10 Who are the terrorists?

Who are the terrorists?

Dear Lily,

There are many secret organizations dedicated to undermining the State. These are often classified as rebel or terrorist movements. The main point here is the obvious one that one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. To some Chechens, Karens in Burma, Catholic Irish, Basques, Kurds, Nagas, Palestinians, Tamil Tigers, their dreams and hopes for independence only seem possible to reach through organized violence against what they consider to be an overbearing State. They believe they are fighting for their freedom and dignity. Yet to those in power they are terrorists. It is mainly a question of perspective.

We can see this easily enough by the way in which terrorists become non-terrorists once they achieve their goals. When they become the Israeli State, Maoist China, or ANC led South Africa, the terrorist label is discreetly forgotten. Nelson Mandela is a good example of the movement from ‘terrorist’ to national hero.

There seem to be a growing number of these organizations. This partly reflects access to weapons and explosives, partly increasing wealth. They often centre on the lines that have been drawn across the world by colonial powers. The borders between states, mainly set out in the nineteenth century, which cross-cut or ignore ethnic groups such as the Kurds, Basques, Nagas, Tamils and many African groups, are often felt to impose apparently arbitrary and alien rule upon them.

What seems to be at the root of this widespread problem is the lack of strategies to make people free but united. The idea of an international umbrella, under which almost sovereign states could carry on their lives according to their own wishes and customs, seems very difficult to achieve.

The bloody history of resistance and terrorism over the last century could have led to a two-tier model in which certain functions necessary for co-working at a high level were done by an over-arching State, but everything else was devolved. This is the model which, for example, some hope that the European Union will achieve. Yet it seems very difficult to manage. Almost every large nation faces the draining effects of local terrorism or resistance in the absence of a satisfactory legal solution.

What seems relatively new is the spread of these organizations round the world. The new type of terror is international, a coalescing of some of these groups and the emergence of others. This has led into the so-called ‘war on terrorism’. In fact, however, there is nothing particularly new about such a supposed ‘war’.

Why do people feel menaced?

Those in power usually feel under threat. At one time it was the Jews who were rumoured to form an international conspiracy to undermine Christian values. They were believed to eat Christian children, engage in obscene rituals and generally to be subversive of all good values. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries certain beliefs coming in from Asia were declared to be heretical and the Cathars or Albigensians in the south of France were destroyed by sword and fire in a giant and ferocious crusade led by the Pope.

Then in the fifteenth century an even greater menace was thought to have arisen. Satan or the Devil emerged to lead a secret assault on civilization with his army of witches. For two hundred years the international conspiracy of evil was thought to consist of witches. Since they were such a threat and could not be detected by normal means, special measures were needed. Manuals were written, legal codes were bent and amended to deal with the new threat. The previous tools to crush heresy, including the Holy Office of the Inquisition, were now used in the war against supposed witches. Thousands were rounded up, tried, convicted and burnt.

So extreme was the fear that even in countries without the Catholic Inquisition and with a different legal system, the laws were altered to deal with the new threat. In England in the sixteenth century, people who could not normally act as witnesses, children against their parents, a husband against his wife, were permitted to do so in these special circumstances. Previous evidence of behaviour, attitudes and crimes, not normally revealed, could be brought before the court. The individual could be placed under unusual physical and mental pressures in order to find evidence. He or she could be deprived of sleep for long periods, supposedly to see if her ‘familiars’ (a small diabolical pet) came to visit her, but, in effect, breaking down her resistance. The presumption of innocence was greatly diminished, the necessity for direct proof was waived and circumstantial or ‘spectral’ (hazy spiritual) evidence was allowed.

In the end, faced with universal fear and loathing, shunned by their friends, told that they were part of a grand conspiracy of Satanic covens or cells loosely joined to each other, the poor creatures confessed and implicated others. They then confirmed that an organization existed whose totally irrational, unjustified and unprovoked aim was to undermine ‘civilization’ as we know it. So ‘civilization’ responded by further abandoning the very justification for its existence. Using the special techniques now allowed, it ‘proved’ the existence of witches and hanged or burnt thousands of them. Only much later did doubt set in. It emerged that the whole conspiracy was a delusion created by the legal methods used to attack it. Thousands had been destroyed on the basis of an illusion.

Similar panics still occur. In the 1950’s it was a panic about a secret conspiracy of ‘communists’ which led to the McCarthy trials in America and the destruction of the reputation of many innocent people.

Then in the 1980’s in Britain a new threat came to light, the so-called paedophile rings. The details of their activities and the widespread sexual abuse of children by their parents were often ‘recalled’ when children were ‘counselled’ by sympathetic experts. Satanic rituals in which children were sexually abused and even human sacrifices were supposed to occur, were suddenly believed to be widespread. Hundreds were imprisoned, thousands of children were taken away from their parents in dawn raids. Only later, as the panic declined, was it discovered that most of the accusations were false, created by the very methods of trying to deal with them.

So there are plenty of precedents for the fear of a malevolent Other, and all of them tend to involve the shadowy presence of Evil, the Devil or Satan. Worldwide conspiracies against civilization were thought to have existed for thousands of years. Among them were Christianity and Islam themselves before they came to dominate.

What is the ‘Axis of Evil’?

The recent rise in the fear of what a President of the United States called the ‘Axis of Evil’ is a general umbrella term. Like an earlier President’s remark about ‘the Empire of Evil’, referring to the Soviet Union, it has wider implications once it circulates through the media.

The evil is envisaged as a threat to all civilized values. It is believed to threaten the State and all aspects of a society, just as witches or Jews or heretics were thought to menace the foundations of Christian morality in the past.

Some think the threat is sufficiently serious to justify the dismantling of the protections for ‘terrorists’. A vast conspiracy is feared and this tends to be fuelled by the moral panic that is whipped up. This movement appeals to those whose power and prestige is enhanced. They may, as with the great witch-hunters of the past, feel a glow of satisfaction and passionately believe that they are protecting their God and their country.

Looking back after the event, as we can now do with witch hunting, we may well come to feel the same about the current panic. People may conclude that the action of the State in countering terrorism is undermining the very values it claims to protect.

Beliefs in Satan, witches and the Axis of Evil are a perpetual, irrefutable, justification for sweeping counter measures. We are used to the temporary and drastic suspension of normal legal protections and processes during a limited war. In the Second World War, for example, suspected aliens were rounded up and imprisoned without trial, all citizens immediately lost many of their rights, freedom of speech was severely curtailed, loyalty to the State became paramount. Serious criticism was discouraged as being close to treason. If you are not fully for us, it was argued, you must be against us. The State was justified in bullying, lying, deceiving, swooping down, spying on anyone. Truth is said to be the first casualty of war; the freedom and rights of individuals are the second.

Afterwards there may be apologies, as there were, for example, to the large numbers of innocent Japanese rounded up and locked away in America after Pearl Harbour. But that is afterwards. War itself usually spells an end to liberty and equality before the law.

Yet wars, at least the typical wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had one compensation. They tended to be bounded. There was a period of war and civil liberties and the normal processes of law were suspended. But then there was peace and the luxury of freedom could again be afforded by the State and was demanded by a citizenry who had not forgotten its earlier freedoms. People even persuaded themselves that this is what they had been fighting for, even if they had had to abandon the rights and freedoms temporarily.

The ‘Axis of Evil’, whether al-Qua’ida, or the satanic cults of witches, is rather different. This is a world linked to certain tendencies within Christianity and Islam. Those involved on both sides of the struggle believe that there is someone out there who is trying to undermine their way of life and whose motives they cannot fathom. These unseen folk are Evil, whether they are the feared western capitalists or Islamic fundamentalists. They are believed by many to be in league with the Devil.

The defenders of ‘our’ way of life believe that Evil never sleeps, is always plotting, always invisible, irrationally consumed with a desire to destroy ‘our’ rational, sane, orderly, pleasant way of life. It lurks menacingly, ‘reds under the beds’ as the communists were once described, or, to use a more modern metaphor, the ‘monster’ hiding in the wardrobe of the frightened child in ‘Monsters Inc’.

Just as in the past witches were thought to hide behind the outward smiles of neighbours, terrorists are believed by some to conceal themselves as ‘students’ in our universities. Evil will use any weapons, of single or ‘mass’ destruction, curses, the poisoning of wells (a well known technique ascribed to witches and Jews in the past), and pestilences (biological warfare against animals and humans) and plagues of caterpillars or locusts.

There may be temporary victories, but there can be no truce or termination. We must fight continuously, for evil is hydra-headed. Cut off one of its manifestations, for instance the Taliban in Afghanistan, and it will spring up again elsewhere. Worst of all, it is not just an external threat, as are the conventional enemies, the Germans, the French, the British or whoever we were fighting against in the wars between nation-states. The minions of the Evil One are in our midst, or so it is alleged.

We are told that terrorism feeds on envy, in the envy of poor immigrants for their hosts, of impoverished Third World people who cannot accept that the fact that they earn one hundredth of what a westerner in many affluent societies earns is perfectly fair. The poison lurks in the devious practices of people who eat strange foods (not, as was supposed with Jews and witches in the past, babies and other sacrificial victims, but highly spiced and strange substances, or rubbishy fast food), who go through strange rituals (not satanic ones, but worshipping Allah or other Gods), who wear too few clothes (mini skirts) or too many (veils).

Of course there are differences between earlier panics and the present one. Witches, we know, could not actually harm people. A bomb, delivered by whichever side in the battle, kills and maims. The main point, however, is to realize from past experience that it is very easy to get into an almost unending vicious circle of fear. We would do well to remember a line from Edwin Muir’s poem. ‘We have seen Good men made evil wrangling with the evil, Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.’

Can the struggle against Evil ever end?

The fight against ‘Evil’ continues, the ‘elimination’ of terrorism or, in the past witchcraft, is the goal. We are told this is a war we must ‘win’. Yet a moment’s thought will show that such a goal forever recedes before us. In a world so blatantly unjust, where some consume three quarters of the world’s resources while the rest live indebted and enslaved, how can those who wish us ill be eliminated?

Witches in the past were blamed for the envy which they understandably felt against those who denied them help. The guilt felt by the better off was reflected back and uncharitable behaviour became justified because it was against a ‘witch’. So nowadays a rich westerner or Asian can blame ‘fanatics’ for being potential suicide bombers. They can be angry at ‘asylum seekers’ for foolishly getting themselves born in a country where no economic living can be made or where torture is widespread.

A ‘war on terrorism’, the endless battle, paranoia, aggression and undermining of civil liberties which it justifies inevitably feeds the power of the State. It is easy to see how swiftly we can move towards the world portrayed by George Orwell in Nineteen eighty-four, with a seemingly benevolent ‘Big Brother’ telling us that ‘one more effort’, one more (temporary of course) erosion of our privacy, dignity, freedom or wealth will finally eliminate the ‘Evil One’. Just one more invasion to ‘root out’ the contagion, to ‘drain the swamps’, to eradicate the ‘vermin’, to crush and destroy.

All the metaphors are taken from the constant human battle to destroy - weeds, vermin, pests, wild animals – which have been classified as unworthy of respect or understanding. They are metaphors which were used in the medieval battle with Satan and his witches, and they are the ones used today.

If we make this last effort, the nightmare will be over, the ‘foreign bodies’ that infect our world will be eliminated, and utopia will be ushered in. For some this means eliminating the insidious poison of consumer capitalism. For others, the nightmare of closed and illiberal religious fanaticism.

Both dreams are unrealistic in our interconnected world. The masses will not want to give up the hope of living in a rich industrial society. Nor will we be able to stop them hating us, to persuade them to thank us for our civilized ability to soak up the world’s wealth. The best we can do is to control our level of fear. I agree with the great American president Franklin D.Roosevelt, ‘Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’