At The Antipodes

So, what number is the present conflict? The 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th World War? Actually, none of the above. What we have now is a real Universal War, one of its kind, and nothing or no-one in the Islamic world, in any other world or in our Western civilizations can feel immune from involvement in the hostilities. This is not only because that irregular and well-camouflaged army of those who are commonly defined as the Enemies of the West can strike anywhere - it is above all because this siege mentality we are witnessing, this terrible fear masterfully cultivated by the mass media of crazed, bloodthirsty lunatics who strike out of the blue, all this is changing or serves to justify the changes in our habitual way of life. In other words it provides an alibi for an asphyxiating form of control over us which spells the end of any pretence of democratic guarantees.

The very notion of a war on terrorism provokes profound changes in the relationships between groups of people. And notice too the careful use of words: "war", not "fight". Both are forms of conflict, but of a very different nature. Fights are carried on in a variety of ways and can even be something positive. For example, you can fight for a different world, a better world. A fight does not require precise battlefronts, it does not require huge deployment of soldiers, it does not automatically require military discipline. War, on the other hand, demands all of this. It needs States and regular armies. So just why did they choose to call it a "war" on terrorism?

It seems obvious that terrorism (at least what is defined as such in the media) has its own ways of acting, ways which are totally different to those of conventional armies which have such a need for visibility that they even adopt uniforms which unmistakably identify their members and on which even hierarchical differences are evident. The more widely and easily identifiable an army's power is paraded, the more fearsome it becomes. Terrorism, on the other hand, acts with the maximum possible anonymity.

It might be an idea to examine for a moment the word terrorism, a term which is so frequently used, not to mention incorrectly and superficially. Historically, terrorism in its true sense it that policy adopted by the revolutionary government of France at the end of the 18th century: the famous Terror. By extension it includes any policy of the powers that be whereby any manifestations of dissent are repressed with violence and fear. Only recently has the term begun to be used to indicate the forms of bloody and violent revolt involving civilians being killed indiscriminately in the midst of the indistinct mass, a definition that ended up becoming the sole possible definition of terrorism in our minds. This only serves to cover up the fact that terrorism is primarily a practice of governments and States. We are dealing with a semantic shift which is by no means unimportant: it allows us to deplore the killing of 300 Ossetian children by Chechen terrorists and blithely ignore the extermination of 40,000 Chechen children by the army of the Russian State as if it were something normal. It would also be worthwhile examining closely the other word which is part of the Bush administration's watchword, to better understand both its continuous nature and (more importantly from the point of view of political analysis) its innovative nature. We need to examine the motivations that drive it and the ways in which it is carried out.

(The full text of this article is published in "Antipodi", No.3 which deals exclusively with war.)

Article from "Alternativa Libertaria" 1-15 November 2004, online news-sheet of the FdCA