Risk and Extortion XXXIV: Tyrants and Terrorists

“We” (those who have been “properly” educated  within our democratic nation states) know relatively little about the historical unfolding of so-called “terrorist movements”. Usually they just appear out of nowhere. Whereas in the early days, terrorist movements had clear goals, this disappeared when they became ethnicized as “islamists”. According to the new definition of terrorism, Islamist terrorists do not have any other goals than cause destruction, because they are evil.  All they want is the destruction of goodness. There is no further explanation needed; sociology becomes a mere excuse to justify evil; a sociology that seeks to explain evil is itself evil-

This is the voice of kakistocracy gaslighting and brainwashing “the public”. Kakistocrats know everything there is to know about the evil of terrorism and when they name someone as terrorist s/he becomes a terrorist in the consequences of her/his actions. The fact that, objectively speaking, terrorists are always identified by their enemies, does not seem to bother those who do not have the courage to look into the abyss of their own corruption. The second objective fact is, that terrorists are always defined from the point of view of state-power. That is terrorists automatically invoke Staatsräson. The third objective fact is that those labelled terrorists have lost any entitlement of human dignity. If they are still treated as having rights, it is by the generous mercy of state-power. If they are being executed without any due process, it is never an issue of law (the most famous example would be the killing of Osama Bin Laden).

It becomes even more peculiar when we look into the origins of the word terrorism. It was coined after the French Revolution to describe the reign of terror (la Terreur) by the Jacobin government under Robespierre. It was only with the establishment of nation states in the 19^th Century that the label terrorism was being used for non-state actors (most commonly revolutionary groups). In 2004, the U.N. – representing the interests of nation-states – tried to impose a binding defenition of terrorism as : “any action that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians and non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act”. It is because of such definitions, that governments can identify any act as an act of terrorism, because it relates to intentions rather than actual harm that can be identified as against the interests of a government. Hence, when a state uses or threatens to use violence, it is called security; but when a force that opposes that states intends or threatens to use violence, it is called terrorism. This makes the label basically unusable for any serious sociological or political-scientific analysis as it always depends on the point of view of the state.

The phrase: “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter” opens up a second issue. Namely the legitimacy of resistance. During the middle ages religious scholars such as Thomas Acquinas debated the legitimacy of assassinating a tyrant, and agreed that – within very strict limits – the assassination of a tyrant could be morally justified, for example, if the tyrant completely defied the will of God and denounced the Holy Spirit. With the advent of modern nation-states, especially those calling themselves “democracies”, the religious arguments became less important and were replaced with secular legal ones.

From the mouths of kleptocrats, kakistocrats and tyrannical states, the word terrorist emerges not as an accusation but as a confession. It is a confession of a lost argument as its self-valorizing legitimation is devoid of substance. It is indeed the utterance of failure. By denouncing an enemy as motivated by evil, one does not simply become good. The enemy has already denounced us as evil; we are merely its doppelgänger. To explain is not to justify, but to understand. If one understands what happened, how it happened (or could happen) and why it happened, one may actually be able to prevent its repetition because the significance of the event can only be prehended when these three issues are connected.

This is the major failure of 9/11 and of 7/10 and every other event labelled as a “terrorist attack”. Instead of prehending their significance, these events are being turned into spectacles of horror. Prehending significance requires a historical-materialist approach that is dialectical enough to allow for critical self-reflection as an antidote against self-valorization.  The major mistake in any escalation of conflict one could make is to take one’s own innocence and claim to righteousness as a starting point. Kakistocrats, Kleptocrats and Tyrants are notoriously bad at being honest.