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Friday
July 15, 2005

Machan's Musings - What Some Don't Get About Terrorism by Tibor R. Machan

Any time a terrorist attack occurs, a great many people wring their hands trying to figure out just what is amiss with such barbaric conduct. Be it an IRA, Palestinian or radical Muslim (suicide) attack, there is the usual acknowledgement that terrorism is horrible and the people doing it are over the top, but then the focus turns to whatever is supposed to have provoked it—usually George W. Bush and his predecessors' foreign policy measures. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (18 messages)

Post 0

Friday, July 15, 2005 - 9:21am

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Excellent essay, Tibor.

Terrorism is vile. It is always done by individuals thinking in a tribalist manner. All actions taken on this planet, are taken by individuals (and this point seems lost on many who don't "get it" -- as you say).

One may even hypothesize that certain REACTIONS to terror may even stem from predominantly tribalist thinking; like when one postulates -- as Thomas Barnett does -- that the materialist cause of terrorism is that some tribes are economically disconnected to the New-World Tribe.**

I see only 2 approaches to combatting terror:

1) the Barnett approach, which presumes that terrorism is a social engineering problem; and that terrorism will be eradicated by bringing "disconnected" groups of people into the bigger, New-World Tribe

2) a more radical approach, where individuals behind terrorism are individually punished/executed -- and other terrorists are sent the message that they too, will be shown no mercy; that they too, will soon end up with THEIR head on the chopping block of justice

**New-World Tribe is a term coined by me, not Barnett. It is meant as a quip to accuse (via insinuation) Barnett of tribalist thinking

Ed

Post 1

Friday, July 15, 2005 - 11:51am

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A provocative article, but I don't see a solution to the immediate problem of discouraging individuals so caught up in their religion that they are willing, even anxious, to die in the act of killing infidels.

Post 2

Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 1:36am

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This short piece didn't promise to solve the problem of terrorism, only to suggest what it involves and why it is inexcusable.

Post 3

Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 6:14am

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I'd also like to add that the term terrorism is often disconnected from its original meaning to apply to all kinds of political dissidents. One example would be the battle between Chechenya and Russia about the sovereignity of the former.
Another example was the resistance in Germany during Hitler's regime. There are many examples that qualify as good and many as bad terrorism. The question is, where we draw the line between resistance and terrorism. Ultimately Terrorism is just a form of guerilla warfare and always comes about, when there is a social clash in which a small group has to fight against a bigger group (insert state here).
Still the term terrorism always is regarded as evil (and it is), but not everything that is coined terrorism is terrorism. It is always in the eyes of the respective persons who sees it that way. Putin certainly sees the Checheynian rebels as the source of ultimate terrorist evil, while the Checheynian rebel would classify himself as a member of a resistance group.
Of course, with religious fanatics, the case entirely different, but still the name terrorism and the label derived from it is always a dangerous tool that easily ceases concrete debate about a problem.

Post 4

Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 6:46am

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Terrorism can never be good, not at least as understood in the piece I posted on this, because it always involves sacrificing innocents to one's cause. However worthy that cause is, it simply fails, ever, to justify such sacrifice.

Post 5

Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 7:56am

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That's it in a nutshell - it requires the 'morality' of sacrifice...

Post 6

Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 8:47am

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Yes and no, what kind of resistance would you lead if you can't wage a war in an open battle, because you know the enemy would beat you in an instant?

I think the difference between terrorism and resistance lies not within the realm of sacrifice (because US soldiers sacrifice their lives everyday in Iraq), but rather in the philosophy that those groups advocate.

For example: Checheynian terrorists simply state that they want independency from the Russian Federation (whether this is sane or not is another topic). The Jihadists, however, employ a very different tactic and philosophy. They don't want freedom, they are waging a war of aggression against the Western World.

If it were for sacrifice to determine whether it is terrorism or not, than every war would be an act of terrorism. In any war, you are going to take civil innocent casualties as granted and you are fighting for a greater good.

So, terrorism is still a bad and very politicized word.

Your turn Machan :)

Post 7

Monday, July 18, 2005 - 6:42pm

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Agreed, in so far as it goes.

But this article seems to presume that 'the west' being civilised doesn't do the same. When we dropped bombs on Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima etc Were we not terrorists on a huge scale?

Was not shock and awe Terror?

What about the several attempts to kill Saddam. One example of blowing up a restaurant where intel had said he was eating lunch. We missed him but sod the other suckers who hadn't finished there's.

To drive occupying forces out of 'your' country when you are so over powered militarily, it is easy to see why some resort to this tactic. It increases the costs to the occupying power.

Fundamentally it is statism that is the root evil. And this is practiced on all sides.

Post 8

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 6:34am

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No assumptions were made or implied in my musing about "the West," itself a tribalist concept if there ever was one.

Post 9

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 7:45pm

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No6:"But this article seems to presume that 'the west' being civilised doesn't do the same. When we dropped bombs on Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima etc Were we not terrorists on a huge scale?

"Was not shock and awe Terror?"

The great difference between this and the Islamo-facists is implicit in Tibor's article, if I read it correctly. There is no way to fight a war, including a war in self-defense only, without the possibility of killing innocent people. But the dividing line is that terrorists see such killing as an end in itself, as a positive value, Both the dropping of atomic bombs in World War 11 and Shock and Awe were intended to save human lives by ending the wars much sooner and with much less loss of innocent lives than would otherwise have occurred.

Barbara

Post 10

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 8:41pm

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Here's food for thought: Bombing Nazi death camps in WWII killing the Jews therein but shuting down the death factories. Would it have been moral? I think it was immoral that those bombs were never dropped.

--Brant

Post 11

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 8:52pm

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And how do you end wars sooner? By killing innocents to terrorize the other side into surrender.

Brant-

Think for a second what would have resulted from your idea. You'd make the death camps more efficient - Germans could just ship the untouchables and a skeleton crew of unwitting privates to a new camp, and the allies would save them even the cost of bullets or Zyklon-B.

Post 12

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 9:22pm

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From everything I've read about the time period most of the parties involved in the war were either in deep denial or tacit sanctioning of the death camps.

I don't think it would've been the best thing to shock and awe. They might lay off attacks with a telegraph, "AT LAST WE'RE FINALLY ON THE SAME PAGE I KNEW YOU'D COME AROUND!"

---Landon

Post 13

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 9:26pm

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How is ,"The West", a tribalist concept? C'mon, Tibor Machan, you're an advocate of specific values that are classified as Western. Personally, I think modernity is a better concept to use. Yet, I don't think "The West" has a tribalist meaning. George Reisman has written a very good defense of "The West".

www.capitalism.net/excerpts/1-931089-04-3.pdf

Post 14

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 8:10am

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Aaron, I don't think the strategic bombings by the allies in Europe did very much to shorten the war, but at the time the allies thought they would. Bombing the big death camps would have served notice that the activity therein wasn't going to be tolerated by the allies to the extent that they could do anything about it and that after the war there would be an accounting. It was not so easy to set up and operate those camps. Only mass gassing was killing Jews at a rate necessary to generally exterminate them in Europe.

But you missed the point of my "food for thought": that bombing innocents can be justified in war.

Post 15

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 1:53pm

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Hi everyone, just wandered by and noticed the lively discussion underway. It's been a while since I obsessively researched the Holocaust, but when I did, I seem to recall that in reality the majority of the killing was done by mobile killing units (einsatzgruppen)--men in trucks with guns, lining people up and afterward burying them in mass graves. So, you wouldn't be shutting down the final solution by bombing the camps. However, you might have destroyed considerable evidence which would have made the Holocaust deniers very happy.

For me, using violence and murder as a form of communication--"sending a message"--is the essence of terrorism, a form of psychological torture and coercion. I suppose you might say that open warfare is the "honest" or "straightforward" approach.

I'm not buying the tribalism argument, because, at bottom, all violence is misplaced revenge, with the noteworthy exception of self defence; someone actively tries to kill you and you naturally do what you can to stop them. In self defence, killing someone doesn't happen until you do it, your aim is survival and if that can be accomplished without killing anyone, your survival instinct is well satisfied. But aside from the dance of individual survival, violence springs first from the wish to do harm and only then proceeds to an object. The wish to harm springs from an inability (or severe disinclination) to grieve properly. We enact violence to stave off the grieving process. To escape the emotional chaos within ourselves, we seek out an "other" who will experience the pain "for" us. Furthermore, all violence proceeds from the spurious dualism of us and them. "Us and them" lies at the very heart of violent ideation. So I guess you could say that all violence, not just terrorism, is tribal.

Post 16

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 9:07pm

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"But you missed the point of my "food for thought": that bombing innocents can be justified in war."

Under a 'they were going to die anyway' logic? I can understand the idea behind that, but don't see how you can get from a conclusion of 'so we can risk the lives of the inmates trying to rescue them' to instead 'so we might as well intentionally kill everyone'. Your logic also would imply it was immoral of Russia to not just bomb the school in Baslan last September.

Post 17

Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 2:06am

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Given the stakes involved in the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- a decision that resulted in the forseeable deaths of an estimated 240,000 people, nearly all of them civilians -- it strikes me as overly facile to say, as Barbara Branden did, that the bombings were intended to save lives (and apparently were therefore acceptable). The option of negotiating with Japan seems to have been given short shrift, in particular that of providing the Japanese government with a way to surrender while maintaining face, rather than demanding the humiliation of something called unconditional surrender. Unlike the terrorists we face today, Japan was an imperial power with identifiable geopolitical interests -- a state actor that could conceivably be reasoned with, while the Sept. 11 hijackers were nihilists, as Machan's piece suggests.

Dying of radiation poisoning is not said to be very pleasant, and tens of thousands of innocent civilians were subjected to this torture and death at our hands in a decision that (like the death penalty) is irreversible. (What if we could have found a way to save even ten percent of that number of lives subsequently, had we waited?) The fact that even just war entails tragedies (friendly fire incidents, accidental killings of civilians) does not mean that its worst human consequences should be regarded as inevitable. Often, as in this example, they are choices that should be subject to moral questioning that is extremely careful.