V for vendetta; the ethics of terror

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Last night I finally got to see the new Wachow­ski broth­ers’ film; V for Ven­detta. This film raises sev­eral inter­est­ing eth­ical dilem­mas that reflect our own world in 2006.

The two main themes brought to the fore are around the rela­tion­ships between people and states. I found myself moved by the chal­lenges raised by these themes and I present my thoughts here in such a way as to not spoil the film for those who have not seen it.

Firstly, what is a terrorist?

What does it mean to say that someone is a ter­ror­ist? Why is Nel­son Man­dela a free­dom fighter and prac­tic­ally dei­fied when someone else, someone equally as valid, is con­sidered the scum of the Earth?

Man­della star­ted as a ter­ror­ist too:

Umk­honto we Sizwe (or MK), trans­lated Spear of the Nation, was the act­ive mil­it­ary wing of the African National Con­gress (ANC). Foun­ded on 16 Decem­ber 1961 by the ANC and South African Com­mun­ist Party (SACP), its pur­pose was to mount guer­illa attacks against the South African apartheid régime for their oppres­sion against black people. It was clas­si­fied a ter­ror­ist organ­isa­tion by the South African gov­ern­ment and media, and sub­sequently banned.

A part of the evil in the world and not a fighter for free­dom (another spuri­ous word used in multi-layered con­texts). Is it that that Man­dela was fight­ing an “evil” régime? Who says so?

Free­dom fighter is a relativ­istic local term for those engaged in rebel­lion against an estab­lished organ­iz­a­tion that is thought to be oppress­ive. The terms “free­dom” and “rebel­lion” are often con­fus­ing, as often both sides in armed con­flict claim to rep­res­ent the pop­u­lar cause of “free­dom”. While external inter­ven­ing parties, even oppress­ors, almost always claim to be “lib­er­at­ors”, ‘free­dom fight­ers’ also often become oppress­ors in the eyes of civilians.

Who is it that decides what is evil? Can one even judge a whole soci­ety as evil? Is our soci­ety any bet­ter? Is the US?

Insti­tute for Policy Stud­ies scholar Pro­fessor Noam Chom­sky has referred to the tac­tics used by agents of the US gov­ern­ment and their prox­ies in their exe­cu­tion of US for­eign policy in such coun­tries as Nicaragua, Chile, Costa Rica, Hon­duras, Argen­tina, Colom­bia, Tur­key, Viet­nam, Laos and Cam­bodia [5] as a form of ter­ror­ism from which the term “Amer­ican ter­ror­ism” has been drawn. Chom­sky has also described the U.S as “a lead­ing ter­ror­ist state.” After Pres­id­ent Bush began using the term “War on Ter­ror­ism,” Chom­sky stated:
The U.S. is offi­cially com­mit­ted to what is called “low-intensity war­fare.“[…] If you read the defin­i­tion of low-intensity con­flict in army manu­als and com­pare it with offi­cial defin­i­tions of “ter­ror­ism” in army manu­als, or the U.S. Code, you find they’re almost the same. [6]

The French?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Armed with some of the strict­est anti-terrorism laws and policies in Europe, the French gov­ern­ment has aggress­ively tar­geted Islamic rad­ic­als and other people deemed a poten­tial ter­ror­ist threat. While other West­ern coun­tries debate the proper bal­ance between secur­ity and indi­vidual rights, France has exper­i­enced scant pub­lic dis­sent over tac­tics that would be con­tro­ver­sial, if not illegal, in the United States and some other countries.

What skel­et­ons are in our closets? Is it really the ines­cap­able con­clu­sion that to call someone a ter­ror­ist is a mat­ter of mere sub­ject­ive perspective?

What hap­pens when that per­spect­ive changes? When the Taliban fought the Rus­si­ans they were free­dom fight­ers, but when they fight the west­ern powers sud­denly they are ter­ror­ists. Rambo III was ded­ic­ated to the “the galant people of Afgh­anistan”, and the film was full of com­ple­ments regard­ing their noble yet fierce res­ist­ance of the Rus­sian men­ace. As Rambo him­self remarks “(They) don’t take any shit”. Now it is more likely that the next film use them as tar­get practice?

Could ter­ror­ism really be a label, some­thing that is simple fin­ger point­ing? Do I say you are a ter­ror­ist and it magic­ally becomes true, or is it that you auto­mat­ic­ally become a ter­ror­ist to me when you attack my trains or my towers? Then what must we look like to the rest of the world? I try and think of the most ter­ri­fy­ing thing I can and basic­ally it is already hap­pen­ing to other nations today. Some­thing that we, or at least our lead­ers and their armies, are doing to them.

George W. Bush: I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these ter­ror­ist killers. Thank you.
[George W. Bush bran­dishes a golf club]
George W. Bush: Now, watch this drive.

Ima­gine: that an alien and, from your point of view, cor­rupt for­eign national gov­ern­ment sent an unbeat­able army to rain down bombs onto you, and no one cared. Cam­eras came and recor­ded you dig­ging the graves of your chil­dren, but they are not there for you. Your private morn­ing is now pub­lic; now bare to the world. It is a world that hates your faith, your coun­try. A World that hates your way of life and who has power, unima­gin­able power over you and at one and the same time fears and hates you. Who can lock you away without trial, forever?

Is that not ter­ror? Would you not, in that situ­ation, point the fin­ger and identify the ter­ror­ists when asked. Would you not give them their own names?

I would.

The mean­ing is even fur­ther mis­used by those who refer to a “War on ter­ror”. Since bring­ing a war against a nation is ter­rible are you not cre­at­ing ter­ror? Should the army simply shoot itself? This mis­nomer has des­troyed the mean­ing of the word. It is polit­ical double speak, the first steps along the lines to News­peak. Double plus good!

Charges of News­peak are some­times advanced when a group tries to replace a word/phrase that is polit­ic­ally unsuit­able (e.g. “civil­ian cas­u­al­ties”) or offens­ive (e.g. “murder”) with a polit­ic­ally cor­rect or inof­fens­ive euphem­ism (e.g. “col­lat­eral dam­age”). Some main­tain that to make cer­tain words or phrases “unspeak­able” (thoughtcrime) restricts what ideas may be held (News­peak) and is there­fore tan­tamount to cen­sor­ship. Oth­ers believe that expun­ging terms that have fallen out of favor or become insult­ing will make people less likely to hold out­dated or offens­ive views. The intent to alter the minds of the pub­lic through changes made to lan­guage illus­trates News­peak perfectly.

So, what does it mean to call someone a ter­ror­ist? Almost noth­ing. The word has almost no mean­ing at all. It is as Niet­z­sche wrote; it is Res­sen­ti­ment.

Res­sen­ti­ment is a pro­found sense of resent­ment, frus­tra­tion, and hos­til­ity dir­ec­ted at that which one iden­ti­fies as the cause of one’s frus­tra­tion, gen­er­ated by a sense of weakness/inferiority and feel­ings of jealousy/envy in the face of the ’cause’, that ulti­mately gen­er­ates a rejecting/justifying ‘value-system’ or mor­al­ity that exists as a means of attack­ing or deny­ing the per­ceived source of one’s own sense of inferiority.

Some­thing from which you can­not escape; a feel­ing of fear and the derid­ing of any­thing dif­fer­ent and unortho­dox, it is the mak­ing of a scape­goat. The war against ter­ror becomes fnord, some­thing that your con­scious brain shy’s away from in an attempt to get on with your life. You will put up with any­thing to keep ter­ror at bay. Almost any free­dom is taken, snatched; not given, from the people because of the nasty fnord await­ing you.

Fnord is the typo­graphic rep­res­ent­a­tion of dis­in­form­a­tion or irrel­ev­ant inform­a­tion intend­ing to mis­dir­ect, with the implic­a­tion of a con­spir­acy.

The word was coined as a non­sensical term with reli­gious under­tones in the Prin­cipia Dis­cor­dia by Kerry Thorn­ley and Greg Hill, but was pop­ular­ized by The Illu­minatus! Tri­logy of books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In these nov­els, the inter­jec­tion “fnord” is given hyp­notic power over the unen­lightened. Under the Illu­minati pro­gram, chil­dren, while still in grade school, are taught to be unable to con­sciously see the word “fnord”. For the rest of their lives, every appear­ance of the word sub­con­sciously gen­er­ates a feel­ing of uneas­i­ness and con­fu­sion, and pre­vents rational con­sid­er­a­tion of the subject.

To get away with this, they send you hid­den poster boys of terror.

A single evil man, sup­posedly the mas­ter in a pup­pet theatre try­ing to des­troy the world. I have seen this thing. One man, they say, one man is wrong. He is the one man. Stop him for he is what you should be afraid of. And so we are. Why? Because we are told to be. In the end the act of attrib­ut­ing more and more events to one mans actions becomes an ever-repeating circle. He becomes a source of ter­ror like the sun is a source of light and all ref­er­ence to ter­ror lead back to this one man.

delib­er­ate tech­niques for scare­mon­ger­ing. For example:

• Care­ful selec­tion and omis­sion of news (some rel­ev­ant facts are shown and some are not);
• Dis­tor­tion of stat­ist­ics or numbers;
• Trans­form­a­tion of single events into social epidemics;
• Cor­rup­tion and dis­tor­tion of words or ter­min­o­logy accord­ing to spe­cific goals;
• Stig­mat­iz­a­tion of minor­it­ies, espe­cially when asso­ci­ated with crim­inal acts or degrad­ing behaviour;
• Gen­er­al­iz­a­tion of com­plex and mul­ti­fa­ceted situations;
• Causal inver­sion (turn­ing a cause into an effect or vice-versa).