New Terror, Old Fears?

From Planet 176

Martin Wright on terrorism and history

It was easy to believe on 11 September 2001, as the Twin Towers collapsed, that we were witnessing the opening of a new chapter in human history. 9/11 was, according to at least one website devoted to recording its events, “the day the world changed”. George Bush asserted this interpretation of contemporary history when he told a joint session of Congress nine days later “all of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” Over four years later, and after the explosions in Bali, Madrid and London, those seeking to vindicate the changed world assertion are not short of evidence. It seems we have entered a new Age of Terror in which “extremist” groups pose a greater threat to “civilization”, “freedom” and “our way of life” than ever before. The new Terror is less intelligible, more uncompromising and more indiscriminate than anything we previously understood as terrorism.

It became a reality in Britain on 7 July 2005. Despite the fact that political violence has been a persistent theme in the recent internal history of the United Kingdom, the London tube and bus bombings (and attempted bombings) of July 2005 were widely seen as a new phenomenon. The attitude of Ken Livingstone, London’s Mayor, illustrates well the shift in the perception of political violence that has taken place. In the 1980s, as Leader of the Greater London Council he won considerable notoriety for inviting so-called terrorists from Sinn Fein to discussions in County Hall, on the grounds that talking to them was the only way of resolving the Irish conflict. The political violence of July 2005 was however a different matter. It was not, he stated immediately afterwards, “a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime-ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners... that isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith, it is an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder.” The New Terror, he clearly implied, is of a different and more degenerate moral order to the “liberation movements” of the past.

It did not take the British Government long to elaborate on this theme. “Let no one be in doubt,” proclaimed Tony Blair soon after the bombings, “the rules of the game have changed.” In other words the new moral order created by the terrorists demands a new, more rigorous approach to counter-terrorism on the part of the state, which in turn requires the sacrifice of some of our freedoms in order to defend Freedom. This, it is assumed, is understood and supported by the public due the unprecedented level of threat. Lord Falconer advanced this argument soon after 7 July when he observed to a BBC interviewer “there is a very widespread sense in the country... that things have changed.” In retrospect we may see these comments as a preamble to the greatest assault on civil liberties in recent British history.
The “Global War on Terror”, of which this assault is part, has necessitated the creation of an atmosphere in which previously unachievable measures of state repression are becoming almost commonplace. In this new atmosphere it is possible for governments to pursue such measures as the summary deportation of individuals, the long-term detention of suspects without charge, the summary closure of places of worship, the banning of political organisations and the circumscription of free speech. It is possible for them to justify illegal invasions of foreign states on the basis of clearly flawed evidence, and to get away with it; and for the police to shoot an innocent man several times in the head on a London tube train, only for their Chief Commissioner to stand up immediately afterwards and praise the action of his men. In the atmosphere of the post-9/11 world, and post-7/7 Britain, frank discussion of the issue of political violence is at best marginalised. At worst it may border on being a criminal offence. In the atmosphere of the “War on Terror” it is subversive to question the assumptions upon which this assault on human rights is built. Under such circumstances it is our responsibility to be subversive.

This does not mean that we need to belittle the obvious threat of further terrorist attacks, as did some commentators before the London bombings. Such an act of denial would be escapist irresponsibility, to which an antidote is provided by academic experts on terrorism, such as Bruce Hoffman and Walter Laqueur. These writers present a chilling analysis of the changing motivations, aims and capabilities of organisations prepared to use violence against civilians. Terrorism in the past, argues Laqueur in The New Terrorism: Fanatics and the Arms of Mass Destruction, “has been a tragedy for the victims, but seen in historical perspective it seldom has been more than a nuisance... This is no longer true today, and may be less so in the future. Yesterday’s nuisance has become one of the gravest dangers facing mankind.” He goes on to portray a wave of terrorist activity in which “political and ideological motivations” are eclipsed by “fanaticism” — largely, but by no means exclusively, Islamic fanaticism. Both Laqueur and Hoffman discern a well-established trend towards greater acts of indiscriminate violence harnessed to causes with ever less intelligible ideologies and ever more uncompromising ends. Both also point to the possibility that the new generation of fanatical terrorists will at some point use weapons of mass destruction.

In one sense their conclusions undermine the supposition that the world changed suddenly on 9/11, as both analyses trace the current drift to “fanaticism” back at least to the 1980s. They are also evidence in themselves (Laqueur’s The New Terrorism was published two years before 9/11) that informed opinion had a good idea of what was coming. In another sense the events of September 2001 and after serve to confirm the New Terrorism thesis, which in turn may be mobilised to support the contention that the “rules of the game” need to be changed. In fact, however, the world did not change overnight on 11 September 2001; it was already dangerous. What changed was our perception. It suddenly became simple again. After almost two decades of confusion, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, 11 September 2001 enabled us once more to slot into a familiar bi-polar world, where Freedom and Democracy are locked in righteous conflict (some use the word crusade) against the forces of the New Terror of Islamic extremism. It is this moulding of our perception — so essential to the erosion of civil liberties demanded by the Global War on Terror — that we must challenge.