You may not remember 1970, but I do, and I’ll tell you that people weren’t peeing themselves over this stuff. They thought these events were horrible, of course, but they also knew that such things had always happened, and would continue to happen.
Acts of Terrorism in the US
While 9/11 resulted in the single highest loss of life due to terrorism, such events aren’t isolated incidents. We’ve always had them:
- 1910: A bomb goes off at the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21.
- 1917: A race riot in East St. Louis kills between 40 and 200.
- 1919: A race riot in Chicago kills dozens and injures hundreds.
- 1920: A bomb explodes on Wall Street, killing 38 and injuring 143.
- 1927: A deranged man blows up a school in Michigan, killing 44 and injuring 58.
- 1943: A race riot in Detroit kills 34 and injures 433.
- 1968: Race riots erupt in at least 125 US cities.
- 1972: Terrorists detonate a bomb inside the Pentagon.
- 1988: A terrorist poisons bottles of Tylenol in Chicago. 7 people die.
Get the picture? And I can give you examples of terror back to a few thousand years BC, from every corner of the world.
Do you really think that our new Nazi-style police state will stop this? (The Nazis couldn’t even stop assassination attempts on Hitler.)
These events are tragic, of course, but the chorus of fear that accompanies them it is all about manipulation: to keep us quiet and well behaved while we are bled of our money and our freedoms.
And boy, are they good at it.
[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]
