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Quote by Iain Overton

“What is clearer is that suicide attacks, and our responses to them, have been central to the formation of the modern age. They helped create the conditions that caused the Russian Revolution; they were in the forefront of the minds of men who created a nuclear epoch and, unwittingly, the Cold War that followed; they were there at the beginning of the War on Terror that still dominates our headlines and they have helped drag the Middle East into the quagmire that it is today. In so doing, they have fuelled fears about migrants and refugees the world over, they have challenged the UN to its very core, and they have fed off conspiracy theories, post-truth propaganda and a view that the world is witnessing a millenarian clash of civilliations that heralds the end of days.”

Quote by Iain Overton

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The Price of Paradise

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Iain Overton

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“This kind of speculation reached a high point with the Pentagon's initiative of creating a 'futures market in events', a stock market of prices for terrorist attacks or catastrophes. You bet on the probable occurrence of such events against those who don't believe they'll happen. This speculative market is intended to operate like the market in soya or sugar. You might speculate on the number of AIDS victims in Africa or on the probability that the San Andreas Fault will give way (the Pentagon's initiative is said to derive from the fact that they credit the free market in speculation with better forecasting powers than the secret services). Of course it is merely a step from here to insider trading: betting on the event before you cause it is still the surest way (they say Bin Laden did this, speculating on TWA shares before 11 September). It's like taking out life insurance on your wife before you murder her. There's a great difference between the event that happens (happened) in historical time and the event that happens in the real time of information. To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the 'global' event- or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc. Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events.”

“The days of passengers sitting still during plane hijackings ended with 9/11. Before then, the worst that would have happened was that you'd probably spend a few days on a runway in a banana republic while the hijackers made their demands. On September 11th, 2001, it was just fireballs of instant death as the planes got deliberately crashed by the terrorists. From that point on, passivity was never an option again.”