Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-05-Speech-3-036"
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"en.20070905.2.3-036"2
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"Mr President, obviously I am not against the litanies of fine sentiments, incantations and pious wishes that are dominating this debate, but I cannot really see in them the kind of objectivity I believe is necessary to understand a phenomenon that has so abruptly come to occupy our minds – so abruptly, moreover, that we are not taking the trouble to work out the ins and outs of it, the causes and the consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, what is politics if it is not patiently working out the causes and consequences of what immediately concerns us?
Frightening video surveillance systems are being installed everywhere, in public places and even on the streets. Why? To fight terrorism. We put citizens on file, develop the police services, and sometimes the secret police. Why? To fight terrorism. We bring back torture. Why? To fight terrorism. We change laws and increasingly we flout them, and we even flout people’s fundamental rights, the supposed substitute for our Bibles of old. Why? To fight terrorism. We install anti-missile shields everywhere, even in countries such as the Czech Republic, to the great displeasure of its population which has not experienced any terrorism anyway, and all in the name of the fight against terrorism. In short, we divide nations, create mistrust between peoples and most of all, we browbeat them, which is what has happened in our European nations, alas, in east and west alike. Why? To fight terrorism.
Ladies and gentlemen, is it not clear that it is not terrorism that absorbs us, but the fight against terrorism? An insidious veil is clouding our vision, and we cannot even see it. Of course I do not deny the vileness of the attacks in our nations, in Spain and the United Kingdom. However, these examples speak for themselves in that terrorism affected these countries because they supported an act of war: the invasion of a sovereign state. Moreover, I am not afraid to say that what happened in Iraq was not so much a response to terrorism as another age-old, barbaric form of terrorism that took international tension up a notch.
In truth, terrorism is itself the consequence of a profoundly unbalanced world, dominated by an empire that, like all the world’s empires, denies borders and peoples, aiming to create everywhere a one-dimensional, uniform world, obsessively focused on the value of goods alone. A world so stifling and violent for the diversity of different peoples that the only response is another kind of violence, one that is obviously equally unacceptable: terror.
Let us have the courage to really think about this. What if terrorism was primarily a consequence of this new categorical imperative that is imposed by market forces and is part of its logic: the suppression of borders. Not only is the abolition of borders, the fashion for cross-borderism, doing away with the world’s diversity and infuriating those who want to keep it, but also the disappearance of borders favours the machinations of gangs. Perhaps this, ladies and gentlemen, is a discussion point that could be added to the debate on the fight against terrorism?"@en1
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