No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Ministries of Fear

Ministries of Fear istening to all the Ramboid crowing that ourguysfinallygot them some terrorists, punctuated here and there by party-pooping moralizing about how we should really be attacking the conditions that lead to terrorism, you would hardly know that theAchuleLauro hijacking was a specific act, with its own particularpurpose and logic (or lack of it). As far as the government and the media are concerned, it's simplyone more exampleof "terrorism," alabelnow appliedto all sorts of political or quasi-political violence, from the hostage taking in Iran to the assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich to the killing of Aldo Moro to the kidnapingof Patty Hearst and the Nyack Brinks robbery.Well, not quite all sorts—it goes without saying that to this administration the crimes of Nicaraguan contras or abortion-clinic bombers are not terrorism. But my point isn't that your murderous lunatic may be my freedom fighter; it's that what passes for public discussion of political violence is simpleminded. Which in part reflects ,in part helps to perpetuate the fact that "terrorism"—so much of which is aimed at getting publicity in the first place—is itself increasingly simpleminded and (except, of course, from the victims' perspective) trivial. Terrorism once had a fairly specific meaning; it was understood to be a kind of warfare, practiced by liberation movements and by governments bent on suppressing them. In its classic form—as immortalized in The Battle of Algiers—the point of revolutionary terrorism was to demoralize an occupying army or colonial population by making it feel that a guerrilla lurked around every corner, that any ordinary café could turn into a death trap. Terrorists might attack particular cops or officials in retaliation for specific acts, but in general the targets of terror were defined less by what they as indis L Ministries of Fear 2.07 victuals did than by who they were: people who weren't supposed to be there. The terrorist message was that there was no neutral ground. But most people, even soldiers in occupying armies, even prosperous settlers, didn't relish being held personally responsible for imperialism ; they saw themselves as ordinary, decent people trying to live their lives.Through terrorism the revolutionists meant to inspire the question, "Is the empire worth getting my head blown off?" At the same time, back in the métropole, the bloodshed would serve to erode the myth of the happy natives (French citizens, in the Algerian case), while the government's counterterrorism would horrify fastidious middle-class intellectuals, again inspiring, on a larger scale, the question of benefits and costs. Similarly, the point of counterrevolutionary terror (the state, of course, had the advantage of police power, with its apparatus of surveillance , prison, torture, and so on) wasnot only to punish activists in the movement but to keep the majority of people from joining them. Since the entire subject population was suspect by definition , giving the slightest grounds for suspicion (being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or with the wrong expression on one's face, or simply inflaming some cop's paranoid imagination) could mean death. What marks political violence asterrorism is that its victims are in a sense incidental. Its purpose is to create a psychology, a climate. To some extent this is true of all war; the purpose of fighting is never just to secure a piece of territory but to intimidate—terrorize—the enemy into giving up. Unlike conventional warfare, terrorism recognizes no clear distinction between combatants and civilians; but in the last 40 years modern bombing technology and the logistics of fighting in the countryside have allbut destroyed that distinction. So on one level terrorism is simply an aspect of war that's more or less central depending on the context. In general, governments turn to open terrorism (secret complicity with terrorists is another story) as a last resort, when normal means of social control have broken down. (Totalitarian states are defined precisely by their institution of permanent, preemptive counterrevolutionary terror; some governments, of course, use totalitarian meth- E X I L E O N M A I N S T R E E T 2.o8 ods against subordinate races or other "dangerous" elements, while turning a more benign face to the rest of the population.) Terrorism is more likely to be the strategy of choice for insurgents, displaced people, or rebels without organized armies.It's...