introducing terrormindedness

This blog is my reflections on terrorism today and yesterday and maybe in the future. Its titel uses a concept, terrormindedness, which I coined in 2002 to describe how people in the past and in the present have learned to live with various man-made threats as a part of our daily lives, how fears become domesticated and incorporated into our behaviour as more or less unconscious mentalities.

It is influenced by the historian Peter Fritzsche's book A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (1992) and its discussion of German 'airmindedness' in the interwar period. I see this airmindedness stretching mainly from WWI to WWII as being the first of three consecutive and partly over lapping eras of technologically induced terrormindedness during the 20th century. The second is the 'nuclearmindedness' related to the threat of atomic bombs and nuclear missiles that the world has experienced since WWII, and the third is the current 'terrorismmindedness' that people can be argued to have experienced all through the 20th century but which became a conscious reality for many urban citizens of the Western world from the 1960s but which reached a new level of public attention following September 11 2001. Contemporary terrorismmindedness is in many ways primarily an urban experience and long before New York and Baghdad cities such as Algiers, Belfast, London, Paris, Jerusalem, Moscow, Tokyo and Bogota had lived with urban terrorism as a part of the daily lives of its citizens.

As a cultural historian of modern science and technology I am very influenced by the French Annales school and what I find particularly interesting about terrormindedness is the development and incorporation of technologically induced mentalités in human society. This partly comes in the form popular and elite culture starting to use terrorisms as topics (for instance Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, Bruce Willis' Die Hard-movies and John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer and more interestingly from my perspective in the development of various 'coping mechanisms' to learn to live with the threat of terrorisms. These coping mechanisms are in the form of immaterial mechanisms - individualized or institutionalized sociopsychological routines and behaviors like air-raid drills or security procedures at airports - and material mechanisms - like the gas masks, underground shelters, x-ray machines and bollards developed or supplied by private companies and public authorities and provided to private individuals and public spaces.

My ambition is to discuss these and other parts of the cultural and social impact of terrorisms and my goal here as elsewhere in my capacity as a researcher and teacher is to further our understanding of terrorisms and its part in our society. I believe this to be valuable not because I think that we should accept or approve of terrorisms but because it like other cruel human activities like war, crime and violence that, whether we approve of it or not, has been, is and will be part of our society and we therefore should better understand it to better learn to live with it.