Terrorists and Anarchists

The Economist ran an interesting piece last week comparing today's terrorists with the anarchists of the late 1800s. The similarities are striking.

Given its political bent, the Economist did not go into the striking similarities between the maladaptive government reactions to the anarchists and our current expensive and maladaptive anti-terror policies.

A quick run down:

We now have a very expensive government bureaucracy (with color coding).
We now have a very expensive war/occupation in Iraq (without enough body armor).
We now have fewer civil liberties (because its easier to catch people saying or reading something than bombing something).

With the anarchists, it was a case of a misperceived threat. They were not organized. They liked attention. But they were not going to take over the world any time soon. Freaking out about them probably prolonged their reign of terror.

Having just come off of a colossal misjudgment about the cold war, we should be more cautious in judging threats and less quick to decide that we need to freak out and change everything. Of course with a hotheaded cowboy in the white house, it was sort of inevitable.