On Terrorism

At times when I think about my future and what I am supposed to do, I feel clueless and hopeless, sometimes I question my interest in my terrorism research and wonder that If I turned to another subject I would have spent my efforts with better results. Yet, I feel interested in terrorism studies, even though my views might seem a little bit deviant from the general views of the terrorism studies literature. However, I never had a desire to appease anyone as much as I desire to point out the thin line that separates reality from the convictions of people. This is largely because of my experience with my beliefs. As I used to hold firm to my previous beliefs until I started questioning them. At this point I drew close inclination with the views of poststructuralists who try to show that there is no ultimate reality but a network of realities that exist in a relationship of competition over mastery, religion is where this relationship is more acute. Most of the views and arguments of poststructuralism are rejected by traditional philosophy as they hold that the poststructuralists avoid the essential questions which I believe to be not true, what the poststructuralists do, is that they question the answers which the traditional philosophy (you can put whichever discipline you want instead of philosophy) believes to be true. For example, the turning point for Foucault from structuralism to poststructuralism was the moment when Derrida criticized his structuralist history by asking, in Lundy’s rephrasing “From what privileged position does Foucault carry out his history of silence and the oppressed?” as Lundy points, Derrida’s intention in questioning Foucault was to cast doubt on the grounds from which Foucault’s analysis derived its authority. This is the simplest example of the Poststructuralist quest. For me, in regards to terrorism, it has always been thought that terrorists are madmen, only because we were told so, but nobody questioned the actions of the United States in this regard. I can only think of Chomsky who pointed out that the problem in defining terrorism is that it is difficult to separate the actions we take from the actions they take, in other words, even the actions of the United States could fall under the definition of terrorism. Think for example, of what the United States did both in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. But nobody questions this because the people detained in these prisons are outside the system, they are excluded from it. I believe this is the power of the term terrorism, once you have been associated with it, you become an outcast, and all the might of the system breaks loose upon you.

Terrorism is a novel form of power relations in which it is no longer equal powers with equal status that fight each other to establish their own system or to protect their own status quo, but it is a novel form of competition in which unequal powers face each other, a state or a coalition of states on the one hand with all their might in competition with a dispersed weak group or organization. But this organization’s strongest weapon lies not in their challenge to the system but it is their own death against a system based on the exclusion of death, as Baudrillard argues. Which for me, shows the weakness of the system itself. In the face of death more death is not a solution. The only solution is when the system persuades the people away from taking their death as a weapon against it and instead provides them with other non-violent and peaceful means to advocate their demands.

This is also one of the consequences of globalization. The problem here is not globalization per se, but the disparities in the living conditions of people which came to front with the advent of globalization. This gap between the living standards of people is one of the reasons behind the persistence of terrorism as a global phenomenon in the dark side of globalization.

As humans we all have in us a “will-to-power”, and it is this will which drives people to violence when their demands are not meant and all other options are exhausted, think of the Irish and what they went through before resorting to arms. Behind every terrorist organization there is a dark past, the Basque, the Tamil Tigers, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front or FMLN, Hamas and Hezbollah are but some examples, but we never say this because we fear that saying this people will think that we are sympathizing with them. But whether they like it or not, it is a fact, it is even true in the case of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, the worlds most horrible groups, they did not just pop-up and started their killing-machine, they had a past! While ISIS’s past does not go far beyond the events in Iraq in the 1990s, the past of Al-Qaeda goes far beyond that, deeply rooted in the struggle between Secularism and Islam in the Middle East, specially as their ideology is very much affected by Said Qutb who he himself was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and advocated to free Islam and the Muslim world from secularism and western influence.

All those people in one way or the other wanted to bring about their own demands for change. The scale of this change however determined to large extent the way they are perceived and how to respond to them. The larger their demand is the more attention and the harsher the response they get. The Irish Republican Army never constituted a threat to the United States, to the contrary the United States implicitly supported them. But in cases where the demand is a complete alternation of the system at the expense of the world’s global power losing all that it holds vital for its survival, for that power then it is hardly acceptable. Furthermore, this demand is not explicit to some terrorists alone, but also shared by other powers as well who point to it either openly or implicitly. Therefore, apart from being an existential threat in themselves they are also given an equal footing along those powers who share the same demands. This to a large extent explains the shifting of focus from the communist threat during the cold war to terrorism nowadays. Before the end of the cold war, terrorism was of no interests for the United States as it was preoccupied with a more vital threat, the Soviet-Communist threat. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States went on to establish its own international system and even in the early periods terrorism was not given much importance up until September 11, 2001, where the United States was challenged directly and on its own territory. Here it is essential to question the vitality of this threat to the international system had it not challenged the United States, would it have been as it is today? Here, I would ask the same question Derrida asked Foucault, “From what privileged position does the United States carry out its war on terror?”