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.

Germany: Europe's Alpha & Omega, Beginning & End.

Germany: Europe’s Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.

Sunday, March 13^th – Chancellor Angela Merkel faces three regional elections in the German states of Saxony-Anhalt, Baden-Weurttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate that are being described, by various observers, commentators and news outlets, as a ‘test of support’ for the Chancellor’s stance on the refugee crisis.

‘Test’ is one way to describe the process, I suppose. Whilst frau Merkel might wish it to be otherwise, the sudden rise of the anti-establishment and populist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which is presenting its regional campaigns as a national referendum on Germany’s open-door response to the crisis and which is polling well above the 7.1% of the vote it achieved in the European elections of 2014, is pulling the narrative away from regional affairs and on to questions of national policy.

International policy, as well. AfD, which is the political wing of the Pegida movement in all but name, is but the closest to home of the myriad of anti-immigration, anti-EU parties that are now in bloom across Europe, resplendant in colours of both the Left and the Right. Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Jobbiks in Hungary, the FPO and the Freedom Party of Austria, National Front in France, UKIP and roughly half the Tory cabinet at home – the political allegiances, goals and methods of each may differ drastically; what they all seem to have in common, and what those that tend toward anti-immigration sentiments certainly have in common, is their opposition to Angela Merkel and the policies of the CDU-led coalition government in Germany.

Angela Merkel is the public face of Germany’s official response to the migrant (or refugee) crisis. Given the unity of the opposition to that response across the right and the far-right, anti-Merkelism seems a fitting and necessary addition to their labels.

There is an essential qualifier to what I am about to say and I beg that you withhold your judgement until you have seen it: they are right to be opposed to Merkel and the German response.

This is not to say that any position defined by xenophobia is correct. This is not to give credence to any argument that is by its nature anti-migrant. But it is to acknowledge that migration policy should be open to discussion (and the argument that the encouraging of mass-immigration is itself an anti-migrant position), and it is to acknowledge that the imposition of policy without an elected mandate, nationally or Europe-wide, is anti-democratic. They are right, then, in that this issue sheds light on the cracks in the foundations of the European Union; cracks that are becoming fissures as the weight of Germany’s influence continues to grow.

You might, as I do, feel by instinct that we should help the poor and the desperate and the destitute. You might, as I do, feel a profound anger at an international community that has shown itself to be powerless to stop the savagery and the barbarism of the conflict in Syria, to which we have contributed bombs and planes and very little else. You might feel, as I do, that the promise by our own government to take in 20,000 refugees over five years is at best a negligible one.

We would, then, share the conviction that these refugees deserve far better than their lot.

But to take that conviction and hide behind it, to throw in the faces of those opposed to mass-migration the accusation that they are unfeeling and uncaring, is to be uncritical. To praise Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders is to give her credit that she does not deserve, based on the presumption that it is something that it’s not.

That decision, which I suspect was intended solely (or mostly) to win popular support for the CDU in Germany, represents the impossibility of unilateral action in the context of a continental political union. What it amounted to was the creation of a policy in Germany, for German party-political interests, which has now been imposed upon every other member state in the European Union, especially those in what has become known as the Balkans Route, without any form of democratic debate, without their consent, and without any consideration for their ability to deal with its consequences.

It shows the arrogance of a continental power, on whose industry and economy the European Union has been built, deeming either that its own interests trump all other concerns or that what is in its own interests must, by definiton, be in everyone else’s interests, too.

This arrogant assumption of power is, in fact, no assumption at all. Power in both the Eurozone and the European Union has never been properly codified to rest in any one elected body; it has its own freedom of movement and, like money, like people, it is drawn to the one place power is known to coalesce of its own volition: power itself. Germany, by virtue of the strength of its economy, is the power in Europe. As such, it has become not only the economic hub but also the political centre of the continent. Dealings between EU member states, and between the EU and other nations, happen through Germany with the official apparatus serving as nothing but a seldom-used fig-leaf.

Greece, which harbours the firsts ports to which migrants and refugees arrive from Turkey on their way to Germany, provided just one of a series of examples of Germany’s monopoly on power. When Syriza swept to electoral victory on the promise of rejecting and then reversing the economic doctrine imposed upon them by the Troika, it was Germany which led the counterrevolution. It demanded control of the Greek economy. When it failed, it demanded the imposition of its own austerity doctrine on the Greek state, effectively using different words to make the same demand.

The charismatic Yanis Varoufakis, during his brief stint as Syriza’s finance minister, primarily dealt not with members of the Eurogroup (comprised of the finance ministers of those countries within the Eurozone) but with Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister and architect of the ‘deals‘ imposed upon Greece that Syriza had been committed to reversing. When Varoufakis attempted to discuss the changes proposed by Syriza, he was met with a steadfast refusal to compromise. Shauble’s view was, according to Varoufakis, that “‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.”

Varoufakis was subsequently removed from the negotiating team, resigning from his post in the Syriza government shortly afterwards, and Schauble got his way.

Greece now has unemployment standing at 25% and it remains to be seen whether it will be able even to service the debt on the last round of bailout funds. Its economic policy, created in and imposed by Germany, leaves it in an untenable position. And now it is expected to shoulder the burden of Germany’s immigration policy, even as that same policy has led to countries along the Balkans route invalidating the Schengen agreement by unilaterally closing their borders. That move has been condemned by frau Merkel, but yet again it is a display of arrogance. Germany is allowed to unilaterally set the immigration policy of the European Union (and beyond – Macedonia has been a candidate for accession since 2005, is not yet a full member, but is amongst those with new fences along its borders) but others, like Hungary, are not allowed to do the same.

Germany is, meanwhile, leading the team negotiating with Turkey on the issue of migration. The vast majority of boats arriving on the borders of the now-dead Schengen zone leave port in Turkey for an often treacherous journey across the Aegean. Given the nature of the Erdogan government, it would be very difficult to imagine the Turkish negotiating team doing anything other than exploiting the migration crisis to suit their own ends: visa-free travel for Turkish citizens within the EU in advance of fasttracked admission to the Union proper. And, given the nature of the Erdogan government, it is tempting to ask quite how committed Turkey is to stopping the boats given that each one serves their political purposes quite nicely.

Any deal struck between Germany and Turkey with provisions for faster Turkish integration with the EU will be yet another example of EU policy set and pursued by Germany without even the pretense at democratic negotiation with its supposed equals.

This is the state of things as they are and there is no hint of any improvement to come. The migration crisis, the nature of which warrants an article of its own, is playing into a crisis in Europe; a political union in which the only demos with any power are the German people. It is they alone whose votes, under the current system, have any real influence on European policy. We have our own referendum to focus on, but should we vote to stay, there will be another referendum soon afterwards; a referendum on the nature of the European Union under the guise of a German general election.

The domestic debate in Germany, a debate of domestic policy, is then not domestic at all. Pegida and the AfD, along with parties like the Greens, represent a continent’s worth of dissatisfaction with a deaf establishment. And it is a damning indictment of the structure of the European Union, a provocateur of the extremes to which the disenfranchised will become suseptible, as well as the complete and final proof of its lack of anything even resembling a democratic process, that burden of responsibility now rests almost entirely on the shoulders of German voters.

You may interpret it as you like when I say that it is a burden we should do our part to alleviate them of.