2 - The other trend is the implicit or global hostage situation: an entire population is hostage to terrorism, i.e. a terrorist entity or a criminal group using terrorist methods. This is the concept of "total war", the ultimate political violence in which no one is kept outside of the so-called "conflict". That`s why, ladies and gentlemen, I told you we are all hostages.
This global hostage situation can be incrementally direct or indirect.

·  Directly, it can be a nationalist group within its own population or in its people's Diaspora (Kurds/PKK, Tamils/LTTE...). It can also happen in a sub-country in a revolutionary or civil war process (Basque country/ETA, IRA/Ireland catholic neiborhoods before the truce...).

The usual means are violence, extortion and revolutionary tax: the whole national group is an hostage of the terrorist and the consensus, if always emphasized, never real. Most of the people pay, not by will, but because they are obliged to; most of them do not agree with the violence which is usually used to show what can happen if they do not satisfy conditions of the terrorist group. They are hostages...

·  This global hostage situation can be indirect too. Indirectly, it can be a whole country, even a group of countries facing a global terrorist threat, where people live in fear and concede to restrictions on their freedoms, while the government reduces fundamental freedoms through the imposition of measures intended to counter potential terrorist acts.
It's today the case of the freedom of travel, particularly in airlines and the global fear of anthrax coming through mail, i.e. the entire problem of NBC terrorism that should be developed separately.

That is the situation we face now here and in many of the western Countries.

We, today, are hostages.