Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Hitchens on the "Thousand Cuts"

Christopher Hitchens weighs in on the airport security issue. An excerpt:

The authors of this propaganda show a natural talent for psychological warfare. It is, one might say, "part and parcel" of the campaign they slightly unoriginally call "a thousand cuts." But the simplicity of that scheme is as self-evident as its cunning. By means of everyday devices and products, plus a swelling number of human volunteers willing to die and kill, they can strike at will and even afford to taunt us in advance. While we pay salaries to thousands and thousands of dogged employees to glare suspiciously at shampoos and shoes and toners, the homicidal adversary discards those means as soon as they are used and switches to another. How they must chortle when they see how sensitive we are to the "invasion of privacy" involved in a close-up grope or a full-on body scan. In preparing their own bodies for paradise, they know no such inhibition. If they guess that we will not even think about how to pre-empt the appalling anal strategy, they so far guess right.

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