[Clips] Velvet Revolutions and the Logic of Terrorism

[R.A. Hettinga]

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 Tech Central Station

 Velvet Revolutions and the Logic of Terrorism
 By Frederick Turner
  Published
  09/20/2005

 Part of our difficulty in dealing with global terror directed against
 civilian populations is that we have not, I believe, understood what it was
 designed to attack. Some see it as a war between cultural blocs, others as
 a religious war against infidels, others as a traditionalist reaction to
 the social, economic, and cultural disruptions caused by globalism, others
 as a continuation of the liberation of oppressed peoples from colonial
 imperialism. There may be a grain of truth in some of these explanations,
 but the counter-examples to each of them are glaring.

 For instance, the majority of deaths by terrorism in the last several years
 -- even including 9/11 and the second Intifada -- have been the result of
 Muslim-on-Muslim violence, perhaps even Arab-on-Arab violence, depending on
 what is counted. Thus we can rule out cultural and religious war as the
 prime motivation. Though one can at a stretch describe the Taliban as
 traditionalists opposing the corruptions of global market capitalism, al
 Qaeda is a quintessentially cosmopolitan, big-business financed,
 historicist, international intellectual movement, as globalist in its own
 way as Microsoft. As for the anti-colonialist explanation, it is hard to
 see how animist Sudanese farmers, Kashmiri Hindus, Sunni Kurds, Iraqi
 Shiites, Philippine Christians or Egyptian or Lebanese democrats, all of
 them targets of terrorism, could be considered colonial oppressors.

 The history of warfare shows us that each new military power arises as the
 result of a new strategy or weapon, with a major socio-economic dimension,
 that effectively refutes the previous one. The disciplined citizen-hoplite
 infantryman of the Greek city-states answers and reverses the huge peasant
 armies of the Persian emperors. The plebeian Roman phalanx defeats the
 elite Spartan line. The Parthian cavalry archer wears out and turns back
 the Roman phalanx. The longbow brings down the armored knight. The swift
 low British man-o'-war defeats the galleon. The machine-gun stops the
 massed infantry attack invented by Marlborough and Bonaparte.

 When the suicide bomber first emerged as the paradigm and core symbol of
 terrorism, it could be argued that it was exactly the weapon to counter the
 nuclear-armed modern democratic nation state (Israel in particular). The
 suicide bomb could not, by definition, be avenged or deterred; though it
 could not target the government, which could always democratically renew
 itself, it could target the population's trust in its government. Its
 target was, appropriately, the whole population, because in a democracy the
 whole population is the sovereign. The bomber could always be disavowed by
 his state bosses and protectors.

 But as I have pointed out, the numbers of Israeli and Western dead as
 victims of terror are only a fraction of the total number. War is politics
 by other means. Why did suicide terror metastasize from Israel to the
 world? What is the basic political enemy of the global terrorist movement?
 What is it designed to attack? Though it would be tempting to say that the
 target is the democratic state, the evidence does not quite support it.
 Many existing democratic states were left alone, and coexisted with, for
 years before suicide terror emerged, and are so still.

 I believe that the evidence points clearly to one target. Thirty years ago
 it looked as if the totalitarian state was solidly established, successful
 and immortal. Democratic capitalism had been stopped in its tracks. The
 nuclear-armed socialist dictatorship could not be attacked or defeated; it
 could at best be contained, and none of its incremental marginal conquests
 could be rolled back. Marvelously, however, a new strategy emerged,
 invented by the world's middle-class populations, that could bring down the
 totalitarian state: the velvet revolution. Totalitarian governments rely on
 elites to govern and control the people and defend themselves against
 outside ideas. Those elites must reproduce themselves, creating a
 property-owning educated class with great power but without the
 revolutionary ideology of their parents; and to remain economically viable
 the state must produce a skilled artisan class, like the shipbuilders of
 Gdansk, with the capacity to unionize. Out of these materials, generated by
 totalitarianism itself, comes the velvet revolution.

 The velvet revolution (also named the orange revolution, the purple finger,
 the rose revolution, the cedar revolution) has swept the world. In
 different ways, nonviolent, non-ideological middle-class and skilled-worker
 mass movements have unseated tyrants and established democracies in an
 amazing range of countries: Spain, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Poland, East
 Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Bangladesh, South Korea,
 Indonesia, the Baltic states, Mexico, Serbia, Albania, Georgia, the
 Ukraine, the Philippines, Lebanon, even Palestine, all fell to the regimes
 of popular sovereignty. China nearly fell in 1989, with the Tiananmen
 protest, and will become a democracy some time in the next twenty years. If
 there is one defining event that characterizes the end of twentieth century
 political modernism, it is this one.

 The suicide bomb, with the mass terrorism it epitomizes, is the weapon of
 choice against the velvet revolution. The target is not, as well-meaning
 critics of terrorism say, indiscriminate: it is exact and precise. The
 target is any population that might organize a velvet revolution, the
 potential sovereigns of a democratic state. It is people who are not
 ideological, who are willing to let others believe what they want, who want
 to make a living and be independent, and who want a say in their
 government. Even in Israel, where it was the citizens of an
 already-established democratic state that were being attacked, the true
 target, as we are now coming to understand after the death of Arafat, was
 the nascent democracy of Palestine. By killing Jews, Arafat could continue
 to oppress and defraud Palestinians.

 Global terrorism is not a revolution, but an attempt to suppress a
 revolution. What is being defended by suicide terror is not Islam, not
 traditional moral culture, not the ethnic nation yearning to be free of the
 colonial oppressor, but the principle of totalitarian rule -- the
 sovereignty of the dictator or the ayatollah, promoted as national
 self-identity and independence, or as the will of God. It is the last gasp,
 historically, of the ancient system by which the huge majority of human
 beings were ruled since the Neolithic agricultural revolution.


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 R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
 The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
 "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
 [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
 experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'