towards terrormindedness

affects of terrorism

2009-06-26T06:26:00.002+01:00

What is the feel of security? What is the affect of terror? That should be central questions for disciplines such as terrorism studies and security studies since their whole premiss are founded on the politics of affects. Although its politics is based on trying to make people feel secure and not being terrorized much work on it is more about its political effects rather than its political affects.

Some scholars are trying to do things differently by developing what I would describe as an affective research style. To some that does not seem like academic or disciplinary science. I got inspired to this post by my colleague Rune Saugmann's blog on a seminar he attended with the British political scientist Cynthia Weber and her "painstakingly emotional, passionate, and engaged visual works" ‘I am an American' project and asked whether her work was "social science?", as Weber's

audiovisual language speaks to one’s feelings in a much stronger and more immediate way than words usually do, but it rarely tries to live up to principle of academic transparency - signaling where one builds upon others’ work, where one criticizes it and where (and how) one claims to produce new knowledge? In not doing so, does it critically loose the openness to engaged criticism that is the hallmark of academic debate?

Rune wisely enough does not provide any answer.

I had the same question recently - or rather whether what I just had finshed was 'humanistic science' - when I read anthropologist's Kathleen Stewart's book Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007). Stewart, an associate professor at University of Texas, Austin, have a traditional lofty academic goal in trying to understand the "present" and its current socio-economic upheavels, or as she puts it, to bring the "the forces" that "neoliberalism, advanced capitalism and globalization" are trying "to name" and tries to "bring them into view as a scene of immanent force, rather than leave them looking like dead effects imposed on an innocent world." The way she goes about is similar to Weber's as she focus on 'ordinary affects' which she describe as "public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they're also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of." But the problem with affect for many academics is that they in many way defies, evades or fight our normal modes of analysis, or as Stewart better put it:

They work not through "meanings" per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social wordlings of all kinds . Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible. The question they beg is not what they might mean in an order of representations, or whether they are good or bad in an overarching scheme of things, but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance. ... At once abstract and concrete, ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings. They are not the kind of analytic object that can be laid out on a single, static plane of analysis, and they don't lend themselves to a perfect, three-tiered parallelism between analytic subject, concept, and world. They are, instead, a problem or question emergent in disparate scenes and incommensurate forms and registers; a tangle of potential connections. Literally moving things — things that are in motion and that are defined by their capacity to affect and to be affected — they have to be mapped through different, coexisting forms of composition, habituation, and event.

She also wisely describes her book as "an experiment" - a well honed tool in many a scientists tool box but it nevertheless almost all but lack the normal scientific trappings of thesis, hypothesis, footnotes (only 17 in the whole book) and reads more like a strung together short (133pp) book of essays or poems, where each 'chapter' can be anything from four lines to four pages.

I picked it up as I am trying to understand the materiality of fear and how things like gas-masks, fallout shelters and bollards can make people feel differently about terror and terrorism, and because it had backside blurbs by a former friend (Lauren Berlant) and wannahave colleague (Donna Haraway). Not expecting it nevertheless has several explicit discussions of security, terrorism and politics. The best way to understand the book's meaning is however to experience its affects and therefore I will give a couple of lengthy quotes from it.

All through the book it is about the politics of power and materiality and of the power of materiality, because power is "a thing of the senses. It lives as a capacity or a yearning". It is as the following chapter calls out, about "The politics of the ordinary":

Ideologies happen. Power snaps into place. Structures grow entrenched. Identities take place. Ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. But it's ordinary affects that give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate. Politics starts in the animated inhabitation of things, not way downstream in the various dreamboats and horror shows that get moving. The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react. There's a politics to being/feeling connected (or not), to impacts that are shared (or not), to energies spent worrying or scheming (or not), to affective contagion, and to all the forms of attunement and attachment. There's a politics to ways of watching and waiting for something to happen and to forms of agency — to how the mirage of a straightforward exercise of willis a flag waved in one situation and a vicious, self-defeating deflation in another

The second is from the chapter "The Turner Diaries" about William L. Pierce's notorious racist novel that allegedly inspired the terriorist group "The Order" and the Oklahoma City bombing 1995:

But what is most surprising about the book is its focus on domestic scenes and the ordinary details of everyday life. The tips it offers are not just about how to organize armies and make bombs but also how to set up cozy shelters and keep house while living underground. The heroes distinguish themselves not by acts of bravery and camaraderie but by honing their skills in engineering, shooting, sexual performance, and housekeeping. It's a recipe book for domestic competence. A little world comes into view. It is a world based on a military model of community and skill, but it is one that is filled, too, with the textures and sensory details needed to imagine a dream world. This lived, affective constellation of practices and sensibilities make the book not just an ideological diatribe (which it certainly is) but also a scene of life filled with worries, fetishes, compulsions, and hoped-for satisfactions. It is possible to imagine how, for those readers who find it compelling but are not about to build bombs, it's a kind of self-help book. Self-help racism. For the uninducted reader, on the other hand, reading it is an eerie experience haunted by what seem at first to be bizarre links between a racist rage at disorder, contamination, and decay and an appreciation for the well-tended suburban lawn, the Martha Stewart-inspired interest in interior design, and the fantasy game of reading catalogues to imagine oneself in that dress, with that face, or holding that particular gun.

She also gives attention to such hotly debated issues like riot mentality and agency of materiality, at least that is how I read these following chapters on 'Swarming' (whole) and 'Agencies':

We will follow any hint of energy, at least for a little while. When something happens, we swarm toward it, gaze at it, sniff it, absorb its force, pour over its details, make fun of it, hide from it, spit it out, or develop a taste for it. We complain about the compulsion to participate. We deny its pull. We blame it on the suburbs and TV and ourselves. But we desire it too, and the cure is usually another kind of swarming, this time under the sign of redemption: a mobilization for justice, a neighborhood watch committee, some way of keeping our collective eyes open. Something to do.

Agency can be strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted. Not the way we like to think about it. Not usually a simple projection toward a future. It's what we mean by "having a life" (as in "get a life"). But it's caught up in things. ... and that all agency is frustrated and unstable and attracted to the potential in things. It's not really about willpower but rather something much more complicated and much more rooted in things.

The book's final lines describes it as "only an beginning, just scratching the surface. But that's what matters in an ordinary saturated with affect's lines of promise and threat."

I don't know if Stewart's work is 'science' but I know that it made me understand the political functions of affect and of threat much better than before. But I am still at loss for words for how to explain it.

A slightly different version has been published on the 'Words of Security' blog.

terrorism & the Wachovski Brothers II: V for Vendetta

2009-06-19T20:56:00.001+01:00

If terrorism was the mainly hidden and implicit subtext to the reality, simulacra and plot of the Wachovski Brothers Matrix-movies, it is much more open and explicit in their first post-Matrix movie V for Vendetta (2004). This is an interesting movie as it is a post-9/11 movie dealing with terrorism that is not of the simple black-and-white kind.

Its main character is a honorable, righteous, compassionate and freedom-fighting terrorist combating authoritarian rule and state terror. In doing this the movie also connects to and draws upon the pre-history of modern terrorism.

This movie is based on the graphic novel by the same name by the comic legend Alan Moore. It deals with the "terrorist" V who in an alternative 1990s Britain fights a fascistic government dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask. A lot of interesting and relevant things can and have been said about the movie and about its connection to post 9/11 "war on terror/ism" but here I instead - with the exception of the 9/11-ish image above - want to discuss its connection to the pre-history of terrorism.

V's mask as well as a later bombing of the British Parliament in the movie is a reference to Guy Fawkes, a British Catholic who in 1605 allegedly attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the king James I and the majority of the aristocracy inside as a way to start a revolt and seize the power in Britain.

This so called Gunpowder Plot failed and Fawkes and his co-conspirators were executed. This plot has occasionally been described as an early case of terrorism, although it is very debateable whether it was terrorism or not. This as although it was an act of (attempted) political violence, it was not 'terroristic' as it was not representational violence intended to terrorize, the target were the de facto political rulers and the intention with the planned deed was primarily not to terrorize a group of people or communicate a message but to decapitate the government to be followed by an attempt at a coup. In this sense it was closer to a traditional military coup attempt.

The gunpowder plot is also interesting from a technological point of view in that it illustrates one of the 'drawbacks' with pre-industrial political assassination attempts using explosives. This as it is an example of one of the rare political uses of explosives before the 19th century. This use of it also illustrates one of the major problem with using gunpowder for bombs, which is that - to put it simply - to be effective you had to have a lot of it, you had to have huge bomb and a lot of organization behind it to have a chance to be effective. In the gunpowder plot Fawkes were discovered before he managed to ignite those 36 barrels of gunpowder, that had been hidden under fuel wood and coal in the cellars of the Parliament. It took him and his co-conspirators quite some time to smuggle in all the gunpowder they needed to be able to achieve a big enough explosion.

That problem was partly solved with the new nitroglycerin based explosives - primarily dynamite - that was developed in the 1860s. This new more effective explosive also made possible smaller portable bombs and those bombs were part of inaugurating the new modern terrorism in the 1870s. Also during this modern terrorism a similar assassination attempt was tried - against Czar Alexaander II - by smuggling in large amounts of dynamite in the basement of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Also that attempt failed however. But that is a later history for another time.

terrorism & the Wachovski Brothers I: The Matrix

2009-06-12T08:00:00.001+01:00

The Wachovski Brothers are two very succesful movie makers that have made their living from movies influenced by terrorism before and after 9/11. In their Matrix-trilogy (1999-2003) terrorists are playing the leading roles, at least if we are to believe one of the main characters in the movies, the Agent Smith.

In The Matrix (1999) Agent Smith mentions the militant Morpheus as being "considered by many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive" and then asks Keanu Reeves' character Thomas Anderson (Neo to be) to help in giving his "cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice". (Morpheus on the other hand sees himself as being in a "war" and describes what he is a part of as "the resistance".) Despite its centrality this is the only time the t-word is actually mentioned as such once in the finished movie. In the script to the movie Smith also says that Morpheus is "is wanted for acts of terrorism in more countries than any other man in the world."(It is possible that it also occurs in the other Matrix-related 'official' animated short movies, comix and computer games developed by the Wachovski Brothers.)

In addition to this occurence in the text, terrorism also figures in one of the central subtexts to the movie. In the beginning of The Matrix, Anderson takes down Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation (1994) from a book shelf and opens it on its last chapter "On Nihilism" and takes out some illegal software hidden inside the hollowed book. This book in general and this chapter in particular contains discussions on terrorism and on violence which is one of the key themes in the movie.

In "On Nihilism" Baudrillard writes the following about terrorism :

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference. In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station [bombing], the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system. There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences). There is no more hope for meaning.

There are several terms and images here that resonates with the movie's. A few examples: 'theoretical violence' which is what all violence inside the simulated Matrix is, 'the system opposes its own' as the Matrix fights its inhabitants and kills its inhabitants and let them be 'annihilated on the television screen'. Baudrillard's book has also beeen described as the hidden philosophical key to understanding the movie, and the Matrix-trilogy "as deliberate attempts to validate Baudrillard's theory".

However, it appears as if Baudrillard does not agree, he claims that his work has been misunderstod by the Wachovski Brothers. But it is doubtful if that matters for postmodern art and terrorism, especially regarding a work which claims to be about the non-reality and simulatedness of reality and its representations. Correct understanding or not, the terrorism of the Matrix is a representation and a simulation of Baudrillard's terrorism whether he wants it or not. There is no way out and the simulations are the truth.

anachronistic 9/11-terrorism

2009-06-05T22:37:00.004+01:00

I have discussed several movies that covered the 9/11 effect but until now not a movie that discuss 9/11 before 9/11, actually taking place even before terrorism as we today know it existed. Such an anachronistic terrorist movie is the Legend of Zorro (2005) which contain many un/conscious references to the 'war on terror/ism'.

According to one of its official websites Zorro is this time battling a wealthy foreigner, the French aristocrat Armand which is "the evil mastermind behind a terrorist plot to destroy the United States." Armand, like several of the other villains in the movie, share many traits with Osama bin Laden and al Qaida. He is a scientific and technological savvy industrialist that is a member of the secret ancient brotherhood (Knights of Aragon). In one passage he says that "piety is a long standing tradition in my family", something which rhymes very well with what we know of the bin Ladens and his father, the building tycoon and his piety. Like the victory of Muslim forces in the Afghan war against the Soviets led to the forming of al Qaida, the secret military brotherhood Armand belongs to was formed after another war between Muslims and Christians in the form of "the Crusades". This secret organisation "want to destroy" the USA, and like Osama purport to want to restore the Caliphate and Islam as a world power, the Knights want to be "restored to our former glory". In addition to the Osamaish mastermind his henchmen does consist of racists religious (Christian not Muslim) motivated murderers (McGivens) and a knife wielding villain (Ferroq) who appears to be of Arab descent.

Two scenes stood out in particular for their post-9/11 qualities. The first scene alluded very strongly to the dark side of the US governments reactions and its notorious renditions and 'war on terror'. This is in a scene when two Pinkerton agents - private "operatives of the US government" operating secretly in California which at this point was a state outside the USA where the Pinkerton's "don't have jurisdiction" - drug and kidnap a foreign civilian (Antonio Banderas as Don Alejandro) and whisk him away in a covered wagon. When he wakes up he is in their own private prison where they keep him locked up and try to make him come over to their side with blackmail and threats. The Pinkerton agents belong to a private intelligence and security company and states that the threat is that "America's gates have been thrown wide open to people from foreign lands" so people like Armand is now coming across the borders. Therefore they poison, blackmail and force civilians to make them work for their purposes by spying on and lying to old friends. But as they explain their behaviour, "our country must be protected ... without apology".

The second post-9/11 scence is when Don Alejandro (Antonio Banderas) is in a drunken stupor when he is suddenly blown to the ground from the shock effect of a mysterious explosion. When he then goes to investigate the explosion site he walks through a charred and burning dark landscape with a big hole in the ground - at least to me - eerily reminiscent of pictures of Ground Zero site in New York. As we are later to find out, the explosion was a test run of the new weapon of mass destruction: the liquid explosive nitroglycerin. Which in the movie was manufactured from such innocent household articles as soap bars, as "science has shown us how", a parallel to how such everyday mundane technologies such as box cutters played a central part in transforming normal commercial airliners into weapons of mass destruction and killing at 9/11. On the dvd there is also mentioned by the director that previous versions of the movie had contained more explicit "references to weapons of mass destruction". In the movie nitroglycerin is produced in 1850 which fits more or less the historical record as it was synthesized for the first time in 1847 but not developed into a practically workable explosive until the 1860s, by Alfred Nobel.

This fictional story is indirectly connected to the true story of the rise of modern terrorism in the late 1870s where the new explosive nitroglycerin played a central part. Nitroglycerine played that part as being the active component of the new explosive dynamite which played a key role in inaugurating what has been described by David C. Rapoport as the first wave of modern terrorism, the anarchist wave, that stretched from the 1870s until the first world war. Dynamite, also that developed by Alfred Nobel, was seen as a 'gift of science' by social revolutionaries and anarchist that made possible a new kind of violent 'propaganda by the deed' - spectacular terrorist bombings - as the central tool for oppressed people to achieve parity with the armies and police forces of governments. But that is a later and a non PG-13 rated history.

terrorizing things

2009-05-29T17:34:00.003+01:00

Can a veil be a security threat? Does a hat securitize? Things might look threatening, but can they also be threats to national security? Veils as potentially terrorizing things were discussed this Wednesday in a workshop on "The ban against religious and political symbols - security for whom and against what?" at my work place Centre for Advanced Security Theory This and other discussions on terrifying and terrorizing things touches on wider issues of the 'securitization' of materiality, how materiality - technologies & things - can be made into security threats.

That such small soft mundane personal and intimate things as pieces of cloth through their mere presence can be perceived as threatening and have a bearing on questions of national security might seem perplexing. It is in stark contrast with those more often and normally discussed materialities of security and the matters of government fears, the large advanced complex threatening technologies of states such as the nuclear missiles of Cuba and North Korea or the barbed walls of East Germany and Israel.

To provide perspective on the veil as a securitizing object, as a thing seen as standing for something we should fear and protect ourselves against, let us shortly discuss two other examples of threatening clothing: t-shirts and baseball caps.

Securitized shirts In 2006 US government security officials considered t-shirts as threatening national security as then at least two American residents were harassed and threatened by government officials because of what they wore and what they symbolized. The t-shirts contained the apparently threatening phrase "WE WILL NOT BE SILENT" in English and Arabic. This was the motto of the German White Rose resistance group, who with words on leaflets fought the Nazis, another government which used religious clothing - yellow star-shaped pieces of fabric - to construct a religious group as threatening. Another interesting aspect of this was that the government securitization of the shirt was counter-productive or maybe even dangerous - if we believe in the threatening character of that particular shirt - as it actually led to a wider proliferation of this threat rather than a suppression or containment. This becaus as a counter-reaction a number of people began to wear the shirt in solidarity and as a way of challenging the authorities view. The US government's consideration of the t-shirt's offensiveness were also later deemed an illegality acknowledged through a $240.000 settlement.

Desecuritized hats Things people wear on their heads appear to be particular prone garments to securitization. Beside the veil, religious headwear like turbans and kippah have been securitized and also other examples of more violently charged headgear are the keffiyeh and the balaclava, where the latter can be argued to together with the Kalashnikov and the 'anarchist cookbook' making up the material pantheon of the 'terrorist' symbolism. The black balaclava also in some later kind of uncanny mirroring also stand for the terrorist double of the counter-terrorist. Balaclavas have also been confiscated by British police as they "could be used to conceal someone's identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act". Another threatening hat is the baseball cap, too many standing for the fear of American cultural imperialism and political and economic power. To many, but not to all. The Islamic Resistance Movement - Hamas, who you might have expected to fear its symbolism and to ban its use, is as can be seen in this image a government that seems to embrace - or at least wear - their fears. By proudly donning the American baseball cap they have chosen a different material strategy than securitization in their battle of hearts and minds, that of 'desecuritization' - to domesticate and appropriate threatening foreign things, as to recode them as safe and less threatening, and internal rather than external to 'our' culture.

Maybe these object lesson could be read as an alternative to the securitization of terrifying things also for Western politicians fearing Islamic and other alien symbols and materialities. Because things are more than what they are made to be, they are also what we collectively make them into. Then and now, for good and for bad.

A slightly different version of this blog has been published on the CAST blog.

literal terror from above & below

2009-05-22T08:10:00.002+01:00

The Danish Resistance Museum in Copenhagen displays one of the most interesting and perhaps odd examples of a technology of terrorism that I know of - the leaflet bomb. This military media technology, sometimes also known as pamphlet bomb, propaganda bomb or ideological bomb is used for disseminating airborne leaflet propaganda.

I have been researching this technology for a while and a few years ago for a class I gave on terrorism and technology I wrote a wikipedia article as a template for student projects, a version of which I have used as a basis for this article.

Origin of leaflet bombs

The first ideas to construct special bombs with which to disperse airborne leaflets was put forward by French and British air force officers during World War II but it was not implemented until 1943 by the American military in the form of the 'Monroe bomb' named after its inventor the USA Air Force Captain James Monroe of the 305th BG. It was developed from laminated paper containers that had been used used to transport M-17 incendiary bombs^[1] Later during the Korean war a modified version of the leaflet bomb - the 'feather bomb' - was developed by the American military to be used to disseminate biological warfare agents. It was also controversially claimed by the Chinese government - and supported by an United Nations commission led by the British biochemist and historian of science Joseph Needham - that US had actually used biological weapons during the Korean War. This have been strongly denied by the US governments and in 1998 evidence was found in Russian archieves that supported that this was a falsehood concocted by the Chinese and Soviet governments.^[2]

Leaflet bombs and terrorism

Leaflet bombs has not only been used by states for purposes of military warfare but has since the 1940s also been used by radical political and ideological substate groups known for using anti-state terrorism.

The earliest known uses of leaflet bombs by non-state militant and terrorist groups also goes back to WWII. One of the earliest known mentions comes from Denmark. During the summer of 1943 resistance groups with connection to the Danish Communist Party on several occasions set off leaflet bombs protesting against the German occupation. Today there are two leaflet bombs preserved in the Museum of Danish Resistance 1940-1945 (Frihedsmuseet) in Copenhagen. The one displayed was supposed to have been used by Communists during WWII as well as in the postwar periode to protest against a visit to Denmark by an US general.

The first use by a recognized terrorist group came in 1945 when the Irgun group developed a bomb that was not dropped from planes but "deposited in the street, ticked away until detonation, then scattered news sheet over a wide and smoky area". In September 1945 three of Irguns leaflet bombs exploded in Jerusalem and injured nine people.^[5]

In the late 1960s the African National Congress (ANC) started to use a version of the leaflet bomb in South Africa. This bomb was developed in collaboration with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and South Africans living in exile in London. The first time this leaflet bomb, known to South African activists as the 'bucket bomb' and to the South African police forces as the 'ideological bomb', was used was in 1967.^[6] This was one of the most important propaganda weapons of the ANC as can be seen by the resources devoted to it and its frequent use during the 1960s and 1970s spreading tens of thousands of leaflets. ANC hailed it publically as a central technology in their efforts as shown by this quote from ANC:s journal Sechaba in 1970 looking back at the uses of leaflets as propaganda in the 1960s:

It was in this new period that underground propaganda, demonstrating the effectiveness of the ANC machinery and projecting its voice, became of incalculable value. Underground leaflets began to appear in the townships, factories and city streets. Passed on from hand to hand, these reminded the people that the spirit of resistance must never die. These were often complemented by slogans painted on walls proclaiming: "Free Mandela," "Free Sisulu" and "Long Live the ANC." as modest as these propaganda efforts were [...] they showed that the ANC could survive the most severe measures of the regime.^[7] [Emphasis added]

Furthermore, the South African press and security forces also saw it as a very important weapon of the ANC as can be evidenced by the threats from the police to take action against the South African press for publishing parts of ANC:s leaflets. The South African Minister of Police even acknowledged publicly that the importance of ANC:s leaflet bombs when he was quoted in an South African newspaper stating that "the explosions are an indication that subversive elements are still active" inside South Africa and warned the "public" that they "must not think the dangers are a thing of the past. It is something with which we will just have to live."^[8] As this statement makes clear the South African police saw this as a weapon causing and indicating a terror among the public. In that sense the leaflet bombs and its words were weapons of terrorism as its effects were seen as creating a widespread fear.

American propaganda bombs

In the 1960s leaflet bombs were also used by American right-wing militants. This was the Minutemen grouop that at the end of the 1960s set off several leaflet bomb including one near the White House in Washington DC.

The leaflet bomb has been relatively popular in Latin America with several recorded uses of various groups advocating political violence and using terrorist tactics.

In the 1980s the FMLN in El Salvador used this technology under the name of 'propaganda bomb'. It was one of the "favorite tactics" of its urban militia groups and preferable used in public places like markets or public parks.^[9] The design of the bomb was adapted to the local environment in that it

"consisted of a cardboard box with a small, low-power explosive underneath a large number of propaganda leaflets. The explosive was set off by a homemade time igniter. The box was disguised to look like any ordinary package or box that might be carried by someone going or returning from a trip to the marketplace."^[10]

The use of leaflet bombs played a part in the FMLN:s recruitment process known to them as fogueo - which meant to experience fire or fire-harden something - which was the process by which the recruits "were toughened and the weak and fainthearted were weeded out". The fogueo process was

"a very carefully designed program of increasingly risky operations in support of the guerilla movement. As the candidates successfully completed each operation, it gave them confidence to carry out the next danger level of operation until they became full-fledged guerilla combatants."^[11]

This process began with low-level information-gathering and propgandan activities in support of FMLN where the culminating activity before being ready for "combat military activity" could be the making and exploding of a leaflet bomb.^[12]

In Honduras the Popular Movement for Liberation (MPL) and Morazanist Patriotic Front (FPM) have also used propaganda bombs during the 1990s.^[13] The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity URNG in Guatemala also used leaflet bombs. In 1996 the group occupied a radio station and set off a leaflet bomb.^[14]

In Ecuador several terrorist group have used leaflet bombs. The Revolutionary Armed Corps (CAR) was according to the Ecuadorian police "an extreme leftist group" which is only known for one attempted attack on February 20, 2001 when a leaflet bomb containing 150 pamphlets was discovered and successfully defused by the police.^[15] The communist Group of Popular Combatants (GCP) has on several occasions during 2001-2005 used leaflet bombs. In 2001 it was blamed by authorities for a pamphlet bomb and later the same year the group claimed responsibility for detonating a pamphlet bomb in downtown Quito that let out hundreds of pamphlets protesting against Plan Colombia.^[16] In 2002 The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador set off a leaflet bomb in a McDonald’s restaurant in Guayaquil that injured three people and caused severe damage to the property. One of the latest uses of the leaflet bomb came in 2004 when the Miss Universe competition took place in Quito, Ecuador: "On 16 May, just hours before delegates were expected to participate in a parade in Cuenca, a pamphlet bomb was deactivated by police. Although it was protesting the economic policies of the Ecuadorean government, police suspected that the bomb, found just six blocks from the parade route, was timed specifically to coincide with the event." Miss Australia Jennifer Hawkins was the winner and could be crowned Miss Universe 2004 without any further disturbances.

Notes

^ Garnett 1947:189-190, Willey 2002:55
^ Leitenberg 1998
^ Weinberg et al. 2004:786
^ Rapoport 1994
^ Bell 1985:144
^ Houston 2004:635-637
^ Ngani 1976:39
^ Quoted in Ngami 1976:44
^ Bracamonte & Spencer, 1995:68
^ Bracamonte & Spencer, 1995:68-69
^ Bracamonte & Spencer, 1995:70
^ Bracamonte & Spencer, 1995:70
^ Weinberg & Pedahzur, 2004:135-136; MIPT knowledge base, http://www.tkb.org/Group.jsp?groupID=4132
^ U.S. Department of State Guatemala Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996, Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, January 30, 1997, http://www.terrorism.net/pubs/dosfan-hr/latinam/Guatemala.txt.
^ http://www.tkb.org/Group.jsp?groupID=3570
^ United States Department of State Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Country Reports on Terrorism 2005 (2006), 165.

Bibliography

Bell, J. Bowyer (1977), Terror Out of Zion: The Fight fort Israeli Independence 1929-1949: Irgun Zvai Leumi, Lehi and the Palestine Underground, The Academy Press Dublin .

Friedman, Herbert A. (2006). "Psychological Warfare of the Malayan Emergency 1948-1960". PsyWar.org. Retrieved on 2007-01-22..

Garnett, David A. (1947), The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive 1939-1945, St Ermins Press. 2002.

Houston, Gregory (2004), "The Post-Rivonia ANC/SACP Underground", in The Road to Democracy in South Africa. Vol 1. (1960-1970) South African Democracy Education Trust. Zebra Press.

Leitenberg, Milton (1998), "New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: background and analysis", Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11(4): 185-199 .

Moroni Bracamonte, José Angel; Spencer, David (1995), Strategy and Tactics of the Salvadoran FMLN Guerillas: Last Battle of the Cold War, Blueprint for Future Conflicts, Praeger Publishers .

Ngani, Jethro (1976), "Voice of Freedom", Sechaba 10(4): 38-44 .

Peffer, John (2003), "Paper Bullets: An Interview with Herbert A. Friedman", Cabinet: A Quarterly Magazine of Art & Culture 1(12), Autumn/Winter, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/pefferFriedman.php .

Willey, Scott A (2002), "Secret Squadrons of the Eigth", Air Power History 49(3): 54-55 .

United States Department of State (2006) Country Reports on Terrorism 2005. United States Department of State: Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism.

Weinberg, Leonard, Ami Pedahzur & Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler (2004) ”The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism”, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16(4), 777-794.

Weinberg, Leonard B.; Pedahzur, Ami (2004), Political Parties and Terrorist Groups, Taylor & Francis Group .

"Revolutionary Armed Corps (CAR)". MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base. Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT). Retrieved on 2007-02-22.

consensus on defining terrorism

2009-05-15T08:32:00.005+01:00

Terrorism is an "essentially disputed concept" that is inherently difficult to define and to reach consensus about. But that has not stopped institutions and individuals from trying. Some of the most fruitful attempts have been by academics to try to come up with various 'consensus definitions', which I use to come up with my preferred definition of terrorism.

Consensus definitions of terrorism has a long history with various efforts by the United Nations and other international bodies to try to define terrorism. The first academic attempt at reaching a consensus definition was formulated in 1988 by the academic researcher Alex P. Schmid. He went about his task through sending out questionnaries to researchers and analysts working on terrorism and asking them how they defined terrorism. He then analysed the answers together with other used definitions (altogether 109 of them) according to what elements that was included in the various definitions. He came up with 22 definitional elements such as: violence and/or force (in 83.5% of the definitions); political (65%); fear and/or terror emphasized (51%) etc.

This list gives rise to some interesting observations. One is that one out of seven definitions of terrorism did not include the use of violence or force! Furthermore, of the definitions only a minority (15%) 'emphasize the innocence of victims' of terrorism. In this I align myself with the majority as I find it very much a matter of perspective and impossible to neutrally determine whether a victim is truly innocent or can be seen as having a part as tax-payers, voters, supporters etc. in causing or be responsible for the grievances or system that terrorists are attacking. Lastly, there is no explicit assertation about the impossibility of state-terrorism, whether terrorism can be conducted by states or not, something that is often hotly debated.

Schmid used his list of 22 definitional elements to formulate an definition of terrorism that incorporated all the major definitional elements, the so called "academic consensus definition of terrorism", which is as follows:

“Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby, in contrast to assassination, the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperiled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.”

Schmid is currently working on a revision of his twenty year old consensus defintion. One example of this "revised academic consensus defintion" is the following:

"Terrorism refers on the one hand to a doctrine about the presumed effectiveness of a special form or tactic of fear-generating, coercive political violence and, on the other hand, to a conspiratorial practice of calculated, demonstrative, direct violent action without legal or moral restraints, performed for its propagandistic and psychological effects on various audiences and conflict parties"

This is an improvement of the previous rather bulkysome definition and I would only change one phrase, that it is "direct violent action without legal or moral restraints". The problem with this statement is that although terrorism possibly breaks generally accepted laws and morals of international society or the target society, it can be argued that it most of the time show some legal or moral restraints. This as it probably follows various legal and moral restraints in effect inside the group or culture to which the terrorists belong, such as for example, not killing children, targeting holy or otherwise revered places or days. Just because a terrorist might be showing no restraint in breaking our or generally accepted restraints does not mean their actions are not showing any such restraints. Once again, this is a matter of perspective that makes it impossible to define neutrally.

One historic example is that of the Russian Social Revolutionary terrorists in the early 1900s that stopped himself from throwing a bomb at a carriage with a high Russian official when he saw he was accompanied by his wife and children. Instead he threw the bomb and killed the official a following day when he was alone. Therefore, to have a more neutral definition that avoid a definition biased towards our or generally accepted values I would prefer to take away "without legal or moral restraints". However, if it was considered essential by the consulted experts that the definition incorporates terrorism being outside of generally accepted violent actions, I would propose to replace it with "breaking with generally accepted legal or moral restraints", although this might end up in similar discussions about what is "generally accepted". Terrorists always shows some restraints but not always the ones we would like them to adhere to.

A third and last example is what has been described as a new academic minimal consensus definition. It was proposed 2004 in an article by Leonard Weinberg, Ami Pedahzur and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler. The consensus was here achieved through canvassing all definitions of terrorism used in all articles on terrorism in the field's major academic journals: Terrorism; Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Terrorism and Political Violence. Then a definition was constructed that fitted the majority of these articles:

“Terrorism is a politically motivated tactic involving the threat or use of force or violence in which the pursuit of publicity plays a significant role."

In my opinion this is a pretty good definition that fits most of those historic examples I am familiar with. However, for it to fit less with academic consensus and more with my understanding of terrorism I would modify it slightly in two ways. First by replacing 'politically' by 'ideologically', so as to also cover religiously and otherwise ideologically motivated deeds. Secondly, as noted by Weinberg et al., a major difference to the previous definition is the lack of emphasize of psycological effects which I see as central to the majority of terrorism events why I would insert that it should include "pursuit of psychological effects and publicity". This would transform the "new academic consensus definition" into a 'modified academic consensus definition' as follows:

“Terrorism is an ideologically motivated tactic involving the threat or use of force or violence in which the pursuit of psychological effects and publicity plays a significant role.”

This is no longer a consensus definition anymore, but it is the definition with which I agree the most and use in my academic work when trying to evaluate whether a violent political deed is terrorism or not.

truths & theories of conspiracy theories

2009-05-08T22:32:00.010+01:00

When I recently was interviewed on a radio program on "film and terrorism" on national Danish public radio (podcast) I was asked why it is so that as soon as one hear about a major terrorist event that 'one soon thinks about conspiracy theories?' That question made me think more about this phenomenon within terrorism.

The radio program mainly treated the new documentary and fiction films about the German Baader-Meinhof group and the Danish Blekingadebanden ('The Blekinge Street Gang') and the discusson gave rise to a debate among the various experts on the program on whether the German and Danish police authorities was complicit in the rise and/or activities of these groups.

My thinking is that maybe the many conspiracy theories connected to explain spectacular terrorist events such as 9/11 have something to do with that these horrific events appear as too 'scripted', 'staged' and 'directed' to be seen as 'really' done by 'non-professional' non-government directors. Too good/evil to be true - think the movie Capricorn One (1978) about the staging by the US government of the first Mars landing. For myself, knowing about the lack of competence and imagination and mis-placed focus of especially the US government before 9/11 and especially in connection with the planning of the latest Iraqi war it feels that such thinking give too much credence to many government agencies competence and planning. Maybe that is more a product of how competent and efficient that we would like and hope our protectors to be.

I found another and more thought through tentative explanation for the popularity of conspiracy theories in the US from the religious studies scholar Mattias Gardell in Rasrisk [Race Risk] (1998; 2004):

My thesis is that it connects with two important factors: the American culture's emphasis on the individual and exposures of actual conspiracies. The individualism leads to a view of history in which structural changes and complex social, economic and political processes are personified which ease the conspiracy theorists' foundational assumption that nothing happens by a coincidence. Behind the events of history there are directors whose connections with other individuals can be mapped by the representatives of good ... It is easier to mobilize against the agents of evil than anonymous processes of structural change. As an militia member in Ohio expressed it: "Nothing happens by a coincident. If something happens it is planned. If it is planned it has to be some who has planned it. If there are some who plans then there is a conpspiracy there. If there is a conspiracy it can be exposed. If it can be exposed it can be resolved. There is only to find out who should be shot."

Some reading is good, a lot of reading can be disastrous, as I found out when I read some more and again by coincidence in Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects (2007) came across another almost totally contradictory affective theory:

There's pleasure in conspiracy theory. An intimate knowledge of secret collusions, clandestine activities, and little collaborative worlds of an "us" tracking what "they" are doing. ... Conspiracy theory travels through divergent and conflicting routes, articulating a widely shared sensibility of being controlled by an all-pervasive something. It takes for granted that the powers that be are functionaries of the opposing camp; that the problem is structural, and that social structures are mysterious, motivated, intentional and often malevolent. It nods to an ordinary that is always already mixed up in all of this, and yet it also beckons to a reversal or a return as if a sudden magical jolt could turn things around or something.

The examples of government conpiracies connected to major terrorism deeds are plentiful, with the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 as probably the most well known. To that can be added (at least) those connected to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the Greek 17 November terrorist group active 1973-2002. Regarding proven conspiracy theories linked to terrorism I could immediately only think of the "Black hand" conspiracy behind the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo and the 1954 Israeli Operation Susannah bombings in Egypt, as well as various false flag terrorist operations such as those in Italy in the 1970s and various Middle East car bombings.

Another large scale and for a long time widely accepted conspiracy theory that reached even into the hands and minds of some of the highest US Governments officials was that about the so called "terror network", put forward by the journalist Claire Sterling in the book The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism (1981). It claimed that the majority of terrorism in the world was due to a worldwide Soviet-supported conspiracy. Minister of State Alexander Haig and CIA director William Casey both bought Sterling's theory and when the CIA's own analysts presented a report that shredded her analysis and failed to find any Soviet conspiracy behind international terrorism, Casey - according to legendary Watergate journalist Bob Woodward in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (1987) - waved Sterling's book at his analysts and told them to read it "and forget this mush" and that "I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50000 a year." Another intelligence report was ordered that came up with a pro-conspiracy result but in the end CIA couln't find any strong links and even discovered that some of Sterling's source material was "blowback" from a CIA black propaganda operation directed towards Western media.

However, this also beckons the question about how many proven conspiracy theories there are in the historical record, or maybe more realistically, what is the truth beyond reasonable doubt about political conspiracy theory? It is clear that among the many alleged proven cases several are doubtful. One example being the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident which appears to be more a case of a deliberate and willful belief in faulty made-up intelligence on behalf of government officials - which unfortunately has been with us until this day - rather than any explicit conspiracy.

So it is true that conspiracies are not just theories but also historical facts although not quite as often as all conspiracy theorists claim.

bomb, bombs, bomber, bombers, bombing & terror

2009-05-01T22:10:00.000+01:00

This title is the name of the different art works included in the SIX BOMB PICTURES (2006) by the British artist-couple Gilbert & George. A press release from Tate Modern explained that the pictures were "to be seen as modern townscapes reflecting the daily exposure in urban life to bomb threats and terror alerts".This is one example of how the art world use material from the contemporary world to reimagine terrorism, and through this help the contemporary world to live with terrorism and the threats of bombs.
The six large images are sculpture works - as the artists prefer to call themselves sculptors - and were based on billboards for the Evening Standard that had been collected by the artist duo. It was created as a contribution to their retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern art museum in London.

In the video below George explain that they "always say that we are here to de-shock rather than to shock that is our theory that we can deal with the difficult subject in a humanistic way that doesn’t send people running out of the museum or running out of the gallery." As explained by them they in and through their work they are humanizing terrorism:

"We think it is quite right that we as artists can deal with the subject of the London bombings or bombings in general because the newspapers and television and radio programmes they deal with it, the church leaders, the politicians all deal with it, we think we can deal with it in a more humanistic, more timeless way, we never used the subject that doesn’t have what we call the moral dimension, we would never use something in a picture because we like it or we dislike it, its only when it has the depth of the moral dimension."

The exhibition later travelled to the USA and the pictures are taken from its showing in New York and The New York Times also published a review of the exhibition.

This is in many ways not new in the history of art. Gilbert & George are followers of Gerhard, that is the German painter Gerhard Richter who by some is considered the greatest living painter. One of his foremost works is 18. Oktober 1977 (1988) which is a suite of 15 oil paintings dealing with terrorism, using motives related to the Gereman Baader Meinhof group. In doing this Richter like Gilbert & George also used images from commercial mass media. Maybe it is that they together with other artists see terrorism as a motive that is difficult to percieve, inseparable or invisible outside of the frames of mass media.

melodic terrorism as motif & beyond

2009-04-28T22:11:00.006+01:00

What role has music played in the history of terrorism? This is a topic we don't have much research about despite it not being insignificant. I would argue that there are at least three different ways of thinking about 'musical terrorism', as motif, motivation and means.
As motif for musical artists there are some very notable examples in classical as well as in popular music. Various forms of terrorism has been a recurrent motif in the work of one of todays foremost classical composers, the American John Adams. In 1991 he wrote the opera The Death of Klinghoffer which depicts the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of the American hostage Leon Klinghoffer. His depiction and choice of this event as motif created a controversy connected with its premier. The criticism against Adams continued after 11 September 2001 and Adams in 2008 claimed that this opera led him to be followed by the US Department of Homeland Security: "I can't check in at the airport now without my ID being taken and being grilled. You know, I'm on a homeland security list, probably because of having written The Death of Klinghoffer, so I'm perfectly aware that I, like many artists and many thoughtful people in the country, am being followed." His terrorism related interest can also be seen in the choral piece On the Transmigration of Souls (2002) commemorating the victims of 11 September 2001 and which won him the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Finally, his opera Doctor Atomic (2005) also deals with what many people consider to be an act of state terrorism, the development of the atomic bombs that was later used by the US on Japan. The role of terrorism in Adams' art is well worth a more academic study.

Terrorism are more prevalent as a motif in popular music. One such example is music connected to the German Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) also known as the Baader-Meinhof group. Marianne Faithfull is one of several artists with an artistic debt to this terrorist group. Faithfull has said that the title song of her album Broken English (1979) was "inspired" by the "terrorist Ulrike Meinhof". She was a member of the Baader-Meinhof group and was arrested in 1972 and Faithfull supposedly saw something about the arrest on TV as "the phrase 'say it in broken English' came from something that flashed on the TV screen, this mysterious subtitle: 'broken English . . . spoken English. . . .' I don't know what it was in reference to, but I wrote it down in my notebook." Meinhof was found hanged in her prison cell in 1974 and Faithfull being a drug addict said she "identified" with but did not accept Meinhof and her "form of idealism" and that the "same blocked emotions that turn some people into junkies turn others into terrorists."(Faithfull quoted in Marcus, 88)
This video clip of faithfull performing her song is in itself an historically interesting document as it is from a performance in Germany in 1980, the year after the group had made a failed assassination attempt on Alexander Haig, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO . The Baader Meinhof group has inspired other British musicians like Luke Haines who used the groups name as a pseudonym and title for the album Baader Meinhof (1997), with song titles such as "Meet me at the airport", "There's gonna be an accident", "Mogadishu" and "...Its a moral issue". The album was supposed to be seen "as the soundtrack to an imaginary film" about the group. That movie never appeared and the Baader-Meinhof movies had to wait for Baader (2002) and the Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008), but instead Haines a few years laters wrote the soundtrack for another terrorism inspired movie, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (2000).

Music also plays more indirect and direct roles for terrorism as motivation and means. There are several examples of how music has been used as an motivational tool for appearingly encouraging terrorist activities. Examples abound within so called "white power music" and a well known contemporary example within jihadist culture is the Dirty Kuffar (2004) rap music video. This video had supposedly been watched by the attempted 21 July 2005 London bombers beforehand, although how influential that was in motivating them are not known. Finally, music are also used as means for terrorism - for mediating ideologically motivated violence with the aim of causing psychological terror and communicating a message - in actual terrorist propaganda deeds. Here the most striking example are such songs and music that are used to accompany the horrific jihadi beheading and bombing videos. Much more can be and deserve to be said about such artistic means of terror.

labeling terrorism in WWII & GWII

2008-11-02T20:19:00.031+01:00

As I am beginning a new research project on "How We Learned to Live With the Bombs" I recently saw the movie Dresden - Das Inferno (2006) about the bombing of the German town Dresden by the RAF on February 13, 1945. The movie was originally made as a two-part miniseries shown on German ZDF in March 2006 - breaking both German records as being the most expensive TV-film as well as with almost 13 million viewers a record for a German mini-series.

The movie was later shown on the History Channel in the US and issued on dvd. A confusing and perhaps interesting thing was that although I had seen the dvd in the store racks for a long time the cover had made me believe that it was an American 'Hollywood-movie' with a love story between Ben Affleck and perhaps Liv Tyler, similar to his performance in Pearl Harbor (2001) (compare the dvd-cover with the poster). I had been thinking that it was somewhat strange that Hollywood had gone that far to use this grueling event as a back drop for a love story, but I had suspended judgment about that choice. But when I finally bought it I discovered it was a german not American movie and although it indeed included a love story - and a menage a trois as in Pearl Harbor - but it had no Affleck nor Tyler and a quite different love story than from what I had expected. Although the love story is central, the movie is primarily about the bombing and about many other strong emotions during the war like fear, terror, shame, guilt, and hate; as well as the crassness, calculations and cynicism of war time mentalities.

Although the movie gave rise to many different thoughts what I want to bring up here is two things related to the depiction of terror and terrorism.

The first one concerned the historical accuracy of the movie. The movie is made with input from the several renowned historians like German Hans Mommsen and British Richard Overy, but it still left me wondering about one thing. That was that the official German radio and cinema news reports in the movie described Allied bombings of Germany as terror bombings (about 6 and 37 minutes into the movie) and that in connection with that one of the German characters in one scene comments that "there one sees who are the terrorists." (36 min). I do not doubt that the descriptions 'terror bombings' were used during the war, but I wonder - but do not know - if the word terrorists would have been used in that sense during the war. Connected to this is that I wonder how often 'terrorists' was used by primarily Germans and Japanese for labelling various resistance groups in occupied companies. I find it very interesting how the T-word was used in this period as it, according to historian of terrorism David C. Rapoport, had a less pejorative and more descriptive meaning at this time, used explicitly for self-labeling by several revolutionary and militant groups. That is supposedly beginning to change during the war when such organizations started to describe themselves primarily as "freedom fighters". This supposedly begun in the British Palestine with groups like LEHI, which as an acronym translates as "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel". The interesting question would be how the labels of 'terrorists' and 'terrorism' was used during the war and if there is any crossoverand influence between the descriptions of state and non-state actors. Today, as we know, 'terrorist' is almost a totally pejorative description and very rarely used for self-labeling but used by states and anti-state actors alike to label its enemies, and especially anti-state militants talks about their state enemy as 'the real terrorist' and at times also with reference to the allied nuclear and fire bombings during WWII. In 1998 the first WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef said in his defence in his trial that it was the US that was the terrorist: "You were the first one who killed innocent people, and you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children in Japan and when you killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, in Tokyo with fire bombings. You killed them by burning them to death." Yousef followed this statement by a rare self-labeling as a terrorist: "The Government in its summations and opening statement said that I was a terrorist. Yes, I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States Government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day." Another later example the same year is from a ABC-interview with Osama bin Laden in response to a statement from the reporter John Miller that many Americans considered the killing of civilian in the first WTC bombing as "terrorism". bin Laden then said that the American and international mass media had conducted "fierce campaigns" against the "mujahedeen" and "called us terrorists even before the mujahedeen had committed any act of terrorism against the real terrorists who are the Americans".

The second interesting issue is the fact in itself that Germany through this movie - but even more through several historical books and documentaries as well as the reconstruction in 2005 of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which also figures in a documentary end scene of the movie - have engaged in a new discussion about its own civilian suffering during WWII and the morality of the Allied bombings against Germany, whether they amounted to terror bombings and war crimes or not. The book that appears to have started of the new wave of books and programs and broken the "taboo" for a German "to question whether Allied bombings in World War II were necessary or legitimate" is Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940-1945 (2002), translated as The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (2006). Among academic historians and politcal scientists there is a debate - similar to the scholarly debate about the reasons for bombing Hiroshima - about the reasons for and morality of bombing Dresden. An intersting fact that once again connect this perhaps seemingly academic discussion back to the current practice of 'War on Terror/ism' is that part of the German resistance in 2003 against the current Gulf War II (GWII) war appears to be based on the bombings of Germany during the war - as well as 9/11 conspiracy theories. To quote a probably not unrepresentative German high school girl who in 2003 objected to that Germans should be grateful to the USA for helping to end the WWII and the Cold War: "We have financed the gulf war. Why should we be grateful? Thirty thousand refugees have been bombed out in Dresden, so we have to be grateful? Why?''

History do sometimes matter, and the historians' answers to such matters about life and death can also be matters of life and death.

'Land of Plenty' & the 9/11-effect on the movies

2007-05-27T16:03:00.004+01:00

I just finished watching Wim Wenders' movie Land of Plenty (2004) and it made me think about the occurence of terrorism in the movies in general and on 'the 9/11 effect' in particular. I have for a long time been interested in what role popular media plays in shaping our views of terrorism. Most of us do not have any direct personal experience of terrorism and, I would argue, form our opinions about it mainly based on the representations of it in news media and popular culture.

I am particularly interested in how terrorism has been portrayed in movies. I have been discussing this in my teaching on terrorism for several years and this year I had the students that took my class on "Science, technology an terrorism" as one assignment write an analysis of a movie on terrorism of their choice (some examples are The Siege, The Rock, Syriana and Munich).

There has been argued that "9/11 changed everything" (including the laws of physics). This is what I like to talk about as the '9/11 effect' which can be seen in science and technology (see the book SAFE: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World as a prime example) and which I hope to write more about in a later blog. There is certainly a very visible '9/11 effect' in the arts in general and on the movies in particular. One of the earliest examples immediately following 9/11 is Arnold Schwarzenegger's planned block-buster Collateral Damage that was influenced and delayed by the attacks, I even read somewhere that New York City were covered in banners and posters for the movie during the attacks (if someone know of any pictures featuring this I would be very interested). Following the attacks several movies have chosen to deal indirectly or directly with the 9/11 and the ensuing campaigns against terrorism and there has been a lot of discussion in the USA, especially connected to the United 93 and World Trade Center movies, when the appropriate time is to depict the September 11 attacks or if one should even portray this event at all in the movies. Regardless of its appropriateness, several movies have chosen to do so indirectly or directly with The Hamburg Cell, United 93, V for Vendetta, and Land of Plenty as some of the most interesting examples.

Wenders' Land of Plenty - the title taken from a Leonard Cohen song - is a very interesting, beautiful and revealing take on terrorism and in some ways can possible be interepreted as a metaphorical view of how terrorism has effected Americans. It follows two Americans both profoundly but differently affected by 9/11, John Diehl playing a nightmare-ridden Vietnam-veteran that after 9/11 takes upon himself to guard and watch over Los Angeles - made me think of Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver and Mel Gibson in Conspiracy - to protect it from terrorist attacks and Michel Williams playing his niece that has just returned to LA to work in a homeless shelter after living in Africa and the Middle East for most of her life. Not to say to much more about the plot I found it a very moving and thought-provoking movie on the role of terrorism in US today.

Not being glad about 9/11 I am still being very glad about that movie being made.

introducing terrormindedness

2007-05-27T13:43:00.004+01:00

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.