Question Terrorism

This week, a big fan of the president in Florida sent some package bombs to his favorite people to criticize, and today someone killed several people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, citing anti-Semitism and refugee panic as his motives.

After we express grief and outrage and talk about the nature of culpability, we might be tempted to put our retributive impulses into the framework of punishing terrorism. But I can give some reasons why we shouldn’t.

First, let’s consider the term “terrorism”. It’s always been politically loaded, but there is room for progressives to makes some claims with the label itself. They have pointed out that in the US, right-wing groups commit more acts legible as terrorism than Muslims or others.

So perhaps now people will believe us about the threat of far-right extremism and its links to the administration’s rhetoric. When the administration removed white nativist groups from its official “violent extremism” label, doesn’t it look especially culpable or at least negligent?

Perhaps. But let’s take a longer view. For nearly two decades, the US has waged disastrous wars that have killed and displaced millions, left no one freer or safer, and have no conceivable end in sight. Few people approve of them, but the abstractions under which they’re waged mean it’s impossible to think of them as won or even lost.

In Western democracies and beyond, nativist parties have moved from the margins to the mainstream, often on false assumptions that racialized outsiders are coming to do violence in their societies.

Here in the US a national security apparatus has arisen that is enormous, often opaque, largely unaccountable, and has thrown civil-liberties jurisprudence into serious question. From the microaggressions of the TSA to the state terrorism of ICE, the post-9/11 banner of national security has covered a reorganization of much of politics and the state around suspicion.

Terrorism-politics, a politics of fear, a politics that searches for rhetorical triggers in what we see and hear, is Trump’s politics. Yes, liberals like Obama have contributed by quietly putting abusive security practices into place while Trump makes a theater of cruelty. But from the criminalization of immigration law to the expansion of the Islamophobia industry all of it stems from a security panic provoked by the naming of terrorism.

So, what are we to do? The mayor of London suggested the potential for terrorism is a condition of life in the freest and richest places. It was a comment taken out of context and much-criticized, but it’s a radical proposal that deserves consideration.

I don’t suggest we should be complacent with the hate and lies that inspire terrorizing violence. I rather suggest that we stop the war machine and the irredeemable regime of border-policing, that we organize against the policies that degrade people’s humanity and, in some sense, validate the views on the right that others are less than human.

That begins, I want to suggest, by unthinking terrorism. Is that such a mindfuck? I don’t think so. For people who live in the West, personal harm from what we call terrorism is a remote actuarial possibility.

I’m not going to be radical here and suggest we abandon policing— I want anyone who does this to face punishment in justice. I’m suggesting that expanding the definition of terrorism connects in our politics to the altered understanding of law enforcement, just war, probable causation. A politics steeped in fear will only grow if we add to its reason for being.