According to iTele there are now 118 dead.
Edit: Now it's up to 140. What a sad day :(
replies(5):
Edit: Now it's up to 140. What a sad day :(
The knowledge that a network could carry out such a widespread and well-coordinated attack without being preempted, in a situation of maximum alert, will heavy on the minds of any French citizen regardless of whether victims were 118 or 119. Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. That is a huge problem.
How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society?
You can't even prevent them when not being a free society. Its not like terrorism only occurs in free societies.
There is very little chance of anyone successfully getting up to terrorism if society is
a) riddled with informers b) detaining people without charges is legal c) totalitarian ideology and political supremacy makes the establishment of parallel societies impossible. Border controls make importing terrorists next to impossible.
The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents. Pulling them off would be harder, the state would cover it up, etc. Just like it had practically no mob.
It did have a great many terrorists, mostly in various training camps.
Being a police state is one thing; being an _effective_ police state is something else, much harder (at least in the pre-computer era). In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...
Soviets did have some organized crime, but they were well, Russians.
GDR, Czechoslovakia, etc, somewhat less inept countries had very little crime and no organized crime to speak of.
While the regime exercised strong control of information prior to glasnost, and had plenty of motive to repress information that would indicate weakness of the regime, there are numerous known hijackings, the 1977 Moscow bombings, and others. (While reliable information about responsibility for some, and any broader organizational responsibility that might be behind those clearly responsible for others, is hard to come by, there does seem to be a disproportionate link to Armenia among the known incidents, with some specifically linked to Armenian nationalists.)
Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.
What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)