Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt

Author:Philip Bobbitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307268501
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

While some terrorists engage in terrorism in pursuit of the kind of freedoms and rights recognized by modern liberal-democratic and social-democratic polities, others reject these freedoms, and pursue goals antithetical to these freedoms and rights…The goals of the terrorist are crucial here, and sometimes these goals are themselves repressive, and, if achieved, would actually bring about, as opposed to lessening, oppression.22

This is in part—but only in part—the distinction between a terrorist attack on a marketplace in Sarajevo and the NATO bombing of Belgrade. The former is meant to bring about a state of affairs in which ordinary people will be compelled to surrender their lawful rights. Any civilian casualties attendant to the latter bombing, however, are a by-product that is contrary to the objective of the mission, though it may be unavoidable. Thus, once again, we are compelled to consider ends and to measure the justification of means in their light.

In order to appreciate this point, consider four hypotheticals.

First, suppose armed dissidents take a group of tourists hostage in an effort to force the local government to release political prisoners. Assume these are prisoners held entirely on account of their lawful, political activities. If we assume that there is no nonviolent means of redress, isn’t this still terrorism? The tourists are being prevented by violence from doing what they would do lawfully. They are not an arm of the government. Here it is the means that condemns the terrorists.

Next, suppose a head of state is assassinated. Does it matter to us whether it’s Adolf Hitler or John F. Kennedy? Whether the objective is to end a Nazi war of aggression and an unspeakable domestic policy of genocide or whether the goal is to impress your wife or satisfy a paranoid reaction to the indignities of the FBI, here it is the ends that seem to determine the answer.

Now suppose an animal rights activist hacks into the computer systems that control energy and water in an agricultural area, and as a consequence, hundreds of thousands of chickens, kept in cramped industrial pens, die. The means are nonviolent—at least to humans—and perhaps the ends are not inconsistent with our democratic system because the rights of animals may be said to be structurally underrepresented by legislatures, anthropocentric as they admittedly are. But aren’t the means wildly disproportionate to the ends sought, and doesn’t this relationship between means and ends create the ecoterrorist?

And finally, consider this hypothetical drawn from my family’s history. My great-grandmother’s earliest memory was of General Sherman’s cavalry riding through her family’s plantation and cutting off the heads of the geese with their sabers. Sherman’s march to the sea during the American Civil War was clearly meant to terrorize the local population. He was trying to force that population to withdraw its material and political support for the Confederate regime. In this, it was no different from the bombing of Belgrade by a later American government. When the goals of these campaigns for human rights are considered—and I do not mean

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