http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_dzohkhar_tsarnaev_a_suspected_murderer_or_terrorist_partner/
SUNDAY, APR 28, 2013 12:00 PM UTC
Mass murder vs. terrorism
When did the definitions of these terms come to hinge on the
perpetrator's weapon of choice?
BY MARISSA BROSTOFF
more
TOPICS: JACOBIN , DZOKHAR TSARNAEV , GUNS , BOMBS,
VIOLENCE, TERRORISM , SOCIAL NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
A law enforcement bomb technician walks away after preparing the
controlled detonation of a suspicious object during a search for a
suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, in Watertown,
Massachusetts April 19, 2013. (Credit: Lucas Jackson / Reuters)
This article originally appeared on Jacobin .
For critics of American foreign policy, it's all but axiomatic that the
designation of a violent act as "terrorism" says as much about the
accuser as it does about the accused. The U.S. government itself
can't decide on a single working definition of the term, but a standard
one denotes unlawful politically-motivated violence designed to
intimidate a government or civilian population. Put pressure on any
part of this definition and it starts to buckle.
"Unlawful"? Why can't terrorists — as per the word's original meaning
— be state actors? "Civilian population"? The category becomes
meaningless if individuals can be retroactively subtracted from it for
the crime of being struck by an American drone.
The arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev last weekend has most obviously
raised questions about what the state sees as constitutive of "political
motivation."
As several commentators have pointed out, we have scant evidence
that the Boston marathon bombing suspect's motives were more
"political" than those of mass-murderers like James Holmes or Adam
Lanza — yet only the Muslim immigrant inspired Republican fantasies
of eviscerating an " enemy combatant ."
On Monday, the Obama administration announced that " this terrorist ,"
like many before him, will be prosecuted in federal court as a civilian.
But the real news here is the unusual charge he faces: Possession of
a weapon of mass destruction. George W. Bush's imaginary Iraqi
nukes have come back to life as a pressure cooker filled with nails.
The charge drives home what has been implicit since the day of the
bombing: The state's understanding of the "violence" involved in
terrorism — on the face of it, perhaps the most straightforward part of
the definition of terror — is as politically contingent as the meaning of
"unlawful" or "civilian." What the United States means by terrorist
violence is, in large part, "public violence some weirdo had the gall to
carry out using a weapon other than a gun."
From the moment the bombs went off at the Boston marathon, the
government and the media treated the attack as a terrorist act — a
charge that didn't stick to the shootings in Aurora or Newtown even
in their immediate, chaotic aftermath. As a White House official told
the New York Times that first afternoon, "Any event with multiple
explosive devices — as this appears to be — is clearly an act of
terror, and will be approached as an act of terror."
The only government official to prominently question this logic was an
"exasperated" Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, who asked
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano at a committee meeting
last week whether she knew of any definitive difference between the
Boston bombing and the small-town shootings. "In terms of intent for
death and destruction and injury? No," Napolitano stumblingly replied.
"Methodology, yes."
In contemporary American political discourse, all "methodologies" of
violence are not created equal, nor are they differentiated based on
the scale of death, destruction, and injury they cause. Mass murderers
who strike with guns (and who don't happen to be Muslim ) are
typically read as psychopaths disconnected from the larger political
sphere — even if, like Jared Lee Loughner, they target politicians;
even if, like Christopher Dorner, they lay out their precise political
motivation in a manifesto, have military training, and evade authorities
on a 10-day cop-shooting spree. (LAPD chief Charlie Beck did call
Dorner, on the lam at the time, a "domestic terrorist," but higher-
ranking officials neglected to pick up the meme. Sensing that Dorner
had scrambled the discourse around terror, Glenn Greenwald asked
facetiously why the government didn't simply send a drone after him.)
On the other hand, mass murderers, or attempted murderers, or even
mere vandals of all races, creeds, and political affiliations who strike
with bombs — or anthrax , or fruit flies , or of course, commercial
airplanes — are terrorists. It's as though we've quietly determined
that these are cruel and unusual forms of violence, and so, de facto,
are designed to terrify whole populations in a way that mass
shootings aren't. And that, in turn, suggests that at some level we
think a guy with a gun shooting a few dozen civilians is, relatively
speaking, kind of normal. America, it seems, has carved its
understanding of terrorism out of its culture of gun violence; our terror
of bombs and our acceptance of guns go hand in hand.
Unlike the defeat of the gun control bill in the Senate earlier this
month, this isn't a phenomenon we can understand simply by
following the money. Though the gun lobby certainly both drives and
benefits from it, the strange hierarchy of destruction we've
constructed also goes deeper than current NRA rhetoric into American
mythologies around violence.
Take, for instance, the New York Times' coverage of the Boston
attacks. Three people were killed in the explosions at the marathon,
and three more (including suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev) died in the
perpetrators' post-bombing gun rampage. But while the Times
described the earlier scene as " a war zone ," it depicted the second
wave of violence as a " Wild West-like shootout." The terror is over,
y'all; now we're just playing Cowboys and Indians, and we all know
who wins in that game. (That Chechnya and the surrounding
Caucasus region historically functioned as Russia's "Wild West," a
playground where dissolute young aristocrats could stage exciting
duels, only makes the analogy more painful.)
The American left has its own vague Hemingway-ish fantasies about
the existential intimacy supposedly conferred by wartime gun
violence. It creeps, for instance, into critiques of drone warfare, when
a very good point about the automation of carnage — that cheap,
low-risk killing encourages aggressors to keep killing — morphs into
an argument that, as one prominent human rights organizer put it ,
it causes dehumanization of victims to keep them at the distance
of a video screen. Those who protest that it's not that much
further than missiles launched from a ship at sea to prosecute a
campaign on land should recall that there is a considerable
difference between being stationed on a military carrier versus
doing "battle" from outside of Las Vegas on civilians in Pakistan.
The implication here is that it feels ghastly to kill humans at close
range because their humanity is unavoidable, and so — to some
extent for a fighter pilot, and more so for a minelayer, and most of all
for a sniper — this repulsion will act as a check on military violence.
But this, as the entire history of war suggests, is not how it works.
Dehumanization can be produced by war itself, and racism, and a
thousand other kinds of hatred, and, yes, by technologies that create
distance between killers and their victims — but, as Hannah Arendt
argued , those technologies are so widespread and insidious that we
may as well just call them modernity.
The state, in Max Weber's famous definition , is an entity that
successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence
within a given territory. The United States perpetually remains in the
awkward position of claiming something just shy of a monopoly on
the legitimate use of violence over the entire globe, while ceding its
monopoly on gun violence within its borders. To commit an act of
mass violence in America with a weapon other than a gun mocks this
tenuous balance; bombs and planes and noxious chemicals are all the
poor state has left. In that light, for a non-state actor to blow people
up on U.S. soil really is inherently more political than shooting them.
It's positively un-American.
Marissa Brotsoff is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate
Center and a former staff writer at the Forward newspaper and Tablet
Magazine.
--
Saurav Datta
Twitter: SauravDatta29
Sent from Samsung Mobile
--You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LST-LAW SCHOOL TUTORIALS" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clat-11+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment