If You're Afraid of Being Killed by a Terrorist...

By Mark Davidson and Stephanie Burgoyne

Our chances of being killed by a terrorist are substantially slimmer than dying from other causes, like falling out of bed, tripping on a chair, ingesting gastric contents, and even air pollution. Yet terrorism disproportionately shapes our perception of the risks we face in our lives, and occupies a central position in our understanding of the relationship between the state and its citizens. This book seeks to inject a level of rationality into this highly ideological and emotional issue by showing us how ridiculous we have become, and how much we've been manipulated by strategic media coverage of world issues. The book begins and ends with satirical discussion of terrorism with a strong analytical base. It might be funny, but it makes some good points (in the opinions of the authors, anyway). We argue the familiar position that the seriousness of harmful behaviour is perceived by how it is presented to us, how it is 'constructed' in political terms. Acts perpetrated against other countries by us and our puppet governments all over the world are presented to us as being part of a larger fight for freedom, while identical acts perpetrated against us, for the same reasons, are constructed as terrorism. Similarly, fatal risks are presented to us, or not, in ways that advance certain political agendas. By showing how insignificant the threat of terrorism is, statistically, we are making the point that although we have to attend to what we perceive as 'terrorism' in ways that minimise that risk, it is important to situate that risk in the context of all other risks. Yearly in Canada 1000 people are killed at work, 45 people die from falling off ladders, and 21,000 die from diseases related to air pollution (and that number is expected to rise to 40,000 by 2030). Does it make sense to spend billions upon billions of dollars on military equipment when that money could save far more lives if invested in pollution reduction? Are we minimising or trivialising lives lost to so-called 'terrorism'? Well, put it this way: is someone's death any less valuable or meaningful if it's caused by pollution or a household accident and not by terrorism? We don't think so. In fact, we argue that by emphasising the deaths caused by 'terrorism' to the near complete neglect of other forms of death, we trivialise and minimise the lives lost due to the latter (or ladder). Would the death of Nathan Cirilo be any less tragic or meaningful to those who loved him if he was killed by a drunk driver? Hardly. Drunk drivers kill far more people than terrorists every year, but do we put as many resources into fighting it as we do into fighting 'terrorism'? Hardly. Are the victims of drunk drivers any less worthy of the victims of terrorism? Hardly. What distinguishes them is not the loss or pain that ensues but their usefulness in advancing a political agenda that would otherwise be rejected by most Canadians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Davidson
• Release date: Oct 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311302397

Mark Davidson

Mark Davidson teaches in the Law and Society program at Wilfrid Laurier Univeristy in Ontario. He has a law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School and a Doctorate in Law from the University of Cardiff.

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Fast Foreword

1. The Ubiquity of Terror, or Terrible Ubiquity

Ladies and gentlemen, Canadians, Americans, citizens around the world: terrorism is no laughing matter. Terrorism has been striking nations since the beginning of time. Well, maybe not that long, but certainly since the Second World War. Up until September 11, 2001, however, terrorism was something that happened to ‘other’ people. Poor people. People in South America, in Africa, Asia, and any other nation in the world that didn’t want to sell its natural resources to us rich folks at fire sale prices, or at all. What kinds of resources are we talking about, you might ask. Good question, and here’s a hint: it’s black, comes out of the ground, and start with the letter O and ends with IL.

Of course, we didn’t hear about terrorism because it was far less entertaining than Star Trek. Television networks had trouble getting advertisement dollars for newscasts that showed fascist South American paramilitaries sticking tiny wires into the gums of homeless people and running enough electricity through them to power a walk-in meat freezer, all for the sake of calculating how much power a person’s incisors could handle before they cleared off all the plaque, or died. Somehow a commercial for that minty-fresh-feeling mouthwash didn’t quite work in that context.

So we remained blissfully unaware of the terrorism that our own governments were frequently (incessantly) inflicting on the rest of the world’s people. But who were those ‘others’ who were being terrorized and tortured? Well, it’s fairly straight forward. If your developing country had control of a valuable resource and didn’t recognize that its ‘rightful’ owners were those of us in the developed world—despite your people having occupied the land since time immemorial—you would be subject to terrorism until wealthy countries got their hands on those resources. How else to you think we stayed wealthy, silly?

Sometimes those resources were in lands belonging to Aboriginal peoples. Sometimes those resources were under the control of governments who wanted to use them to help their own people, and not to subsidize the lifestyles of people who drove around in BMW’s and drank $7 coffees with whipped cream and artificial flavours whose names contained so many letters that they would crash spellcheck if we listed them. Those Aboriginal peoples were simply ‘dealt with’: they were either encouraged to relocate to luxury condominiums in Miami, or offered early retirement packages they simply couldn’t turn down. But (usually socialist) governments who refused to obey their Northern masters were labeled dictators, human rights abusers, and generally called bad names.

If you do some research you will discover a trend in world history. The governments of poor countries who hand over their nation’s resources to rich countries at wholesale prices are despised by the bottom 99% of their own people, but they are adored by the rich countries. Their own people dislike them so much that these governments must employ authoritarian (fascist) measures to suppress their peoples’ dissent in order to continue serving their First World overlords. But it’s not as if the rich countries don’t express their gratitude to their fascist friends. No, in exchange for receiving a