Comment by lotyrin
3 days ago
You justify surveillance in the wake of terrorist attacks, etc. and when public sentiment toward government is mostly good (the financial surveillance here is an example)
You make moves to constrict the available information and permitted behavior of residents and citizens in excess of what is defined by law through pressure on culture and public marketplaces, etc. and not legal action by government. (e.g. the stuff going on with erotic content on Steam recently, but not limited to stuff like that). You start with more questionable and controversial things like e.g. sexually explicit content, then progress to all content or ideas that are inconvenient to your regime.
You boil the frog of authority over the public at a rate where only a minority starts noticing problems and looking for solutions in educating themselves using politically inconvenient media (and flagging themselves as enemies in the surveillance tools) or taking action that is inconvenient to you
You start making court cases against these inconvenient people and start deporting them or incarcerating them. First with e.g. illegal immigrants or foreign national students that are saying things that are unpopular, but slowly escalate to all the people that disagree with you.
If you don't think all these things are well established, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(
Is it though? I mean the US supported Bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians. Essentially we had a pet snake and complained when it bit us.
I think that the same case with Hamas which I believe was a mossad creation.
Most of these problems are self inflicted.
Well, no, not really - Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit attrocity so great against the American people that they will have to look into who those people are and why they did it, at which point hopefully they will discover their own government's work in the middle east and rise up against the government in protest.
Obviously, that didn't happen - I don't think your average American had any interest in looking into any of it, they just went "Arab people bad, let's invade", and of course accepted even greater invigilation and intrusion into their daily life and travel than ever before, all in the name of "safety". So yeah, terrorists made our lives miserable - but they failed to achieve their goals.
It's not really that, though. The people who won are those in power, at home. They were handed a pretext to increase their control and surveillance of their citizens.
"Letting the terrorists win" is an expression from not long after 9/11 using a combination of the following logic. First, the Bush administration said something along the lines of "they hate us for our freedom" about the 9/11 terrorists, and if the terrorists hate freedom then enacting freedom-reducing policies in response to an act of terrorism is playing into their hands. Second, a common definition of terrorism is using fear to achieve political ends, so anyone who uses an act of violence to justify oppressive policies is sadistically taking political advantage of a tragedy at best and even meets that definition of a terrorist. Therefore enacting oppressive policies in response to an act of terrorism is letting the terrorists win.
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They had the Patriot Act ready to go prior to 9/11. Some minor text changes, and everyone is voting for it.
It's my favorite thing about "Inside Job" conspiracies. Whether authority has covertly orchestrated an event behind the scenes or if they were quietly and deliberately lax in preventing the event, if they were just incompetent, or simply failed through no fault of their own: the event has now happened, so the important bit is that they have overtly capitalized on it to create policies with harmful consequences.