Terrorism in Caricature
Unfortunately, the president has chosen to view terrorism through the prism of war. He has remained consistent since September 11 in his condemnation of terrorists as agents of evil and foes of freedom and has stayed on message to the point of sheer redundancy bolstered by celebrity spectacles, solemn memorials, and patriotic witnessing at major sporting events and other public occasions, including the high-profile anniversary ceremonies a year after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The primary burdens of citizenship in this war against terrorism have been to wave the flag and exercise the courage to consume. The patriot knows, according to this logic, that freedom must be sacrificed in some undefined measure and for an indefinite period of time in order to defend against the enemies of freedom and civilization. (Yet, this kind of reasoning may also call to mind the infamous adage of the Vietnam war that we had to destroy the village in order to save it.)[12]
The opening lines of Bush’s first state of the union address pushed his favorite theme of war, patriotism, and consumerism in the defense of freedom and civilization by declaring “our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers.”[13] Since the “shock and suffering” of four months earlier, he continued, “our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.” The terrorists who survived our bombing campaign in Afghanistan were now either occupying cells at Guantanamo Bay or running for their lives. The women of Afghanistan were free, no longer “captives in their own homes.” America was “winning the war on terror” against a hateful and mad enemy that “laugh[ed] about the loss of innocent life” while plotting to destroy American nuclear plants and poison public water supplies. The president’s aim was to “eliminate” these “terrorist parasites” worldwide and to prevent the “axis of evil” regimes in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea from threatening the United States, its friends, and allies with weapons of mass destruction. The war would continue indefinitely until an evil enemy that embraces “tyranny and death” is defeated by those who “choose freedom and the dignity of every life.”
Not only did the president’s state of the union address establish a focus of evil, but it also reduced all other political questions to this singular focus as extensions of the war on terror which, he stressed, “is well begun, but it is only begun.” Just as September 11 had brought about the unity and resolve of America and Congress, “this same spirit [would be] directed toward addressing problems here at home.” Not only did the president propose the largest increase in military spending in two decades as the price of freedom and security, but he also requested new funding for homeland security to protect against bioterrorism, provide for emergency response, fund airport and border security, and enhance intelligence gathering. Research on bioterrorism would yield knowledge to “improve public health.” Training and equipping “heroic police and firefighters” would mean “safer neighborhoods.” Stricter border enforcement would “help combat illegal drugs.” And better intelligence meant depending “on the eyes and ears of alert citizens.”
Moreover, to revitalize the economy, the president’s budget, or what he referred to as his “economic security plan,” would promote good jobs, good schools, and reliable and affordable energy production along with expanded trade, new world markets, and tax relief that will “grow the economy by encouraging investment in factories and equipment.” “Health security” and “retirement security” were further measures of the nation’s “true character” in this “time of testing,” in this time for “courage and compassion, strength and resolve.” Each American patriot was called upon to dedicate 4,000 hours to public service over the rest of his or her lifetime, thus proving that our enemies who believed us to be weak, divided, and materialistic “were as wrong as they are evil.”
While the language of evil isn’t entirely wrong for characterizing heinous crimes against humanity, it isn’t the most serviceable term either for guiding our thinking about how best to address the continuing problem of terrorism. Rather than bringing us together as a diverse and democratic people committed to respecting pluralism at home and abroad, the rhetoric of evil constitutes us negatively through a ritual of victimization. By premising the defense of freedom on a caricature of terrorists as the personification of evil, we construct, celebrate, and witness our patriotism as a public exercise in extreme Othering, thus undermining our own democratic values and the nation’s capacity for coping with the condition of diversity except by the futility of coercion and domination. The administration’s problematic profile of evil promotes the rhetoric of the scapegoat, which is an exercise in blaming rather than problem solving, a way of asserting our own innocence and legitimizing a strong desire for righteous revenge instead of looking for ways to curtail the cycle of violence. Declaring total war on absolute evil escalates the level of violence and plays directly into the designs of terrorists. That, in short, is what’s so troublesome about the perspective the president has articulated for the nation in this time of trial and tribulation.
Complicating the Caricature
A longer explanation of the limitations of the president’s narrow perspective, especially if we wish to promote peace and foster democracy, requires us to place the present crisis in a wider frame, one that expands the definition of terrorism, complicates the question of culpability, and redirects the impulse to war. I’m reminded here of the hypothetical dialogue composed by Kenneth Burke between Satan and The Lord, entitled “Prologue in Heaven,” which is a “Parable of Purpose” about the subject of humans as the “symbol-using animal” – those “talking animals” who “derive purposes from their physical nature” but also invent purposes with “the resources of language” from which their quandaries arise and by which they are goaded “to further questioning. For language makes questioning easy. Given language, you can never be sure where quest ends and question begins.” Satan is portrayed in this dialogue as “an agile youth,” a robust figure wearing a “fool’s cap,” an “over-hasty, mercurial” fellow seated “at The Lord’s right hand” and quick with easy answers to difficult questions. Our two speakers are on “friendly terms,” and The Lord is “affectionately amused by his young companion.”
The immediate relevance of this celestial conversation to those of us here on earth at this moment is that “the complications [of our world] will be unending.” Each time Satan, as The Lord’s eager interlocutor and interpreter, confidently pronounces the meaning of the human condition he’s told by The Lord that, although he’s right in a limited sense, the human condition is “more complicated than that,” it’s just “not quite that,” he needs to adopt a wider frame of reference because “there can be no perfection but here in heaven.” “Where the Earth-People are concerned,” says The Lord, “any terminology is suspect to the extent that it does not allow for the progressive criticism of itself.”[14]
The Lord’s advice to the devil is all the more applicable to human beings. We mere mortals, talking animals that we are, must keep questioning and criticizing easy answers to complicated issues, remaining in a state of rhetorical becoming so that we might invent the most serviceable attitudes possible to govern our everyday lives and our relations toward Others. This is a crucial lesson to remember, especially when we think we’ve got the exact answer to something as complicated as terrorism and particularly when we are convinced that we can solve the problem simply by eliminating evil itself. This is the lesson Burke teaches as a comic corrective to our tragic inclinations, the lesson of practical humility, of casuistically stretching our favored frames of acceptance so that they take into account greater degrees of complexity in order to protect us against the pitfall of oversimplification. Probing the incongruities of a trite and tired perspective is the best anecdote for hubris and the first line of defense against escalating the cycle of violence. Thus, we should probe further into the meaning of terrorism, the question of culpability, and the propriety of war, all of which are key complications badly underrepresented or missing in the president’s profile of evil incarnate.
Let us begin our examination with the question of whether terrorism is a crime against humanity or, as the president insists, an act of war on freedom. In the spirit of Kenneth Burke’s preference for the more complicated “both/and” answer over the less serviceable “either/or” dichotomy, we should acknowledge both that it is a different kind of war and a unique form of crime. It isn’t exactly war or crime but instead a hybrid of both that must be understood distinctly from its two most likely counterparts. Terrorism on its own terms is a politically motivated and systematic act of violence against civilians. As Bruce Hoffman explains, it “is fundamentally and inherently political. It is also ineluctably about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and the use of power to achieve political change. Terrorism is thus violence – or, equally important, the threat of violence – used and directed in pursuit of, or in service of, a political aim . . . . it is a planned, calculated, and indeed systematic act.”[15] And its principal target is noncombatants; in Caleb Carr’s words: terrorism is the “modern permutation” of “warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable.”[16] To the extent it is a crime, terrorism is a politically motivated crime rather than an exercise in personal gain; to the extent it is warfare, terrorism victimizes defenseless civilians primarily and on purpose rather than directly attacking armed, and therefore far more dangerous, military combatants. Thus, as Philip Heymann concludes, terrorist “assault[s] on civilians to advance political purposes” are “both crimes and forms of warfare.”[17] Or, seen from the reverse angle, such politically motivated assaults on civilians are acts neither of war nor crime in the conventional sense of either term.
Consistent with this basic definition and as a clarifying extension thereof, we might now ask two related questions: Who are the perpetrators of such heinous tactics? And what motivates the use of violence against civilians? Answers to these questions will help us widen the circumference of the problem at hand, complicate our working image of the terrorist, and reassess the plausibility of eradicating terrorism.
The most typical terrorist tactics include (as we have become so painfully aware) hijacking, kidnapping, and hostage-taking, various forms of bombing (including car bombing, aerial attack, midair and suicide bombing), arson, murder and assassination, armed assault and missile attack, contamination of consumer products, and increasingly the threat of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.[18] On the lighter side, and in the spirit of instructive comic relief, this list might remind some of us of a scene in Mel Brooks’ lunatic film, Blazing Saddles, where arch villain and state Attorney General Harvey Korman is about to recruit “an army of the worst dregs ever to spoil the face of the West” for the dastardly purpose of terrorizing the simple, pacific, although racist, people of Rock Ridge in the higher cause of railroad expansion and personal gain. In a crescendo of gleeful, parodic panegyric, Korman instructs his hapless sidekick and gofer Slim Pickens “to round up every vicious killer and gunslinger in the West.” Specifically, he exclaims, “I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, burglars, bushwhackers . . . horse thieves . . . train robbers, bank robbers . . . and Methodists.” An enthusiastic Pickens even manages to add Hell’s Angels, Nazi storm troopers, and Ku Klux Klansmen to Korman’s long list of assembled thugs boasting impressive credentials in murder, arson, armed robbery, and mayhem.
As parody, such comic stereotypes reveal the incongruities in our everyday distinctions between good and bad characters, but taken literally, especially in today’s context of terrorism, these same caricatures lack the necessary texture of life; all shades of grey are lost and ironies of division missed to our own detriment. Actual agents of mayhem are not simply or exclusively located on the dark side of inhumanity and outside the boundaries of enlightened civilization. They aren’t always foreigners or even necessarily strangers, and it’s dangerously misleading to think of them simply or singularly as sick, irrational madmen who lack roots, rationale, motivation, and strategic objectives.[19]
As a resident of rural Indiana, for example, I am particularly mindful of the virulent history of the Ku Klux Klan in my state and the current activities of the Indiana Militia, which has been “described by observers as a particularly militant anti-gun-control organization” whose “members proudly proclaim,” in an ironic twist of enemy imagery, “that they are ‘sick and tired of being raped and pillaged by the bunch of thieves that run the federal government.’”[20] In my home county, the Indiana state police infiltrated a local militia unit just in time to foil the murder of a suspected traitor to the militiamen’s cause. And as we now know, especially after the intense publicity surrounding Timothy McVeigh’s infamous bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, the militia movement has spread throughout the United States. These militias consist of our neighbors – perhaps even some of us, our relatives, and/or our friends – who “consider themselves ‘minutemen’: ordinary citizens and patriots ready to take up arms at a moment’s notice to defend their inalienable rights, self-styled heirs of the tradition of the American Revolution.”[21] The day 168 men, women, and children died in Oklahoma City at the hands of Christian patriots attempting to start a new revolutionary war was chosen to coincide with Patriots Day in New England – the anniversary of the beginning of the American revolution in 1775 – and more recently, the day in 1993 on which the Branch Davidian compound burned to the ground in Waco, Texas.[22]
Terror, like politics, is local and personal, not something remote, not something safely removed from our everyday lives or perpetrated by a subspecies entirely alien or unknown to us. As a member of the faculty of Indiana University, I learned how close to home terror can strike when Benjamin Smith, a student who had attended both IU and the University of Illinois and a member of a white supremacist church, chose Independence Day 1999 to begin a racially motivated shooting spree that killed an African American basketball coach at Northwestern University and a Korean graduate student at my university, and also seriously wounded six Orthodox Jews, a Taiwanese student, and two other African Americans. According to Smith’s girlfriend, he wanted to protect the freedom of white Americans “from the increasing pluralism of American society.”[23] As a white American, I don’t feel any safer for his efforts, nor do I think freedom needs protection from pluralism, but I can’t just dismiss his behavior as alien to our political culture and continue to insist on the innocence of American experience. Benjamin Smith is a product of our culture and our experience and a disturbing symbol of the nation we might all too easily become in a crusade against evil Others.
Domestic terrorists abound, whether they are militiamen like Timothy McVeigh who truck-bomb federal buildings, white supremacists like Benjamin Smith who randomly murder racial minorities, or anti-abortion militants like Eric Rudolph who set off a bomb in Atlanta, Georgia at the 1996 summer Olympics and the Reverend Paul Hill who killed Dr. John Britton on July 29, 1994 for performing abortions at a clinic in Pensacola, Florida. The actions of homegrown terrorists are disturbingly similar to those of foreign or international terrorists who blew up Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, truck-bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in
August 1998, van-bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and then used commercial aircraft to destroy it eight and a half years later, killing thousands of unsuspecting civilians.
Unfortunately, these domestic and international terrorist acts are not completely unlike the U.S. military’s “precision” missile and bombing strikes against Iraq during the Desert Storm conflict of 1991, a conflict that reportedly killed more than 35,000 Iraqi civilians when only 370 Allied soldiers died in combat, and most of those soldiers were victims of friendly fire.[24] The Pentagon has not even attempted to count the number of civilians in Afghanistan killed by our most recent bombing campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, a number that may exceed 3,000 although our high-altitude weapons this time around are supposedly even more precise than the precision weapons we used so confidently a decade earlier in Desert Storm.
It is difficult to ignore the disturbing parallel between the enemy’s terrorism and our counterterrorism when the world’s richest and strongest nation pulverizes one of the world’s poorest countries without even bothering to count civilian casualties. As Caleb Carr warns, “warfare against civilians” must “never be answered in kind,” for it is a “failed tactic” that brings about “retaliation in kind” and “perpetuates a cycle of revenge and outrage that can go on for generations,” planting “the seeds of our own eventual downfall”; “a nation must never think that it can use . . . the agents of terror when convenient and then be rid of them when they are no longer needed.”[25]
Performance Violence and the Terrorist Trap
So, given this counterproductive cycle of terror and counter-terror, why are such tactics used? What so strongly motivates the political use of violence against civilians? What are the roots of terrorism? What makes them grow ever deeper? And how have we become so thoroughly entangled in them? |
