Andrew Sinclair: There has always been a war on terror

Listening to the claptrap of politicians about a war on terror, I can only revert to the facts. There has always been a war on terror in every society. It has nothing to do with morals, but only with the numbers of the dead and the extent of fear. How many people will die? How many of us will be frightened for our lives?

Governments may rule by fear and fail to control the agents of terror, yet last for a long time. The history of terror should only count the victims and ask why their sacrifice was so necessary. And for what? Usually, only to keep a tyrant in power, or an empire, or an occupation of the wrong land, leading to a protest or intifada from its population.

It is not so much that history repeats itself in tragedy or farce, but in fear. The four human horsemen of the apocalypse, the supreme philosophers of terror, were Machiavelli and Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler. They all advocated measured doses of fear to be given to the population, until the state was taken over. For then, the terrorist groups would be forgiven for their atrocities, once they became the government. In the seizure of power, success creates few critics.

The horror of modern times, however, has been the scale of state terror. We call ourselves more civilised, yet we have managed to massacre through officials and police and death camps more than one hundred million of the innocent in the past hundred years.

Terror will be for ever with us, because there will always be the unjust gap between rich and the poor nations. The thing is to oppose it, but not to use it. The defence of liberty is excellent intelligence and enforcement. And, may I suggest, learning some lessons from past wars on terror.