A worthwhile read on terrorism

Terrorism is becoming normal, and that will be its undoing
Fintan O’Toole: Attacks on civil society are futile. Humans have a great capacity to just carry on

Sun, Jun 4, 2017, 18:07
Fintan O'Toole

After every terrorist outrage there is a renewed commitment from political leaders to defeat terrorism. But the underlying truth is that terrorism is self-defeating. It suffers the paradox of all forms of outrage: the more of it there is, the less effective it becomes. And for much of the world, terrorism is becoming normalised: it is part of the texture of contemporary life.
This is not, of course, to diminish the horror and sorrow of events like those in London on Saturday night or to dismiss the depravity of those responsible. Nor is to say that the people and networks who carry out these crimes do not need to be fought with every effective weapon that is compatible with the continued existence of an open democracy. But these attacks on civil society are futile, because there is nothing the terrorists can do about the human capacity to just carry on.
Perhaps the single most notorious phrase to have emerged from the Northern Ireland conflict was the claim by the British home secretary Reginald Maudling in 1971 that the situation in Ulster represented “an acceptable level of violence”. Most people, quite rightly, found this language repellent, oozing a terrible smugness about suffering and death. But there was also an uncomfortable core of truth in Maudling’s claim. No level of violence is or should ever be morally or politically acceptable – but societies do learn to live with a surprisingly high level of dread.
We know this very well in Ireland. The Troubles, after the initial shock, acquired an element of the surreal. The most shocking thing for foreigners visiting, say, Belfast in the long years of conflict was not the troops and armoured vehicles on the streets or the ever-present possibility of bombs or murders. It was the normality. Mundane reality was not displaced by the violence but continued alongside it.

This condition is not quite universal now, but it is becoming a common experience. Most contemporary people live in parallel mental universes. One universe is stable and steady and familiar. The other is full of horrors. We try to keep them apart because how else can we live? And this double-mindedness is not primarily a result of terrorism. It’s just the way human existence is. We all know that terrible things can happen to us at any moment, even in the most peaceful and secure societies. Illnesses and accidents are always waiting to claim us and our loved ones. Death is always at the edge of our peripheral vision – always has been and always will be.
It’s because this is just part of the human condition that people are able to deploy it in the face of terrorist atrocities. When attacks like the London one happen, journalists and politicians reach for words like heroic and courageous to describe the determination of ordinary people to carry on with their lives. But it’s not heroic: it’s just human. We are compartmentalising creatures. If we were not, we would be so consumed by anxiety that we could not function at all.
So the terrorists are not really up against the heroism of mundane life. They are up against its very mundanity. This quality is not very nice. It involves a hell of a lot of forgetting, the deployment of a defensive force field that keeps away the knowledge of what we hear and read and see. It makes us collude with oblivion: all but those who were personally affected by Saturday night’s atrocity will have blanked out the names and faces and the mutilated bodies within months, even weeks. This is not something to be proud of, but it is the way we survive.
We need both to fight against this tendency and to embrace it. The fight against it is partly a matter of language: the dead deserve better from us than the deadening cliches that we roll out again and again – monsters, insane, cowardly, heroic, courageous. They do not deserve knee-jerk political responses that demonise suspect communities or inadvertently collude with the killers in undermining the values of an open society.
But we also have to acknowledge the plain fact of resilience. The stuff that people tend to say in the aftermath of an atrocity – that London, Manchester, Madrid, Paris, Brussels or New York will never be the same again – is well meant. But it’s not true. And saying it only feeds the narcissistic delusions of the terrorists. It is what they want to believe, and believing it justifies in the zealot’s overheated mind the cruelties he inflicts. The truth is that places recover with shocking alacrity. Even after the megaterror of 9/11, New York quickly went back to being New York.
It’s much, much harder to terrorise a population into submission than official and unofficial purveyors of mass violence always think it is. Normality isn’t a fixed state but a spectrum with a remarkably wide range. Terrorists are contemptible for many reasons, but one of them is the stupidity of not knowing this. They try to magnify themselves with epic acts of cruelty. In the end they are diminished and defeated by the strange ability of human beings to step around the pools of blood, keep going and forget..

Click to expand...

happypig said:

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/t...normal-and-that-will-be-its-undoing-1.3107639

Click to expand...

portlock seagull said:

Think it's a pretty naff article actually - long winded, misguided by parallels to NI and nonchantly suggests we'll win by endurance. Very laudable until you consider at what cost? Turmoil can continue indefinitely, just look to the Middle East. Which is ironic really. No thanks. Rather we focused on shorter term solutions rather than just step over the body bits with a shrug on our way out for Friday night drinks because that's the norm.

Click to expand...

1234andcounting said:

I was just wondering what shorter term solutions you have in mind. Terrorism on mainland Britain has been an ever present factor for my whole adult life, albieit for different "causes". If there were one or more solutions, short or long term, to terrorism do you not think that they would have been implemented by now. Or maybe our leaders, regardless of political persuasion, or our security services, regardless of competence, are deliberately ignoring the solutions so that the general population has to live its lives in varying states of anxiety about a potential attack.

I can't remember the precise quote and can't be bothered to look it up, but someone once said about preventing terrorism, something along the following lines; "the terrorist has to be lucky once; we (ie the state), has to be lucky 100% of the time".

Looking forward to reading your solutions, unless you have already sent them to Theresa May (who as a previous Home Secretary, obviously is short of ideas in this area).

Click to expand...

portlock seagull said:

A little patronising but hey, I'll let you off. But are we in government? No. Can I see we need to do things differently though? yes. Does the government? Yes. Do I believe we must accept and can't do more? No (do you?). But it's up to the politicians to counter this new threat. Consider that when you cast your vote. It could be you and your loved ones next. Could be any of us.

Click to expand...

portlock seagull said:

A little patronising but hey, I'll let you off. But are we in government? No. Can I see we need to do things differently though? yes. Does the government? Yes. Do I believe we must accept and can't do more? No (do you?). But it's up to the politicians to counter this new threat. Consider that when you cast your vote. It could be you and your loved ones next. Could be any of us.

Click to expand...

Braggfan said:

I don't normally like to comment on threads about terrorism, because everybody has an opinion on them and they are easily the most emotive subject, and that means you stand a much greater chance of upsetting people, which isn't really my aim on here.

I also I think making terrorism a pre election topic/campaign subject is a tricky one because there is no obvious answer and therefore as its an emotive subject if your opinion differs from someone else it likely to escalate quickly in to a big old row.

However you ask us to consider this when we vote, as this is a new threat. I would like to correct you and point out that this is not a new threat. The 7/7 bombing happened in 2005, thats 12 years ago, of which the Tory government has been in power for the last 7. So if you consider this an election issue maybe you should be asking yourself, what have the Tories done in those 7 years that have made things better, and how do you see them doing things differently after this election that will be drastically change the situation we currently face.

Click to expand...

1234andcounting said:

So, still no suggestions as to what might be done even though you say we need to do things differently. How and why is it up to the politicians and the politicians alone?

And on the subject of patronising - I am perfectly able of deciding what to consider when I cast my vote..

Click to expand...

portlock seagull said:

Who said this was new and who said you needed to vote Tory? Two assumptions you've made there..

Click to expand...

Braggfan said:

I'm not looking to rile you with this, but you said in your post "But it's up to the politicians to counter this new threat". To be fair you didn't say you were voting tory or encouraging anyone to, but I wasn't leveling that criticism at you. You were simply asking people to consider how politcians will respond to this "new threat" when voting. I was simply pointing out that it isn't a new threat and if you're going to consider it while voting, then you need to consider what has been done in the last 12 years about a well known and consistent threat.

Click to expand...

portlock seagull said:

Think you need to calm down and stop looking for a row / to point score where there's no need. Your aggressive tone suggests that Wasting my time writing the alternatives being discussed out there for you isn't going to enlighten you. All you'd do is sit there typing knock backs for each in the same smug self righteous tone you first replied with. Hardly productive so we're done here.

Click to expand...

portlock seagull said:

I know you're not. Never thought you were. In my opinion, It's new in many ways. The ideology, the numbers, outdated laws, the choice of attack, today's media, a new generation that's not experienced permanent threat and so on. Like all dangerous viruses it mutates and finds weaknesses - are we currently equipped to fight it sufficiently? It feels like we've got at least one hand tied behind our backs and politicians serving up platitudes for each horror almost from a CD with 18 condemnation 'tracks' to choose from. We've got to do more and allow them to do more even if that curbs our civil liberties. France called a state of war and national emergency. Perhaps we ought to?

Click to expand...

Knocky's Nose said:

If you get chance, and want an angle on what's happening to the world we live in today, this will really make you sit up...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c

It's called 'Hypernormalisation' - and features a lot of stuff I was never aware of.

Click to expand...

symyjym said:

Looks interesting, will try it later.

Click to expand...