Remember, remember, the fifth of November... in honour of the day, I was watching V for Vendetta. I won't summarise the movie here, but suffice to say that it focuses on the question of terrorism, one that I think it's wise to consider today, if at no other time.
We're all tired, I'm sure, of hearing that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", but it is certainly something we should all keep in mind. Terrorists, one would guess, cause terror — but whatever spin that terror is given, is it ever justified, even if the people on the receiving end are villainous beyond measure? Is physically violent terror any different from mentally-induced terror?
Most importantly, as Evey Hammond asks in V for Vendetta (and I'm paraphrasing), how is destroying a building meant to fix a country with a host of problems? And is asking a country to unite behind the destruction of the building any different than the government asking the country to unite in the face of a deadly pandemic?
So maybe we're all terrorists, establishment and anti-establishment alike. Because there's never going to be a "right" answer, as long as there are people on both sides of the divide. We can only make our voices heard and hope to achieve a solution that we can all live with, right?
In that vein, if you live in the US and are over 18, please, please go vote on Tuesday. It's the least you can do.
About Me
- Emily Rutherford
- Princeton, NJ, United States
- I blog avidly, but on WordPress. I'm a teenager from California and I aspire to overcome both these things.
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5 comments:
I would tend to see terrorism as a tactic of war, in the same way as siege engines and stone castles might have been in medieval times.
The world we live in today has military advantage stacked heavily in favour of a very small number of nations - they can attack from the air, they can use remote sensing to identify enemy targets, they can literally reduce a city to dust in one action. So, terrorism has evolved as a response to this huge level of asymmetry - small, mobile independent units using channels such as the media to spread panic and fear as a way of combating the huge advantage of the heavily armed opponent.
It's not linked to any particular world-view either, although a strong ideology tends to support it. The IRA and the Red Army Faction were Marxists, the Shining Path and the Nepalese Rebels are Maoist, Al Qaeda are Wahhabi Muslim, the SADR brigade are Shia muslim, the Tamils are Hindu, the Michigan Militia were just plain paranoid: but the common thread seems to be David vs Goliath type conflicts and the use of flexibility and mobility and the media to combat vast military superiority.
This, to me, is why references to a "War on Terror" are ridiculous. It's like First World War generals saying "we are going to have a war on trench building".
Terrorism is effective in the same way as war is effective. Some wars are won with little bloodshed, others - many of them - end in a massive quagmire of killing and suffering. The vast majority of times terrorism has no long-lasting effect despite the damage and bitterness engendered, but it may help to create a democratic mandate, as the IRA have done in Ireland, or to throw an invader out of your country, as the Mujahideen did to the Soviets.
I would love to think that we could all settle our differences in democratic debate and compromise, but it seems, war has always been around in one form or another because ultimately we don't like listening to each other and so many of us think we have it all sussed. What we see with modern day terrorism is a manifestation of war in the 21st century.
Sort of agreeing with Woodpigeon...
It's a bit of a false dichotomy. Terror has always been used in war. As the Duke of Wellington said of his own troops:
"I don't know about the enemy, but they terrify me" Other examples...sirens deliberately fitted to JU-88 (Stuka) dive-bombers; the bagpipes of the Highland regiments...and in our own times...'Shock and Awe'.
Yes, the distinction between 'terrorist' and 'freedom fighter' is a bit of a cliché. Chomsky makes a different one - between retail terrorism and wholesale terrorism. Governments are capable of inflicting - and do inflict - not only more destruction than any freelance group, but also more terror. Governments argue that, unlike the 'terrorists', their terror is an uninentended if inevitable side-effect. This seems somewhat disingenuous. Also, inaccurate: In WWII the RAF (unlike the Luftwaffe) deliberately targetted civilian areas. The philosopher AC Grayling has argued that this could legitimately be judged a war crime. Others (see here) counter-argue "So what else should they have done?"
Now apply this to a Hamas suicide bomber.
A historical note:
I think that the word 'terrorist' was first coined during a bombing campaign by anarchists (see Conarad's The Secret Agents and later Fenians in Late 19th/Early 20thC London. (The Police's counter-terrorist HQ was housed above a gentlemen's public lavatory. The Fenians bombed it! :-) ). In these campaigns, the 'terror' was comparitively low-key and focussed.
Woodpigeon:
The Rote Armee Fraktion...Marxist? Yes and no. I've been researching them for a long-pending h2g2 Entry and have been trying to make sense of their political aims. I've spoken to some politically savvy German friends - the kind of people known to throw rocks at the police in Kreuzberg - but thay can't figure them out either. One pointed out the dissimilarity with the Italian Brigate Rosse who had understandable politics and links with unions - hence their assasination of a Fiat boss during a strike. The consensus seems to be that Andreas Baader was just a thug with good fashion sense. Work in progress here.
*rolleyes* Here we go, taking up the opposition.
Soldiers are pre-arranged targets and meters for a war. Whoever kills the most soldiers, thereby making the other side yell 'uncle', wins.
Terrorists who target soliders - like American soldiers in Iraq - are yes, employing another form of warfare. I would even suggest that they not be called terrorists.
Terrorists who target civilians, regardless of their beliefs - for terrorists frequently kill supporters (collateral damage) - are not practising warfare, or even war-unfair. They're murdering.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, offers this definition of terrorism: “The deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends.” (Terrorism—How the West Can Win) Sam Sarkesian of Loyola University, Chicago, defines it as “usually characterized by a variety of tactics, such as assassination, hijacking, kidnapping, sabotage, and the use of ‘innocent’ victims to affect a third party. Terrorism, in short, is the creation of fear in a population in order to force the existing system to respond to the terrorists’ demands and/or objectives.”—Hydra of Carnage.
On the other hand, Catholic professor of theology James Burtchaell writes: “Terrorism is the warfare of the desperate. . . . [It] is always the gesture of those who feel themselves at a disadvantage.”—Fighting Back.
Whichever way you look at it, terrorism usually means violence and death for innocent people. As Jan Schreiber writes in his book The Ultimate Weapon: “Like an army, a terrorist gang operates in a dehumanized mode, making atrocity the stuff of daily life.”
"Terrorism : Who Are Affected?" in Awake! Jan 8, 1987.
Sorry, I didn't make it clear that my previous comment is entierly a quotation. So is this.
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