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.
