Another Orwellianism?

The one I have in mind is calling suicide bombers cowards. This one’s been around for a while, but not all that long; but I do think that it predates the 9/11 attack. Every time I hear it, I shudder. The dictionary definition is rather straight-forward: “one who shows ignoble fear or timidity.” Ordinary Americans seem to accept this definition without any difficulty at all. Even a cursory look at the web shows many exchanges questioning this use of the word. The consensus seems to be: It takes courage to become a suicide bomber, not cowardice. Those on chat sites who disagree with this position show themselves to be quite incapable of using language as a carrier of truth.

Let me sharpen the issue. Let’s take a man who enlists in our volunteer army in a time of war. By doing so he agrees to fight in combat, thus endangering his life. The difference between this man and a suicide bomber, who also views himself as killing enemies, is the probability of paying the ultimate price. Are we therefore entitled to call the new enlistee a coward lite—and lite because he might survive his career under arms?

This subject has even attracted academic interest. Michael Weber of Yale has published an article in Public Affairs Quarterly (October 2005) titled “Are Terrorists Cowards?” It’s interesting reading. It instructs us concerning the mental acrobatics possible, indeed necessary, when we accept the premise, even if only for the sake of argument. Weber’s bottom line is that calling terrorists cowards is a rhetorical device to strengthen the American people to “support aggressive reply to terrorist attacks” and that “If this is right, and intentional, then perhaps Bush and other leaders who insist that terrorists are cowards are smarter than we think they are, however much we might hate to admit this.” — And I paid JStor $18 for the privilege of learning this?

The genuine value I obtained from the article is the reminder, Weber provides this in a footnote, that Bill Maher, the late host of Politically Incorrect, got his show cancelled when he opined that the 9/11 terrorists had been courageous rather than cowardly.

My bottom line, obviously, is that courage is courage, cowardice cowardice. Calling one the other can’t really fool the common people but may cause the privileged minority to lean every which way to stay on message. I also have genuine grounds for writing off our entire establishment. The center will hold, however, even if it has no voice.

Ideology Is Not The Cause

In the current climate of fear, anxiety, and what appears to be intercultural conflict, it is especially important to remember that any and all structures of human thought are easily exploited to create massive death and havoc. It’s certainly fashionable in this country to single out Islam—while forgetting that, mutatis mutandis, every religious and secular structure of ideas has at one time or another (conditions “cooperating”) been twisted all out of shape and used as the authority to justify killing “the other.”

All widespread human ideologies have developed, over time, to achieve the universal good—however flawed these structures might be in detail. The sequence of events is not as depicted in the usual bashing approaches. We’re led to believe that ideology comes first and/or is peculiarly suited to sanction violence. The actual sequence is that vast social pressures arise, almost all grounded in economics and the abuse of power. These are experienced as injustice. Those reacting to the pressure then look around to justify what they want to do—which is to hit back. To hit back is the motive, not the Qur’an in this case. And whatever the ideology that prevails in those places where the pressure is most felt—it will be that ideology that gets deformed to give authority for doing what should not be done.

The now prevailing terrorism—suicide bombings and the like—arises because of general underdevelopment superintended by wealthy and exploitive regimes so common in Islamic countries. Those rulers are thought to be conspiring and in alignment with the much more powerful West. The West, therefore, becomes the target. Secularism is not immune from this sort of thing either, and modern quasi-scientific ideas have also been twisted into justifications.

Indeed it is always best to ignore the ideological justifications of low-level conflicts and simply look at what is actually happening to the populations that breed the anarchists, terrorists, you name it.

Principles, Realism...or What? Ooze?

One of the peculiar features of life in modern society—in which appeal to rationality and principles is but one of multiple options—is that processes that may have begun rationally enough, thus based on principle, can go on indefinitely for no good reason whatsoever. The war in Afghanistan is an example. Principles derived from game theory suggest that it’s rational to meet an attack with an equivalent counter-punch. Natural law permits self-defense. The corollary of this initial reaction is that if the other party then subsides, we should do the same. Escalation is bad strategy.

In modern times, however, where power appears to depend on the emotional state of large collectives, symbols used to rally the public take on an ever greater role. The 9/11 attack on three buildings was linked to a single person, Osama bin Laden, and an elusive movement called Al-Qaeda. We attacked both but did not achieve what we call “closure” today. But we did destroy bin Laden’s camp and drove Al-Qaeda underground. That should have satisfied us. After achieving that, we should have subsided. We did not.

We did not because symbols we raised and caused to become much larger than life persist. Our leadership raised those symbols to shape and manage public expectations, thus to maintain itself in power. And this process continued even after the leadership changed. Notice the evolution of the symbolism. It began with the names of one leader and one group. It became a “war on terror” (however one is to define that) or “Islamic terrorism,” which suddenly had us fighting all of Islam. We’ve also worshipped—ever since it escaped our grasp in Vietnam—something we’ve called Victory, and for the same reason. But this concept is sufficiently vague under current circumstances so that we cannot claim it. What is wrong?

Al-Qaeda had no borders. It just happened to have its camps in Afghanistan. We expanded the conflict to Afghanistan as a whole—and specifically to the Pashtun group that then controlled it, the Taliban—in search of a “closure” that had been expanded in definition to what? The eradication of a whole civilization or, at least, its way of life? A rational and principled response to an attack on one of our centers with an attack on the centers of those who presumably caused the attack on us has evolved into a war against Afghanistan and, because of very permeable borders, with parts of Pakistan. No end in sight. We’re now at war everywhere in a small way at least. In this process we’ve also engineered a war with Iraq for which no rational grounds existed at all.

I ponder this now that the definition of “victory” is once more complexifying. Evidently it means that Afghanistan must be turned into a republic recognizably like our own, with regular elections, a consumption culture, competing parties, a real economy, and people who look reasonably like our own so that we can finally relax. But this isn’t in the cards.

I wonder if humanity has ever encountered this particular problem before—namely one in which vast masses of voters, manipulated by symbols, call the shots without wishing to do so and cause the leaders to behave in entirely irrational ways that the public, although it does wish to do so, cannot stop.

Experienced from Hidden Depths...

Sometimes I’m reminded how problematic it really is to view other societies from a distance—entirely through the filtering and abstracting lenses of the media. The feeling typically arises when I’m watching a genuinely good documentary or a foreign film, a film that its director made for another public, not ours, never even dreaming that it might actually be shown in America. Pictures from Persia have frequently had this effect on me. Suddenly I’m keenly aware not only how life in Iran is seen and felt but also—and seen through Iranian eyes—how diverse and surprising, for Iranians, it might be to see how their own rural populations live.

And in my mind I add to this a note or two. I’m actually experienced in this. I’ve been a rolling stone, rolling from Hungary to the altogether different environment of Germany, then from Bavaria to Saxony, from there to America. There was a time once in my life when I genuinely pictured America filled with cowboys and Indians—and when arrival in Kansas City, MO by night—our future home—shocked and depressed me. I arrived in the by now long-forgotten days when Neon Owned the Night, and the city didn’t look at all like the Wild West, not even the dark shadow of a buffalo in sight. Mind you, I was fifteen. And mind you, further, that I was plenty smart. The glittery intellectual surface was not in the least surprised, but deeper down we are—really we are—much more complex and strange beings, and something in my depth revolted at the trivialization of my imagination.

Now all this comes to mind when I’m forced to contemplate—through Afghanistani, Pakistani, or Yemeni eyes—and not urban eyes presumably already jaded by modernity—the impression that America produces by drones and mayhem that might have killed people known to me, a village over, say. And what this sort of thing does to fifteen-year olds there, who later, indeed soon—these wars have been dragging right along—are twenty-five-year-olds. Twenty-five-year-olds whose glittery intellectual surface may be entirely up-to-date but whose dark and archetypal depths do not approve and produce chthonic emotional upheavals. Is it to be wondered at that such experiences produce what we contemptuously label terrorism? As if we were, in our depths, superior to it?

One Man's Principle, Another's Convenience

Attorney General Eric Holder suggested yesterday that Congress should ease up on self-incrimination statutes (the so-called Miranda rule) in cases involving terrorism—so that law enforcement shall have more “flexibility.” The Supreme Court’s Miranda decision rests on a constitutional right in the Fifth Amendment—to wit: “No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself….”—and the right to a lawyer, which appears in the Sixth Amendment: “[T]he accused shall enjoy the right … to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

The presumption behind the language of the amendments (and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of them) is that a principle is involved rooted in fundamental human rights. So at least I understand it, so I would feel myself compelled to explain it if I were teaching this matter in school. We must draw our laws from some kind of fundamental and absolute conception of rights.

But the justification Holder offers for weakening this rule is that of convenience. The New York Times quotes him as saying: “We’re now dealing with international terrorists, and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.”

This is as nice an example of relativism in ethics as I could wish. And, as such, it is ultimately of the same family, genus, and species as terrorism itself. Because this side-stepping of principle, however small the step, is the abandonment of principle. It says that we shall adhere to our values—when it suits us. And we shall, behind the veils of legislative gestures, abandon them when it suits us.

The way I understand this initiative is that “anything goes.” If those in power can pick and choose which principles they must observe, based only on the sanction of a shifting majority of votes—why then, folks, what they can do, anyone can do. But that’s precisely the ideology behind the terrorist threat—an absolute assertion that the only principle is force. The terrorists use it stealthily, we use it legislatively. In turn that means that we’re no longer a nation of laws—or that we choose to redefine what “law” means. A principled rule becomes a chameleon-like continuous shifting of responses in flexible adaptation to whatever happens. If people are going out to buy guns, I can only nod my approval.