The Oxford English Dictionary defines terrorism as “the unofficial or unauthorised use of violence in the pursuit of political aims”. “Unofficial and unauthorised” is there to prevent every soldier on the planet from being hauled before a court of law for murder or grievous bodily harm. The Israeli Defence Force may massacre children and turn hospitals into rubble, but the view of the army of the state of Israel is that these atrocities aren’t generally regarded as acts of terrorism. Hamas’s monstrous crimes on October 7 last year were certainly acts of terror, but not because they weren’t wearing uniform.
Who is and isn’t a terrorist isn’t always clear. The Nazis regarded the French Resistance as a terrorist organisation, but the British begged to differ. Was the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa a bunch of terrorists or freedom-fighters? Terrorism, according to the OED, must be “unauthorised”, but it’s not clear who might legitimately authorise it. “The state” is the usual answer to the question of who has the sole right to inflict violence, but many a government, from imperial Rome to the modern United States, has engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians, which sounds pretty much like the use of terror. Were the bombing of Dresden and Coventry during the Second World War acts of terrorism, or simply the inevitable consequences of war? Yet being at war is no defence against committing abominations. On the contrary, it’s when you’re most likely to perpetrate them.
Not all unofficial or unauthorised violence is to be condemned. What if a crazed gunman breaks into a school classroom and prepares to pick off the children one by one, while you are standing behind him with a revolver in your hand? Not many people would argue that you shouldn’t shoot him in the back, and certainly not because you’re not “authorised” to do so. There just wouldn’t be time to get the Met Police or the Ministry of Defence on the phone. I say “not many” people would be against killing the gunman because some pacifists would refuse to do so on the grounds that the use of violence is absolutely wrong. Leo Tolstoy was one of them. (“Absolute” here, by the way, needn’t mean “very very wrong”, just wrong despite any set of circumstances you might think up to try and justify it.)
The only problem with this kind of pacifism is what you say to the bereaved parents at the next meeting of the PTA. Not trying to kill the gunman is obviously a mistake, which is to say that literal pacifism is untenable. There are situations in which killing someone isn’t only permissible but obligatory. Not shooting the mad gunman would be immoral. But these situations are mercifully rare. Moreover, they almost all concern the right to self-defence against an act of unjust aggression. What you can’t do is commit an act of unjust aggression while claiming that it’s in self-defence, as the Israelis are currently doing in Gaza. Violence used in self-defence must be proportionate. You can shoot the crazed gunman in the back, but you can’t roast him slowly over a fire. You can take out Hamas operatives known to be intent on murder, but you can’t turn their country into a wasteland in order to do so. Besides, the gunman in the school is guilty, which is a judgement on the act he’s about to perform rather than on his moral character, whereas the vast majority of those slaughtered in Gaza are innocent. This, once again, isn’t a judgement on their moral character but on what they do (or in this case don’t do, i.e. murder people as members or supporters of Hamas).
Terrorism, however, is supposed to be for a political purpose, which isn’t the case with the crazed gunman. Think, however, of someone intent on assassinating a president (let’s not make it Trump) when you’re the only person who can stop him with a well-aimed bullet. Some pacifists claim that in this situation they would shoot for the legs but not the head. They aren’t absolutely opposed to injuring people, just to taking their lives. This isn’t a pedantic distinction, since there’s quite a difference between being crippled and being turned into a corpse. But what if the head is the only bit of the assassin you can get in focus? In this case you can kill justly for a political end — but if you’re an ordinary citizen, the act isn’t either authorised or official.
So the dictionary definition of terrorism is fairly incoherent. An act of violence can be legitimate without being part of your professional duty or endorsed by the state. Or it can be ordered by the state but be in every other respect indistinguishable from terrorism. In any case, it isn’t always easy to distinguish political motives from more personal ones. A disaffected youth from an ethnic minority may kill in the name of a warped version of Islam, but also because he feels alienated and aggrieved. Or you may kill someone simply for the hell of it, like the Moors murderers in the Sixties. There’s a vein of anarchist thought in 19th-century Europe which believes in destruction for the sake of it. If you can bring nothingness into being with the flick of a finger, then your powers must surely rival those of the God who created the world. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, as every child with a balloon in its hands is aware.
The present Home Secretary appears somewhat insensitive to these distinctions, having recently placed spraying paint on aircraft in the same category as burning people alive. One consequence of this absurdity is that it devalues the significance of burning people alive. But then terrorism has always been too easily expanded a concept. It has its origin in the French Revolution, the event which gives birth to the modern era, and more precisely in the so-called Reign of Terror to which it gave rise. Terror becomes for the first time a specific form of politics, as though it was an alternative to neoliberalism or social democracy. It also begins life as a state-sponsored programme, not as a strike against the state. The way to govern is to scare one’s citizenry almost to death all of the time, as opposed to boring them to death all the time like the present prime minster. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that some of those who emphasise the cruelty and bloodlust of this episode seem rather less outraged by the French state’s suppression of the Left-wing Paris Commune eighty or so years later, which resulted in the slaughter and imprisonment of far more people than died at the hands of the Jacobins. The Commune, the historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked, was crushed by massacres of Parisians on a scale which would normally have been inconceivable in civilised 19th-century states.
There’s a case for arguing that the idea of terrorism was invented as a kind of joke. The Revolution was an age of –isms, and the word “terrorism” can be seen, somewhat fancifully, as a satirical smack at this use of language, indicating a bankrupt philosophy which consists of nothing more than spilling guts and hacking off heads. In a darkly ironic gesture, “terrorism” raises these depraved acts to the bogus dignity of a political theory. It’s no longer a question of using violence to enforce your kind of politics. Instead, violence is a kind of politics — a politics beyond politics, in the same way that some avant-garde art represents an art beyond art. Rather than persuading people to act in a certain way, you prevent them from acting in any way at all. The distinction between war and peace can no longer be sustained. From the terrorist’s viewpoint, the social order is itself a form of violence, so placing a bomb in a crowded café is just a more spectacular version of what goes on all the time.
Alternatively, of course, you can wrap the bomb around your body and combine murder with suicide. Suicide bombers usually see themselves as the humble instruments of a noble cause, but this contradicts the fact that the act of suicide is one of supreme self-sovereignty. A character in Dostoevsky remarks that in taking your own life you become for a moment divine, since you exercise the kind of dominion that is supposed to be reserved for God. It is the ultimate state of autonomy, even if it lasts no more than a few seconds. Behind this autonomy lies a vital notion in the Western philosophical tradition, namely the idea of self-ownership. My body belongs to me rather as a piece of property does, and as with a piece of property I can dispose of it as I wish. It’s true that I can’t leave my body in a pub as I can my umbrella, and it’s not clear what it is apart from inside my body which is doing the owning; but this dream of self-possession has been a potent force in European bourgeois thought. I can own my body pretty much as I can own the bodies of others, traditionally known as slaves; and just as I am free to kill them, so I am free to kill myself. In fact, doing so is the ultimate act of freedom. One response to this lethal way of seeing is to argue that we belong not to ourselves but to each other, which sets certain constraints on what we can do with our bodies. It’s important to point out, however, that the last thing people desperate enough to kill themselves usually have in mind is the doctrine of self-ownership.
The problem with violence is that it was there at the beginning, which is one reason why it’s so deep-seated. In order to create a civilisation you have to dominate your environment, and that dominion doesn’t just go away once a civilised society is up and running. Instead, it is “sublimated” (in Freud’s term) to a higher end. This is known as the political state, which has a monopoly on the use of force. It turns that force outward against its enemies, as well as inward against its various domestic adversaries. But this means that violence is built into civilisation, and is not just a regrettable aberration. That is at the heart of the social order which is profoundly at odds with it. And if that isn’t a gloomy enough reflection, there are also those who feel that they are unrepresented by that order, and that they can only draw attention to their plight by blowing other people to bits.
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