Orlando - It's Not Terrorism.

It's Much, Much Worse.

~~~

It took far too long for the stupid and fatuous term War on Terror to be expunged from the lexicon of foreign policy. The political history of the United States is littered with silly declarations of hopeless domestic conflicts – on drugs, on poverty, on want, on crime – but the War on Terror is so asinine, so self-contradictory, so evidently impossible to prosecute that it could only have been created in and maintained by W’s White House.

What is war if not a terrifying prospect? What does it do if not utilize means and methods that terrify the sane? Has there ever been an account, from a civilian trapped in a conflict zone, that has not spoken in stark and candid terms of the terror they felt?

How can a War on Terror then be prosecuted when it involves us in a mind-numbing tautology. War involves terror; a war on terror must necessarily involve a war on the means of warfare., and yet not once did the Bush White House order the bombarding of an enemy with white poppies.

Bush, it seems to me, was at best half right. What he presented as a declaration of a new war, on terms and against an ‘enemy’ of a nature that made a mockery of the claim, should have been presented as a response to a declaration of war on civil society. Terror was never an enemy to be opposed; it is a symptom of war.

We, who are too often disinterested observers, would do well to keep this fact in mind. We are told of the “desperate search for answers” in the aftermath of acts that are commonly, and wrongly, described as “senseless” and “meaningless.” In fact, attacks like that on the Pulse nightclub (made bitterly ironic because a pulse is what the victims have been cruelly deprived of) should serve as reminders: that, whilst it is obviously ridiculous to say “on terror,” we are still participants in a war that predates, and goes well beyond, our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alright, if we are not at war on terror then against what, or with whom, are we struggling?

The  employment of the term terrorist actually predates the Bush White House by three decades or more. It is not as self-evidently self-defeating a term as War on Terror, which probably goes some way toward explaining why it is still in employ whilst the War on Terror is not. But it, too, is rank with contradictions and ripe for specious misuse. A terrorist cannot be defined in isolation from the concept and definition of terrorism and terrorism has no universal or binding definition.

It is commonly parsed as “the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Yet this is quite obviously inadequate in a conversation which often involves a debate about the ‘backers’ and ‘financers’ and ‘enablers’ of terrorism. And it grants the holder far too much power whilst allowing for capricious and arbitrary application.

So it is that the Reagan White House could justify its interventions in Nicaragua on the spurious grounds that it was becoming a ‘terrorist state’ (thus admitting that terrorism can in fact be ‘authorised’) whilst at the same time making nice with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan which actually do support, finance, back, endorse, enable and authorise acts of terrorism. Bush’s War on Terror cannot then be reparsed as a War on Terrorism because his related talk of a new axis of evil made no mention of the supposed allies who created and supported the Taliban and, more recently, Islamic State.

Furthermore, the definition requires that violence is used ‘in pursuit of political aims’. This, again, allows for advocates of political causes to be admitted as terrorists – whether they be Viet Cong, Sandinista, PKK, ETA (but not, curiously, - and here again the point about capricious and arbitrary standards – French colonialists, Bay of Pigs insurrectionists, contras, the Turkish government, the murderers of Salvador Allende, for all of whom the United States has found a use whilst denying that terrorism can be or has ever been ‘authorized’) – whilst precluding the application of the term to the very people we now most readily call terrorists, the invariably apocalyptic and messianic death cults of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic State. These are groups which combine the ugly fatalism of the nihilist with the dangerous supremacist outlook of the fascist and the zeal of religious fanaticism. And one would have to be very generous indeed to allow that the desire to bring on the apocalypse could count as a ‘political aim’.

The injunction to ‘call things by their proper names’ has had an unusual progression through philosophy and politics, it being recommended to us by figures as diverse and removed from each other as Confucius, Orwell and Ted Cruz. Donald Trump claims prescience on this matter but it was Cruz who first and most often and most eloquently demanded that politicians describe their enemies without equivocation, only then to mischaracterise the nature of both the threat and its propagators.

“Radical Islamic terrorism” was and remains his classification of choice. One might, I suppose, give him the credit of trying; the response universally adopted by those on the liberal left-wing of politics has always been to resort to the lines “it has nothing to do with Islam,” “hate has no religion,” and words to that effect, a via negativa approach that does not attempt to provide an explanation or to give answers to those who so “desperately search” for them.

But Cruz fails the standard he claims to value so dearly. For one thing, terrorism is (as we’ve seen) a stupid and inadequate category that affects specificity but is in fact staggeringly vague. For another, it does not distinguish between different forms of Islamic, or Islamist, fundamentalism. Islamic State is born of Wahabbism which is itself a strand of Sunni Islam; should Hezbollah achieve its stated wish  - the destruction of the state of Israel – it would have achieved a goal of Shiite extremists. And for another, it encourages jumping to a conclusion without consideration for the facts. Remember how quickly people declared Anders Breivik’s slaughter in Norway an act of Islamist terrorism?

There is no easy, immediate, catch-all definition which answers our burning questions. Life, like the perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity, is not so forgiving. It is not blowback; the LGBT community so pointlessly massacred in Orlando have no more invaded another country than had the children at Sandy Hook Elementary, killed not by any Islamist terrorist but by a mentally deranged American citizen. It cannot be justified by citing the alleged crimes committed in the name of foreign policy, nor can it always be said that the perpetrator is gripped by a fervour that is explicitly religious.

Where any of these things can be proved to be true, we should then call them by their proper names. The shooter in Orlando did apparently offer a pre-emptive declaration of affiliation with Islamic State. But what if he hadn’t? What if he had been motivated by Shiite fervour? Would it still have been ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ had this man, with a ‘Muslim name’, instead been a devotee of some crazed, millenialist sect?

No, ‘terrorism’, whether Islamic or anything else, simply will not do. There can be no guarantee of motive, no pre-emptive classification. There can be no certainty, and that is a terrible thing. Nihilism, the pointless taking of life, the wanton destruction in and of this world by those to whom life has no value except as preparation for the unknowable and non-existent beyond; this is what we are faced with. Not a clash of civilizations but a war between civilization and its enemies ; enemies who view all of us, gay or straight, man or woman, adult or child, black or white, civilian or military, as combatants to be targeted.

It has no political aim, it has no realisable dream, it has no goal to be justified. It’s not terrorism; it’s much, much worse.