They call them anti-terror raids, though one has to ask seriously whether they are stopping anything at all. An idle conversation where a man who is worked up blurts out, “I would like to shove a bomb up his arse” can always be interpreted by an over-zealous, dumb police officer as a terror threat.
The timing of the raids in Brisbane and Sydney was very neat – it all happened very close to September 11, the day that all people in the West associate with terrorism. It’s a good time to stage such raids and raise the fear factor.
Politicians all over the world know the value of the politics of fear. Scare the bejesus out of the populace and the ratings of a president or prime minister generally tend to rise. And Tony Abbott has been in sore need of just such a rise in ratings ever since his treasurer, Joe Hockey, brought down an ideological budget that taxes the poor and makes the rich richer.
It is no coincidence that nobody is talking about the measures in the budget which have still to be passed – a fancy parental leave scheme that would benefit the rich, the changes to education that would again ensure that only people with money can acquire an university education, the changes to welfare payments that would deprive young people of the dole for the first six months they are eligible for it… it goes on.
It would appear from all the blather that Abbott and his ministers — particularly the attorney-general George “Metadata” Brandis — have been spouting that Australia is about to be subjected to numerous attacks by terrorists.
One account is that there was a plan to behead someone in public. You know, cut off the head of Mr Average Citizen. Another was to blow up Parliament House. And so on.
But the evidence for all these plots is hidden from public view – that’s a convenient smokescreen to make any and all allegations and make a gullible public scared enough to accept it.
Governments have been doing this kind of thing for centuries. Remember the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incidents which served to kick off the US involvement in Vietnam? Remember the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the weapons which still have not been sighted?
The tragedy in all this is that there are no journalists with the balls to question anything. They dumbly swallow all the tales trotted out and even magnify them to make the whole thing seem scarier. Before the whole charade was kicked off, Abbott announced a sum of $630 million for the security forces over four years — including the “spy” agency ASIO which has never caught a single spy — and, of course, they have repaid his munificence in spades.
Some years ago, the American journalist Matt Taibbi, when writing about the late Christopher Hitchens’ criticism of Michael Moore for his film Fahrenheit 9/11, defended Moore by saying that if one American scribe had shouted out “bullshit” when George W. Bush was ratcheting up the fear factor with his talk of WMD and trying to push an invasion of Iraq, then the whole thing might have just died a premature death. Taibbi made the point to emphasise that Moore’s film was doing just that and would have been unnecessary had the media done its role as the fourth estate.
This time, too, there is no-one to call out that one word, to be sceptical and raise questions about this whole terror play. It is a sad day for the media – and yet people wonder why newspapers are losing readers when they serve as another arm of government propaganda.
Welcome to Team Australia.