Well over 50 years ago the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif did a study that showed the fastest way to unite a group which has group conflict is to provide them with a common enemy that comes from outside the group. The problem is that when there is real group conflict those conflicts don’t disappear. “The war on terror” is an example of the rulers of a capitalist society, in this case France, inventing a boogie man – the terrible Islamic fundamentalists – to suppress its own conflicts within its domestic population. In this case it’s the organized protests at the United Nation’s Climate Conference in Paris in spite of the French ban on demonstrations of any kind.
The efficiency of the term “terror” is that it scares people into thinking in black and white terms, and it discourages its enemies from publicly expressing their domestic opposition to the rulers. But we’re afraid the French people are not as easily tamed in their protest against climate change as the Americans were in their version of 911 as this footage shows.
