From an article1:
Everyone knows what threatens the United States -- "terrorism." But what exactly is terrorism? The suffix "ism" is a clue. The dictionary defines it as "a distinctive doctrine, system, or theory." Thus, what we fear are not merely uncoordinated and unrelated acts of nihilist violence -- mailed anthrax, airliners-turned-into-missiles, malicious computer hackers -- but a coherent "system of principles" that sponsors such acts. Terrorism so conceived can threaten even a powerful nation like the United States because it is understood to possess global reach, apocalyptic ambition, an entangled network of hostile alliances abroad, and capacity to exploit vulnerabilities of our democracy at home. Thus the American response is the "war on terrorism," as if the enemy were one thing.
But is this way of evaluating the danger a mistake? The suffix "ism" was key to defining a mortal threat once before, and in that case the result was a disastrous misreading of what the United States confronted -- both abroad and at home. To evaluate the present danger, it can help to cast the mind back to another time, another danger.
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Sometimes people do seem to talk as if "terrorism" is a country and "terrorists" are easily identified members of its military.
Complete text of the article,
Antiterrorism Creed, by James Carroll
Everyone knows what threatens the United States -- "terrorism." But what exactly is terrorism? The suffix "ism" is a clue. The dictionary defines it as "a distinctive doctrine, system, or theory." Thus, what we fear are not merely uncoordinated and unrelated acts of nihilist violence -- mailed anthrax, airliners-turned-into-missiles, malicious computer hackers -- but a coherent "system of principles" that sponsors such acts. Terrorism so conceived can threaten even a powerful nation like the United States because it is understood to possess global reach, apocalyptic ambition, an entangled network of hostile alliances abroad, and capacity to exploit vulnerabilities of our democracy at home. Thus the American response is the "war on terrorism," as if the enemy were one thing.
But is this way of evaluating the danger a mistake? The suffix "ism" was key to defining a mortal threat once before, and in that case the result was a disastrous misreading of what the United States confronted -- both abroad and at home. To evaluate the present danger, it can help to cast the mind back to another time, another danger.
On March 12, 1947, President Truman delivered a speech outlining "the Truman Doctrine," an explicit definition of the threat from the Soviet Union. Instead of seeing the ambitions of the men in the Kremlin in traditional terms of nationalistic self-interest or even of imperialist purposes like the czars before them, Truman saw a Manichaean struggle between "freedom" and the "ism" of communism. The threat from Moscow was not the normal challenge of a nation competing for power or territory. The Kremlin wanted not only to be a trans-national capitol but a trans-historical one. Russia was seen to be driven by a cosmic, apocalyptic, evangelical determination to overturn not just borders and economies but whole systems of belief -- especially ours.
Navy Secretary James Forrestal, chief among those who saw the Soviet threat in such terms, said, "Nothing about Russia can be understood without understanding the implacable and unchanging direction of Lenin's religion-philosophy."
The Truman speech, in defining the threat in transcendent terms, proposed a response of such ideological sweep -- "doctrine," indeed -- that it, too, could be described, as it was by one senior American statesman, as "a declaration of religious war." Such rhetorical extremity served a political purpose, shoring up support in Congress and among Americans for the administration's program. But by seeing Moscow exclusively through the lens of the "ism" of communism, the United States missed the significance of nationalist differences among the various communist movements and soon found itself embroiled in a futile worldwide effort to "contain" not Russia, however imperialist, but every insurgency around the globe that raised the banner of Karl Marx.
And because the threat was taken to be apocalyptic, Moscow's capacity to inflict actual harm on "the Free World" was consistently overestimated, which also helped shore up domestic political support. Mystical dread replaced analysis. However the conflict was defined in Moscow, in Washington it took on theological significance that pointed politics toward the afterlife ("Better dead than Red"), which alone explains how the United States could so enthusiastically pursue an arms race that put everything this side of the afterlife at risk.
Not only that. The "ism" threatened inside America, too, which is why the search for communists required, beginning within days of the Truman Doctrine speech, the suspension of traditional guarantees of American citizenship. Anticommunist dread redefined the purposes of the American government, which then exploited that dread to solidify support for those purposes among the American people. Perceptions of the "ism" that threatened the United States introduced a climate of suspicion inside the country and overturned the traditional understanding of relations among nations. "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony," the 1950 policy statement NSC-68 said, "is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world."
It may be true that Moscow under Stalin aimed at world dominance, but if so, the goal was Moscow's dominance, not communism's -- traditional imperial politics, not theology. Washington's failure to grasp this prompted a quasi-religious US response that both gave Russians the motive to adopt the cosmic rhetoric Washington expected and then drove both nation's toward the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Washington imagined a holy war fanaticism and set about to match it.
Is it happening again? A sure sign that a theology of "terrorism" has come into its own is that wildly dispersed mischief makers are elevated to mystical status. Xenophobic tribal leaders, local insurgent groups, mafia chieftains, freedom fighters, malevolent anarchists, and "rogue regimes" are all now branded "terrorists," and their dangerous but hardly equivalent purposes are labeled "terrorism." This "ism" justifies America's aggressive war abroad and "Patriot Act" assault on rights at home. But the Cold War teaches that such transcendent aggrandizing of antagonists is the thing that makes them really dangerous.
reference=http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0923-02.htm
The Clipboard: Antiterrorism Creed