SOME HARD FACTS ABOUT TERROR

John Chuckman

 

We are having an outbreak of reports in the Canadian press about “home grown” terrorists, “radicalized” young men of Muslim faith traveling out of the country to participate in extremist groups abroad, a relatively insignificant phenomenon which has received inordinate publicity. In any event, if you give the matter some thought, you realize that this “news” is a kind of empty publicity, noise about something as old and familiar as human life itself, although it has been bestowed with a new name intended to frighten us into supporting measures outside the framework of a society of laws.

The truth is that young men, at least a certain portion of them, have always traveled abroad to join causes and wars. It’s about as ordinary a phenomenon as playing team sports or joining clubs. In many cases, we end up praising them for their bravery and idealism, as was certainly the case with the many thousands of Europeans, Americans, and Canadians who traveled to Spain in the 1930s to volunteer in the civil war against General Franco. In other cases, we condemn and imprison them and sometimes even execute them as part of the losing side, as America has been doing in its rampage through the Middle East.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of new, independent nations from the British Empire drew thousands of young men to Africa to fight as mercenaries or volunteers. Apartheid South Africa used to run classified ads in newspapers abroad to attract young men in its battle against the African National Congress. Young Jewish men in the past went to Israel to join the IDF out of some sense of brotherhood, and they do so still. The French Foreign Legion gained almost mythical status as a place for young men to leave things behind, embracing an undefined sense of purpose and brotherhood. Young European adventurers, often young noblemen with hopes of gaining glory, sailed across the Atlantic in the 1770s to volunteer in the American colonies’ revolt against the British Empire, far more of them than Washington’s meagre army could use.

Magnetic leaders like Napoleon or Castro or Nasser attracted countless volunteers from abroad in their heyday. Our history books don’t dwell on the fact but large numbers of young men from many countries volunteered for Hitler’s invading legions. The phenomenon does not depend on the high or noble nature of the cause, although the luster and publicity around grand causes undoubtedly attracts a still wider range of young men.

Young men often just want to escape from every-day, humdrum life, a boring marriage, a nothing job, or, as in the case of the Foreign Legion, to leave a criminal or failed past behind in hopes of high adventure, a new identity, and a fresh start in life. The genuine nature of a cause often matters little because young men’s fantasies convert grubby deeds into mythic stuff at least for a time. Young men in the Foreign Legion were actually fighting for a brutal imperialism in North Africa. Volunteers to the IDF only assist in the oppression of an abused people, not in the protection of the Jewish people. Those who joined Napoleon thought they were spreading liberté, égalité et fraternité across a mummified old-order Europe, but they were helping one of history’s great bloody soldier-conquerors glorify himself and do what it was he lusted after doing.

Mental illness also intrudes into terrorist matters, all things unusual or different being grist for the big dumb mill of the press. In Canada, during the wave of empty chatter about “home-grown terrorists,” there were two isolated incidents of murder in different parts of the country, one of a policeman and one of a reservist in the military. Immediately the press began a completely uninformative and patience-exhausting round of speculation about the dark nature of the perpetrators, complete with interviews of various self-proclaimed “terrorism experts,” men, as it generally turns out, who run security firms and are out drumming up business. In both cases, we finally learned through the fog of misinformation generated by the press, that the young dead men were deeply mentally disturbed, their acts having no more political significance than the crazed men set on suicide who first kill their wives or children or the boys who periodically show up heavily armed at school, shooting their way through classmates.

And of course, it is almost invariably males who do these things, our prisons containing about ten men for every woman. The violence we see in professional football, hockey, or boxing being almost an exclusive male domain. Woman rarely commit murder, males being responsible for almost all of it, with young males being responsible for an extraordinarily disproportionate share.

Aside from the psychotic and deeply depressed, there is a certain segment of young men in every society who are simply attracted to opportunities for legal killing, rape, and mayhem – this being the truly ugly side of every war and conflict that we never mention in our sentimental world-war memorial services or high school textbooks. These men are variously termed sociopaths or psychopaths, and they appear to exist naturally in some proportion in any population. They enjoy killing, inflicting pain, and the sense of supreme power over the lives of others, and they are incapable of sympathy for their victims or remorse for their acts. They only fear being caught, and war provides a wonderful legal playground for them.

The bloodiest, most brutal and pointless war of the last half century, America’s grotesque slaughter in Vietnam, attracted thousands of volunteers from other countries to join in the gruesome fun – acts which included everything from raping girls and then shooting them to throwing men out of helicopters. Even then-peaceful Canada, whose prime minister, Lester Pearson, bravely turned down Lyndon Johnson’s bullying demands to send troops (charmer that Johnson was, he is said to have grabbed our Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader by the lapels during a meeting and pushed him against a wall), saw hundreds of adventure-seeking young men, on their own, join the American holocaust, which would see three million horribly slaughtered, countless wounded, and an ancient agricultural land overwhelmed with America’s landmines, cluster bombs, and poisons.

Today we call people terrorists as easily as we more accurately might have called them reckless or mad. The word terrorist has been given an almost frightening, superstitious connotation much resembling the word witch in the seventeenth century when any poor old soul who suffered from a mental illness like schizophrenia might be burnt alive for her mumblings and delusions. Today, the same people we once burnt would be sent to a homeless shelter or a psychiatric hospital. Another aspect of the word terrorist is related to what Stalin used to say when he expected his officials to launch a new purge to keep the country terrorized into submission. The Vozhd would say something about “wreckers” or “wreckers of the revolution” and his minions would busy themselves demonstrating alacrity in finding large numbers to consign to prison or death. All of our press and government spokespeople now use terrorist with those two meanings, and to the extent that they do, we should recognize the foolishness of their speech and its danger to a free society.

Of course, anyone who commits violent crime needs dealing with, and we do have laws covering every form of violent crime and what is judged the degree of culpability. But creating a special class or type of crime, somehow understood to be different in nature from other crimes, and thereby requiring extraordinary measures of espionage and policing and imprisonment and standards of evidence, is a shabby, dishonest, and cowardly political act. It is a political act in exactly the sense best explained by George Orwell.

The template for this kind of state activity comes directly from Israel. It long ago succeeded in changing the outside perception of events since 1948 from that of a relatively powerless people having their homes and lands taken with great brutality. Everyone knows instinctively that people treated in that fashion have every right in international law and custom to fight their oppressors. We call them at various times and circumstances freedom fighters, guerillas, resistance fighters, or irregulars. But in this case, they were transformed into terrorists who seek only to destroy law-abiding, democratic Israel – unspeakably evil beings intent on attacking the imported Ozzie-and-Harriet peacefulness of white-picket fence neighborhoods constructed on other people’s property. It truly is a case of the world turned on its head.

It does make things so much easier when you shoot someone or bulldoze their home or send them to prison indefinitely with no trial and subject to torture, if you first have demonized them, much as in the case of witches or wreckers, with terrorist being this generation’s choice demonizing word. And when Israel kills some people whose identity as “terrorists” might be seen as very doubtful, the victims magically become militants, a Newspeak word which strives to make the killing of anyone from boys to grandfathers palatable, our shabby press in the West having adopted the word in its reportage without so much as blinking an eye, much less asking a question. This has been Israel’s day-in, day-out pattern of government for decades, but now it has managed to export to the United States the same pattern of behavior. The United States, after all, is a nation given to Captain Ahab-like obsessions, as it has demonstrated many times in its history, Muslims now having displaced the Communists it pursued with relentless fury for decades at home and abroad. And when the United States embraces a new obsession, its dependants in Europe, Canada, Australia, and other places are bullied into embracing it too. America has many avenues for pressuring the acceptance and recognition of its latest craze or special interest or dark operation and to quiet the criticism which would naturally flow from those who disagree and think for themselves.

Were America not enthralled with this voodoo about terror, Europe and others would quickly fall away, and Israel’s ugly behavior would be left in a glaring spotlight, much as South Africa’s once was.

It is the force of these considerations in part which leads so many to question the true nature of what happened on 9/11, for that set of events was pivotal in having American public opinion embrace extraordinary, anti-democratic, and anti-human rights measures. I do not subscribe to the (not-uncommon) conspiracy notion that the American government was complicit in 9/11, using it as a kind of Nazi Reichstag Fire to ignite the mindless war on terror and a crusade through the Middle East to overturn governments unfriendly to Israel. I do very much believe though that the full story of that event has never been told, and, as always, that can only mean highly embarrassing or compromising facts are being suppressed. The immense body of confidential information in Washington on all matters of state – literally tens of billions of documents – would largely disappear if it weren’t for considerations of embarrassment and compromise, the need for genuine government secrecy being much rarer than many assume.

A free society does not recognize crimes deemed in some way to be different or more heinous or extraordinary: it maintains and enforces sensible, well-reasoned laws which apply equally to all. It does not create criminal laws which reflect political pressure or special interests. The United States, now on a new hunt for a great white whale, has virtually re-created East Germany’s dreaded Stasi, only in a much more sophisticated and far-reaching form. It meshes with the all-pervasive secret state police apparatus Israel has constructed in the Middle East with infinite care since 1948. Now, over all our lives there is something, not answerable to any electorate, working to dissimulate, to intimidate, and to generate fear as nothing of which the Soviet Union was remotely capable. It influences all of our laws and customs, even attempting to shape the way we speak and think.

 

THOMAS FRIEDMAN, SPOKESMAN FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

John Chuckman

Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, is my favorite phony American liberal. Why phony? Over the years Mr. Friedman has written a number of remarkably parochial, jingoistic columns. Topics have included his protectionist views on competition with Japan, his militant views on Cuba, and his rambling, imperialist-stained notion of globalization.

But recently, on the matter of suicide-bombings in Israel, Mr. Friedman has set a new standard for American liberalism by offering views that for all the world cannot be distinguished from those of violent, right-wing extremists.

Mr. Friedman, on March 31, told readers, “Israel needs to deliver a blow that clearly shows that terror will not pay.”

“Pay?” Just what does Mr. Friedman mean by that? Would payment mean Israel’s occupation ends? That assassinations end? Improper arrests? Torture? Well, if any of these were the goals of the suicide-bombers, they hardly deserve to be called terrorists as Mr. Friedman does. In that light, they might well be regarded as some of Mr. Reagan’s freedom-fighters or as members of World War II’s resistance.

Mr. Friedman begs an important question by assuming suicide-bombers have any goal other than expressing hopelessness. Coming, as he does, from a country where children regularly bring loaded guns to school and shoot their classmates, you might think he’d be aware of the possibility. In that case, what Mr. Friedman advocates reduces to running tanks over the family homes of the disturbed boys responsible for the Columbine High School Massacre.

Of course, that word “disturbed” raises yet another possibility. The suicide-bombers may be sick or mentally unbalanced. In which case, Mr. Friedman’s proposal amounts to running tanks over the homes of Ted Kaczynski’s brother and parents.

But what I think Mr. Friedman clearly means is that Israel will exact four or five eyes for every one. He is talking about vengeance, plain and simple.

Whatever it is that Mr. Friedman means, his proposal is a very old one, one Israel has practiced for decades, and, to date, there is not a jot of evidence that it works. And Mr. Friedman seems unaware that it has been Mr. Sharon’s ruthless, bloody response to an Intifada that began with stone-throwing that, like the sowing of dragon’s teeth, has produced a terrible crop of young people sacrificing their lives.

Mr. Friedman glibly says that desperation is not a reason for suicide-bombing, that “a lot of people in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves.” Then what is the reason? You cannot order people, you cannot pay people, much less young people who normally are filled with God’s gift of a desire for life, to go and blow themselves up.

But Mr. Friedman brushes off all moral issues and other complexities by asserting that the suicide-bombing is “a strategic choice.” Cold, clinical, calculating – these are the connotations of his expression. And ,of course, therefore deserving of ruthless reprisal.

Mr. Friedman parrots American defenders of Israel’s worst excesses, people who, stunned and desperate themselves to explain horrific events, advocate a theory of child zombie-killers, the idea that the Palestinians have somehow perfected a process of brain-washing that eluded the CIA and KBG through the Cold War, to produce an army of murderous human automatons. If you believe this, you believe in the Manchurian Candidate.

Mr. Friedman sweeps on in magisterial, arm-chair outrage to demand that his government should not permit any Arab leader who even calls suicide-bombers “martyrs” enter the United States. These are frightening words. They surpass the soul-deadening depths of Mr. Ashcroft.

First, Mr. Friedman here attempts to bind the United States more intimately to Israel in the dispute, knowing full well the Palestinians need to retain some shred of hope in the United States as an intermediary that at least sometimes acts fairly.

Tell Arab leaders what words they must use? I do think we find here the measure of how carefully Mr. Friedman has thought about what he says. This suggestion is about as astute as building a fire in a dry-tinder forest.

Mr. Friedman appears influenced by the recent arrogant tendency of the United States to set laws that effectively govern the actions of people in other nations. This is contrary to of all accepted principles of international law, and recent efforts along these lines with the Helms-Burton Act or the Trading with the Enemy Act with regard to Cuba have earned the United States serious, entirely-avoidable resentment in Europe, Canada, and other places.

Well, Mr. Friedman would undoubtedly say that the survival of Israel justifies almost anything. And there might be some argument here were Israel’s survival at risk. But it is not. How on earth do a limited number of suicide-bombings, shocking as they may be, endanger the existence of Israel? London withstood The Blitz, Vietnam withstood some of the most horrific bombing in all of human history. Yet London and Vietnam are very much with us.

And this brings us back to the actual cause of the bombings, desperation, for they cannot under any imaginable circumstances achieve what Israeli extremists insist is their aim, the destruction of Israel. If it is isn’t desperation to be doing something that cannot possibly succeed, I don’t know what is. So, even assuming the extremists’ own definition of the bombers’ purpose, we come to the only question that means much here: When will Israel begin working to solve desperation instead of trying to crush it?