Does Terrorism Work?

Some things to think about even if you don't want to...

Normally I post all the cartoons from a single week and write whatever scattered thoughts are associated with them, but this cartoon took a lot of explaining and the explanation was getting way way way too long so I decided to make it a separate post, which you can ignore if the subject makes you uncomfortable.

And now that I write that, it seems silly and pompous on my part because you’re obviously free to ignore anything that bothers you, including, but not limited to the following suggestion that you become a subscriber:

And…

People who think you should tip for service when you pick up carry-out food and didn’t get any service, bureaucrats who want to put warning labels on alcohol because up until now we all thought it was healthy and good for us, award show acceptance speeches in which actors we previously considered cool reveal themselves to be insecure, self-centered twits and anything I draw or write about.

And if this serious subject stresses you out, don’t worry...

Before you know it I’ll be back to writing silly stuff about New Year’s Resolutions or Crappy Christmas Gifts or Shoveling Snow and The Accompanying Heart Attacks, but if you’re still with me, let’s try to answer the question at the top of this essay:

One More Time; Does Terrorism Work?

Like the rest of America, on New Year’s Day I woke up to the news that an ISIS Fanboy had driven a pickup truck into a crowd of people celebrating the New Year on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

And like a lot of you I asked myself just what that accomplished; how does running over a bunch of innocent people with a pickup truck help ISIS establish a global caliphate (a world being run by a Muslim caliph which sounds like a long shot and I’d bet the under) but according to the following CNN article, that’s what ISIS wants:

https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/11/middleeast/isis-syria-iraq-caliphate/index.html

But whenever I hear that terrorists killed people with a car bomb or opened up on a crowd of concert-goers with automatic weapons or hijacked planes and flew them into buildings, my immediate reaction is revulsion for the people who did it and their choice of tactics and I’m guessing I’m not alone so how does terrorism do anything to further a terrorist’s cause?

Acts of terrorism seem either “counter-intuitive” or “counter-productive” (although the first hyphenated term that sprang to mind was actually “fucked-up”) because as someone I’ve forgotten wrote in a book whose title I also can’t recall:

“Until morale improves, the daily beatings will continue.”

But one of the many problems we have as human beings is assuming we’re “normal” and everybody thinks like us, which, if you pay attention (and a depressing number of our fellow humans don’t) is definitely not true; people can have a wide variety of reactions to the same set of circumstances and events.

You think free-form jazz is enthralling and innovative, I think it sound like a bunch of determined musicians falling down a long flight of stairs.

Google “does terrorism work?” and you’ll be directed to a wide variety of articles with a wide variety of conclusions and the answer seems to depend on what you mean by “terrorism” and what you mean by “work.”

Now here’s the definition of terrorism: “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”

The word that jumps out in that definition is “unlawful” which makes it sound like when an individual or small group employs violence and intimidation against civilians it’s unlawful, but if you can get a government to say it’s OK and Our National Policy, you can use the exact same tactics and now it’s not terrorism.

For instance:

During the American Revolution, John Paul Jones attacked non-combatant civilians in England; was that terrorism? (The English seem to think so; here in America, school kids are taught John Paul Jones was a hero, in England he’s known as John Paul Jones the Pirate.)

During WW2 we bombed non-combatant civilians in Germany: was that terrorism?

During that same war we firebombed Tokyo, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed hundreds of thousands of non-combatant civilians: was that terrorism?

Most of us would say no, that’s not terrorism, but if we ask ourselves why not, the answer seems to be because our government said it was OK to attack civilians.

And if you argue that those non-combatant civilians were supporting the military forces we were fighting so it was right to attack them because maybe it would make those military forces less efficient or less motivated or possibly make them come back home to protect the civilians we were killing, then you’ve opened a very big can of worms and while we ponder that moral conundrum and icky metaphor let’s move on to the word “work.”

Here’s a TED talk by Professor Richard English who for our purposes conveniently wrote a book called “Does Terrorism Work?”

Short version for those of you who didn’t watch the video: terrorism rarely “works” when it comes to achieving the terrorists’ overall, long-term goal, but can achieve a short-term goal, like generating publicity for the terrorists’ cause.

How many of us ever heard of ISIS before they started cutting peoples’ heads off?

The media (of which I’m kinda sorta still a member) is in a damned-if-you-do-fucked-if-you-don’t position because if they publicize acts of terrorism they’re doing what the terrorists want, but if someone’s going around killing innocent people isn’t that news innocent people need to know?

Terrorist acts can also attract followers a few face cards short of a full deck (the kind you can convince to blow themselves up with a suicide vest because you sure as hell don’t want to do that) and when it comes to the ways terrorism “works” here’s one we might want to think about:

Terrorism can provoke governments into undermining themselves by their reactions.

If you hate the idea of a Liberal Democracy and everybody running around willy-nilly doing whatever the hell they feel like doing, including wearing mini-skirts and eating pork ribs and drinking Pina coladas and doing The Twist and having sex for recreational purposes (which sounds like a really fun Friday night and if you plan on doing any of that, give me a call) but let one moron get on a plane with bombs in his sneakers — a scheme seemingly inspired by Wile E. Coyote — and for the next 24 years airline passengers have to take their shoes off.

Fly planes into buildings and we freak out and pass the USA PATRIOT Act and our Liberal Democracy becomes a lot less liberal.

Professor English also made the point that governments making promises they can’t possibly keep – like ridding the world of terrorism – undermine their own credibility.

By now we should be realizing this is a complicated subject with no easy answers and maybe your head hurts thinking about it, so you stop thinking about it, buy a MAGA cap and decide to believe whatever simplistic crap Donald Trump tells you, like the problem is immigrants when the guy who drove his truck into the crowd was actually an American with a foreign sounding name.

(But close enough for Our Future Government’s work.)

Generally speaking, no matter who commits them, acts of terrorism push governments farther to the Right because people freak out and say make us safe and if you have to listen to our phone calls and read our emails to make that happen, so be it, and by the way, here’s a bajillion dollars to build whatever weapons system you currently have your eye on.

And while we’re at it, go ahead and kidnap people you only suspect of being terrorists even though you don’t have solid evidence and take those people to Black Sites for “enhanced interrogation” – AKA torture – and when that doesn’t work, just hold them without charges forever and we’ll do our best not to think about it because the NFL playoffs have started and we’ve got other things to worry about.

Now Google “is there any evidence that governments have allowed terrorists acts to happen” and the AI robot that will eventually enslave all of us, but for now is limited to summing up what’s on the internet, says a lot of people suspect that it happens, but it’s difficult to prove.

Nevertheless, on numerous occasions governments have been accused of: “supporting rebel groups, turning a blind eye to extremist activities” and “using terrorists as proxies” to get the populace scared and malleable and willing to go along with whatever cockamamie scheme the government comes up with (like invading Ottawa) and if you think governments wouldn’t do things like that, think about the cockamamie schemes we know our government came up with like:

• Exposing Americans to radiation to see what happened next.

• Only pretending to treat syphilis in Black men to see what happened next.

• Giving unsuspecting people LSD to see what happened next. (They also hoped they could brainwash those people into carrying out assassinations, but unfortunately for the government all it did was make them Grateful Dead fans.)

• Spying on and intimidating people they found “disruptive.”

And…

• Covering up 32 “broken arrow” incidents in which a nuclear weapon was lost, stolen or mishandled, which is yet another item on the long list of items our government would prefer we stop thinking about.

If you want more details, here’s a National Geographic article about crazy schemes our government cooked up and then lied about:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/us-government-conspiracy-declassified-secrets

In Conclusion: I Don’t Really Have One

So the answer to the question “Does Terrorism Work?” is, “Yeah, kind of,” but today I’m sure I provided more questions than answers and if it makes your head hurt and you don’t want to think about it anymore…

How about them Chiefs?

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/