| Tuesday, March 7, 2006 |
13:58 - Terrorism
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It seems to me that a lot of people have managed to badly misconstrue the point of terrorism.
People assume that terrorist attacks are themselves a means to extract concessions from a population; that if you as a society give up these concessions, then the terrorist attacks will stop.
This is badly wrong. Terrorism in and of itself is not intended to extract anything from the population. Its purpose is to create terror. Its purposes are to raise the stakes, to change people's expectations and thresholds of pain, and to put people on edge. The real dividend of a terrorist attack is never the aftermath of the attack itself; it's the fear of the next attack.
After 9/11, and after Bali, and after 7/7, what was the immediate shift in the national moods in question? It was to harden against the terrorists, to band together in patriotism, to reassess one's cultural strengths, and to go to war in grand alliance. From the perspective of an outside party watching the fortunes of al Qaeda immediately following 9/11, or following any of the other attacks they've pulled off, it could only be seen as a colossal misstep on the part of the terrorists—a huge blunder that succeeded only in steeling the population against them.
But say that to an al Qaeda strategist, and he'd probably just smirk knowingly. Offer him the concessions directly, and he'd probably laugh and go on with the plans for the next attack. Extracting concessions isn't his job. Terrorizing us into thinking we have to give up the concessions is his job. Real terrorists can't be bought off with concessions. If they could, they'd just be extortionists, not terrorists.
It's true that terrorism has steeled people against the terrorists themselves, yes. We've exerted our righteous anger in cleansing Afghanistan and driven al Qaeda and the Taliban out of the headlines and into the funny pages. But in the meantime, we're bending over backwards to appease the terrorists' less-deadly co-religionists, the ones raging over cartoons and demanding the removal of Piglet coffee mugs from the workplace. We worry more about bestirring the fragile peace of the Arab Street than about being seen as weak and perfunctory in our anti-terrorism efforts. All out of the fear of another attack—an attack that might never have to come.
As far as al Qaeda are concerned, their work is done. They've started the wheels in motion. They sacrificed themselves, and in so doing won their hoped-for concessions—not for themselves, but for the rest of the world's Islamists.
Terrorism serves as a means for creating a backdrop behind peaceful social change—an unspoken understanding of what will happen if we don't concede things. "Limit our free speech," we tell ourselves, "or else we know what'll happen." No further need to explain. And no further need for actual terrorists—the specter of their possible existence is sufficient to give us the context for our decision-making. Without even realizing what we're doing, we pass out concessions like candy—all while telling the world we'll never bend before terrorists or accede to their demands. Gimme a break: we're acceding like puppets. We just don't think we are, because it's not the terrorists who are themselves directly benefitting. Their demands are a lot further along the way toward being met than they were in 2001, aren't they? By any outsider's measure, the Islamists are winning spectacularly.
I wonder if we would be so eager to equivocate in the name of multiculturalism and tolerance and understanding if we thought about it this way.
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Brian Tiemann
