Terrorism: as dangerous as a bathtub

Stilgherrian — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 01:24:44 +0000

Over-hyping “the threat of terrorism” is one of the more obscene reality-distortions being committed by our current government and its Washington and London counterparts. This is well-documented. But nowhere is it made more clear than in this statistic:

Excepting a few particularly bad years, the annual number of deaths from terrorism worldwide since the late 1960s, when the [US] State Department started record-keeping, is only about the same as the number of Americans who drown every year in bathtubs.

Now for a quick crash course in how terrorism works…

Louise Richardson has been teaching about terrorism for more than a decade. She’s so annoyed by the Bush response to terrorism that she wrote What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat.

For a very quick summary, read John Naughton’s 12-bullet-point distillation.

For a more elaborate summary, read Max Rodenbeck’s review in The New York Review of Books, which also considers John Mueller’s Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them and by Charles Peña’s Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

There’s plenty of happy bed-time reading for you!

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Terrorism: as dangerous as a bathtub

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