Profiling Terrorism: From Freedom’s Evil Enemy to Democracy’s Agonistic Other
Robert L. Ivie
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University, Bloomington
“The ‘War’ on ‘Terrorism’: A Critical Response”
88th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
November 22, 2002[1]
On August 5, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, then another within three days on Nagasaki. A third bomb was readied to explode over Tokyo when, on August 14, Japan finally capitulated to America’s demand of “unconditional” surrender. The axis of fascism was defeated; freedom had prevailed; world order was restored, civilization secured. In announcing that “an American airplane dropped . . . the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare,” President Harry S. Truman observed matter-of-factly: “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.” Justice was served; evil was obliterated by righteous fire. The nuclear age thus began, in the president’s words, as “a new and revolutionary increase in destruction.” It was an innovation in the mass destruction of civilian lives made possible by “harnessing the basic power of the universe,” but it was also a continuation and an escalation of the established practice of fire-bombing urban populations from Dresden to Tokyo for the purpose of undermining enemy morale. This new kind of bomb had been aimed first at the center of a city of 350,000 people and was used again to destroy a second city with a population of 270,000. In Truman’s view, Americans should be “grateful to Providence” that decent people acquired this weapon to defeat an evil enemy.[2] America had emerged triumphant, powerful, and proud in its war against fascism, but not without setting in motion a new cycle of terrorism even as another was brought to such a dramatic close?
Terrorism today is firmly rooted in our past and specifically in the history of American empire since World War II. In an important sense, it is what Chalmers Johnson has called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. This is, for the most part, an “unacknowledged” and “informal” empire, an “imperial project that the Cold War obscured” but the byproduct of which is “reservoirs of resentment against all Americans . . . that can have lethal results.” America’s determination “to dominate the global scene,” to project its military power and extend its social, political, and economic system throughout the world, is a “triumphalist” act and attitude, Johnson argues, for which the United States and its citizens will continue to “pay a steep price” unless and until we reassess our global role and become more conscious of how we look to others who hate us for our arrogance and hegemony. Even as we worry about how to defend ourselves against “rogue states,” we must consider “whether the United States has itself become a rogue superpower.” We have declared ourselves the world’s “indispensable nation” and the architect of “a new world order.” Now we must confront the likelihood that when it comes to understanding terrorism, “empire is the problem,” at least to a significant degree.[3]
Instead of reflecting carefully and judiciously on America’s global presence, however, to consider how we might play our post-Cold War role more constructively, our greatest impulse in this time of crisis is to close ranks in patriotic fervor, declare war on international terrorism, and vow triumph over evil. When we succumb to this great temptation, we risk falling ever more deeply into what Jeffrey Simon has called “the terrorist trap,” that web of psychological, political, and social entanglement in the “dramas of international violence” which will persist and worsen unless we learn to address the problem of terrorism comprehensively and democratically in its many dimensions.[4] Thus, my purpose is to focus attention on how our current image or profile of terrorism is a dangerous caricature of the enemy, a crude portrait of absolute evil which can only confound the quest for peace and security in a global village where diversity resists conformity, tribalism confronts empire, and, in Benjamin Barber’s phrase, “Jihad vs. McWorld.”[5]
Profiling Terrorism
Profiling is a dangerous practice, for as Nietzsche observed, language is necessarily an exercise in interpretation and “interpretation itself is a form of the will to power” which leads all too easily to caricature and the scapegoat – that dark alley where words dilute, depersonalize, and brutalize. “Every society,” Nietzsche continues, “has the tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures” so that “the ‘good man’ sees himself as if surrounded by evil.”[6] We know from hard experience that racial profiling is more than just an abstract philosophical problem, but profiling terrorists has become a widely, if somewhat reluctantly, endorsed practice by Americans – including even victims of racial profiling in this country – out of concern for their safety following the devastation of September 11, 2001. Profiling, in fact, is a microcosm of the problem of terrorism in a pluralistic world, of the difficulty of living safely and not overreacting in an interconnected global village where religious, cultural, and other differences directly confront and threaten one another. And if profiling itself is a mirror of terrorism, we must become especially alert to the distortions in the image of the enemy that it necessarily reflects, for every perspective on reality, as Kenneth Burke underscores, is a terministic screen that simultaneously enables and disables our collective action, a set of blinders that both directs and misdirects our attention, equipment for living together that easily degenerates into a trained incapacity and an appetite for victimage.[7]
Profiling in one form or another is as inevitable as it is dangerous. We are language-using and language-misusing beings destined to interpret and reinterpret our world through the fog of symbols and with an eye toward adapting in the best way possible to ever-changing circumstances. To persevere, we must remain to some degree in a state of rhetorical becoming, forever skeptical of representations of evil, so that we might act with maximum consciousness and with the least possible harm to ourselves and others. As Nietzsche noted, language is inherently rhetorical in its articulation of perspective and motive.[8] All we can hope to do is to hold our limited perspectives accountable to one another, to retain an agonistic edge, especially where the presence of one narrow point of view or profile threatens to overtake our collective conscience and dominate our political consciousness. Thus, we should stand ever-ready to critique the language that constitutes extreme attitudes of Othering, and, in the immediate case, to profile the prevailing profile of terrorism.
None of this denies the fact of terrorism, nor questions the imperative of responding effectively to the reality of violence perpetrated against civilians, which is the modus operandi of terror used as a weapon of political influence and change.[9] Terrorism isn’t something entirely new to Americans. The United States, its property, and its citizens became a primary target of international terrorism overseas well before the more recent strikes against our home territory, strikes which have now galvanized the nation and focused our attention on “doing something” to avert disaster.[10] The problem is how best to interpret the continuing fact of terrorism and thus what general attitude to assume in formulating specific responses. Declaring a war on international terrorism and totalizing the divide between good and evil may well be the worst attitude for meeting the present challenge. Yet, that is exactly the posture President George W. Bush has taken with the overwhelming support, so far, of the American public, perhaps because our options seem so limited.
The president’s profile of terrorism, it goes almost without saying, is the single most influential interpretation of the danger at hand. It is his role and the responsibility of his office to shape public opinion, to put events in perspective, and to set the nation on a sensible course of action. “Terrorism is a complex and frightening experience for the general public,” Simon notes, “and it becomes natural to look toward Washington for guidance and reassurance.” The president’s words are magnified by the exigency of the moment and the prominence of his position of leadership. He can either fuel the crisis in “a highly charged emotional and political atmosphere” or help defuse it in order to avoid falling prey to the terrorist trap. He can raise unrealistic expectations, which is the easiest course to follow in the short run, or he can undertake the more difficult task of guiding the nation steadily in the service of long-term interests. The latter approach requires a balanced and more complex perspective on terrorism; the easier and more dangerous course is to declare a war that promises to defeat international terrorism even though realistically “terrorism is an endless conflict.”[11] |
