How Terror Has Lost Its Meaning

[Guest Gandalf Grey]

How Terror Has Lost Its Meaning

 

By John Chuckman

Created Jul 12 2007 - 2:16pm

 

Why does terror dominate our headlines and the attention of our governments

going on six years after 9/11? The answer cannot be what George Bush says

that it is: it is not the fault of people who hate democracy and freedom.

 

We know this for a great many reasons. One of the world's oldest terrorist

organizations, the IRA, had no interest in British government and society.

It was interested only in being free of their control.

 

We know Bush is wrong also because the people who genuinely hate democracy

and freedom - the world's oligarchs, dictators, and strongmen - are people

who hate terror themselves because it threatens their security.

 

Strong absolute states have no tolerance for terror. The Soviet Union never

had a serious problem with terror, neither did East Germany, nor did

Hussein's

Iraq.

 

Absolute states are also frequently supported by, or allied to, the United

States, presumably for reasons other than promoting terror. We don't need to

go into the long history of the Cold War to find this. It remains true

following 9/11. Contemporary examples include Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,

Kuwait, and Egypt.

 

Bush is wrong, too, because all evidence, whether from polls or interviews

or writing, shows that people living in lands without democracy

overwhelmingly would embrace freedom were it available to them.

 

Of course, all such generalizations are statistical in nature. That is, they

are about trends or tendencies that reasonably describe the overwhelming

bulk of specific examples. There are always exceptions, extreme examples,

what statisticians call outliers, but you cannot talk about any subject

sensibly when you talk about only exceptions.

 

We also know, despite truckloads of publicity saying otherwise, that terror

is not by any measure one of the world's great problems. The number of

people killed in the World Trade Center, the largest terrorist attack by

far, was less than one month's carnage on America's highways. It was

equivalent of about two months of America's murdering Americans on the

nation's streets.

 

Terror is intended to frighten and intimidate people, its secrecy and

methods calculated to make deaths, even a small number of them, more

shocking than everyday deaths. But if we look at societies that have

undergone horrors beyond most people's ability to imagine, horrors greater

than any modern terror, we find something very interesting.

 

Life in London carried on during the Blitz. Germany maintained a huge

armaments production despite thousand-plane raids day and night. The people

of Leningrad, despite 800,000 deaths from being shelled and starved during

the German siege, managed to carry on a kind of society. People in Sarajevo

made do through a long and agonizing terror. Even the seemingly-hopeless

inmates of death camps often made remarkable efforts to maintain some

semblance of normality.

 

Perhaps the greatest terror experience in modern history was American

carpet-bombing in Vietnam. We know from Vietnamese war veterans that these

were their most feared events. They were horrific, and the United States

left Vietnam having killed something like 3 million people, mostly

civilians. But it did leave, and the people it bombed so horribly won a

terrible war.

 

Now all of these experiences, plus many more we could cite, have the

elements of randomness for victims and methods that just could not be much

more horrible. They all are experiences in terror in the broadest sense.

What they tell us is that terror does not work, despite its ability to make

people miserable.

 

I like the anecdote that following the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima, within

weeks, wild flowers were spotted growing in the cracks of the pavement. I

very much like to think of that as representing the human spirit.

 

Terror as we traditionally think of it is a method of redress or vengeance

for those without great armies or powerful weapons, those at a great

disadvantage vis-