Fearmongering Is Terrorism Very, Very Bad
A phrase I ran into somewhere or other the other day, and it keeps coming to mind. Notexactly at all true, but there's significant truth in
[Thanks to Anonymous for smacking me back onto the straight and narrow...]
A phrase I ran into somewhere or other the other day, and it keeps coming to mind. Not
[Thanks to Anonymous for smacking me back onto the straight and narrow...]
posted by Winston Smith at
8:46 AM
12 Comments:
"Not exactly true". Not even a little true. There is one point of major analogy between fearmongering as a rhetorical strategy and terrorism: Using fear as the motivating emotion. On most every other salient point, they are very different. There are certainly not nearly enough points of similarly between fearmongering and terrorism to get the moral equivalence that this slogan is clearly meant to imply.
I'm rather surprised to see you going for this pattern of sloganeering, Winston. Moving from one similarity to equivalence is such a favorite past time of the loony academic left, source of: "The University is a plantation", "Heterosex is rape", and "Hollywood is genocide". No, they're not - not even if a clever person can point out a similarity between them.
Sorry to get hung up on this, but left in the US has been infected for a while now with these false equivalencies. This got started in playing the game of Soviet apologetics, when each monstrous action of the USSR had to be put in one-to-one correspondence to something that happened here: "Oh, well Stalin's purges were terrible, but what was the Hollywood blacklist but a purge of our own?" This habit of coming up with some kind fake tu quoque for any evil the right denounces is bad because it's usually false, but bad practically for the left for two reasons: It stifles the case for reform, since every time you improve society, an analogy can be drawn to the evils of the old. (The academic left is fine with this of course, since only Revolution! can count as anything being any better at all.) The other main problem with this kind of thinking is that it alienates reasonable people: Who want to listen to an argument from someone who thinks making a red phone ad is like incinerating a subway train full of commuters?
Good points, A, and I appreciate you keeping me honest.
Of course I've been obsessing about the forces that are acting as al Qaeda force multipliers by blowing the threat of terrorism radically out of proportion. When I asserted that there was truth in 'fearmongering is terrorism,' what I meant was something like: fearmongering about terrorism makes you an ally--perhaps an unwitting ally--of terrorists."
So, that's a truth, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 'fearmongering is terrorism'...but it's pretty clearly not *in* it in any reasonable sense.
So you're right, so far as I can tell, and I was wrong.
So I'll modify it asap to something more like:
Fearmongers: the terrorist's pal.
Our national discourse hasn't been based on a clear definition of what 'terrorism' means. The Bushists and the press have used it very loosely to mean any violence perpetrated against us that is sufficiently heinous.
The definition I use, FWIW, is violence for political ends that targets innocent people. There is of course still a lot to work out in that definition since there's a lot of room in 'political' and 'innocent'.
So, without evidence to the contrary, I'd say that the Bushists aren't even abetting terrorism. They're just weakly succumbing to it by exploiting the fear that many of the rest of us have managed to overcome.
The troubles with LL's definition:
1) To capture clear cases of terrorism, "political" would have to be broadened to the point of vacuity. Aum Shinrikyo's attacks on the Tokyo subways were clearly terrorism, but - as Murakami's great book on this makes clear - none of the purpetrators had any kind of identifiable political goal in mind. And, if even just venting-my-crazy-world-view counts as a political goal, then pretty much anything does.
2) Putting aside what counts as "innocent", it's pretty clear that one can be the victim of terrorism even if you are flat guilty of something, if you are flat guilty of something that is motivating the terroists to come for you, and even if you are flat guilty of something that really is very wrong and is motivating the terrorists to come for you. If someone had, for example, snuck into Pinochet's bedroom and taken him hostage to get the disappeared set free, it would still have been terrorism.
The only reason to try put get "innocent" built into the definition of terrorism is to try to have "terrorism is wrong" come out as always, 100% (because analytically) true. But this strategy for defining "terrorism" sacrefices what is distinctive about terror as a phenomenon - distinct from war, from propaganda, and other similar things - in favor of making the word useful as a term of abuse. Any violence we see as wrong is terrorism, whether is be an unjust war or fighting back against a just one.
Terrorism is, I suspect, like torture in the following way: The sentence "Terrorism is wrong" is not simply true without investigation of the facts, by definition. The fertile imagination can come up with plenty of stories in which committing a terrorist act is right; the Pinochet case above might be like this. (This being the web, most such stories will be about Hitler...) But, given the actual character of terrorism, when it will as a matter of fact work and why you might use it instead of another technique, these stories are going to be pretty far fetched. In actual fact, Pinochet and Pol Pot and the Third Reich don't get hit by terrorists to make them quit their evil, countries with free medias and governments sensitive to public opinion get hit to make them freak out - and indirectly advance religious fundementalism. That's what makes it wrong in just about every real case you can name.
Its a mistake to try to get the definition to do the work of generating the principle.
Well said, especially the last bit.
For the record "terrorism" was originally used simply to get "Islam" out of the term. There was a well-founded concern after 9-11 that any reaction would be seen as a "War on Islam," which would have brought a billion Muslims off the sidelines.
And for the record, "fearmongering" is a pejorative, and begs any question it asks.
Like a high school debater - or Presidential candidate - I'll dispense with the easy "critique" first. 'Terrorism' has been in use for a long time. The Bushists' use of it has been filled with conflation for political purposes from the beginning. They are not a good source for its proper usage.
Anonymous's critique follows my signposts, but s/he mistakes 'terrorism' for 'asymmetrical warfare'. Killing Pinochet or even Hitler would not have been terrorism; rather, they would have been war or revolution.
Aum Shinrikyo? I don't recall a coherent grievance, but weren't they attacking the Japanese government by attacking civilians? If so, still terrorism under my definition.
Whether 'terrorism', as used almost universally is always wrong is, I think, settled usage. But I'm looking for useful categories through this definition, so if Anon has a better definition, I'm all ears. I would however resist a definition that defines 'terrorism' solely by tactics or by ignoring who the victims are.
Anon, I think the error you're making is akin to calling all killings murder. Yes, in a specific case, we still have to investigate to determine whether a particular act is murder or terrorism. What we know at the outset is that the act is killing or (usually) asymmetrical warfare (though of course the use of terror against civilian populations can come from the strong as well as the weak).
Nice, A.
In a rush now, but I agree that the definition of 'terrorism' is tough to get right. As with lots of similar terms, there are roughly two ways to go with the dfn:
1. A normatively loaded dfn., e.g. one that builds the wrongness into the concept.
or
2. One that doesn't.
I'm not sure that terrorism is a concept that's even clear enough to know which way to go on it. Of course if consequentialism is true, then anything can be justified if the consequences work out right.
If I were going to let myself get pulled into responding to Tom, which I am not, I'd point out that it is, of course, a pejorative term, but since fearmongering is a bad act, it should be named by a pejorative term. I would also point out that Tom still apparently does not know what 'begs the question' means.
I used it quite purposefully and correctly. It's a question that supplies its own answer, as you do when you start any argument with the term "fearmongering."
You simply declare your opponents are doing it, and you win. It begs its own question.
Sorry I gravitated to the part that was slagging on me. It's a conditioned response. LL of course ignores that directly after 9-11, "Bushists" prudently used the generic non-Islam-related term "terrorism" for a very specific phenomenon, al-Qaeda announcing with that brutal act the commencement of the Restoration of the Caliphate.
Good call, altho to this day some complain about its vagueness. But that's semantics ex post facto. Everybody knew what Bush [and the US, and the rest of the West] was talking about. They just didn't give al-Jazeera a quote to take out of context, and wisely.
To the larger point of terrorism, I happened to agree with Ward Churchill's characterization of the Twin Towers victims as "Little Eichmans," altho playing the Hitler Card repulses more people than it attracts.
When civilizations clash at the elemental level, there are no innocents [except perhaps children, a side discussion]. In the olden days, in a death struggle, women used to follow the advance of the male army, slitting the throats of the enemy wounded.
There is no real difference between these women and those who today provide logistical support for a war effort. Or, to the Islamist mind, those who sustain neo-colonialism and crusader domination.
Fair game. Pow.
The West has no historical grounds to carp---it's true Hitler started it in WWII with his terror bombings of Britain [and later, the V-2s], but the Allies answered in kind as the war went on. And before Hiroshima, there was the terror incindiary bombing of Tokyo, which claimed even more lives than the nukes themselves.
In a death struggle, there are no "gentleman's agreements." The Geneva Conventions were conceived as gentlemen's agreements between professional soldiers, not on "human rights" grounds. A social contract between elites, not a cosmic declaration.
And as the West seeks to define "terrorism" as inherently evil, it forgets the seminal moment of terrorism as geo-political change---the Zionist bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. To this day---accurately or inaccurately---it's seen by the Muslim world as the pivotal moment and act that led to the establishment of the State of Israel.
They do not forget.
Menachem Begin was the head terrorist. He eventually became the prime minister of Israel. Yesterday's terrorist becomes tomorrow's statesman, and that's why Yassir Arafat has such a long shelf-life.
So, we in the West may decry "terrorism" as inherently bad on whatever grounds, but the Muslim world still suspects that's it's merely another tactic, and, judging by history, an effective one.
[You have the chance to kill Hitler in 1944. Justice, moral act, terrorism? Google Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the amazing story of an amazing man...]
Um, this doesn't actually make any sense, Tom.
I agree with Tom. I'm skeptical of this Fearmongering assertion. Since it's impossible to have any evidence for it outside of one's own political purview, it's a question-begging scenario. It's a conditioned response ex post facto.
Sorry, WS. The Bonhoeffer was an unnecessary tangent.
As to the rest, add in the theological dimension, and "terrorism" becomes not only not-inherently bad, but a virtuous, even redeeming act.
Ugh.
Not-bad satire, Mystic, but I wouldn't have misused "purview."
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home