Is the word “terrorism” a secret terrorist weapon?
It appears that when US government officials try to think about terrorism their brains stop working. It’s a word that has become a piece of neural malware and everywhere it spreads, rational minds sputter and then cease to function. Who could have dreamed that a simple word could be so potent and destructive.
Yesterday we were told this: “The State Department alerts U.S. citizens to the potential for terrorist attacks in Europe.”
Why were they so specific, limiting the warning to just one continent?
The State website usefully provides a map, just in case anyone isn’t sure where Europe is. Should Americans already there jump on the first plane to head home? Apparently not.
“U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.”
This might prevent a few road fatalities. Drivers in Europe do expect pedestrians to exercise caution in the vicinity of fast-moving traffic. It’s always a good idea not to step off the curb with your eyes shut.
The New York Times thought it would be good to get some expert opinion on the significance of the State travel alert. Georgetown University’s Bruce Hoffman said: “I’m not sure what it says, beyond the fact that the world’s a dangerous place, and we already knew that.” Indeed.
As to who prompted this response to the latest al Qaeda threat:
A White House spokesman, Nicholas S. Shapiro, said that while the State Department had decided to issue the alert, it came in response to Mr. Obama’s insistence that “we need to do everything possible to disrupt this plot and protect the American people.”
Now here’s the serious point.
In terms of being able to identify where the next major act of terrorism may strike, the US government can’t be any more precise than to specify a continent — and with that level of precision who’s to say whether they identified the right continent.
At the same time, when it comes to identifying from where the next major act of terrorism will emanate, the US government claims it can identify targets with pinpoint accuracy as it escalates drone warfare in Pakistan.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that those who see danger everywhere also claim they have a talent for shooting straight.
There was a time — and it’s really not that long ago — that terrorism provoked a sturdier response from politicians who recognized that it was not their job to become agents of mass hysteria.
On October 12, 1984, Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, survived an assassination attempt by the IRA. Five were killed and 31 injured in the blast which occurred at 2.54AM. Just over an hour later, having dusted herself off and changed her clothes, Thatcher spoke to the press.
“Life must go on as usual,” she said and went on to speak at the Conservative Party Conference which continued on schedule.
The event was recalled in Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain*:
The IRA responded with equal clarity:
Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.
The Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign continued until 1997.
Thatcher may have lacked the political flexibility and imagination required for the peace process, but she and the people of Northern Ireland and Britain demonstrated that life can indeed go on as usual even during a decades-long bombing campaign.
President Obama on the other hand seems willing to try and perpetuate the illusion that rests as the foundation of the war on terrorism: the idea that terrorism can be thwarted. It cannot.
The opportunities for individuals or small groups of individuals to cause carnage are infinite. The means to prevent such acts of violence are limited.
Political courage demands the articulation of this truth: the issue is not how you stop the unstoppable, but what you do afterwards.
Terrorism can provoke either intelligent or stupid responses and nothing is more stupid than an approach to counterterrorism which ends up fueling further acts of random violence.
Is the world safer now than it was on September 12, 2001? Obviously not.
The fact that 9/11 was followed by a decade of war with no end in sight is the grossest act of stupidity in modern history. Through its misconceived approach to counterterrorism America has rewarded al Qaeda more generously than Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed.
*Marr’s entertaining BBC documentary series covers British history from the end of the Second World War onwards. The context for the clip above was Thatcher’s ruthless campaign against the National Union of Miners led by Arthur Scargill, but more broadly an effort to destroy the trade union movement and dismantle the welfare state. In the process, she deservedly became the most despised woman in Britain.
North American peopple are not only uneducated and sentimentaloid.
They are also paranoid.
You can not fight a war on a ‘strategy’.
Such constant fear-mongering is what keeps the the Corporate Military-Surveillance-Media Complex in power and justifies its outrageously bloated budget as everyone else struggles to survive the collapse of the predatory capitalist economy.
War is a racket (Smedley Butler) which must be continually propagandized.
I lost the URL. but William Blum posted an article a few days pointing out that the US has bombed 30 countries since the end of World War 2 not to mention involvement in numerous coups against governments our ruling elites disliked for one reason or another. The US supported Indonesian coup in 1965, for example, resulted in the death of an estimated 500,000 communists and other leftists.
So these kinds of atrocities long preceded the so called war on terror. The”war on terror” really is just the latest propaganda cover for a war to achieve US global hegemony.
The US culture is one in which a mere word can reduce its hearers to gibbering stupidity. Terrorist, Islam, socialist, Darwinist, atheist — good grief, I hope I haven’t caused someone a heart attack by putting five together.
While it’s evident that many people can look at the words rationally, the resources keeping the masses in thrall are enormous — paid for by the work and spending of those victims themselves. It’s the mall/advertising culture, the consumer society that eats its own children in the process of bolstering that fraudulent benchmark called GDP. Those with the greatest financial rewards, in industry, commerce, government, and the military industrial complex are those who produce the least social value.
It’s happened to others but at least they, like the Brits, had the sense to despise and remove the cause of their afflictions.
Fillmorehagan, surely you are aware that it’s only terrorism when it’s done against your country? When your country does things far more unjust and contemptible than anything terrorists have ever done by definition those things are done by patriotic good Americans who deserve medals.
Regards, Alex
What is quite striking about the distortion and hysteria about “terrorism” is how old the story goes back in the U.S. , “Land of Freedom”.One could cite Chomsky at least twenty-five years ago (I refer to the Barsamian interviews and others from the 1980’s) on how the manufacturers of consent in the U.S. have been so successful in indoctrinating the public, especially the “educated” public.
In the U.K.( and “Old Europe” generally, I suppose), we are, of course, more sophisticated and less openly hysterical about these things, probably because, unlike the Yanks, we have a recent history of being severely under fire at home (not, say, in Hawaii) ourselves in real wars from powerful enemies.
Because of the post-1945 kow-tow to the senior partner (as Mr Cameron has put it) Thatcher made scarcely a murmur when the gallant U.S. forces invaded and crushed Grenada, supposedly a British area of influence.All in the name of the Cold War, of course.
Then again, glorying in the nostalgia for the Empire, Thatcher was able to win one of her elections through an open war, to defend the Falklands. The huge damage she did to the British psyche continues to today, when we are becoming subtly militarised, very much as the Land of the Free is. Thatcher and her cronies were/are as slithery as any Washington pundits, just with a different accent.
I am not impressed with ALQ and all those supposed Muslim radicals as terrorist. Where are the hordes of pissed off Muslim suicide bombers in Europe and the US?
The Irish were better terriers than these folks.
Seriously, why aren’t they blowing up Walmarts and McDonalds, grocery stores, churches, schools, restaurants, apartments building in Miami or Lizard Lick..I mean there are so many easy targets they could hit to strike fear and sow chaos . Hell, you could blow Key West completely off the map with half a dozen bombs. If I were a terrier out to destroy the West I would want to destroy ‘normal’…make people fear all the normal places they go and things they do every day. Bombing the WTC or national monuments is theater, not real terror. And all a decent assassin has to do is read the NYT, WP and LA society and gossip columns that tell everything you need to know about who goes where regularly, when they going to be there ..you could get rid of
half of the K Street operatives, assorted media pundits and politicians with one small shoulder missile weapon fired at a private home political fete in Georgetown.
I don’t know, these terriers don’t seem very professional or dedicated to me.