--- boddi satva <lbo.boddi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay, so completely impoverished and completely
> insane, the D.C.
> Sniper killed a dozen Americans in a few months.
>
> Four years after 9/11, you'd think Al Qaeda would at
> least have shot
> somebody. Anybody. Just a little shooting.
I think the main point of a terrorist action is not shooting someone, but make a big spectacle in which the "message" is writtien with dead bodies and blood (just like in Kafka's _Penal Colony_). Killing an enemy in combat is too mundane, too comonplace, it does not even make the news - so to shock the enemy one needs a big bang, a spectacle, something outrageous and terryfying.
A few day ago I watched a docmentary on the History channel about the recent civil war in Liberia. The war was fought basically by rival gangs that tried to "impress" their rivals by savage violence - such as dismembering captured rivals, cutting off their genitals and sticking them in their mouth, ripping off their hearts and eating them, or slicing them alive. One group of "warriors" would strip themselves completely naked, paint their bodies and go on rampage inflicting indiscriminate violence on just about anyone - just to appear fierce and fearsome. Why engaging in such senseless savagery if not to make a spectacle?
Terrorism is a spectacle and as such requires grandiose mayhem that otherwise has little or no strategic significance. If you can successfuly organize a suicide bombinng mission inside your enemy's country, whoy would you attack the World Trade center whose strategic importance is close to nil? Becaouse it is a big structure laden with symbolism, and thus makes a perfect spectacle. Or if you are a domestic terrorist, why do you blow up a government building in Oklahoma? Again it is a symbollic specatcle - attacking the enemy in "heart of America."
Wojtek
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