James Fallows has another good post up about the tragedy in Norway. He quotes a Norwegian friend of his who says the same kinds of things my friends in Sweden have been saying in my conversations with them this summer.
I think what we are seeing is a mutation of Al Quaeda / Jihadist tactics, to domestic political action, and the surprise is that it happened in peaceful Norway. (Yes, there was McVeigh and Oklahoma city, but it feels different, and maybe it is different just because it happened before 9/11). The international press reporting on this is still confused, and I think the Norwegian press is hesitant to express what may be obvious to them — maybe out of a feeling of shame.
Here’s my read on the story: Anders Behring Breivik looks like (and has the profile of) the prototypical “west end” Oslo’er. Like (too) many of the inhabitants of the Norwegian capital, where more than 25% of the inhabitants are immigrants, he turns into a racist. For most, racism is a mental state, but not for him. And. in the absence of a party like the Front National in France, where the need for votes imposes restraints on extremism, he becomes an individual host for the Al Qaeda gene [attracted simply by it’s ability to project the voice of a minority, cf. his John Stuart Mills tweet], and in a completely open society he is free to develop and execute his plans at leisure (the only hitch being that the Labour Party youth summer camp coincides with the July “national” vacation month so you can’t get maximum impact in both venues).
I hope that in Norway, the effect of yesterday, will be that any kind of racist tendency will be abhorred even by those who dreamed of a less diverse, and thus less complicated, society. They may have lived with this dream were it not for the ugliness of yesterday’s crimes.
But I fear that the virus of “jihadism” may spread to extremist national politics in other countries.
I touched on this earlier, and in no way do I want to accuse American right-wingers of having sympathy with terrorists. But where are the retractions from Jennifer Rubin and other right-wingers who tried to gin up more anti-Muslim sentiment in the first few hours after the attacks?
We have to come to grips with the fact that many right-wingers now embrace chaos and revolution as a way to get back to the good old days. The sentiment takes different forms in the US than in Europe, but it’s all of a piece.
Update. Wonkette rounds up the reaction from Free Republic.
Update. Fallows’ friend’s comparison with Al Qaeda probably isn’t perfect as some of you have suggested.
Update. Okay, the whole idea that right-wing terrorists got their ideas from Al Qaeda is stupid. That guy shouldn’t have said that. It’s not what my friends in Sweden said, they just said they felt the right-wing tide was rising in Scandinavia and that it would likely lead to terrorism along the lines of the things that Al Qaeda (and the IRA and others) have done.
Djur
Uh, did I miss when al Qaeda became known for mass shootings?
al Qaeda’s most notable elements have been its cell organization and access to large amounts of cash money. Its most notable attack was a hijacking and suicide attack. I think it’s really imprecise to associate any kind of terrorism with an “al Qaeda gene”.
The West has had right-wing terrorists since before UBL was a twinkle in his father’s eye. The Ku Klux Klan. The Brownshirts. Etc.
The Dangerman
Extremist politics? You mean like intentionally harming an economy to assist in winning an upcoming Presidential election?
At some point, one has to at least wonder where the line of sedition is crossed (if it isn’t obvious, IANAL).
Brian S
I don’t know why you wouldn’t. They throw eliminationist rhetoric around pretty freely–and I’m talking about elected officials here, not just whackos on the Free Republic. They’ll deny it, sure, because it’s not polite to say such things publicly, but they talk smack about wiping out liberals “as a joke” often enough that it’s hard to say they don’t share at least a little sympathy with people like this Norwegian asshat.
Hunter Gathers
It’s the current M.O. of the Conservative Movement. They are more than willing to set the whole damn country on fire as long as we can go back to the way things were before the turn of the 20th century. Except this time we’ll have TV.
chopper
great. now horizontal gene transfer works in extremist politics.
geg6
I think this is correct. And I think we’ll be seeing more of this here in the US, too. What else was that Seattle bomb at the MLK parade about if not about killing African Americans and their liberal friends. Racists with insane Christianist beliefs take the tactics of AQ? Doesn’t surprise me a bit. They both attract the same sort of person, so of course they will act the same.
licensed to kill time
Very OT but CNN Int’l reporting Amy Winehouse found dead in her apartment.
sukabi
with respect Doug, this backhanded way of linking the Norway terrorist / murderer to ‘jihad’ and radical muslim terrorists sucks and stokes ‘the other’ ness…
regardless of religious / political affiliation, people learn from the actions of others… what works, what doesn’t… how to be most effective… if they didn’t we’d still be lining up in rows and shooting point blank at each other, while our generals sat on horseback on the hill overlooking the field.
to the folks engaged in ‘terrorism’, to them they are engaged in warfare and are ‘learning’ from each other… it’s not like there’s an information blackout on tactics / tools or what not… the information for waging warfare is all around us, from our history books to the latest newspaper, all conveniently available for everyone on the internet…
Ol' Dirty DougJ
That’s sad, her music was a breath of fresh air on the radio, it is too bad she had so many problems.
Cacti
Why?
Where were the condemnations on the right for the assassination of George Tiller?
licensed to kill time
@Ol’ Dirty DougJ: V. sad indeed. Link here .
Ol' Dirty DougJ
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I see your point. The comparison should probably have been made more delicately.
Djur
You can accuse the right wing of fomenting terrorism without linking them to al Qaeda.
BGinCHI
Can someone please disabuse me of the idea that the current GOP economic terrorism isn’t straight out of the Shock Doctrine playbook?
Crisis….benefit….GOP.
Violet
@licensed to kill time:
Very sad, but not exactly a surprise. She had so many substance abuse problems.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Fortunately, it can’t possibly be that white folks in general are the most extreme and most violent people in history. And, of course, the creepiest.
.
.
Yevgraf
Not to mention the condemnation of the numbers of pasty, pudgy North Carolina Christians that obviously aided right wing Christian terrorist Eric Rudolph for his sojourn in the wilderness. The fucker should’ve been waterboarded until he gave them up….
Xecky Gilchrist
And. in the absence of a party like the Front National in France, where the need for votes imposes restraints on extremism, he becomes an individual host for the Al Qaeda gene [attracted simply by it’s ability to project the voice of a minority, cf. his John Stuart Mills tweet], and in a completely open society he is free to develop and execute his plans at leisure (the only hitch being that the Labour Party youth summer camp coincides with the July “national” vacation month so you can’t get maximum impact in both venues).
This is the product of a professional writer? Sloppily conceived and mispunctuated.
Trentrunner
Fallows is usually sharp, but what’s with this “Al-Qaeda gene” thing?
Was there no terrorism before Al-Qaeda?
This careless redefinition of “terrorism” into “what Islamists do” is getting pretty scary.
Btw, what kind of gun did his Norwegian nut have? Where did he get it? What are Norway’s gun laws?
licensed to kill time
@Violet: Yes, quite true. I don’t want to hijack this thread, I just heard it on the TV and natch just had to share here.
Ol' Dirty DougJ
It’s something a friend emailed him.
Alex S.
@licensed to kill time:
Wow, I am shocked and strangely moved. But all the signs pointed to this end I guess.
Rob
Similar instances in the US aren’t labelled terrorism. Now its never been on the same scale, but we have guys caught planning similar shooting, we have clinic bombings and we have smaller scale attacks. It just gets more cover from people in power here.
jacy
All the references to “Second Amendment Solutions” seems to have slipped past you…
Exactly, nothing new under the sun, blah, blah, blah.
I’ll just echo what a lot of others have said in a lot of other places: funny how when it was assumed to be Muslims everybody says “terrorist” and then when it’s a white right-winger a certain slice of people replace terrorist with “madman.” Because nothing that the right-wing spouts could conceivably encourage people to commit violence against their perceived “enemies”…
Bill Murray
Have they moved away from this? Many right wingers clearly sympathized enough to help Eric Rudolph hide following the 96 Olympics bombing. I would not accuse all right wingers with sympathy for all terrorists, but that isn’t how I read your statement
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Yeah, I have problems with the language here, specifically using the word ‘jihadism’ and ‘virus of jihad’. It buys in to the continued frame of language intrinsically linking Islam with Terrorism.
It only allows the issue to be muddied and make it easier to ignore how these right-wing extremist assholes and Al-Qaida continue to be mirror images of each other, in motivation and in willingness to destroy for their own ideologies.
Cacti
Not to mention, as monstrous as Al Qaeda has been, I’ve yet to hear of an incident where they entered a youth summer camp and started indiscriminately clipping kids.
plawless
Bull.
Oh no, the once “pure” political body of the West has been infected by the “virus” of extremism.
If such a virus can be said to exist, then it is endemic to Europe no less than elsewhere. Ever hear of the 20 Century?
The West (whatever that is) requires no outside reservoir of crazy. We’ve been producing it in quantity for centuries…
Frankensteinbeck
I’d like to make a distinction here on whether the mainstream conservative movement endorses violence. They heavily push violence *fantasy*. They encourage each other to talk about revolution, 2nd amendment remedies, etc. In the mainstream this is understood to be a fantasy, although like most fantasies it takes some of the magic out if you have to admit that.
The problem is that this influences people for whom it isn’t fantasy. Indeed, there’s no clear dividing line between the idiots who get cattharsis by wearing a gun to a presidential speech and this terrorist criminal. There are plenty of middle levels, like the people who send hate mail and threatening phone calls to liberal figures, or the ones who point guns at census workers.
John T
Okay, maybe you won’t accuse right wingers of having sympathy with terrorists, but I will.
I hereby accuse right wingers of having sympathy with terrorists. Do you hear that fapping sound? It’s the sound of a million internet tough guys — you know, Real Americans™ — imagining that they were the man on the island with the gun and the bag full of ammo.
Alison
FFS – just because someone’s death might not “surprise” us doesn’t make it any less sad or tragic. And when you insist on pointing out that someone’s demise could be seen to be coming it sounds like you’re saying “so therefore it’s not as big of a deal”. It’s like you’re trying to make sure people remember she lead a dangerous life, and therefore…what? Deserved to die young? No. It is still a death, and it is still a big deal.
I don’t see anyone who is slack-jawed with shock about it, so why the need to make sure we know this was a likely possibility? Yeah, it was likely, because she had major demons and addiction problems that she struggled with, and that were joked about and mocked constantly by thousands of people. Not funny, not surprising, and still sad as fuck.
Sheesh.
wrb
And I’d thought that all had been well until the peaceful muslims got infected with the Berserker gene
Ed Marshall
Charles Johnson broke up with the American internet right *precisely* because they were hanging out with insane, racist parties in Europe.
Joel
@Ol’ Dirty DougJ: I’m going to disagree. I think it’s important to keep in mind that the letter-writer is Norwegian and so extremist right-wing violence is considerably more surprising to someone from that country. Before yesterday, they just didn’t have the Timothy McVeigh frame of reference.
Now, perhaps Fallows should have exercised a little more red ink when publishing the letter, but he’s just giving the unvarnished opinion of someone in Norway. I think it’s easy for people to forget that not all perspectives are American perspectives.
I think, however, we need to be on high alert here in the United States. I noticed that airport security at Seattle-Tacoma was absolutely nuts last night, about ten squad cars, twenty-thirty minute backup on midnight arrivals.
Cacti
Indeed.
To hear some people talk, one would think that some other cultural sphere had given the world Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, et al.
Roger Moore
I’ll join in the chorus shouting bullshit. Violent extremism existed long before Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Political bombings and shootings were tactics of Western extremists before anyone had heard of Islamic terrorists. If somebody picked up a “gene” from the outside, it was the Islamists getting it from Westerners, not the other way around.
Frankensteinbeck
Uncle Tom:
Wow. You don’t know ANYTHING about history, do you? Humans are violent. No race has a monopoly, or even a calculable edge. If anything, this is important here. White Christians need to not think that THEY are inherently peaceful and can’t have terrorist extremists in their midst.
WereBear
Gee, the Right Wingers go to political events packing heat, “joke” about setting people on fire, put gun targets over pictures of their political enemies, and scream about how they are “under fire” from their “enemies.”
What part of terrorism are we not supposed to accuse them of, again?
MikeJ
Every time a teabagger shows up at a rally carrying a gun, it’s proof that right wingers sympathize with terrorists.
Shawn in ShowMe
Fallows may be on our side but he insists, just like the right-wing columnists ridiculed in previous threads, as seeing Al Quaeda as the model for all violent extremism in the world.
Or maybe it has a lot more relevance to this case but doesn’t fit into the narrative that “9/11 changed everything”. Damn right it changed everything. The terrorists really did win. They have more power thanks to the narrow-mindedness of the corporate media than they could ever get on their own.
Liberty60
Terrorism is the tactic of the weak and desperate. If AQ had a 600 ship Navy and hundreds of bombers and fighter jets, I doubt they would use car bombs.
As others have pointed out, guerilla tactics and terrorist attacks have been a staple of American/ European political scene for centuries- we Baby Boomers just aren’t used to seeing them here in our own time.
Joel
Amy Winehouse is, sadly, the latest member.
If you expand the club to 27-28, you can include Bradley Nowell and Shannon Hoon in the mix. Pretty eerie.
MikeJ
Strange over at rumproast nutpicks from free republic:
They proudly claim McVeigh. They don’t claim this guy because it’s fresh. In less than 10 years they’ll sell t-shirts with his picture for their fundraisers.
Observer
What a load of nonsense.
Helloooooo, anyone ever hear of the IRA and bomb and masked gunman attacks.
I don’t know what it is about you lefties, you have some strange need to go searching for right wing nonsense and then re-broadcast them to your “audience”. But, Doug, this is plain and simple nonsense.
The sheer idiocy and falsity of the information quoted in this post is mind boggling.
Doug, if there’s a way to retract a post, then you should do it.
demz taters
When their beloved founders did it, it was asymmetric warfare.
Southern Beale
In other news, it appears Amy Winehouse has died. Apparently found dead in her London apartment, no cause of death released yet.
Very sad, such a talent …
Wendy
“Not to mention, as monstrous as Al Qaeda has been, I’ve yet to hear of an incident where they entered a youth summer camp and started indiscriminately clipping kids.”
Not AQ, but Islamic terrorism: Beslan school massacre.
Ol' Dirty DougJ
See my correction at the end. I *still* think the guy makes a good point, beyond the stupidity of saying that this mutated over from Al Qaeda. What I mean is that the Norwegian guy isn’t a just a lone nut, but a product of an ideological movement.
Catsy
It’s been said, but I’m going to pile on here: why not? They sure as hell do. Between the wink-nod approval for abortion clinic violence, relentless eliminationist rhetoric, and the economic terrorism being committed right now by elected Republicans in Congress and the insane parts of their base who actually want the US to default, there is ample evidence that right-wing terrorism has plenty of support–both tacit and active–in American conservative politics.
If the Norway attacks had been committed by a brown person or a Muslim, Fox would be covering it 24/7 and you wouldn’t be able to get a microphone within a kilometer of a Republican politician without them trying to exploit the tragedy. The only time they make the right noises about fighting terrorism is when it can be used to attack Democrats or justify their own bigotry.
GregB
This whole post is a rehashing of the oft used lie:
Not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.
Fallows really launched a stinker with this piece.
JGabriel
@Djur:
Apparently, yes. On the right, it’s a given that the Nidal Malik Hasan shootings at Fort Hood were an Al Qaeda related terror attack.
Edited to add:
The two-prong attack — two simultaneous, or nearly simultaneous, attacks, in different locations — has generally been a signature of Al Qaeda. I suspect that’s what people mean by this attack having an “Al Qaeda gene.”
.
BGinCHI
Joel at 42. Shannon Hoon was a stupid cracker who didn’t know shit from shinola. I know, I went to high school with him.
Good fucking riddance.
jheartney
Not to wish ill on someone with serious substance abuse problems, but I’m surprised she lasted this long.
WereBear
Not just the IRA, but earlier than that; in 1881 Tsar Alexander of Russian was assassinated with a bomb. Just to show how counter-productive terrorism is, they murdered the guy who had freed the serfs, and was planning a parliamentary changeover. They set themselves up for Stalin.
Then there’s the Anarchist movement…
Citizen Alan
Cacti @ 10
Condemnations?!? Nearly everyone at Faux Noise said that he deserved what he got!
Why anyone at this late date would even pretend to do deny that the Right Wing is a terroristic, fascistic, anti-democratic death cult is beyond me.
BGinCHI
Not sure if anyone noticed, but the biggest selling books in the world in the last 5 years have been about “the rise of the right wing” in Scandinavia.
No, not Harry Potter.
Stieg Larsson.
Joel
In other bad news, a train accident outside of Shanghai has possibly killed 100 people or more. Scary enough that I rode that very same route (not the same class of train, however) a little less than a year ago.
dr. bloor
Maybe not eerie at all. Could just be a sort of an LD50 metric as applied to the natural course of addiction. Start in your teens, and it starts to catch up with you in your late 20’s, something like that.
Svensker
I don’t get the point of this, either. Is the point that there are violent ideologies that are becoming popular? Why is that a shock? Does no one remember 1930s Europe? Most confusing post ever from Fallows, whom I usually like, as well as Doug J, which ditto.
Cacti
You’re wrong!
The reason why we have incidents like the Norweigan Nut, Scott Roeder, James Von Brunn, Richard Poplawski, etc. is because they all caught the Al Qaedasitis.
Cacti
The Bolsheviks and Black Shirts caught the Al Qaeda gene 70-100 years before it existed.
It just proves how powerful Islamofascism is.
Observer
@Ol’ Dirty DougJ: I hate to be pedantic but there is literally not a single sentence in the quote that you embedded that is factually or otherwise true.
Not a single sentence. Each sentence either contains an outright false statement or it embeds an assumption which itself is false. And I mean literally every single sentence is untrue.
I fail to understand how you can write that the guy “makes a good point”.
Shawn in ShowMe
@DougJ
Unless we find out that the person is mentally ill, shouldn’t we assume that all political assassinations are the product of an ideological movement? I’m still looking for an example of this lone nut assassin the right wingers have been telling us about all these years.
Suzan
Fallows’ post after the one linked to is also great. “Time for the Bushshit” speech? Links to a great “speech” Obama should give. (I must admit, I’ve been crafting one for Obama to give as well. “Courts will close, the FBI and CIA will be sent home. etc.” All with that wonderful passive agressive tone “to fulfill the wishes of Congress.”
Elizabelle
Probably late to the party, but John got a nice shout out from Steve Benen today.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_07/tire_rims_and_anthrax031053.php
travis
I see the comparison wrong only in the reasons Fallows uses. Todays right wing didn’t catch a disease from AQ. They are identical creatures with the same birth defect. Both hate women and gays to varying degrees. Both are hyper religious or have a strong religious wing. Both are violently racist. Here they are only rhetorically so but it’s early. Both cannot stand the actual practice of democracy because it means the unclean get a vote. Hell, I don’t have to squint to see one in the other. Our right wing is on the same road that AQ traveled before them, with the same destination in mind. A pure nation.
Cassidy
Why not? They support Pro-Life “activists”. They are sympathetic with terrorists as long as it is their side.
Only in that Al Quaeda is too narrow. The various insurgent groups in the ME are using highly effective tactics. Why wouldn’t they be emulated by domestic terrorist? Anyone remember the IED in the NW?
Cassidy
Guess she should have gone to rehab after all.
Calouste
You can’t really line up the IRA (at least the Provisionals) with al-Qeada. The Provisional IRA are of course a murderous bunch of bastards, but they didn’t set out to cause mass civilians casualties, they just wanted to show that they could. They almost always called the police in advance of the bomb going off so that the area surrounding it could be evacuated (but of course not so far in advance that the bomb could be dismantled). Take the 1996 Manchester city centre bombing. An hour before the bomb went off there were 75-80,000 people in the area, debris flew for half a mile, over a billion dollars in property damage, yet no one was killed.
Joel
@travis: This comment most cleanly aligns with my own thoughts on the matter. The more important question is, what to do? At some point, we’ll need a large and unified public demonstration to show that a decent society won’t tolerate this kind of shit anymore. Not even on the smallest scale.
Brian S
Someone like Charles Whitman, maybe? I mean, he really did have mental problems in the form of a brain tumor, and most people who engage in this type of stuff don’t have that excuse, but I suspect that’s where at least part of the mythology comes from.
MonkeyBoy
@Wendy:
Umm, the Beslan school hostage crisis involved separatist militants who took a whole school hostage. They did not start indiscriminately clipping kids. Many kids did die though though the deaths appeared unintentional – and it is hard to tell the direct cause be it hostage taker’s booby traps or actions of the rescuers.
Violet
@Joel:
That doesn’t usually happen until the horror has become so outrageous that people simple can’t continue to ignore it. Like with the Holocaust, Rwanda, etc.
A Mom Anon
@43,does this freak not remember that there was a day care center in the Murrah Bldg and McVeigh knew that? There’s a clip of him saying somewhere that he didn’t regret the collateral damage also.
I have no idea why it is such a damned shock that if you have a part of any culture devoted to hatred that hatred will be the inspiration for horrible things.
Awktalk
What is becoming clear, from reading his comments on document.no, is that the terrorist is cut from the same cloth as the “anti-jihadist” movement.
He worships at the alter of the “Vienna School”:
When submitting his ideas to further their community in Norway/Europe, he sites the Tea Party:
He regularly reads Pam Gellar, referring to her as “Atlas”:
And they are not even distancing themselves from his ideology:
If you want to know the type of people in the “anti-jihadist” cult, led by Pam Gellar, you can look no further than Anders Behring Breivik. That’s not to say they all act on their views with extreme psychotic violence, or that they intend to promote this type of violence, but this guy shares their ideology to the core.
Shawn in ShowMe
Al Quaeda is an international crime organization. They don’t have a nation. But you know who did have a nation? Of course you do, if you’re aware of all internet traditions ;-)
Calouste
@Liberty60:
Let me guess, you are an American, not a European?
jwb
Observer: I don’t think the email made a very good point at all and found it perplexing when I read it on Fallows’ blog this morning. But I do think it’s a very telling quote for the peculiar way it filters the incident, the way it mixes genetics and parasitism along the lines of horror film, and the very odd idea that the “real” problem is that Norway (apparently) doesn’t have a wingnut party to channel and moderate wingnut rage.
lacp
Yes, I can’t imagine how anybody could interpret “Don’t retreat, reload” as a call to violence.
travis
S2 shawn
Aq would make a nation if it gets it’s way. Or caliphate. As for organized crime, the comparison still stands. The right wing is not adverse to breaking laws in the name of it’s ideology. It sets about limiting voting ability but calls that legal. I honestly see no difference. Righties want a nation of white people. If they got that, they would work on the religions. Once they got all the wrong religions purged, it’s on to moderates. The ride only ends, as it must, when there is no one left to purge. We can’t all be in the ruling class, sitting on our plantations. Somebody has to work the fields.
JGabriel
Anders Breivik (via Awktalk):
Me, Yesterday:
Eerie.
.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Brian S
Charles Whitman wasn’t a political assassin by any stretch of the imagination. Those killings were random. The Norway murders targeted a political party.
fasteddie9318
I hate to bring up He Who Must Not Be Named, but Greenwald had a killer piece on this very subject today. It’s pathetic, though not in any way surprising, that the western media needs to make this attack al-Qaeda’s fault somehow. Terrorism is being defined as anything Muslims do that we don’t like, while acts of violence (or, frankly, sedition) committed by white folks are either explained away as something else or are blamed on the Muslims for teaching those poor non-violent white people to be so nasty.
debbie
@ cacti:
I heard a report from an ITN reporter yesterday that they intended to block food aid to Somali refugees. A new kind of monstrous.
Brian S
@Shawn in ShowMe All I was responding to is one example of where the “lone nut gunman” meme could have come from. The fact that it doesn’t actually work as an analogy isn’t much of a problem for a group of people who are bent on deflecting criticism from their positions or rhetoric. The fact that there was once a lone nut gunman who killed lots of people is enough for them.
Dennis SGMM
As others have already noted, AQ seems to have temporal as well as physical reach.
Lawguy
I’m coming a little late to the this thread, but Al Quida gene? give me a break, if it is a terrorist act it must have something to do with moslems, right? Just what sect of Islam did most of the IRA members belong to?
But at any rate I now demand that right wingers and tea partiers every where denounce this without any restraint. Until they do they are just as responsible as the killer.
Heliopause
Not just righties, I saw some supposed expert on CNN who seemed pretty sure al Qaeda was behind it. I’m afraid this notion that white people can’t be terrorists has been quite mainstreamed.
Quiddity
@Brian S:
Re:
Allen West (R-FL) recently said that when he sees someone with an Obama 2012 sticker he thinks the person’s a “threat to the gene pool”. That is eliminationist rhetoric.
TD
There is a big debate in the field of Security Studies regarding “New Terrorisms” vs. “Old Terrorisms”. This debate is probably what Fallows was getting at. That the parameters of this discussion aren’t explicitly known amongst the general population probably should have been taken into consideration by Jim.
A very brief rundown:
There is broad agreement in the Security Studies establishment that, when understood in the broadest sense, the goals of terrorist organizations fit into two fundamentally distinct categories. Those are groups/individuals with fundamentally temporal goals, and those groups/individuals with goals that are primarily transformational.
The temporal/transformational dichotomy can be most accurately elucidated by analyzing terrorists’ more narrowly conceived objectives, along with the methods used to attain them.
According to former head of the CIA, Paul Pillar, most terrorist groups have objectives which can be found amongst the following inventory:
-They may seek to gain leverage (by hostage taking, and then demanding the release of prisoners.);
-Or cause political or diplomatic disruption (to spoil a peace process);
-Provoke a government into reacting harshly and indiscriminately (alienating the government from the local population);
-Demonstrate that a government is weak and not in control of its territory;
-They may also want to impose costs on an adversary in order to increase the chance that it will change its policies;
-Or deter its opponents through punishment;
– Seek vengeance (in reality difficult to discern from deterrence, but motivated more by a desire to “get back” regardless of any other benefit);
-Satisfy simple hatreds (often linked to revenge, but stimulated less by any one action than by a belief that the citizens of the targeted country deserve to die)
-Lastly, they may see themselves as carrying out a divine mandate
Paul Pillar makes the argument that while the distinctions in the above inventory are often blurry, and most organizations are in the pursuit of more than one objective at a time, nonetheless:
“…different groups tend to be associated with different points along the spectrum of objectives. In general, groups that conduct terrorism for the more carefully calculated, instrumental purposes near the top of this list are more likely to give up terrorism as a result of rational recalculation of changed circumstances…than are groups that conduct it for the more visceral purposes near the bottom of the list. The most incorrigible terrorist are those driven both by elemental hatred and by belief that they are performing a sacred mission.”
As suggested, the objectives at the top of the spectrum generally indicate the greater significance of temporal concerns as a motivator for terrorist activity. And, historically speaking, when an actor is primarily seeking temporal gains, they subject themselves to certain political, moral, and practical constraints which often shape and limit the range of their operations (Think Omar, in the Wire). Temporarily minded terrorist organizations, for instance, rarely see indiscriminate violence as consistent with their political aims.
Nationalist/separatist organizations, such as the Real IRA, ETA, and the PKK, generally find themselves in this category. (And this is NOT to say that setting off a bomb outside of Harrods is particularly “discriminate”; the point is to say that the IRA could have set it off inside the packed lunch area on a Saturday afternoon, but didn’t. They wanted a lot of people watching, not a lot people dead.)
Meanwhile, the objectives at the bottom of the list betray a fixation with the transcendent or transformational. They often cannot be attained short of remaking the very fabric of world/national order. Groups determined to attain transcendent goals generally redefine morality in terms which are consistent with whatever methods they deem necessary to achieve their ends. As psychologist Jerald Post notes, “The group, as selector and interpreter of ideology, is central. What the group, through its interpretation of its ideology, defines as moral becomes moral-and becomes the authority for compliant members.” Thus, transcendentally oriented organizations are generally much less restrained, as any action tends to be self-justifying. Such actions tend to be more extreme as a result. They want a lot of people watching, AND they want a lot of people dead. As many as possible, in fact. (Think Marlo, in the Wire).
Al Qaeda wasn’t really the first example of “New Terrorism” (and, lest I mislead you, the idea that there is a significant distinction to be found between the “Old” and “New” forms isn’t universally accepted), but it was the first to really carry out an operation that dramatically illustrated the logical ends of its ideology.
And there is also a point that Philip Bobbit noted years ago: that the fact that the first serious incarnation of this beast had an ostensibly Islamic face was purely incidental. He argued that the logic of mass murder by individuals or small cells will come to have many faces in the future. In this case, it seems he was tragically prescient.
Alex S.
@Awktalk:
Funny. When Sarah Palin entered the national stage I thought of her as the american version of the european right-wing populists like Geert Wilders, Pim Fortuyn or Le Pen.
scav
“al Queda” is clearly the new Family Values crowd equivalent of the Family Circus’s “Not Me”.
FlipYrWhig
Um, haven’t there been terrorists, atrocities, and mass murders in Europe for decades? Munich ’72? Red Brigades? The IRA?
TD
Flip, are you addressing me?
Anyway, I address most of those points in my post, at least as far as Black September and the IRA go. The Red Brigade is an interesting case though, as they certainly are another example of a mostly transformationally-minded terrorist organization. What they lacked, however, were actual operational successes on the scale of those achieved by Al Qaeda. They also, mercifully, lacked a constituency bloody thirsty enough to really embrace the coldblooded murder of former Prime Ministers.
whetstone
@TD
Thanks for that–adds clarity and richness, and shows the use of distinguishing between ideology and method.
Ben Cisco
OT – a GOS post worth reading: http://bit.ly/o74OaN
Shawn in ShowMe
It’s gonna be so cool when Muslims extremists have so much power that they can engage in multi-billion dollar white collar crime. Then Enron, WorldCom and Bernie Madoff’s records can be expunged from the history books, also too.
Dennis SGMM
@TD:
TD, thank you for the erudite post. One take away for me is that effectively dealing with terrorism is going to require a lot more thinking and a hell of a lot less reacting out of anger than is currently the case.
opal
@TD:
That’s far enough. Drop your laundry and turn slowly.
gwangung
TD Canz we distribute? Far and wide? (Cause this is good stuff…._)
Dennis SGMM
@Shawn in ShowMe:
It’s curious, in a tinfoil hat sort of way, to me that the corps have been monstrously effective in sweeping aside their detractors and would-be regulators around the world and yet they’re seemingly powerless in the face of handfuls of radicals wielding plastique and Vietnam-era weapons. The tinfoil hat (With a grounding strap) aspect is that if the multinationals were really worried about the threat of terrorism they would have already co-opted most of the terrorists and eliminated those who refused to be play ball.
It’s almost as if they need the blood and guts terrorists to distract us from their takeover.
Stillwater
I just want to commend you DougJ for this line:
This is what separates people who use evidence to shape their beliefs from those who use ‘evidence’ to confirm their beliefs: they can admit when they’re wrong about when details don’t comport with the facts. That’s an instance of a rare property known as rationality, which is increasingly becoming the exclusive domain of liberals.
Mnemosyne
@fasteddie9318:
Is that the same piece where he says the Norwegians deserved it because they’re warmongering fiends who are bombing Libya, or did he write a new piece since then?
TD
Distribute away!
Stillwater
And actually, from and institutional/ideological pov, the use of violence to achieve political ends is categorically different between AQ and domestic terrorists. I think that ought to be obvious. Also, that there is a similarity of tactics, as was suggested in the pre-updated post, and that rightwingers learn these tricks from AQ is a bit overblown: the use of force to achieve political ends is as old as politics. One recent example: the IRA was blowing shit up long before AQ emerged on the scene.
Why isn’t the IRA vilified for starting this whole mess?
TD
However, I do need to make a correction. Paul Pillar was the chief of analysis at the Agency’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC). Not the head of the agency. Don’t know what I was thinking…
Stillwater
Hmph. I see others already got there. Nevermind.
FlipYrWhig
@ TD : I wasn’t addressing you, but rather the overarching subject of the post. You provided an interesting take. I just think, and I’m obviously not alone in this, that politically symbolic massacres in Europe are not exactly a 21st-century phenomenon, and there’s no need to speculate that this event is riding the Al Qaeda vector rather than being just the latest instance of homegrown European/Western evil shit.
Comrade Kevin
@Calouste: Have you never heard of the Omagh bombing?
Stillwater
@FlipYrWhig: Dude, you’ve got to install a reply button. This has gone on long enough, dammit!
I feel like I hardly know you anymore.
FlipYrWhig
@ Stillwater : That would be like installing hands-free parallel parking on a Stanley Steamer. At this point I’m resigned to using obsolete technology until it breaks.
Seebach
Apparently, the Oslo shooter was a big fan of the tea party:
He argues for setting up a system of social networking “such that is linked to similar organizations in other countries (similar to a beginning of a cultural Euro-version of a Tea Party movement).”
TD
Flip-
Oh yeah, I agree with that. This line of inquiry has taken a bit of an odd course over the years, though.
Right after 9/11/01, Paul Berman posited that al Qaedaesque terrrorisms were fundamentally derivatives of the European 20th century experience (i.e. totalitarianisms). But now that that strain may have reemerged in the European context (in at least one circumstance, anyway), it’s been transmogrified into the “jihadist strain”.
There is nothing really surprising about this, but it is interesting.
Stillwater
@FlipYrWhig: Well, that makes me sad. Laptops are incredibly cheap these days. I hope you can scrape it together to get yourself one. Plus, the graphics are amazing!
Brachiator
Very few lone nuts are really lone nuts, that is, some sick interpretation of religion, ideology, politics, urges them on.
But what seems to be happening, in the US and around the world, is a new attitude in which people respond to these incidents by hardening their stances, refusing to step back from the most vile expressions of their ideas, and utterly rejecting the idea that hateful rhetoric can spark hateful actions.
It’s as though people have developed a new appetite that can only be satisfied by hate, and the unbalanced are especially attuned to this, and, unable to control their impulse, they instead load up.
And though you cannot and should not ban or restrict it, the Internets and other means of instant communication can flood the world with images of hope, but also let lone nuts sit in their rooms and engorge themselves with carnage porn.
Calouste
@Comrade Kevin:
Omagh bombing was the Real IRA, a splintergroup. Not the group that people usually call the IRA, the Provisional IRA. I was explicit about that distinction in my post.
As TD points out in his post above, there is a distinction between terrorists who intend to massacre civilians and the ones who don’t.
Bender
The same place the retractions were when lefties blamed Gifford’s shooting on Sarah Palin? So…nowhere?
opal
@Bender:
Where’s your retraction to “tax cuts increase revenues”?
TD
The Omargh bombing actually is an interesting case because it illustrates exactly WHY the PIRA could never behave in the same way as al Qaeda, even at their worst. It turned out, at the end of the day, their constituency simply wouldn’t accept that level of terrorism.
When it comes to Omagh, the PIRA came up with all sorts of excuses as to why the bombing was as bad as it was, all with the aim of absolving themselves of responsibility for the size of the massacre. They insisted that they notified the police beforehand, to give them an opportunity to clear the area of civilians. However, for whatever reason (either that never really happened, or the police botched the response), dozens of people were killed anyway.
The PIRA eventually apologized for the bombing (imagine al Qaeda doing that).
That level of carnage wasn’t acceptable to the people the PIRA aimed at leading, because, in part, they were still working within a framework that valued tangible political gain. The attack woke people up to the reality of the PIRA, and they realized their interests were best pursued through other means; it eventually helped re-ignite the peace process.
Chyron HR
Okay, Bender. Whatever you say, Bender. Please don’t go to a summer camp and shoot dozens of children, Bender.
Stillwater
@opal: Where’s your retraction to “tax cuts increase revenues”?
Wait, what? You mean they don’t?
Fuckinghell!
Kyle
Bender’s response to the mass murder of dozens of teenagers by one of his political compatriots, gun-fellating right wing bigots, is to whine that a blog commenter said something nasty about Sarah Palin last year.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
And Bender pops up 20 minutes later to prove your point.
Awktalk
The terrorist has a 1500 page compendium that you can download here: http://www.2shared.com/file/M-s-2fBD/2083-AEuropeanDeclarationofInd.html
It is scary stuff. Starting in section 3.1.5.4 he documents the past couple of years of his life leading up to the attack. Here are his favorite Facebook pages:
Large patriotic Facebook groups – pan-European groups:
– Take America Back (19k members)
– English Defence League (11k members)
– Ban Islam!! (3k members)
– Stop Islamisation, wake up Europe (3k members)
– Stop Islamisation of Europe (5k members)
– Stop Islamization of America (3k members)
– Contre l’islamisation de l’Europe / Against Islamisation of Europe (13k members)
– I Support Israel in the War Against Terrorism (72k members) this groups is full of Western patriots (Euro-Americans), not particularly targeted at European nationalists though.
Geert Wilders (fan page – 5k members)
– Fan pages of every European right wing political party (100-200k members)
– Take America Back
Cliff
he becomes an individual host for the Al Qaeda gene [attracted simply by it’s ability to project the voice of a minority, cf. his John Stuart Mills tweet]
I know 123 other people have already said this, but that’s fucking stupid.
TD
“As TD points out in his post above, there is a distinction between terrorists who intend to massacre civilians and the ones who don’t.”
I would parse this a bit. I’m not saying that some terrorist organizations don’t intend to kill citizens; most of them do. After all, I would say that part of what defines a terrorist group is that it deliberately targets them.
But while the IRA certainly wanted to kill some English civilians, they didn’t want to kill as many of them as they possibly could. Indeed, that’s the entire point they were trying to communicate; that’s what gave them political leverage. Listen, they would say, we blew up that mailbox and killed some of your citizens, now imagine what we could do if we really TRIED. So, about those demands…
Terrorism, I think we can all agree, has a communicative function. What differentiates terrorists, however, is what they are trying to communicate. And what they are trying to communicate is manifested in their actions.
Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not the killing of civilians is incidental to a broader strategy aimed at potentially realizable goals (what these folks don’t realize is that terrorism is a very poor way to achieve even these), or whether it’s simply an outlet for religious/ideological/personal rage.
Tonal Crow
Well well well, what have we here? A right-wing Christian fundamentalist murdering his own countrypeople? No one could have anticipated that! I mean, the right wing is always so peaceable, and never says anything that could remotely be considered hateful, and has never so much as given a hateful glance to anyone, let along taken hateful action. Unlike the vile left, which has continually and vehemently preached violent healthcare for everyone, murderous environmental protection, and the execrable crime against humanity that is Social Security.
Comrade Kevin
@Calouste: “Real” IRA, Provisional IRA. Same people, different name.
Mjaum
Some Republicans (many, I fear) asolutely have sympathy for both the thoughts and actions of this type of right-wing terrorist.
The rest are not doing enough (or, in fact, anything) to fight this sort of thinking.
They are the mirror of their own image of “Islamofascists”.
Dr. Omed
The question that Fox News, Laura Ingraham, and all other right wing mouthpieces have to answer is where are all the left-wing socialist Kenyan Moslem madmen that commit mass murder to further the cause of imposing Sharia-inspired Health Care on our Freedom Fries.
fasteddie9318
Different one, but I guess since he also wrote something stupid about Libya, that invalidates everything he had to say, so actually there is no problem with the western media reducing the term terrorism to “stuff that Muslims do that we don’t like.” The First Law of Greenwald Must Always Be Wrong does make life easier, but I find that it sometimes leads to peculiar places.
bob h
Where the Norwegians have egg on their faces is the 1.5 hrs. the shooter had to kill unopposed by the police. Had the events occurred in the NYC metro area, he would have had maybe .5 hr. at most.
Cowbelle
You know what they’ll say: “in the White House!”