| First Thoughts On Ayers And The Discourse Of Terrorism
Three points stand out at the beginng: First, is that while the term "terrorism" is a contested one, a key component that majority of experts agree on is that it is violence directed against civilian non-combatants. This was not, in the main, the case with the Weathermen. Their aims were to target the American government (which was prosecuting a war against the people of Vietnam), not the American people, and their method was to destroy property, and not to harm people.
This aim was not uniformly followed, however, particularly in firebombing of the home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh, who was presiding over the trial of the Panther 21. The extreme difficulty of remaining exclusively focused on property attacks was and is one of the fundamental moral objections to the path that the Weatherman chose. Still, if the Weathermen themselves were heedless of how readily their actions could lead to crossing the line into terrorism, we should not make the related mistake of equating the two. There was a difference-a very important one, morally-however difficult, or even impossible, it might turn out to be in practice.
Second, while it is arguable whether the Weathermen should be considered a terrorist organization, the questions regarding William Ayers is a different one. If others in the organization crossed the line into terrorism-and the Murtagh bombers certainly did-that does not mean Ayers himself was a terrorist. Indeed, virtually all modern wars involve some terrorizing of civilian populations, in violation of the laws of war. This does not automatically make every combatant a war criminal.
Or does it? Which is more morally disturbing to us?
This is not a trivial matter of "mere semantics", as we shall shortly see. Our capacity to resist evil, from within as well as without, is crucially dependent on our ability to name it, and to situate it, particularly when our choice is not between good and evil, as it seldom is, but when our choice is between conflicting forms of good and evil mixed together.
This brings us directly to our third point: The official, hegemonic discourse on terrorism is sharply dichotomized: innocents on one side, terrorist "evil-doers" on the other. This reflects the outlook of the paranoid-schizoid position, one of two basic psychological orientations in the object relations school of psychotherapy, developed by Melanie Klein, which I discussed in my diary, "Beyond The Ontology of Snark-Spliting And Projective Identification From Infancy To World Politics".
Here is a partial description of the dynamics involved:
A child seeks to retain good feelings and introjects good objects, whilst expelling bad objects and projecting bad feelings onto an external object. The expulsion is motivated by a paranoid fear of annihilation by the bad object.
Klein describes this as splitting, in the way that it seeks to prevent the bad object from contaminating the good object by separating them via the inside-outside barrier.
The schizoid response to the paranoia is then to excessively project or introject those parts, seeking to keep the good and bad controlled and separated. Aggression is common in splitting as fear of the bad object causes a destructive stance.
The child's ego does not yet have the ability to tolerate or integrate these two different aspects, and thus uses 'magical' omnipotent denial in order to remove the power and reality from the persecuting bad object.
This splitting, projection and introjection has a frighteningly disintegrative effect, pulling apart the fragile ego.
In contrast to this is the depressive position, which enables the process of coming to terms with ambiguity and complexity:
The initial depressive position
The initial depressive position is a significant step in integrative development which occurs when the infant discovers that the hated bad breast and the loved good breast are one and the same. The mother begins to be recognized as a whole object who can be good and bad, rather than two part-objects, one good and one bad. Love and hate, along with external reality and internal phantasy, can now also begin to co-exist.
As ambivalence is accepted, the mother can be seen as fallible and capable of both good and bad. The infant begins to acknowledge its own helplessness, dependency and jealousy towards the mother. It consequently becomes anxious that the aggressive impulses might have hurt or even destroyed the mother, who they now recognize as needed and loved. This results in 'depressive anxiety' replacing destructive urges with guilt.
The general depressive position
In the more general depressive position, projective identification is used to empathize with others, moving parts of the self into the other person in order to understand them.
To some extent, this is facilitated when the other person is receptive to this act. The experience that the projecting person through their identification is related to the actions and reactions of the other person.
When the thoughts and feelings are taken back inside the projecting person from the other person, they may be better able to handle them as they also bring back something of the other person and the way they appeared to cope. It can also be comforting just to know that another person has experienced a troublesome part of the self.
The depressive position is thus a gentler and more cooperative counterpoint to the paranoid-schizoid position and acts to heal its wounds.
The intent of this diary is to approach the subject of terrorism and terrorism discourse from the depressive position. By refusing to mindlessly echo the paranoid-schizoid identification of certain people as terrorist "evildoers" and all "true Americans" as pure innocents, this approach is immediately subject to attack as "excusing" or "justifying" terrorism.
But this is the only possible approach that can ever hope to actually bring terrorism to an end, by healing the underlying wounds that give it life, rather than constantly creating new wounds under the guise of avenging old ones.
Recent "Terrorism" Discourse-Pre 9/11
Discourse around the term "terrorism" became politically prominent during the early 1980s, as right pushed the theory that the Soviet Union was behind all manner of seemingly independent terrorist organizations around the world. This was a particularly breathtaking claim, given the overtly fascist orientation of some such groups-such as the Grey Wolves, a disturbed member of which, Mehmet Ali A?ca, attempted to assasinate Pope John Paul II. Indeed, the right invested a tremendous amount of effort in trying to pin his actions on KGB, via the Bulgarian KBG. Other problems with this theory were seen in the exposure of the Italian "strategy of tension" (strategia della tensione), involving secretave groups such as the Propaganda Due (P2) Lodge, which stood at the center of wide-ranging strategy to discredit the left by engaging in terrorists act that were then blamed on leftists groups. (P2's activities spread as far abroad as Uruguay, Brazil, and especially Argentina, during the period of the "dirty war.")
These various activities merely represented the most recent example in the long history of rightwing reliance on torture, intimidation and violence, throughout the history of Europe and the Americas. Indeed, rightwing ideology has generally justified such actions in fairly straightforward terms, even going so far as to celebrate them. Celebrating the power of force and disdain for weakness are central themes of right wing thought stretching back through centuries of time.
While there most certainly was a counter-tradition of left-wing violence dating sporadically from the French Revolution through the otbreak of anarchist assassinations and attempts against political leaders in the late 19th Century, this tradition was both much more recent and less widespread, it had limited resonance with core leftwing ideas-if not outright conflict. Without doubt, the Soviet Union had a clear record of deep contradictions between professed ideology and actual actions-not to mention the purge, imprisonment, and execution of thousands of committed communist party members. But this deeply conflicted history had resulted in considerable tension and distrust, if not outright hositility toward it by others on the left.
Terrorism Defined-As Best We Can
The Wikipedia entry on terrorism is instructive in that it begins with both providing a core definition, and noting the vast diversity of definitions out there:
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion."[1] There is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism.[2][3] Most common definitions of terrorism include only those acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for an ideological goal (as opposed to a lone attack), and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants. Some definitions also include acts of unlawful violence and war. A common opinion about terrorist groups, especially after the 'Global War on Terror' began after 9/11/2001, is that the majority of terrorist attacks are due to Islamic-extremists or radical religious groups. The 2001 attack of the World Trade Center and the hijacking of four passenger jets are a very well known and a well documented example of Islamic terrorism in recent memory.
Terrorism is also a form of unconventional warfare and psychological warfare. The word is politically and emotionally charged,[4] and this greatly compounds the difficulty of providing a precise definition. One 1988 study by the US Army found that over 100 definitions of the word "terrorism" have been used.[5] A person who practices terrorism is a terrorist.
In the section on origins of the term, Wikipedia says:
The word "terrorism" was first used in reference to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. In many countries, acts of terrorism are legally distinguished from criminal acts done for other purposes, and "terrorism" is defined by statute; see definition of terrorism for particular definitions. Common principles among legal definitions of terrorism provide an emerging consensus as to meaning and also foster cooperation between law enforcement personnel in different countries. Among these definitions there are several that do not recognize the possibility of legitimate use of violence by civilians against an invader in an occupied country and would, thus label all resistance movements as terrorist groups. Others make a distinction between lawful and unlawful use of violence. Ultimately, the distinction is a political judgment.[7] In November 2004, a United Nations Security Council report described terrorism as any act "intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act." (Note that this report does not constitute international law.)[8] U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) defined terrorism as: "The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological." [9]
A section on "Key criteria" has subheadings: Violence, Psychological impact and fear, Perpetrated for a political goal, Deliberate targeting of non-combatants, Disguise, and Unlawfulness or illegitimacy. The last is elaborated thus:
Unlawfulness or illegitimacy - Some official (notably government) definitions of terrorism add a criterion of illegitimacy or unlawfulness[13] to distinguish between actions authorized by a government (and thus "lawful") and those of other actors, including individuals and small groups. Using this criterion, actions that would otherwise qualify as terrorism would not be considered terrorism if they were government sanctioned. For example, firebombing a city, which is designed to affect civilian support for a cause, would not be considered terrorism if it were authorized by a government. This criterion is inherently problematic and is not universally accepted, because: it denies the existence of state terrorism; the same act may or may not be classed as terrorism depending on whether its sponsorship is traced to a "legitimate" government; "legitimacy" and "lawfulness" are subjective, depending on the perspective of one government or another; and it diverges from the historically accepted meaning and origin of the term.[14][15][16][17] For these reasons this criterion is not universally accepted. Most dictionary definitions of the term do not include this criterion.
Indeed, the history of modern warfare is so intimately involved with the terrorization of civilian populations that it seems perverse beyond words to exclude state terrorism. The victims of state terrorism far exceed the victims of non-state terrorism, but more importantly, it is historically impossible to understand the one without the other.
How The US Came To Embrace Terror
It wasn't under George W. Bush, sad to say. We embraced terror a long, long time ago, before we were even a nation, in the initial stages of the long, bloody history of exterminating and displacing our country's original inhabitants. King Philip's War was a highlight of the early stages of this process, one of the few times in which we suffered almost as much terror as we doled out. More recently, however, we embraced terror in a modern, technological form, and we did so under Walt Disney and FDR.
This story is told in capsule form in an article by Sherwood Ross, "How The US Reversed Its Policy On Civilian Bombing". While the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War was widely viewed with horror as an unprecedented act of evil, Ross reminds us that it was not a first. Civilians had been intentionally bombed before:
During World War I, in response to a series of French bombing raids on German cities, Germany struck back with a zeppelin bombing of Paris on March 21, 1915, which killed twenty-three and injured thirty. A similar bombing of London on May 31 killed seven and wounded thirty-five. By war's end 670 Londoners had been killed by bombs from zeppelins and airplanes.
The British, for their part, used bombers in Egypt, Northwest India, and the Sudan early in the war, bombed Constantinople in 1917, and carried out a major strategic bombing campaign against Germany from late 1917 to late 1918 under the direction of Major General Hugh Trenchard, "the father of the Royal Air Force."
.... Trenchard influenced American air commander Billy Mitchell, who claimed that bombing cities would speed the end of a conflict and was "more humane" than cannon fire and bayonets. Indeed, after the war Trenchard, Mitchell, and Italy's first air commander, Giulio Douhet, each published articles arguing for strategic bombing of industrial centers and other civilian targets as a way of destroying enemy morale in future wars.
The British quickly put those ideas to work. In 1920 they used bombers to quell the dervish uprising in East Africa led by Somali leader Mohammed Hassan, striking their decisive blow by tricking "the mad mullah" into preparing for an official visit. While Hassan, his lieutenants, and his family duly waited under a ceremonial canopy at Taleex, Trenchard's bombers attacked, killing most of Hassan's family and pursuing him and his followers through the desert.
For the Third Afghani war of 1919 the British bombing effort was organized by Squadron Leader Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who subsequently, in 1924 in Iraq, pioneered a new method of governance, "control without occupation," which included dropping fire on straw-roofed huts. In his report at the end of hostilities, Harris wrote: Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise they could stand bombing they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage ... that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.
Amazing how little new there is, no? Terrorizing Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq? "But what about America?" you ask. Getting to that. Very early on in WWII, Britain and Germany started bombing each other's civilian populations. But the US held back for more than a year after entering the war:
And even though, at their Casablanca conference in January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on a strategic bombing offensive that included reducing the morale of the German people "to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened," the United States clung for the time being to its policy of destroying military targets only.
Germany's Inspector General of Fire Prevention Hans Rumpf makes the distinction between initial British and American strategies in his 1963 book, The Bombing of Germany, writing that the British night attacks systematically struck Hamburg's neighborhoods with incendiaries and "were dearly of a terrorist nature" while, "during the day, the U.S.A.F. bombers attacked military and industrial targets in the dock areas and, in particular, the shipyards and submarine yards" with high-explosive bombs.
Change, however, was soon to come, though it would still be resisted:
Then Walt Disney entered the picture. In The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney, Richard Schickel describes how Disney embraced the strategic bombing philosophy of Major Alexander de Seversky in producing a 1943 film Victory Through Air Power. This hour-long work of propaganda gave a tremendous boost to the argument for terror bombing. Critic James Agee wrote of the film, "I noticed, uneasily, that there were no suffering and dying enemy civilians under all those proud promises of bombs; no civilians at all, in fact." In the closing scene the battle is between an American eagle and an octopus with its tentacles gripping a map. Agee felt he couldn't "contentedly accept the antiseptic white lies" of the movie.
This film at first proved more popular among British policymakers than those in the United States. But that would change. According to H.C. Potter, one of the film's directors, Disney personally told him that Churchill had screened the film for Roosevelt at their Quebec Conference of August 1943 and thus induced Roosevelt to warm up to long-range strategic bombing.
In his public speeches, however, Roosevelt still clung to the concept of striking only military targets. Addressing Congress in September 1943 he said, "We were not bombing tenements for the sadistic pleasure of killing as the Nazis did, but blowing to bits carefully selected targets--factories, shipyards, munitions dumps."
Colonel Robert Morgan, who piloted the first bomber to complete twenty-five missions over Europe and who later flew a B-29 over Japan, writes in The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle: Memoirs of a WWII Bomber Pilot:
I will always be proud of the restraint shown in the United States Army Air Forces in those early months of the European air war--the time of the Memphis Belle. The ordnance carried by the B-17s of the Mighty Eighth reflected the humanitarian hopes of our government and our strictly defined and limited mission, which was to attack only military installations, never civilian centers.
Of the later switch to civilian targets, however, Morgan writes, "Nothing and no one was safe--combatants, civilians, women, children, cities, churches, the great historical monuments" and "no physical or moral boundaries would be able to check the spread of slaughter."
In this context, on March 6, 1944, the New York Times gave page one coverage to a protest by twenty-eight prominent Americans, mostly clergy, against "obliteration raids" on German cities. The protestors called upon Christians "to examine themselves concerning their participation in this carnival of death" and to acquaint themselves with "the realities of what is being done in our name in Europe"
But the shift from pinpoint bombing of military targets to strategic, or area, bombings by the United States got another push from Churchill in 1945 when he pressed for cities in eastern Germany to be made high-priority targets. According to Geoffrey Perret in Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II, General Carl Spaatz, "commander of the Strategic Air Force, obliged by ordering the Eighth [Air Force] to strike Berlin. Not the industries of Berlin, not the marshalling yards of Berlin, but the city center--the heart of German government and an area of high population density." Perret writes that General Doolittle "protested that such an attack would be terrorism, without any justification on military grounds.... Spaatz, however, wasn't prepared to discuss it. He insisted the attack go ahead." On February 3, 1945, nearly 1,000 bombers struck Berlin's city center, killing 3,000 Berliners and rendering 120,000 homeless....
Lee Kennett in A History of Strategic Bombing writes that, toward the end of the war in Europe, the United States showed "an increased interest in attacks directed specifically at the German people." R. J. Overy in The Air War, 1939-45 writes, "The most striking moral paradox of the war years was the willingness of ostensibly liberal states to engage in the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians from the air." Indeed, Visser t'Hooft, Secretary of the World Council of Churches, wrote at the time, "These bombardments create the impression that the whole world has gone totalitarian"
In the Pacific theater, bombing civilians started much later, but quickly made up for lost time:
Meanwhile, in the Pacific theater of operations, Major General Curtis LeMay took over the U.S. XXI Bomber Command in January 1945 and decided the high-altitude precision daylight bombing of Japanese military targets had achieved only limited success. So he changed tactics. On February 25 his bombers showered incendiaries on one square mile of Tokyo, destroying some 28,000 buildings. These incendiaries were a mixture of magnesium and jellied gasoline that clung to the surface of whatever they struck--human beings included--and burned slowly at a high temperature. According to Colonel Robert Morgan, who flew a B-29 over Tokyo:
We were bombing with the very latest in the grim technology of death by fire--the incendiary M-69 and napalm-packed M-17. Tens of thousands of these projectiles were now falling on the center of Tokyo, turning it into a hell on earth.... As the fires spread and conjoined, the stampeding crowds grew. They choked the narrow streets, fleeing from one incinerated block only to collide with another throng streaming in the opposite direction. Great tongues of fire reached out to roast them en masse, like the breath of massive dragons. As the fires surged into vacuums created by the eaten-up oxygen, wind velocity increased, and scrambling human herds were overtaken by hundred-mile-an-hour firewinds. In their desperation, thousands of men, women, and children flocked towards the rivers and canals that cut through Tokyo, but these only yielded other forms of hideous deaths. Jumpers drowned, were asphyxiated, or were crushed to death by succeeding waves of jumpers. Soon the steel girders of bridges spanning the waters grew white-hot, forcing refugees to jump into water that was itself beginning to boil.
From there to Hiroshima was hardly more than a hop, skip and jump. If that isn't terrorism, then pray tell, what is?
Thank you, Walt Disney. We all live in your magic kingdom now.
But, of course, all this, and much, much more was forgotten on September 11, 2001. For we are not just a nation of terrorists. We are a nation of amnesiacs as well. Such is the nature of the paranoid-schizoid position. |
