Does Making a Tautology out of Violence do a Violence to Tautology?
Posted by zunguzungu on August 7, 2008
In listening to Michael Krasny’s “Forum” today, I was struck by the fact that animal liberation firebombers are being called “domestic terrorists.” It’s an interesting gesture. In the most banal sense, of course, using bombs to intimidate your political opponents is terrorism, if anything is, but the very banality of that fact begs the question of why it’s necessary to brand them as such. Isn’t firebombing someone’s office worth unnacceptable enough on the face of it to prosecute it simply as an act of murderous violence? What is achieved by calling it “terrorism”? The modifier “domestic,” too, is interesting, since if the distinction between foreign and domestic terrorism is worth making, it must signify something. Is the act of bombing a public place to protest the exploitation of animals better or worse than bombing a public place to protest, say, the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia? From the perspective of the person being blown up, I’m not sure how you would answer that question.
So it occurs to me that this is precisely not what is at stake. Instead, the problem of nomenclature is one of distinguishing between different motives for political violence. And this is what makes “terrorism” what it is, right? If you compare the number of people killed and injured by US interventions in the mideast to the number of Americans killed by hijacked airplanes, it should be clear that calling the one “terrorism” (but not the other) is not particularly related to any objective distinction between the amount of pain and suffering being caused. This is as it should be: as the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of utilitarian philosophers illustrate, objectively comparing amounts of pain and suffering is a tough trick to pull off, since you have to act as if a non-fungible thing is fungible. As the boys in Johnny To’s Exiled remind us, feelings are not commodities, and just as you cannot measure a ton of love, neither does it make sense to convert “pain” from metric into old english measurements. And as War or Car reminds us, there is something funny about converting a war into a commodity, something instructive, yet also strikingly perverse.
As a result, we tend to treat crimes by reference not to their effects, but to their causes, introducing qualifiers like premeditated, unpremeditated, politically motivated, temporary insanity, and so forth. Or rather, we mediate the irresolvable problem of suffering’s irreducibility by transforming it into an ethical dilemma: a terrorist who blows you up is worse than a soldier who blows you up, because the one is in service of a good cause, while the other is in service of a bad. And anti-war activists who call both of these activities “terrorism” don’t so much solve the problem as reveal it to be unsolvable, flattening the term to the point where any violence is terrorism. And what, other than foregrounding the difference between legitimate violence and illegitimate, is the point of that?
After all, why is terrorism bad? If George Bush’s terrorism is bad because it is, like the terrorism of <insert scary Islamic guy here>, a violence against innocent people, we’ve moved all the way from “terrorism is violence because it’s terrorism” to “violence is terrorism because it’s violence.” Neither gets us all that far, and at least part of the problem is that “violence” is, itself, impossibly difficult to narrow down: is violence against non-innocent people still violence? Is unintended violence still violence? Is driving a car a form of violence, since it contributes to global warming and all sorts of bad stuff. Are we all little Eichmans? What about the Trolley Car dilemma? If you answer no to these questions, then (again!) we’re just de-linking the violence from its object and returning it to its subject. This is a worrying thing to do, because you start down the road to saying that some violences are actually objectively good. But if you answer yes, then does the the word “violence” even mean anything anymore? By such a standard, pretty much everything is violence.
Vance Maverick said
This is not easy to talk about clearly. I think we use “terrorism” to denote a strategy — to say that the perpetrators acted in a certain way not primarily to kill or maim the immediate victims but in order to have some effect on a larger population. So the motives matter in a sense, but not the larger motive.
Put this way, of course, the bombing campaigns of WWII do look like terrorism (no surprise).
zunguzungu said
Yeah, that’s exactly it: any definition of “terrorism” that doesn’t talk about motives is going to have real difficulty distinguishing between “good” and “bad” uses of violence; from the perspective of the people being bombed, maybe there isn’t one. But on the other hand, if we try to use motive to distinguish between, say, the bombing campaigns of WWII and the 9-11 hijacking, we run the risk of legitimizing some sorts of violence (say, “shock and awe” in Iraq) while de-legitimizing others, simply on the basis of political convenience.
Not that both approaches aren’t appropriate at particular times, I suppose. But I think it’s worth thinking about *why* it’s so difficult to talk about this kind of thing clearly; these sorts of distinctions and questions *should* be vexed. It seems to me that it’s exactly when we think they’re simple (me good, they bad) that people become dangerous and do terrible things.
Vance Maverick said
I think I meant “tactic” rather than “strategy”, though obviously the meaning got across. I was thinking of the phrase strategia della tensione in Italian politics, referring to the supposed goal of the terrorist acts of the anni di piombo. What’s curious there (to me, anyway) is that the actors are generally thought to have been a mix of groups of the left and right, and many of the most notorious acts, like the Bologna train station bombing, have never been definitively explained. So the immediate agents are unknown, and the long-range goals; but we have consensus about the short-term tactics and (a bit more vaguely) the medium-term strategy. (And about the moral evaluation, at least publicly.)
zunguzungu said
That’s a fascinating term, and one could expand the use of “strategy of tension” to describe a variety of sins beyond terrorism, as it gets practically defined.
Reading about it in the Italian context, of which I’ll admit I know very little, makes me speculate if some of the novelty of the idea (the counterintuitivity of leftists and rightest using the same strategy for the same medium term goal) comes from the very Western notion that all political activity is oriented on the acquisition of state power. In the West, or where the state is developed enough to make it the logical instrument of political control, de-legitimizing the state by contesting its monopoly on violence might be an awkward way of getting control of it. On the other hand, in contexts where the state is manifestly *not* the most powerful actor in society–I’m thinking of the recent violence in Kenya, for example–a variety of sides in a political conflict can be in long term opposition to each other, but also share the same medium term goal of delegitimizing the government. During the Iranian revolution, too, I’m told that all sorts of opposition parties (both the communists and the educated liberals, for example) shared with Khomeini and his people the medium term goal of delegitimizing the Shah’s regime, despite having massively different long term goals, which had a lot to do with how things went down.
Thinking out loud. Not that a strategy of tension couldn’t be a way of bolstering state power, too; the GWOT seems a good example of that, with its color coded terrorism alerts and so forth.
Vance Maverick said
Of Italian politics I know only what an American expat picks up from conversation and popular accounts. But it is fascinating. The endgame of spring 1945 seems to have left Italy with a sort of zombie far left and far right, which were both real and potent yet only seldom openly in control. Berlusconism is the ascendancy of a different sort of right wing — corporatist / corrupt on modern models but not fundamentally fascist.