Mythology of Terrorism

Do terrorists exist? Yes, of course, and they exist in many guises. Do some of them want to do us harm? Unquestionably! It's a fact of life in any civilization, and 9/11 brought it home in spades to the U.S. (but let's not forget domestic terrorism like McVeigh in Oklahoma City, or Eric Robert Rudolph in Atlanta and Birmingham).

But the way the Bush administration wants to cast what is really a highly fragmented and variegated collection of terrorist groups into some monolithic threat on the order of the Cold War Soviet regime is a lie on a scale so massive that it can only have a single purpose. The so-called "War on Terror" has been fabricated so that under this phony blanket of fear the fascist-minded zealots can keep chipping away at limits to their power, visibility into our own government, and our very rights as citizens.

The War on Terror is a marketing scheme, designed to collect any threat or act anywhere and put it into the pot of rationalization that this group of thugs keeps stirring and serving up as a gruel of repression. Quit eating this shit! Quit using the term. Start talking about the war on Al Qaeda, or Indonesian bombers, or Islamic extremists in Spain. Get specific.

The reason for this is that how we use language to describe what must be done reveals whether or not we understand--or intend to explain--what our plan is for dealing with the situation. If the police simply talked about our "war on crime" every time a robbery occurred, wouldn't you be asking who did it, where, with what, and how? And yet our news media doesn't seem to want to delve any deeper than the thin porridge of platitudes that Chimpie's gang serves up in steaming bowls.

The threat of terror is real, but it is no more or less than it was four years ago, or ten, or twenty, or fifty. It's a fact of life, but rather than effectively dealing with terrorists, the game is now played to hold up terrorism as a justification for acts by government that are much more of a real threat to our way of life.

Don't be conned. Demand specifics, and demand specific actions. The next time someone says "War on Terror," ask where that war is being waged, with what means, and against whom. These are not phantoms or supermen or boogiemen. And we don't have to surrender to fascist fear-mongering to effectively deal with them. Unless, that is, you're running a corrupt and incompetent evil empire of your own.