Terror, Right and Left
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On May 30 several men and a woman broke into an Arizona trailer, killing 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father. This weekend three people were arrested for the murder, two of whom are leaders of the Minutemen American Defense, an anti-illegal immigrant group not connected with the Minuteman Project. Here’s one of the accused on his web site:
"I take a very hard line with drugs and illegal immigration. Make no bones about it, I have a zero tolerance for terrorists, and that is what they are.”
It would not have occurred to your average anti-immigration activist, before 9/11, to describe Mexican families seeking honest work as “terrorists.” Nor would it have occurred to liberals to call the Minutemen themselves “precursors of domestic terrorism.” Yet George Bush used this rhetorical device so successfully, and so pervasively, that it has now become standard to characterize any violent person with potentially politically motives as representing some larger terrorist threat. James von Brunn was declared a terrorist hours after he murdered a guard at the Holocaust Museum. Dayo points out, as has Ann Friedman, that Tiller’s killer might be deemed a terrorist.
These men are terrorists, but I don't know that shouting "terrorist" from the rooftops gives us any insight into the causes of violence. The word "terrorism" is rhetorically useful precisely because it’s substantively vacuous. Bush used accusations of terrorism to render complex political situations black and white, to dehumanize entire nations, and to demonize a class of people rather than merely those responsible for an atrocity. He used it to drive any semblance of complexity from the conversation. Like “industry,” as in “abortion industry,” the word terrorism is meant to trigger thoughts of a coordinated conspiracy rather than individual action, Manichean morality tales rather than nuance, an amorphous glop of evil rather than gut-wrenching individual stories. As blogger IOZ puts it in a discussion of Tiller’s-killer-as-terrorist, this kind of rhetoric exists to remove any given crime “from the ordinary processes of criminal law and sanction, which are already quite draconian in these United States.” The men at Guantanamo, we were told, weren’t among those deserving of basic legal protections; they were alleged terrorists after all, and everyone knows you can’t use normal interrogation techniques with terrorists.
What does the left gain by calling a lone gunman an agent of right-wing terror? I think it obscures more than illuminates, but I don’t know that it’s an ineffective political strategy. The right has been extremely successful in adopting a leftist rhetoric of victimization. No surprise, then, when the left finds use for a rightest rhetoric of militarism.
Kerry Howley is a contributing editor at Reason Magazine and an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa's literary nonfiction program.
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Kerry Howley is a contributing editor at Reason Magazine and an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa's literary nonfiction program.
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Words mean things.
By: auros | Mon, 06/15/2009 - 22:32
Some people, on both right and left, are in the habit of calling anything they don't like "terrorist". The same stripping of semantic value has happened with "fascist".
But the fact is, both of those words actually did originally mean something, and when referring to something that actually meets the original definition, I don't think it's out of bounds to use those words. People who commit acts of violence in order to create fear in the general population and its political leaders, in order to get the general population or its leaders to change their behavior -- i.e. people who terrorize -- are terrorists.
Tiller's murderer is very clearly a terrorist. The Holocaust denier, maybe not -- he didn't kill people with the goal of getting them to stop talking about the Holocaust. If that was the goal, he might have, say, attacked a history textbook publisher.
Maybe people in the media, and on blogs, are using the word too often -- but don't say they shouldn't use it at all.
Terror, Right and Left
By: llwillis | Mon, 06/15/2009 - 11:11
It helps me to focus on the 'act', rather than the person. The definition cited in a comment to the IOZ piece you referenced is as good as any other... "violence against civilian targets intended to produce fear in a population so as to achieve specific political ends". Do these 'lone actors' see themselves as representing a group of like-minded folks? Probably. One test of whether it's terrorism or not... is it working? Looks like it, in the case of decades of anti-abortion violence.