The (in)security game

Nedd Willard

I don’t know if we will be able to make them stop. Everywhere we go, even in peaceful and friendly Geneva, they are at work tearing up good land, cutting down trees and putting concrete towers, walls, gates and fences up in front of us.

Is paranoia so contagious that one attack is enough to make those is charge of each country recruit more police of all kinds, institute the badge on your chest and the forced stop at the entrance into even a place as safe and dull as an international organization? It must be, or they would not get away with it so easily.

Two things are worth pointing out at the beginning. If people had not allowed themselves to be so scared, so terrified if we can use the expression, of bad people, of imagined murderers and disasters, we could easily slip back into the period, only a few years ago, when these mini-steps toward police states did not yet exist. The other thing to keep in mind is that this new media-promoted mind-terror has allowed a huge and diverse new industry to develop and make large sums of money for those who own, direct or serve in it. Together they constitute the twenty-first century insecurity game.

Before we forget, it was not so long ago, no more than an adolescent’s age, that building prisons was not a massive industry, nor stuffing them over-full of prisoners. And the wars that had gone on before had well defined uniformed enemies fighting them. Today, we have ‘drug fiends’, mad terrorists, illegal combatants, and incompatible “ethnic” groups. Mixed together, they form an evil miasma without definite form that hangs over every citizen’s head, everywhere.

It took quite a while to drift over the Geneva sky and infiltrate the corridors, but it is here now. Dissipating this dark cloud, calming things down, asking what are really the risks and who gets paid for supposedly dealing with them will take time. But we had better start asking harder questions now about the need for all these uniformed response to undefined menaces that will take away, bite by bite, our basic rights as human beings to go where we want, without hindrance, so long as we bother no one else. We have an intrinsic right not be questioned, searched, or detained just because someone somewhere, in a government statement or on television, has proclaimed it. And we had better start now, before things get a lot worse.