WHAT'S TERRORISM AND WHAT ISN'T
Walzer, Michael
Belatedly, the world recognizes the peculiar evil of terrorism—the murder of innocent people, the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the sense of personal vulnerability, the violation of...
...Colonel Qaddafi and his European apologists follow a familiar pattern when they call the American raid "state terrorism...
...It doesn't make much difference, and the difference collapses entirely when a gang is hired by a state or a state taken over by a gang...
...We could respond with terrorism...
...There is indeed such a thing as state terrorism, but it is no different from terrorism itself: the deliberate killing of innocent people...
...We have to distinguish degrees of ugliness...
...Often enough, however, it is on the same scale...
...Belatedly, the world recognizes the peculiar evil of terrorism—the murder of innocent people, the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the sense of personal vulnerability, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public places, the coerciveness of precaution...
...Consider the pattern...
...It may also be true that the raid was unwise, imprudent, a failure of policy...
...Beyond that there is a wide range of alternatives, extending all the way from assassination to diplomatic protest...
...Simplification serves the terrorists, all of them, in power and out, because it suggests that terror is all there is, the only real option, with every other policy a mask for the attack upon innocence...
...One can fight terrorism politically, economically, or militarily...
...antiterrorism is terrorism too...
...That means, nonviolent violence, a notion that doesn't help in explaining the varieties of repression...
...Or again, if violence is what we hate, then all those forms of repression and control that involve no physical injury have to be described (if they are to be opposed) as "implicit violence...
...boldly or fearfully...
...Why are we (for these are commonly the rhetorical sins of the left) so eager for a vocabulary without nuance...
...But that is a different argument, and anyone making it would be obliged to explain what an alternative policy might look like...
...It is only those distinctions that hold out some hope for decency...
...Moral men and women, concerned to avoid civilian deaths, should not put their faith in smart bombs...
...in any case we haven't...
...Again, if genocide is the paradigmatic wrong, then every mistreatment of a people must be genocidal...
...A bomb can be carried into an airport or planted in a pub or supermarket by the agent of a state or of a gang...
...openly or covertly...
...if no one is killed, it is "cultural genocide...
...A bomb falling, unaimed, on a city is the moral equivalent of a bomb planted in a public place or a machine gun pointed at a crowd...
...Terrorism, recognized as an evil, becomes the only evil...
...The American bombing of Libya was not state terrorism, for it was aimed at specific military targets, and the pilots took some risks in their effort to hit those targets and nothing else...
...All this seems obvious now, but as soon as it is obvious, something strange happens...
...then it describes the same phemonenon differently organized, differently justified...
...If slavery is the paradigmatic wrong, then capitalism must be "wage slavery," though that misnames the phenomenon, as any slave would know...
...No bomb is morally smart...
...everything anyone opposes must be called terrorism...
...Now it is so much more difficult to get at what is really wrong with the wage relationship...
...To aim at such targets in Tripoli itself may have been wrong, but the wrong was not terroristic in character...
...Sometimes terrorism organized by the state is on a wholly different scale 274 than the terrorism of movements or gangs—as in the bombings of Dresden or Tokyo in World War II...
...We shouldn't do that and presumably won't...
...alone or in alliance...
...death squads can be sponsored by a government or a party...
...That would mean, in this case, the indiscriminate or random bombing of residential areas...
...We have to argue about our options— none of them are pretty, but they are not the same—and for that we need a rich and differentiated vocabulary...
...How should one respond to terrorist gangs sponsored by sovereign states...
...Sometimes these days the world looks like that, but as long as we have arguments and choices to make, it is not wholly like that...
...What looks like mere exaggeration, a piece of linguistic exploitation, produces genuine misunderstanding...
...The falsehood is so obvious in this case that one might well come to feel tolerant of mistreatment...
...prudently or recklessly...
...The phrase makes sense only when contrasted with revolutionary terrorism or nationalist terrorism...
...It was one more example of American hubris: an arrogant overconfidence in our own technology...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
