Being inoculated against national acts of collective masochism gives me a clearer perspective to think about terrorism, or rather its cultural significance. The latter is an important qualification, because terrorism is almost incomprehensible as an act war, but it makes a perfect sense as a spectacle of the reality TV genre.
As the means of achieving tactical or strategic objectives that matter in war making, terrorism is remarkably ineffective. Such objectives typically involve incapacitating the enemy combat unit deployed against 'our' combat units (tactical objective) or to reduce the enemy's general capacity of carrying adverse actions against 'our' units (strategic objective.) Historically, non-conventional combatants (partisans, guerillas, revolutionaries, etc.) who did not have the capacity to successfully engage the enemy's military, typically pursued strategic objectives, such as blowing up infrastructure, sabotage, assassination of enemy functionaries, gathering intelligence and submitting it to allied armies, etc. Tactical engagements were typically avoided due to superior fire power of the enemy units, and carried out mainly in conjunction with strategic engagements (e.g. attacking an enemy unit protecting an installation to be destroyed in the strategic engagement) or defensively (i.e. when attacked by enemy units.)
Such conduct of non-conventional military operations is dictated by the logic of war - if you face a much stronger enemy whom you cannot defeat in direct combat, you target the enemy infrastructure instead to weaken his capacity to fight you. It is so, because it is much easier to destroy strategic infrastructure than defeat an army, so attacking infrastructure weakens the enemy in two ways: it depletes its materiel and forces him to divert some of its forces from attacking you to protecting its supplies.
There is no dearth of strategically important installations that can be attacked relatively easily, oil pipelines and refineries, power plants and electrical lines, shipping routes (as Somali pirates do it rather effectively with very limited resources), or communication facilities to name a few most obvious. However, it is hard to think of a passenger airliner or an office building as an object of any strategic importance. Yet, these are the primary targets of terrorist attacks, both foreign (Mohammed Atta & Co.) and domestic (Timothy McVie.)
Therefore, terrorists attacking these objects must be either irrational - in the sense of purpose rationality - or have objectives different from those of non-conventional military operations. I believe it is the latter, and their real purpose is to stage a gigantic spectacle, a world-scale reality show just as seen on TV, only better. What gives these guys away is that they all play soldiers on camera - dress in military garb, conspicuously display their weapons, talk the military speak complete with gibberish about 'liberation' of "their" land from enemy "occupation," etc. - but their actions make no sense from a military point of view. In fact, their actions are counterproductive from a military point of view, as they are virtually assured to strengthen the enemy forces deployed against them rather than weaken them.
But what makes no sense to a real soldier, it makes perfect sense to someone who wants to play one on camera. The last thing such a wannabe soldier wants is not to be taken seriously by his audience. So he stages a big reality show - as seen on TV only bigger - to scare a living shit of his audience and prove he is for real. And if the enemy deploys more real forces against him, that is even better as it makes this show even more real.
So the terrorist acts may feature Islamist actors, but their origins are in the American show business and the reality show genre it pioneered. Back in the 1970s, Umberto Eco used the term "hyperreality" ("Travels in Hyperreality http://public.clunet.edu/~brint/American/Eco.pdf) to poke fun of the American theme parks, built to look more real than the originals they imitated. Then came the era of reality shows whose main selling point was that what they depicted was not some artifice or stage set made to look real, but the reality itself - or rather hyperreality that looks more "real" than the actual reality experienced by the audience in their everyday lives. Terrorism was only a next logical step in the direction of hyperreality - it offered the audience direct, un-mediated by TV, participation in the show in a way as theme parks did but even more hyperreal, as guys jumping at you during your ride were not some animatronic contraptions but real freaks with real weapons and real explosives. Hyperreality show at its peak.
Not long ago I saw a guy on the Metro wearing a T-shirt with a logo saying "It is only funny until someone gets hurt, then it is getting hilarious." From that point of view, terrorism is a 'hilarious' spectacle featuring wannabe soldiers, big bangs in the sky, and many people getting hurt, a reality show spectacle produced by TV-brainwashed folks for TV-brainwashed audience.
Wojtek
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 5:28 PM, <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
> For some reason, the American Legion rejected my keynote address. May as well dump it on ya'll.
>
> <http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2011/09/killing-fields-forever.html >
>
> Dennis
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