There are times when social constructs have to attain the level of absolutely absurd extreme before we can see that the absurdity actually exists at a much lower level of the idiocracy chain, and the latest swipe of the terrorist wand is definitely one of those times. When the Dalai Lama is declared a terrorist – Dharamsala Nancy the new Hanoi Jane? – even those people who accept the axis of Islamic evil concept have got to be experiencing lexical dissonance. The Dalai Lama orchestrating a terrorist plot? What spin doctor came up with that notion? Ah yes, the ever-ameobic Chinese government, always embracing the best of what works in the West. But i’m not blaming the Chinese. This is what the W Dick junta has done to the world - their lasting impact, cause célèbre, Chernobylesque meltdown in the sphere of global syllogisms. As it now stands, anyone anywhere who uses violence in charged political atmospheres – or is affiliated with those who do - is branded a terrorist; all acts of dissent that the state (or a corporate entity) doesn’t like become acts of terrorism. China is merely following the US lead, and it becomes harder for the US to publicly criticize them without drawing further attention to its unabashed hypocrisy.
In the old days we had terms like insurrection – revolt – war – occasionally, the crazed rantings of a recent widower or war veteran. Then guerilla wars became “low intensity conflicts,” regionalized with huge imparities, evolving finally into privatized occupation and militarily weeding out evil-doers (itself a twist of “enemy;” is it obvious, the extent to which the West is also highly theocratized?) This is a new New World Order, and woe especially to those whose acts remain somewhat unpredictable, making the state look weak and feel weak. Instilling fear is a mandatory counter measure, leading people to want their big strong uncle to keep them safe: whatever it takes, just do it. This is all about spin at a gross Orwellian magnitude, but it has far more serious consequences than generating middle class suburban paranoia. Countries are being destroyed, cultures are being exterminated, increasingly far and wide as part of a “global war on terror.” War seems to be what globalization is ultimately all about, or at least where its strands are most strongly knotted together. As the safe havens between war zones shrink, arms deals are cut which would have been unlikely or unpermitted a decade ago. Slap a “war on terror” tag on the package and it’s a go. War has always been big business, and terror is proving to be bigger business – the shock doctrine is just part of it.
On any given day that i can tolerate a few minutes of seeing what Little Bush is up to, or Ehud Olmert, or (at the more pathetic end) Musharraf, i am struck again and again by the use of “terror” to justify any level of violence the state apparatus chooses to employ. US soldiers from Iraq speak about how rules of engagement essentially devolved to the point where anything moving was a valid target. Indiscriminate killing – is that not murder? (Is that not terrorism?) In Palestine, same situation. The IDF doesn’t even bother with the whole collateral damage label since all Palestinians are current or future terrorists. The arbitrariness of harassment is maddening, and the soldiers as well as vigilantes operate with total immunity. The US wants to bomb targets in Pakistan, they bomb Pakistan. Israel wants to bomb civilians in Lebanon, they bomb civilians in Lebanon. Columbia wants to eliminate the FARC, they ignore borders and shoot to kill. You can do whatever you want, or pay someone else to do it, with one very crucial provision: do not, under any circumstances, allow the enemy to organize a real army, with colonels and uniforms, marching into battle under a unifying banner, because then you’ll be forced to drop ‘terrrorism’ from the slogan, it will just be war and there will have to be limits, and maybe conscription (in the US, at least), and the whole presentation would have to change.
At the heart of the current public relations campaign is the premise that suicide bombers, RPG-toters, and their various counterparts worldwide are in the fight for the mere existential thrill of killing people and wreaking general havoc. While the latter is in fact probably true, the over-arching problem is that by focusing on terrorism, states are able to ignore the political issues that underlie the resistance movements. Israel mastered this tactic early on, leading the world to assume that once Palestinians ditched the suicide bombings and stone throwing, they might get their independence, or at least Israel wouldn’t have to constantly be punishing them. Putin used the same tactic with Chechnya, Bush continues to slog it out on this premise in Iraq and, along with the rest of NATO, in Afghanistan. Now China has attempted to justify its violence against Tibetans by construing monks as suicide terrorists, shifting the question away from why they are persecuted to why they must be even more aggressively occupied and controlled. It’s effective spin in this age of fear and retribution. In the “have your say” comment boards about Tibet, Chinese contributors say over and over that terrorism is not the way for Tibetans to put forward their cause. The ultimate irony is that the longer legitimate political and cultural rights are repressed or ignored, the closer people move towards taking unpredictable, violent action. To paraphrase Sartre, we don’t get a war without wanting a war, and people get the war they want.
Which brings us back to the absurdity of Jiabao’s government labeling the Dalai Lama a terrorist. Whatever his political shortcomings, the Tibetan leader-in-exile has repeatedly offered to negotiate the establishment of a culturally autonomous region within China, under which Tibetans would control selecting their leaders and basically managing their territory according to their own traditions, while China would be able to continue exploiting the natural resources, secure the borders, et al. One assumes this would allow Han Chinese who’ve moved into Tibet to continue living there, so long as the PLA is not around enforcing cultural genocide. However, since nearly all governments tow the line that there is no negotiating with terrorists, this new classification of Tibetan resisters as suicide attackers serves to undermine negotiations, with public support for doing so. China – like Israel, Russia and the US – has huge military resources and theoretically doesn’t have to put up with anybody who burns their flag. Yet, it’s one thing to not negotiate with a bunch of kuffiya-wearing desperados who’ve hijacked a plane, another entirely to not negotiate with an entire people. The options that leaves us are exactly two: extermination or perpetual war.
This is the essence of why the terminology is so blatantly idiotic and corrupt: political conflict is not about methodology; it’s about greed and sometimes, ideology. Just today, Bush in Bucharest told his NATO comrades that they must “fight to the finish” against Afghani extremists. This was in the context of pushing missile defense systems in South Asia and expanding NATO. The rest of the EU leaders joined in at the refrain: death to the Taliban or bust. On other words, we’ll just annihilate the farmers, herders and religious illiterates in Afghanistan and then all will be well with the world. Guess again. That Bush is trying to get NATO to commit more resources, and intensify the fight, has only got to mean that from their standpoint, the situation is going backwards not forward. Stronger methods are required. In other words, the terrorists in Afghanistan are calling the shots? If that’s the case, the only way to resolve it is to fight terror with terror, and therein lies the rub.
There is no moral high ground here, as any Iraqi exile will tell you – terror, by definition, is determined as such by those at the receiving end of it. i’m no fan of Osama bin Laden, but let’s be real about what these Afghan “extremists” want and why they haven’t put down their toys yet: i guarantee they are not fighting to protect Osama or whichever crazed mullah is in command at the moment. The US/NATO position that in the war against terror there are no constraints is a license for everyone involved to use whatever means of battle they choose. That US forces cannot succeed in a guerrilla war is not the guerrillas’ fault. Nor is it the Tibetans’ fault that the Chinese cannot get the world to forget about their violent occupation of Tibet. Painting these resistance movements over with lacquers of terrorist fanaticism ultimately lays bare the inability of governments to deal effectively with the political conflicts they, themselves, have initiated and subsequently perpetuated. (To be clear, i do not use “effectively” here to mean success of the invaders; effective ending of a conflict means negotiating conditions that are just, and respect the aggrieved parties, i.e. the unsuccessfully conquered.) It also keeps the battle going, the war profiteering on track, likewise the endless death and destruction. We can call this a fight against terrorism, but really it’s a fight against fighting back, and to pretend anything else is to side with the well-manicured terrorist spin doctors, those people who appreciate the finer aspects of gloss.
