Blaming the Victims by Edward W. Said & Christopher Hitchens

Author:Edward W. Said & Christopher Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

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The Essential Terrorist

Edward W. Said

As a word and concept, ‘terrorism’ has acquired an extraordinary status in American public discourse. It has displaced Communism as public enemy number one, although there are frequent efforts to tie the two together. It has spawned uses of language, rhetoric and argument that are frightening in their capacity for mobilizing opinion, gaining legitimacy and provoking various sorts of murderous action. And it has imported and canonized an ideology with origins in a distant conflict, which serves the purpose here of institutionalizing the denial and avoidance of history. In short, the elevation of terrorism to the status of a national security threat (though more Americans drown in their bathtubs, are struck by lightning or die in traffic accidents) has deflected careful scrutiny of the government’s domestic and foreign policies. Whether the deflection will be longstanding or temporary remains to be seen, but given the almost unconditional assent of the media, intellectuals and policy-makers to the terrorist vogue, the prospects for a return to a semblance of sanity are not encouraging.

I hasten to add two things, however, that are. The noisy consensus on our Libyan adventures is, or seems to be, paper thin. The few dissenting voices are a good deal more effective in stimulating discussion and reflection (which on their own, alas, cannot prevent the destruction we are capable of unleashing) than one might have thought. A small instance of what I mean occurred recently during a Phil Donahue show whose subject was the 14 April 1986 raid on Libya. Donahue began the show by asking the audience for their opinion; he received an almost total, even enthusiastic, endorsement of ‘our’ righteous strike. Two of his guests were Sanford Ungar and Christopher Hitchens who, once they got going, managed quite rapidly to extend the discussion beyond the audience’s unexamined assumptions and patriotic bombast. By the end of the hour, the kicking of Libyan ass in revenge for terrorism seemed to be a less agreeable, more troubling exercise than when the program began.

The second source of encouragement is related to the first. The obvious case to be made against the ugly violence and disruptions caused by desperate and often misguided people has little sustainable power once it is extended to include gigantic terror networks, conspiracies of terrorist states or terrorism as a metaphysical evil. For not only will common sense rise up at the paucity of evidence for these preposterous theories, but at some point (which is not yet near enough) the machinery for pushing the terrorist scare will stand exposed for the political and intellectual scandal that it is. The fact is that most, if not all, states use dirty tricks, from assassinations and bombs to blackmail. (Remember the CIA-sponsored car bomb that killed eighty people in the civilian quarter of West Beirut in early 1984?) The same applies to radical nationalists, although we conveniently overlook the malfeasance of the bands we support. For the present, however, the wall-to-wall nonsense about terrorism can inflict grave damage.

The

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