Surrealpolitik: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction

After 9/11, we found ourselves in an apparently open-ended and permanent state of emergency, a 'war against terror', whose ramifications are as inscrutable as terrorism itself...When society feels under threat, attempts at rational analysis are often openly resisted as giving aid and comfort to, or even sympathizing with, the enemy. (page 1-2)
Tags: [Terror, Rationality]

For the core of nearly all definitions of terrorism -- the use of violence for political ends -- is too similar to the definition of war to be of much use. (page 6)
Tags: [Terror]

The attempt to transfer the notion of 'innocent civilians' from the international law of war to the study of terrorism has foundered on the realization that innocence is another relative, unstable quality. It was, for instance, impossible for people fighting against Germany in the Second World War to accept that most German civilians...bore no responsibility at all for the existence and conduct of the Nazi regime...But of course the Germans themselves felt, if not entirely, then substantially (and increasingly) innocent: this amplified their sense of unfairness when they were deliberately targeted by the British bombers. And in politics, as distinct from courts of law, subjective belief and feeling are supreme. (page 7-8)
Tags: [Terror]

When (presumed) 'terrorist' acts are left 'unsigned' -- like PanAm 103 or the 9/11 attacks -- it is up to the onlookers to fill in the blanks. The results can be varied. (page 9)
Tags: [Terror]

The Spanish government tried to pin responsibility for the Madrid train bombing in March 2004 on ETA; (unusually) it suffered electoral defeat for its perceived deception. (page 10)
Tags: [Terror]

Thinking about the terror process leads to the conclusion that the essential distinction between war and terrorism lies in their operational logic; war is ultimately coercive, terrorism is persuasive. War is in essence physical, terrorism is mental. (page 14)
Tags: [Terror]

If terrorists are 'fanatics of simplicity', so are all too many good citizens. Most terrorists, like all too many of those who have taken part in mass murder, are disturbingly normal. (page 17)
Tags: [Terror]

Since [the French Revolution], governments have been on any quantitative measure the most prolific users of terroristic violence. Yet there is no hint of this in the dominant official discourse, whether of national or international law. In that discourse, terrorism is used by extremists -- rebels -- against the established order -- the state. (page 24)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Culture, Terror, Media]

Can terrorism liberate? Or might the process of terror have 'corrupting consequences that reverberate for decades'? Certainly the apocalyptic dreams which have animated many terrorist groups have never materialized. In this sense, those, like the distinguished historian Walter Laqueur, who argue that terrorism has always failed are right. Shock and horror have their limits. (page 27)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Terror]

Despite its obvious improbabilities, not to say absurdities, the terror network idea was subjected to surprisingly little criticism until the end of the Cold War eviscerated it. (page 28-29)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Terror]

There are certainly grounds for caution. A recent skeptical assessment of the threat suggested three major reasons why it might be exaggerated: sloppy thinking, vested interests, and morbid fascination. (page 34)
Tags: [Terror]

Six months after the 9/11 attacks, the American jurist Ronald Dworkin warned that the biggest damage resulting from the counterterrorist reaction had been to the long-cherished American legal defences of individual freedom. Though nobody would dare to suggest publicly that such damage was greater than the masse killing in the Twin Towers, it may have a more pernicious long-term effect on the quality of our life. (page 36)
Tags: [Terror]

The Committees of Public Safety and General Security, even more than the Convention from which they sprang, represented the progressive avant-garde of the French Revolution. They pioneered representative democracy and equality before the law. It was their adoption of terror that first imprinted the word 'terrorist' in the political lexicon, and transformed the Revolution in the eyes of many outsiders from a liberating to a destructive force. At the same time, their rationalism itself drove them to rework the justification of political violence. They had to find justifications for violent killing, especially lynching -- the most problematic kind of violence because the most threatening to an ordered society. (page 38)
Tags: [The Left, Terror, Rationality]

The Reign of Terror was informed by the Enlightenment assumption that the social order can be changed by human agency. For a long time, those who were prepared to defend the terrorists did so on the grounds that their action was rational, because inevitable, in the circumstances. Certainly the Revolution as the Jacobin elite saw it was under threat in 1972-3, confronted with both external and internal enemies. But this argument is weakened by the fact that the Terror reached its height, with the truly terrifying law of 22 prairial Year II (1794) -- depriving the accused of the right to counsel or to call witnesses, and empowering the revolutionary tribunal to execute suspects on the basis of moral conviction -- at a time when both of these threats were receding. (page 38-39)
Tags: [The Left, Fascism, Terror]

More telling still is the way that the radical revolutionaries defined -- or invented -- their enemies in relation to their special vision of the revolution. The men who dominated the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre and Saint-Just, like the editor of L'ami du peuple Jean-Paul Marat, invested the people with a republican virtue that was often too sublime for the real world. They framed issues in absolutes and opposites: Robespierre's rhetoric invoked 'all the virtues and all the miracles of the Republic' against 'the vices and the absurdities of the monarchy'. Counter-revolutionaries were labelled monsters, ferocious beasts, vultures, leeches, or -- if allowed human status at all -- brigands, and were found even more frequently amongst the lower orders than amongst the aristocracy. There might be a monarchist or a 'non-juring' priest (one who refused to accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) under every bed. Along with these negative or visceral identifications went the positive identification of revolutionary justice, in the form of lynching. Marat argued from the outset that such killing was an imprescriptible right of the sovereign people: the natural violence required to resist oppression and preserve liberty against tyranny. Altogether this provided an ideological charter for the most extreme action, without compunction or remorse. (page 39)
Tags: [Revolution, The Left, Fascism, Terror]

[With reference to the Reign of Terror] But what was such terror intended to achieve? And what did it achieve? Extirpation is different from intimidation or persuasion. Were the dead simply to be eliminated, or to serve as an awful warning pour encourager les autres? Were the terrorists just too pressed for time to attempt to convert the counter-revolutionaries, or did they think them beyond saving by force of argument? In trying to unpick this issue, we can begin to establish a basic repertoire of the functions of terror. Three key motives may be identified: vengeance, intimidation, and purification...The function of violence as moral agency -- very clearly enunciated by Marat, for instance -- was the Revolution's most distinctive translation of premodern into modern political logic. (page 40-41)
Tags: [Terror]

The French Revolution's ruthless and systematic use of violence created a model for the application of terrorizing force by the holders of state power over the next couple of centuries. (page 41)
Tags: [Terror]

It is important to grasp how far state terror has dwarfed the puny efforts of rebels in the 20th century. (page 46)
Tags: [Terror]

The military or military-controlled regimes in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere, taking the socialist threat as justification, unleashed full-blown systems of terror designed to paralyse all left-wing activity. The keynotes of these systems, in which whole armies and police forces seem to have participated enthusiastically, were not only killing, but a perhaps more sinister and subversive structure of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and 'disappearance'. Though these must be described as 'systems' of terror, they were not comprehensible as such -- rather the apparently uncontrolled action of variegated and overlapping security forces created a nightmarish situation that may perhaps be called Kafkaesque. (page 47)
Tags: [Fascism, Terror]

[Argentinian] General Videla defined as a terrorist 'not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization'. (page 48)
Tags: [Terror]

Running through any account of state terror is the tension between 'terror' as a semi-random by-product of massive repressive violence, and terrorism as a deliberately focused product of demonstrative violence. One notable authority suggests that 'rule by violence and intimidation by those already in power against their own citizenry' is 'generally termed "terror" in order to distinguish that phenomenon from "terrorism", which is understood to be violence committed by non-state entities'. Oddly, it seems that the former -- vastly more murderous and widespread over the last century -- has raised less public alarm than the latter. There was perhaps some consistency in the Soviet view in the early 1980s (inevitably dismissed as ludicrous special pleading by most Western writers at that time) that while communists embraced revolutionary violence, they 'reject terrorism as a means of obtaining political objectives'; and that the main perpetrators of terrorism in Afghanistan were the US-backed guerrilla forces. (page 51-53)
Tags: [Terror]

The effectiveness of terrorism in achieving national liberation also appeared to be demonstrated in the Algerian war of independence. The Front de Libération nationale (FLN; National Liberation front) launched its rebellion in 1954 but was making little progress until it adopted in 1966 the terrorist logic advocated by Ramdane Abane. Abane urged that a single killing in Algiers -- where the US press would report it -- was more effective than ten in the remote countryside, and he insisted that the morality of terrorism simply paralleled that of government repression. (page 94)
Tags: [Terror, Media]

Studies of mainstream religious culture in Egypt and elsewhere are demonstrating a world where the natural and supernatural are inextricably interlaced. (page 103)
Tags: [Terror]

Suicide attacks have multiplied dramatically -- there have been three times as many since 2000 as in the previous twenty years -- and some have produced visible strategic results. For instance, the hugely destructive suicidal attacks on American and French installations in Lebanon contributed to the withdrawal of those countries' forces from Lebanon, with significant medium-term political effects. But thinking about this issue is fraught with difficulty, not least because in the nature of things there is often no conclusive evidence whether the incidents were simply high-risk operations rather than deliberate sacrifices. Even the 9/11 hijackers may not all have been told of the finality of their mission. In some attempted car and truck bomb attacks in Lebanon in the 1980s, it appears that the drivers did not know that they had been chosen to become martyrs by remote control. (page 108)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Terror]

The UK Defence Minister went as far as to declare in October 2010 that 'the world is more dangerous than at any time in recent memory'. He was not asked to justify this proposition. In political terms, the option of ignoring terrorism, however rational, is unprofitable. (page 119)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Terror]

But being seen to 'do something' is not easy when the opponent is invisible. Governments soon develop, as Adam Roberts says, 'a powerful thirst for intelligence' which can quickly lead to bending or breaking legal constraints in the search for information. It can lead to increased police powers, detention without trial, far-reaching changes in legal procedures, and the use of torture, or its milder relation 'inhuman and degrading treatment'. (page 120)
Tags: [Fascism, Terror]

Clausewitz made the apparently simple point that 'the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive' is for decision-makers to be clear about what a situation is and what it is not. Any illusion of simplicity here dissolves when terrorism is at issue, since we are driven back to the fundamental problem of defining the nature of terrorism and the threat it represents. (page 121)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Terror]

The advocates of military action were not required to demonstrate that 9/11 was the opening of a new kind of conflict, rather than an old-style terrorist act on a larger scale. The idea that terrorist organizations could be located and destroyed in the manner of conventional targets was hardly subjected to any public dispute at the outset. (Rare objections came from the distinguished military historian Sir Michael Howard, who urged more painstaking, less cathartic methods, and the former Monty Python star Terry Jones, who first raised the question whether it was possible to make war on an abstract noun.) (page 122-123)
Tags: [Humor, Terror]

Though the US at first claimed [bin Laden] had been killed resisting arrest, it became clear that he was unarmed. If this was 'justice', as President Obama asserted, it was far removed from due process. Bin Laden was killed not because he could not be captured, but because (as with the Guantanamo detainees) it was impossible to convict him in court. (page 127)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Terror]

It has always been clear that antiterrorist action needed to be international as well as domestic if it were to be effective. (Conrad's Secret Agent, Verloc, was employed on just such a design, on the part of an illiberal central European state, to lever Britain into an antiterrorist coalition)...But the whole problem -- as acute in 1937 as during Tony Blair's visit to Syria in October 2001 -- was that no usable common definition of terrorism, least of all 'as criminal behaviour', could be reached. (page 130)
Tags: [Terror]

A belief in the deterrent effect of 'smart' munitions (quicker and simpler than intelligence work, certainly) has survived a surprising amount of contrary evidence. (page 135)
Tags: [Terror]

There was at least room for suspicion that the threat of terrorism was being used as a pretext for striking down disagreeable regimes. (page 135)
Tags: [Fascism, Terror, Myth]

If we look for precise evaluation of the effectiveness of antiterrorist policies we find it is surprisingly thin on the ground...none of the many official reviews of the British antiterrorist legislation carried out over the last 40 years has adduced any concrete evidence on its effectiveness -- or apparently seen the need to do so. (page 136)
Tags: [Terror]

It is less often registered that the main contribution of the media is to 'the perception more than the reality of the terrorist threat', as Simon notes, and that it tends to widen and dramatize the public notion of the threat. More commonly and intemperately, analysts and politicians have asserted that publicity is the 'oxygen' of terrorism. (page 138-139)
Tags: [Terror, Media]

Terrorism, however defined, is certainly a calculated assault on the culture of reasonableness. It is also, surely, liberalism rather than democracy that is threatened, not so much by violence itself as by the state's reactions to it -- often, as Schmid notes propelled by popular demands...It is here that the problem of defining terrorism and evaluating the threat it poses becomes acute; the very imprecision of the concept and its operation leads to loose definition of the powers taken to oppose it, while (as in war) the blanket of national security smothers the interrogative powers on which public accountability depends. Without the effective interrogation of legislation and executive action there is no liberal democracy. (page 140)
Tags: [Surrealism & Politics, Terror, Rationality]