The value of defiance

First things first: what happened in London last Thursday was horrific, unjustifiable and unforgivable. Faced with an outrage like the bus and tube bombings, it’s entirely appropriate to express respect to the victims, defiance of the murderers who carried it out and solidarity with the people of London.

What happened on Thursday was terror: “personal violence against non-specific targets, with the immediate goal of causing panic and alarm”. That word ‘non-specific’ is important here. Murder fuelled by personal hatred is a sad, grim thing, but it’s always on a human scale; there’s always a story in there somewhere, a sense of an interaction between two people which could have turned out differently. (Murder comes closest to being genuinely tragic – inspiring a kind of horrified awe – when it is most pre-determined: when it seems that, after a certain point, those two people could not avoid that final confrontation.)

Murder fuelled by a blank determination to kill someone is on a different scale altogether. Its particular horror lies, I think, in the way that it resembles death by misadventure and death by natural causes and death by who knows what: it’s like the great crushing wheel of death that rolls through all our lives, in the form of accident and illness and bereavement.

Death says: you, here, now.
And Death says: no, it’s not fair.
And Death says: no, there’s nothing you can do about it.
And Death says: no, there’s no more time.
Death says: you, here, now.

To commit acts of terror is to be like Death – or rather, to usurp other people’s Death. To value life – to value living human beings – is to rebel against death, even if the rebellion is ultimately, inevitably, futile. It’s also to rebel against anyone so shabby and vile as to usurp Death for their own ends, whatever those ends might be.

So, setting aside any consideration of motives and outcomes, it makes perfect sense to oppose terror in the name of humanity. You shouldn’t have done that to us. You shouldn’t do that to anyone.

But this is not the same thing as opposing disorderly political activism. Under the Terrorism Act of 2000, ‘terrorism’ is defined as the commission or threat of serious personal violence, serious violence against property or attacks on ‘electronic system[s]’, when these are carried out (or threatened) for political ends. Under this definition, it is difficult not to apply the label of ‘terrorism’ to political violence of any sort. There doesn’t even need to be a human victim: ‘terrorism’ includes property damage; it includes hack attacks; it even includes threats. At the same time, it becomes extremely difficult to think in terms of ‘terror’ when talking about anything but direct action from below. If ‘terrorism’ is a challenge to the state’s monopoly of violence, the state cannot itself be guilty of terror tactics, more or less by definition. If what we say about ‘terrorism’ has anything to do with a consistent definition of ‘terror’, these distortions need to be resisted.

Nor is opposing terror the same thing as opposing the terrorists. There was a particularly woeful contrast between Blair’s and Ken Livingstone’s statements last Thursday. Obviously only one of the two is a natural speaker: Livingstone delivered a genuinely eloquent speech in effortless, conversational style, while Blair delivered a disjointed stream of verbiage in a style that wasn’t so much animated as animatronic. The contrast between what they actually had to say was more telling. Livingstone stressed the multi-cultural nature of London: this was not an attack on the elite of a ‘Christian’ country, but an attack on “ordinary working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old”.

Blair, on the other hand, said that most Muslims were perfectly sweet once you got to know them:

We know these people act in the name of Islam but we also know the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor this act of terrorism every bit as much as we do.

(Venn diagram challenge: draw sets representing ‘these people’, ‘the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad’, ‘all Muslims’, ‘all British people’ and ‘all British Muslims’. Now draw a set representing ‘us’.)

After that it got worse.

It is through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values, and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours. … We will show, by our spirit and dignity, and by our quiet but true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs.

For Livingstone, terror is bad because it’s terror: the constituency you rally against terror need only be defined – and should only be defined – by its resistance to terror. (You shouldn’t have done that to us. You shouldn’t do that to anyone.) Standing up against terror – like becoming a victim of terror – can become part of anyone’s life, at any time. When it’s over, perhaps, we’ll congratulate each other on our stoical British sense of humour and London’s indomitable spirit. (And perhaps we won’t.) But at the time, we’ll resist for no other reason than that we like our lives and want to get on with them. A dreadful, unforgivable attack happens; you name it as dreadful and unforgivable; you mourn the dead and defy the attackers; and then you get on with it. After all, it’s not as if it’s the first time:

The last time a bomb went off there was February 18 1996. … a 21-year-old IRA member called Edward O’Brien, on his way to do who knows what, had accidentally blown himself up. No one else died. It seemed terrible, at the time; it was terrible, just as the Docklands bomb was terrible, and the Harrods bomb before that, and all the other bombs too. Another time, only 18 years ago, the King’s Cross fire, 500 metres up the line from last Thursday’s bomb, killed 31 people and made a great many others feel that they were never going to go on the tube again. They did, though. My point is that not only is this not the first time that the long street that includes Woburn Place has been bombed; it is not even the first time it has been bombed by a terrorist on a bus during the last decade.

(Emphasis added.)

This is all a long way from Blair’s world. For the Prime Minister, terror is not a type of attack but the distinguishing feature of a group of evil people. Those people and their values are the enemy we need to rally against; the constituency to be rallied is defined in terms of ‘us’ and ‘our values’. This argument seems to spring from a certain kind of communitarian thinking, which holds that people can only be mobilised by appealing to the values of their communities – and that the bonds and symbols defining those communities are pre-political, if not pre-rational.

Whatever its roots, the implications of this argument are alarming: presumably those people would still be evil men with evil values (and would still need locking up) if they gave up terrorism. On the other hand, presumably we don’t need to be judged by our actions. The British state may bend a few rules and tread on a few toes along the way, but it’ll never be guilty of terror; on the contrary, it will be in the front line against terrorism, buoyed up by our strong and enduring British values. It’s not far from here to Mary Riddell‘s truly appalling argument in Sunday’s Observer:

No one savaged the legislature more effectively than Lord Hoffman, when the law lords rightly ruled as unlawful government detention of foreign terror suspects without trial. ‘The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from terrorism, but from laws such as these,’ he said. Liberals galvanised by Lord Hoffman’s passion should also have been uneasy. … Ask the commuters with their smoke-filled lungs what they think. Ask the maimed, the terrified, the mourners whose loved ones are lying in a mangled carriage entombed in a tunnel. Ask them whether the bomber or the over-zealous lawmaker more threatens British life. You will find Lord Hoffman’s credo held in scorn.

Magna Carta? Leave it out – we’ve got terrorists to defeat!” The dangers of this line of argument are obvious.

(Incidentally, thirty seconds with Google found this, slightly more accurate, rendering of Hoffman’s words:

The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.

Hoffman rather specifically didn’t say that terrorism posed no threat, or that bad laws were more likely to kill people than terrorist bombs. He said that the fabric of British society – a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values – can be damaged far more extensively by bad laws than by terrorist bombs. The point is not that the law is more violent than terrorism but that it is more important; ‘Lord Hoffman’s credo’ means ‘never allowing last week’s spirit of survival to fester into hatreds and bad laws’, in the words of Riddell’s own conclusion. Given that Riddell appears to know and understand Hoffman’s argument, her misrepresentation of it is contemptible; as as is her projection of her own half-considered ‘scorn’ onto the victims of the bombing. But enough.)

If we are to condemn terrorism, it should be because we condemn terror, not because we condemn anyone who challenges the state’s monopoly of violence or anyone who opposes Britain. But these distortions of the ‘anti-terrorist’ message tell us something troubling about the message itself. The ethical humanist appeal to resist terror is a statement about how people should and shouldn’t act – whatever social situation they occupy, however much or little power they wield, whatever cause they espouse. It suspends any consideration of motives and outcomes – any consideration of ways in which the social world should change.

As such, the anti-terrorist message is fundamentally not political. It’s true that an act of terror is not like other forms of violence; one of its distinguishing qualities is that of being unforgivable. But it’s also true that, like other forms of violence, acts of terror are always meaningful. The act was committed by a certain group, with its own aims and its own history; certain targets were chosen; the effect of the act was to shift the balance of power in particular ways; some causes were furthered and others hindered. In practice, this means that ‘unforgivable’ is not the end of the story. From London to Madrid to Algiers to Deir Yassin to Fallujah to Srebrenica to the via Fani to Brighton to Omagh to the Milltown Cemetery, we have always to ask (we cannot help asking), unforgivable and… what? Was that particular act unforgivable and irredeemably vile, unforgivable and contemptibly cynical, or unforgivable and horribly mistaken? Might it even, in some circumstances, be unforgivable but tragically constructive?

Opposition to terror and terrorism is an honourable ethical stance – arguably it’s a necessary ethical stance – but it’s not a political position; if anyone offers us anti-terrorism as a political programme, we should be very wary of what we’re getting. If your opposition to terrorism has political implications – to reduce the amount of terror in the world, we should change this and this – the chances are that you’ve brought those conclusions to your stance on terror, not derived them from it. (Apart from anything else, how did you decide which source of terror needed most urgently to be changed?)

Opposing terror is not a political act. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a good thing: death has its due, and the dead should be mourned. All terror is equally unforgivable, and we should say so: to resist terror is to honour its victims. But when we’ve demonstrated our opposition to terror we’ll go our separate ways, and within a month or a week we may well find ourselves on different sides of a political argument.

Which is how it should be: life goes on, which means that politics goes on – and it goes on without the terrorists, just as it did before. We defy terrorists, but there comes a point when the best way to defy them is to forget them.

10 comments
  1. Chris said:

    If I were living in Nazi germany I hope I would have the courage to oppose Hitler to the extent of my abilities.
    I could stand in front of a tank and declare my intentions to destroy the Nazi state but I personally would view that a futile gesture. (kudos to chinese resistor at tienaman square but did he achieve anything in the long run?)
    I hope I would have the opportunity of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (only earlier and more successfully) but it is unlikely I would have that sort of access.
    The only thing I could do is sabotage the war effort and the hardest thing to replace are people so an attack on a factory workforce would be my best chance to promote my cause.
    I could happily justify the killing of random civillians if the cause were great enough.
    As an aside: as many people will die on the roads in the week between the bombings and the 2 minutes silence on Thursday, are they less important people? will their loss be felt less keenly by their families?

  2. For the Prime Minister, terror is not a type of attack but the distinguishing feature of a group of evil people…. presumably those people would still be evil men with evil values (and would still need locking up) if they gave up terrorism.

    But what to do about people who don’t define themselves outside their ideology? You can’t love the sinner (the person) and hate the sin (terrorism) then. You can’t just fight the idea. I’d use an army analogy: you can’t separate the soldier from what or who he’s fighting for. We can’t reject terror just by tackling terrorism. We need also to deal with terrorists and their constituency. And for me that does demand a communitarian strand of sorts. That community being ‘Britain’ or ‘London’ or ‘Europe’, and the strand being a basic understanding of and agreement with liberal democratic values, on which membership is contingent.

  3. Juan Golblado said:

    I think this “aside” is really the point of a lot of the discussion around how to respond to the bombings.
    as many people will die on the roads in the week between the bombings and the 2 minutes silence on Thursday, are they less important people? will their loss be felt less keenly by their families?

    Here is part of an answer from Violence and Agency by a very thoughtful English professor:

    My aspiration would be that someday, al-Qaeda and all the men and women who support it or movements like it should simply cease to exist, that there would be no such thing, that as a movement or worldview or set of practices it would be historical and strange to the world of the present. I don’t have the same aspiration for myself or my society or the institutions I inhabit. So there’s an asymmetry here that can’t be waved away by saying there is no “us” and “them”. There is.

  4. Phil E said:

    Chris – I agree entirely. Terrorist acts are vile and unforgivable of their nature; that doesn’t mean that they can never be associated with a good cause, or even that they can never be the most effective way of advancing a good cause. It’s a complex question, and I think one of the things that makes it complex is that both ethical and political considerations are always present.

    Jarn – I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re saying, but I think I may disagree very strongly. “That community being ‘Britain’ or ‘London’ or ‘Europe’, and the strand being a basic understanding of and agreement with liberal democratic values, on which membership is contingent.” What do you do if you get talking to someone down the pub and you judge that they don’t meet these criteria? Shop them as a suspected terrorist? I would really hope not.

    Juan – I haven’t read Burke’s piece in detail, but it seems to me he’s confusing institutions with practices. I don’t personally give a damn whether an Islamist organisation called Al Qaeda exists (or, getting back to my reply to Jarndyce, what its members think about liberal democracy); what I care about is what it does. If you focus on practices which we would like to see cease to exist, ‘our’ side of the scale looks a lot less empty – I’d like to see a lot fewer deaths by motor vehicle, for example. (Which is a social question, as Ellis Sharp points out.)

  5. Rose B said:

    Nothing can condone or justify these attacks but to denounce those responsible as ‘evil’ is not an adequate response. If we are ever to break the cycle of despair which begets such inhumanity and violence we must ask ourselves questions about why these young men were prepared to destroy themselves and others in such an horrific way.

    We used cluster bombs in Iraq, men are routinely tortured in Guantanamo Bay, in Palestine people are torn from their land by those just as zealous as the terrorists who died last Thursday. This we know – but are there any corners of the globe where parents do not lose their children to violence and injustice? The only adequate response to terrorism is to work for peace through peaceful means. We must all find other ways to resolve our old hatreds and fears. We belong to one world; whatever our colour, race or creed we must remember our common humanity. This is the only hope for a safe future for our children.

  6. Phil: thoughful post, but have a lot of misgivings which I’m mulling over – they might appear as a post in response some time soon.

    Rose: why not call evil by its proper name? I accept that labelling as such is not enough, but our understanding should start from an acceptance of the basic fact – that these acts are evil, and their not being one-off aberrations, some of the people involved come as near to a judgement of evil as possible. That’s not to say that they are beyond redemption – but that redemption must start with an acceptance of their wrongs, by them.

    As for: “the only adequate response to terrorism is to work for peace through peaceful means.” Yes, appeasement’s always a winner, isn’t it? You might’ve noticed that a lot of those taking leading roles in terrorist campaigns aren’t exactly the oppressed – Osama bin Laden, son of a billionaire, for a start; but there aren’t many cluster bombs going off in Leeds you know. (Think what it’d do to property prices.)

    And: “We must all find other ways to resolve our old hatreds and fears. We belong to one world; whatever our colour, race or creed we must remember our common humanity.” Ok. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Nilson, Peter Sutcliffe… These too were all part of that one world and that common humanity. What’s your point, exactly? That because we’re all humans, we can make no other distinctions? Should we not be judged according to our deeds?

    Please, tell me that comment was ironic. Or do you not realise that some people do evil things? And that sometimes it isn’t because they weren’t hugged enough as a child or any other excuse, but because they are sick in their souls and can see no reason why not. If we can’t cope with this basic fact of human life in all times and all places, then our civilisation really is for the dustbin of history.

  7. I’m not talking about institutionalising thought police, Phil. Merely expecting people residing in a liberal state to show minimal respect for liberal principles: the right to vote, the right to self-determination, and so on. I’m also not saying that people who don’t share those views be deported (to where?) or locked up. Just that they can’t expect to hold and propagate those views and not be viewed as a potential threat by the rest of us. They shouldn’t expect to be free from ridicule or suspicion. For example, anyone suggesting the last week’s bombings were A Good Thing and that “we should have more of it”, is someone I think we should be keeping a very close eye on. That’s what we have states for. Just because they haven’t blown anyone up yet isn’t enough.

  8. iggy said:

    Very happy about your defiance, but what are you defiant about? It’s a tragedy and people need to console and my heart goes out to them, but really, what are you defiant about? Is your defiance about your way of life different from the people fighting occupiers and pushers of corporate capitalism cloaked in the sheep’s skin of “democracy” any different? In what way is your defiance about “holding on to what is dear to you” and attacking people and killing them in their countries with all the weapons and money in the world, different from men who attack you, holding what is dear to THEM (not trying to take away what is dear to YOU) without money and resources and trying to fight you in your own country like you do in theirs except they got no money? (You kill their civilians now they gone want to kill yours.) And please don’t say they don’t kill civilians in the occupied countries.

    You are not afraid; the rest of the world is fed up of being afraid of you. From the time of Jesuits till now. Why not put up a site asking Tony Blair why he is killing others and supporting supplying arms to others? oh I forgot, when u do mass killings OFFICIALLY with a government stamp it’s different, almost angelic isn’t it? Well maybe I am unfair for what do you know, you are from a generation that was brought up on the blood stained money of others, through the regime change of democratically elected leaders, installing pro-corporate west leaders (getting good money from deal henceforth), Nicaragua (yes you have made yourself a part of it),Iran 1953, (CIA overthrows democracy installs shah), you are part of this now, Guatemala 1954 (CIA directs exile invasion after new gov’t nationalized U.S. company lands; bombers based in Nicaragua, Panama 1964 (panamanians shot by troops for urging canal’s return) list goes on.

    And do you still believe Blair when he says you were attacked for what “we hold dear”. No, It was for what others hold dear and to hold on to it with all they have got. Like the Robert frisk article said, which quoted one of the mujahideen. “Why are we not attacking Sweden?” Which also has western lifestyle, why only this small group of countries?

    If you wanna label me a terrorist, carry on, I can’t stop lies. But although I feel the whole city needs to consoled, and feel for them, i don’t see what you are so defiant about. London needs love and consolation, so do children in Baghdad, Kabul, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, YOUR “”IMF and World Bank hit countries who rally for free trade so everything can be de-nationalized and the capitalists can have a suitable environment for cheap child labor and you can have your parks and porn houses built””countries and so on.

    Adious,
    Iggy

  9. Phil E said:

    Iggy: Very happy about your defiance, but what are you defiant about?

    Next time, try reading the post and not just the title. I don’t know who you think you’re shouting at, but it ain’t me, Iggy babe.