The new incrimination of “terrorism”: a weapon of global repression (11)

Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism

11 - The new incrimination of “terrorism”: a weapon of global repression

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

The advantages that the offence of “terrorism” thus established offers to the totalitarian repression of governmental action are incomparable; they are such ones, that no other criminal figure can compete with it. With the introduction of the new supreme offence of “terrorism”, the fundamental human rights and the international and traditional political guarantees: constitutional, legal, judicial and procedural, precarious though they might have been, disappear at its presence. Sanctions, pressure and repression grow increasingly worse and spread without limitation.

The principle of legality: which founded the official modern version of the “State of law” as “rule of law”, gives way to the political, legal, police and judicial arbitrariness characteristic of totalitarian Terror. If there was a time in which a bard felt the need to denounce in his song “I know the police cost you trouble: they cost trouble everywhere”, now the police, even in London, can with impunity arrest or fire seven shots on the body – killing him – to a passer-by walking too quickly, even if he does it so as to avoid losing the tube-train in his way to work. Any judge, under his “intimate conviction”, can lock up any citizen; or else his arrest warrant will pursue him through the entire world. All the conditions of the State Terror, now globalized, have been developed to the utmost point.

Far from being an ideological handicap, the indeterminacy of the concept of “terrorism” allows its universal application. All amalgamations are possible, since any undesirable activity is reducible to the unique “concept”. And all activity incorporated to the “terrorist” whole is attributable to each partial component, according to their belonging to the functionally ready-made list; which allows the transfer and application of globalized hatred and revenge on each element or individual. The new concept of “terrorism” is the absolute and global ideological weapon.

The new crime of “terrorism”, implemented, promoted and manufactured by the hegemonic Power, is the universal, fundamental and supreme Terrorism of the established totalitarian Power: first resource and ‘ultima ratio’ of the new world policy. This new Terrorism, thus established and restored, extends already without limits to all international reality. Every political régime adhering to the pact of “collective legitimate defence” of the totalitarian States has the support and carte blanche for the suppression without restrictions of any ideological and political opposition, and of any social reality that somehow sustains it. Also, any opposition to one of the States “signatories” of the Pact faces, in just and solidarity-based correspondence, the vindict and excommunication from the new masters of the world and from the whole vassal States. The democratic Resistance of Peoples and their legitimate States against Imperialism and Fascism is the main target of the new international system of political repression; a line of action immediately assumed by all the totalitarian States of the World. Under the need to “combat violence and terrorism”, all the real or fictitious barriers that were trying to put a stop to the Violence, Terrorism and War of Aggression have blown everywhere.

From then on, war, terrorism, resistance, law, struggles for liberation and self-determination, aggression, retaliation, interventions, raids, legitimate defence, preventive legitimate defence, interference and humanitarian interference: like State, People or Nation, are concepts constitutively correlative to the ideology of totalitarianism, and consequently are correlatively interpreted, adapted, falsified and destroyed in order to cover or justify the own behaviour and to disqualify the others’. While an excessive exploitation does not deplete the vein, no political agent will cease in future to qualify as “terrorism” any activity or situation that opposes to him, nor will qualify as terrorism their own activities. Each State makes or interprets the norms and concepts as it wants to. Never ever a State has described its own behaviour as unjust war, aggression or crime against humanity, nor has it rated that of others as just war, legitimate defence or humanitarian interference. In this sense there can be no place for talking of a common concept of “terrorism”: there are so many terrorisms as political agents.

The concept of “terrorism” becomes as relative as that of State or Government, of just or unjust war, or of aggression and legitimate defence. The appreciation depends on the comprehension and extension of the idea of legality; it depends on the own interpretation and point of view, which become interchangeable and transformable according to the situation, the opportunity and the circumstances.

The Chechen rebels and their Caucasian neighbours were already described as bandits, criminals, thieves and murderers – before becoming “terrorists” – since the first “peaceful and pacifying” expansionist campaigns of the “great” Catherine, promoter of Russian imperialism. Her successors did continue with her same “peaceful” Terrorist task: “[I will] never rest until [only] one Chechen is left alive”, and “I desire that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more potently than chains of fortresses”, said the genocidal Russian General Aleksey Yermólov, “responsible for implementing [in the Caucasus] a series of policies that [...] might very well be called State-sponsored terrorism”. Up to reach the current Kagebist-Putinist “democrats”, who do instruct and encourage their followers to “drown them in the toilets” (Putin dixit) anywhere they can be found. They all are Resisters and Fighters for Freedom and national liberation against a colonial war and similar things, according to other and more accurate perspectives.

The Founding Fathers of the USA were terrorist avant la lettre for the English Government and laws; afterwards, the American Aborigines were exterminated as bandits and savages without faith or law. The French revolutionaries and the activists against the Vichy régime were terrorists according to themselves or to the others. The Soviet régime and its Terrorism were sheer gangsterism for the law of the USA until 1933. And so we continue, with the infamous agreement between the Great “democratic” Powers, which have slaughtered and looted the world by means of their atomic and conventional Terror of masses.

In Nigeria, Katanga or Biafra there became apparent that the wave of African decolonization did not solve the “international community” discrepancies with regard to the right of self-determination, and the situation there lingers on at a standstill. The French repression in Algeria did invoke the right of self-determination of the French People against terrorism; because, where there are no more People than the French one, “France cannot fight against itself”. Thus, once the reality had been denied and the formal logic destroyed by begging the question (petitio principii), the suppression of “terrorism” could only consist there of police and peacekeeping actions. Similarly, “the Contras” of Nicaragua, armed by the USA, were terrorists or democratic forces, according to tastes. The Mujahedeen of Afghanistan are or cease to be one thing or another, simultaneously or in succession, according to the point of view and the time of the cold war or post-war; the same as the peshmerga of Kurdistan and the fellaha of Algeria.

The International Law, according to the UN, does exclude from the term and concept of terrorism the legal acts of State violence, the wars and the international armed conflicts, in which are included the struggles of self-determination of Peoples, the legitimate defence and the Resistance against aggression. It does also exclude the reprisals, the interventions in defence of freedom, democracy, security, balance of powers, peace and human rights, the humanitarian interferences and protections, the civilian wars and conflicts, the belligerence, the guerrilla and the insurrection. (Cf. the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan with the colonial wars carried out “against” human sacrifices or the attempts on missionaries.)

Yet, it’s not a matter of limiting the range of application of such an ideological bargain; and thus, the conceptual reduction of “terrorism” is followed by its expansion. In this way, the “terrorist exception” disconnects the laws of war in relation to the “cases of terrorism”. The “war against terrorism” allows to ignore the laws of war and all the Conventions and Resolutions on “Humanitarian Right in armed conflicts”. (Afghanistan, Guantánamo.) What’s more, that exception becomes a total and totalitarian norm: whatever its purpose, perpetrator and extension may be, the concept of “terrorism” extends to any violent action – whether limited (attempt/attack) or unlimited (war or armed conflict) – that is carried out against the régime that defines it. In fact, the concept of “terrorism” presides over and reviews the concept of war or armed conflict.

When both concur, the war of aggression does not discredit its Terrorism, whereas the “terrorism” of he that has been qualified as such discredits his (defensive) war. State Terrorism reclassifies the war and armed conflicts, whether international or “civilian”, which become designated as appropriate to the de facto power of the totalitarian State. Thus they become excluded – only at one-way direction – the laws of war or of armed conflicts, which do not apply to “terrorism and terrorists”. Indeed, and “as is evident” according to the established “logic”, there are no laws of war or of armed conflicts where there is no war or armed conflict but only on one side, since on the other there is not war but “terrorism”. (To be noticed: it has to be underlined on this purpose the recent “Declaration of war against terrorism” made by the hegemonic Power after the bombings of New York; which, referred to those attempts, improves the strange – though not unprecedented – concept of a “war” to only one-way, with or without “counter-war”. Thus, “war and counter-war” are replaced now by “war and terrorism”.)

There can be “just or unjust war” but not “just or unjust terrorism”; which makes relative, weighted and casuistic the reprobation of the first, but absolute that of the second. “Terrorism”: “intrinsically wicked”, is the new archetype of absolute evil, without any good mixed, in the popular imagery. The new film wave driven by the hegemonic Administration has found in the “terrorism” the ideal and archetypal villain, which all the preceding ambiguous production had not been successful in outlining.

The dominant powers have channelled all the horror and disgust that inspires their own conduct, and have directed them against the new political and ideological objective called “terrorism”. They have taken advantage of the end of the cold war and the disorientation of stunned populations, to surprisingly and in a very short time disrupt and ruin the State and international order or disorder, and the foundation and structure for defence of Human Rights.

All totalitarian States – of course purportedly and officially democratic – that are confronted with conflicts that are unwilling to solve through the respect of Fundamental Human Rights (and above all by the respect of the right of self-determination or independence of all Peoples: “first of human rights and prior condition of them all” according to contemporary International Law), do denounce as “violence and terrorism” the international and fundamental right of legitimate self-defence that a subjugated People wields against the Terrorism of the occupying State, correlative of its right of self-determination or unconditional and immediate independence.

The French Government does relentlessly demand the renunciation “of all violence” in Corsica, as it had done before in Algeria, Madagascar or Indochina, while unceasingly reinforcing its own monopoly of criminal Violence on the Island conquered and occupied through blood and fire: a “French territory where the Government will respond to violence with force”. So as to leave no doubts about the “force” that is being talked about, “the Marseillaise”: protected by the French penal law, continues inciting to soak the soil with the impure blood of the others; not to mention what they call the ‘force de frappe’ of ¨France: the thermo-nuclear bomb, terrorist weapon of mass and indiscriminate destruction. The functional unfolding of a concept, which is unique and identical, in the terms of “violence”, on the one hand (which designates what others do); and “force”, on the other (i.e., one’s own violence), does obvious serve a deliberate ideological mystification.

The same as there happens in the “classical” propaganda about violence, the realistic – technical and practical – concept of “terrorism” founds and at the same time contradicts the ideological illusion and delusion. That’s to say, the traditional concept and term of terrorism are preserved and used to recuperate their emotional value, which is an effective determinant of social psychology; and through that confused ideological transfer, the new realistic and practical criteria are concealed and justified. Thus, the dominant ideology retains the term “terrorism” with its primitive concept, but reduced and expanded at the same time. In this way it manages to recuperate the negative psychological charge of that idea, which is fraudulently transferred to different ideas.

The new “terrorism” is thus a self-sufficient conceptual agglomerate: closed, independent, indefinite and indefinable, imprecise, variable and contradictory, universal, multi-use, unpresentable and indisputable, objectively expanded to all violence against the régime that determines it, and subjectively adaptable and modifiable. The rest is indifferent form of no interest: whether it be presented under the form of either Anarchism, Communism, Nationalism or Islamism. The new idea of “terrorism” evokes, elicit and uses fear; but “sheer” fear, regardless of other determinations. For the patients whom this ideological trap is aimed to, “terrorism” has no end or means other than itself.

Of course, one’s own terrorism is so good that it is not terrorism, nor is called terrorism, nor fits in the “modern” concept of ‘terrorism’. As there happens with the terminological and conceptual unfolding of the constellation ‘violence/force’, the correlative unfolding between ‘terrorism’ (what others do) and ‘repression-against-terrorism’ (which is what totalitarian power calls the Resistance) serves to destroy the single notion that shows the identity of content – comprehension-extension, according to formal logic – of the “vulgar” concept of violence: common to all political acts, whether despotic or democratic.

“Terrorism” is not defined: it is named and listed. The first Atomic and Terrorist Administration of the world has unilaterally and arbitrarily established the list of “terrorist” agents, Peoples and States on Earth; and this without no possible recourse or defence, and without any definition that would allow the free Peoples and persons concerned to impeach that enumeration. Meanwhile, corrections and additions to that list are made at the simple demand of the most vile, reactionary and criminal politicians and rulers that Nazism and Fascism brought to the World.

(From: ‘Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism’.)