In the wake of the horrific Charlie Hebdo massacre, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian made the following statement . “¡°Today,” he said, “the new and serious element is that there is no dividing line between the external threat and the internal threat.” He made this statement as he sought to .justify the current mobilizaiton of ten thousand French troops inside France as well as the expanding French military role in U.S.-led neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and else where.
This statement parallels a historic statement by Adolf Hitler which was also said to justify both military build-up for foreign wars of aggression and suppression of working class and other democratic organizations at home:
“The universities are filled with students and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. The Soviet Union is threatening us with her might and the republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order.”
Such ‘dangers from within and without’ claims are the tried-and-true method for preparing ordinary people, who do not want war or the suppression of democratic rights, to accept both.
The mass march of one-and-a-half million people in Paris, attended by 40 world leaders, might lead one to believe that Islamic jiihadist terrorism is a major threat to the safety and lives and democratic rights of French people and the people in other European or other countries.
But the reality is quite different.
The danger posed to democratic rights and peoples’ lives is virtually infinitesimal compared to everyday occurrences, not to mention far deadlier forms of terrorism orchestrated or supported by some of the same 40 world leaders who appeared in Paris
The U.S. state – supported by its EU allies – has in recent years imposed on the world massive state-sponsored forms of terrorism which have killed not dozens, as in the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but hundreds of thousands or millions. It’s drone terrorism has killed thousands of people, most of them innocent bystanders, and these attacks are carried out without any judicial oversight or ordinary court proceedings; U.S.-led economic terrorism in the form of sanctions has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths in the middle east and elsewhere; and its ; proto-warfare terrorism has been used to kills masses of people and overturn governments using Jihadists as proxies in places like Libya or Syria, or neo-fascist parties like Svoboda and Right-Sector in the Ukraine; and its’ outright wars of military aggression in violation of international law which claim far more lives each year th terrorism.
What’s more, at least in the U.S., unarmed civilians are more likely to be killed by police – at least 450 each year – than by Jihadist terrorists. As for France, vastly greater numbers of people are killed annually by cigarettes, cars, and so-called economic austerity policies which drive people to deaths through outright suicide or by stress.
Beyond the mass media hype, and beyond the pseudo-concern for democratic rights and human lives of many of the 40 leaders who marched in Paris, lies the truth: The horrific Charlie Hebdo massacre is being used by the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, and some other EU governments as the pretext to steamroller public opinion into supporting anti-democratic measures at home, including mass domestic deployment of the military and new repressive legislation; expansion of Ilocal and global police-state-style systems like the NSA; and a further escalation of imperialist wars of aggression aimed at control of the resource rich and geo-strategically important area of the Middle East.
