Apr 14, 2005

On Terrorism

by Cliopatria

Some thoughts on terrorism:

Eric Rudolph’s recent guilty pleas have reminded me of something that we too often forget: For all of the (absolutely legitimate) concerns about Muslim Fundamentalist terrorism, in the history of the United States the worst terrorists in terms of body counts, number of attacks, or the level of threat they posed to the American ideals of liberty, freedom, democracy and justice have been radically right-wing white men. Rudolph has pled guilty to four bombings, and officials know that he was probably responsible for more carnage and attempted mayhem. Rudolph’s agenda was both clear and highly ideological, one of the main components of any definition of terrorism. Indeed he made it quite apparent that his reckless murders came about as a result of his opposition to abortion (right to life, indeed).

One need look no further than the thousands of documented lynchings in the South (indeed in America generally) in the seventy-five years after the 1880s, not to mention countless other acts of violence against African Americans, including civil rights activists, returning World War II veterans who refused to acquiesce to white supremacy, victims of sexual mores designed putatively to protect the virtue of white womanhood while at the same time keeping women in a box of sexism and patriarchy, and yet others who fell victim simply by virtue of bad luck, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I think about this pervasive form of violence, terrorism that has far deeper and more profound impact on the history of the United States than 9/11, when I try to tie global terrorism into the American experience, something I am trying to do both in a course on global terrorism that I have been teaching at UTPB this term and for a book on terrorism that I am at work on these days. If, for example, it is acceptable to engage in racial profiling for Muslim men in airports, why not for white men in all government buildings? If terrorism is always an act of war, why is the government allowing Rudolph to plead guilty to crimes? And was Margaret Thatcher then wrong in assigning criminal status to IRA prisoners in the 1980s? This decision led not only to the Blanket protest, Dirty protest and Hunger Strikes of the period from 1976 to 1981, but also that increased the scope and intensity of IRA terror campaigns. Is the answer possibly more complex? Can we not recognize that terrorism can be an act of war, a vicious crime, and simultaneously something else?

I also think about the cynical way that the very use of the words “terror,” “terrorist” and “terrorism” has manifested in the past. The Bush administration has insisted time and time again of accusing Iraqi insurgents attacking military targets, including US troops, of being terrorists, and yet if that is the case, then when our attacks fell civilians, are we also not terrorists? I do not think so, but sloppiness of terminology intended to propagandize our cause against the enemy leads to such thoughts. Our enemies can be bad, wrong, even evil, but if terrorism is simply anything we say that it is, then it must be true that one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. I do not believe this to be true, indeed I am ardently against it, but the cynical use and misuse of these terms suggests that it must be so. After all, the South African government, with a huge assist from the state-run media, referred to all anti-apartheid opponents as terrorists even when it was the Apartheid government using force against civilians to maintain its political system. Calling someone a terrorist does not make it so.

And what of settlers and settler colonies? I think in particular of the two Rhodesias and Kenya and South Africa, but it holds for Israel as well. Are settlers in a colonial endeavor really just civilians? If land is taken by force and people live on that land with the imprimatur of the colonizers, are they thus given some sort of halo of protection? Were those who carried out Mau Mau really terrorists for attacking those who had no business on their lands? I only partially exempt Israel because the West Bank and Gaza came into Israel’s possession as a result of a war declared on Israel by neighboring nation states who held title to those contested lands, but even then, I am a lot more conflicted about casualties among the increasingly intransigent, disruptive and noisome settlers than I am about casualties in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or Netanya.

These are random thoughts, episodic and indicative of the sorts of issues with which I am wrestling these days. There are no easy answers, and with the exception of those who seek a foolish consistency, sometimes the answers that do emerge will appear contradictory – Israel is not Kenya, after all, and each has different historical circumstances even if on narrow grounds there may be much to compare. Wrestling with these difficult questions can be frustrating but, as with all work of this nature, it can also be immensely rewarding, especially if it can contribute to a discussion in the public arena in which these issues are handled, and maybe even resolved.

More Comments:

Derek Charles Catsam - 4/14/2005

Chris --
Good points, providing a philosophical and theoretical background that i did not. The difference between "good" proscription and "bad" proscription, though you oppose it, at least seems like some sort of concession to acknowledging degrees of the goodness or badness of conquoring the lands of others. It reminds me a bit of Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting approach, that there were good and bad trusts, and that he knew the difference and could act accordingly -- the problem with that, of course, was that taft had a different conception of which counted as good and which bad, and predictably that opened the old can of worms.
Of course all societies were once settler societies in the broadest conception. the key has to do with interaction and i think time plays a role as well -- our settlement happened in substantial ways long before Kenya's, say, and by the 1950s settlement is therefore more problematic (historically, not morally, let's say) than settlement in the Northwest territory in 1804. It is, again, not a very neat or comfortable scale froma moral vantagepoint, but there is something to be said for a vaguely whiggish interpretation in which we say that the british should have known better and could have done better.
Obviously I'll have to concede lots of points here and acknowledge potential for inconsistency, but it also allows me to differentiate between historical circumstance. Settling does not have to be bad -- but when o you take all the good land and create a perpetually subservient class (some would say subaltern; not me, though), you are asking for trouble. I'm wary of calling that trouble terrorism per se, because as a settler, are you really just a civilian?

dc

chris l pettit - 4/14/2005

No bickering here...I like the post.

I just wanted to touch upon something that seems to be a key aspect in settler societies that we are touching upon in the class on Rights and Justice that I am lecturing this semester...proscription.

As background...Locke, a rights theorist, actually supported a right to conquest of sorts in that he (and Rich as a libertarian will probably agree with this) stated that there was a right to property, but only if one was using property in the "right" fashion (according to those doing the perceiving and in power). It was because of this "right" that settlers in the US could wage war on, slaughter, and deceive Native Americans into giving up their land. The argument used by both Locke and future theorists and politicians was that the Native Americans were not "mixing their labor with the land" and therefore forfeited their right to property in favor of the superior peoples with superior technology who could better exploit the land (we all know how that has turned out for the Native Americans and the environment that we now know is vital). This argument is still used to this day in conflicts in Uganda, DRC, and other Central Africa republics.

Now...once the atrocities of recognising this right became apparent, theorists (Burke foremost among them) made the argument that is very prominent in Israeli argument, among countless others, that "time washes it away" and that once land has been begotten and held onto...no matter how atrocious the methods used were...that is just the way it is and history just records it as such. Burke actually based his whole version of the right to property on this theory. How much time has to pass and what has to be done is left to the power that took the land and is in charge...so you can guess how that turns out. As DC knows, this ideology was very prominent in South Africa, and a version continues be utilised to this day to combat the redistribution of property from the Apartheid era. For universal rights theorists such as myself, proscription is an abhorrent theory that is totally inconsistent with any sort of rights theory (as a side note, I actually enjoy Burke's natural law theory...he just screws it up once he gets to prejudice and proscription). The blatant rewriting of history by those in power and able to set the time limits of when things start and how long is long enough simply returns us to Hobbes' "state of nature" where power relations rule and law is non-existent. This appeal to history, tradition, and the "passing of time" seems to be a very hollow way of describing a might makes right philosophy. I was curious what you thought as proscription to this day dominates many a discussion on the middle east as well as many other areas. I do recognize the problems in reparations and, for instance, the atrocity that happened in land redistribution in Zimbabwe, but this does not mean that we simply let the victors and the pwoerful have the spoils and let rights and history go by the wayside (or be rewritten).

CP