States of Terror

History, Theory, Literature

David Simpson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226600369
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How have we come to depend so greatly on the words terror and terrorism to describe broad categories of violence? David Simpson offers here a philology of terror, tracking the concept's long, complicated history across literature, philosophy, political science, and theology—from Plato to NATO.Introducing the concept of the "fear-terror cluster, " Simpson is able to capture the wide range of terms that we have used to express extreme emotional states over the centuries—from anxiety, awe, and concern to dread, fear, and horror. He shows that the choices we make among such words to describe shades of feeling have seriously shaped the attribution of motives, causes, and effects of the word "terror" today, particularly when violence is deployed by or against the state. At a time when terror-talk is widely and damagingly exploited by politicians and the media, this book unpacks the slippery rhetoric of terror and will prove a vital resource across humanistic and social sciences disciplines.
 

1

Weighing Our Words

Throughout the Nazi years and during World War Two, while his life was routinely in exceptional danger because he was a Jew living with an Aryan wife, the literary scholar and Dresden resident Victor Klemperer kept a diary in which he recorded and discussed the changes visited upon his native German language by the political and media culture of the Hitlerzeit. He ends his account by recording a conversation in which a woman describes herself as having spent a year in prison “’cos of certain expressions.”1 She had dared to criticize the party and its leader, or had failed to reproduce its preferred words and phrases. This, for Klemperer, was the moment when he realized why he had been taking all those notes: because of certain expressions. It can be the “single word,” he opined, “which reveals the way a particular epoch thinks” (148). Even after the end of Hitler, in the early years of postwar Germany, relics of Nazi speech habits could be heard in the language of ordinary people: “The remnants of linguistic usage from the preceding epoch confuse and seduce them” (2). These words operate “like arsenic,” inducing a delayed toxic reaction (15), and when they are used, they change the value of other words around them, monopolizing meaning and colonizing what had once been common property.

Those of us who do not live in totalitarian states, despite the occasionally strenuous limits on our freedom of speech (for instance, on “hate speech”), are only rarely fined or sent to prison for using the wrong words. But that does not make us free. True freedom of choice about how to speak and what to say are inhibited not only by formal and informal speech codes but also by habit and familiarity. The speed and thoroughness with which speech cultures reproduce themselves is breathtaking, their exact origins seemingly impossible to track. Does anyone know for sure how and why and exactly when our fellow citizens began to use like as a filler in almost every sentence, often more than once? What explains the strange dissemination of creaky-voice speech (glottalization) among the under-thirties (and now often their elders) or, before it, of uptalk? What brings words into being and explains why they become widely current? We have no agreed origin for the familiar word Yankee, which in the nineteenth-century designated a New Englander and by 1945 described (in British English) all Americans. In today’s common parlance, it is impossible to use the freestanding word terrorism for describing the behavior of a nation-state, even though that was its original sense and its most common use before about 1970, and even as the ability to deploy terror arguably remains dominantly the property of nation-states. Terrorism is understood to be what antistate groups perform. To resurrect the earlier sense, we need an adjective: state terrorism, which is enough of a term of art that many will wonder what it can possibly mean. The simplification of terrorism as meaning always and only the indiscriminate violence of counterstate agents has not gone uncontested: Noam Chomsky and others have for decades insisted on the terrorist activities of the United States.2 Oppressed minorities have always known the nature and reality of state terror: recall the circulation of shirts bearing an image of Geronimo’s band and the inscription: “The Original Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1492.” But a few cogent books and articles, even when backed up by witty and astute T-shirts, do not a language revolution make. The national and global interests that stand to gain from a negation of terrorism as only ever the strategy of the enemy other have proved far too powerful and pervasive to be diverted by an oppressed minority or by a few independent intellectuals, even those with the charismatic force of Chomsky or Edward Said. These interests operate not so much by fiat but by command of a working consensus among newspapers, television networks, and politicians in a world where victory goes to the mass-circulation media that can seemingly override occasional strong dissent (e.g., from the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books) as long as the dissenters are kept well away from television talk shows and from “expert” consultation with governments and political parties. Words matter most when their usages remain uncontested.

What follows does address the question of terrorism but only indirectly: it is much more concerned with the career of terror, which has a longer and more intricate history, one which of course interacts with terrorism since (and for once we can be precise about this) 1794. Marc Redfield persuasively suggests that the invocation of terror is “the exemplary speech act of sovereignty for our era.”3 Redfield’s commitment to understanding terror as part of a rhetoric is exemplary: rhetoric is what persuades or coerces, inclining the hearer or reader to agree with the person employing it. Nazi speech patterns as described by Klemperer were a rhetoric in exactly this sense. Words also carry with them a history, one that can be displaced or even inverted, one that can enforce, authenticate, contest, or qualify what particular writers and speakers are intending at their particular moment in time. As such they call for a philology, a history of their inventions and reinventions, one that contextualizes their transformations through social and linguistic time. Such history (and rhetoric) cannot alone change the direction of the governing consensus, as history itself has so often proved. Philology will not start a revolution; it may not even cause the governing powers more than a moment of anxiety, if that. But it does make clear that word choices are not self-evident, that they involve exclusions and silent contestations with alternative rhetorical possibilities, roadblocks, or roads not taken. These unmentioned or displaced histories carry with them information that unsettles the univocity so often assumed or imposed by the prevailing consensus. The history of terror reveals several twists and turns that can sometimes appear as complete inversions. In the sphere of aesthetic experience, in tragedy, for example, or in the gothic novel, a measure of terror has been proposed as the sine qua non of a positive experience: not just a good thing but also an essential contributor to appropriate reading or beholding. Terror is the kingpin of Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime. It has also been put to use by theologians as an important educative power in the hand of God. But for the current generation, terror has mostly become at once an entirely negative and a morally illicit practice carried out only and always by the enemy other. Trotsky noticed this ruling elite habit back in 1911: “They would like to label all the activities of the proletariat directed against the class enemy’s interests as terrorism [Terrorismus].”4 Anyone opposed to the Washington Consensus invites nomination as a terrorist; those on our side are exempt from such descriptors even when, as in the case of Jewish state formation in 1948, terrorism is the major component of political action.

The recent career of terror is one among many cases of a process eloquently described by Philip Fisher whereby “along the path of [an] almost three-thousand-year history the language that we now use, or find ourselves lacking, has been frozen into place at surprising moments.” This is often the result of a “single salient case that steers response from behind the curtains of time.”5 In the case of modern ideas of terror, that salient example comes from the French Revolution, and specifically from its Jacobin phase from 1793 to 1794. If William Reddy is correct that emotions (and terror is one among them) “operate like overlearned cognitive habits,” then one component of that learning is the historical accretion of a dominant meaning or meanings.6 Such dominance affords opportunities for abuse, especially when the emotions are—like terror—highly charged. Many years ago, William Empson found in emotive uses of language “a protean confusion, harmful in a variety of fields and particularly rampant in literary criticism.”7 His privileged attention to literary criticism looks more than a little dated now, but the warning about harm remains timely, and especially so given the career of terror talk in the popular media and among our politicians. Empson, with appropriate modesty, does not think that he can solve the problem of protean confusion, but he urges critics to at least “try to clear an area” where they “will not do harm.” This deserves to be the most minimal aspiration of any of us doing similar work. Whether we can indeed claim anything more is doubtful, but that should not in itself serve to dispel hopes and good intentions and perhaps intimations of better times to come. It might seem delusional to think that, for example, an appropriate understanding of the philology of terror could have prevented the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. But can we be sure that a populace more familiar with that philology would have permitted so many to be so easily fooled? The damage to which terror talk contributed is still being done, and there is continuing need for an adequate historical record that could contribute to preventing similar sleights of hand from working again and again. Furthermore, not doing harm, if conceived on the grand scale of a national politics, turns out to be a rather stringent criterion and one all too rarely observed.

Again, this inquiry concerns itself principally with terror, and only more tangentially with terrorism, but the operations of the one inevitably refigure those of the other. And the history of terrorism-talk offers some useful lessons, as well as some salient contrasts. It is relatively easy to map the major transitions in the common consensus about the meaning of terrorism. An exemplary instance of the coercive semantics gathering around this term is the 1986 book Terrorism: How the West Can Win, edited by Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also the major contributor. The book assembles short essays (based on conference proceedings) by high-profile politicians, journalists, and academics, mostly Americans and Israelis, and many with right-of-center affiliations. Its premise is that there is something called “the West,” of which Israel is a leading representative, that is under sustained attack from international terrorism sponsored by the then Soviet Union and by a number of Arab states. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is the chief offender in a global terrorist network described as or compared to a malignancy, organized crime, gangsterism, and cancer.8 This network is a throwback to a “savage era” (11) and the marker of a radical distinction between barbarism and freedom (226). A Marxist-Muslim conglomerate, it is suggested, plays on the disunity and dismay of the West, and exploits the “sloppiness” of its thinking about the use of force (204). Given this declared crisis, there is no place for the “middle ground of neutrality,” for mere economic self-interest or for “cowardice” (219, 223). Above all, we are bidden to dispense with the fantasy that the relevant issues can be resolved by “politics” (224), that is, by anything short of punitive violence. The response to terrorism is terror.

What is notable is what the book does not mention. It gives no sense, for example, that there were two sides in the Cold War, each operating in similar ways in their various spheres of competition. It avoids any mention of the association of terrorism with national liberation movements, except (once and briefly) as a thing of the past. It mostly defines the new terrorism as a post-1968 phenomenon, but without any mention of the 1967 war in Israel-Palestine; and when it does indirectly signal that event, it is to accuse the PLO of being founded three years before the breaching of the Green Line, as if there had been no motive for Palestinian resistance before 1967 (i.e., no 1948). Significantly, it fails to mention the French Revolution and the Jacobin Terror, and thus effaces a long historical association of terrorism with the “Western” nation-state itself, whether in its internal disciplinary aspirations or in its behavior toward foreign or colonized populations. Terrorism, above all, now belongs wholly to the non-West, whereas the West itself is directed to destroy it and to follow the example of the West’s exemplary representative in the Middle East, Israel.

Not every address to the topic of terrorism is as ideologically transparent as this one, although large numbers of specialist journals and government-sponsored reports still do not offer any alternatives to its presuppositions, and this despite a rich counterinsurgency literature that understands questions of terminology to be of crucial importance. One example: Frank Kitson began his career on active service in Kenya, where he devised ways of infiltrating the Mau Mau movement, whose members he referred to variously as gangs, gangsters, and terrorists.9 Some years later, Kitson dropped the gangs and gangsters (which will be resurrected by Netanyahu) from his comprehensive list of terms from which to choose:

In writing on this subject one of the most difficult problems concerns the matter of terminology. The British Army gives separate definitions of Civil Disturbance, Insurgency, Guerrilla Warfare, Subversion, Terrorism, Civil Disobedience, Communist Revolutionary Warfare, and Insurrection on the one hand and of Counter Insurgency, Internal Security, and Counter Revolutionary Operations on the other. Elsewhere conflicts are variously described as Partisan, Irregular or Unconventional Wars, and the people taking part in them have an even wider selection of labels attached to them. Furthermore, although a particular author will use one of these terms to cover one aspect of the business and another to cover another, a different author will use the same two terms in a totally different way.10

Kitson opts for subversion as the best term to describe everything that falls short of violence, and uses insurgency for the rest (3), but even these call for careful contextualization. Terror, notably, is not on Kitson’s list, unless we assume that it is implicitly subsumed under terrorism as what terror performs. The 2001 war on terror is surely also a back-formation from terrorism, a seemingly natural association that sees terror as simply what terrorists do. In 1794, it was the other way around: the successors and enemies of the Jacobins first designated the “reign of terror” and then invented the word terrorist to describe those who carried it out.

For terror itself, the thing from which terrorism is derived and of which it is the executive arm, there is hardly any analytical tradition.11 Until 9/11, terror occupied a somewhat quieter rhetorical register; and even after 9/11, it is still terrorism that attracts more attention and interest. The history of terror, though, is much longer, and the range of its associations and implications is larger. As an emotion (or affect or feeling), it subsists (in English) with a range of cognates or near synonyms that it can either displace or combine with; as an agent-object in the world (a terror), it can be described and redescribed in a seemingly limitless number of ways. And when one looks into the ways in which non-English terms are or are not translated as terror, the possibilities expand even further. Fundamental questions about what is and is not common between different persons in different times and places come to the surface when we ask, for example, whether the Greek phobos is best rendered in English as fear or terror. Terrorism, coined (in French) only in 1794, often passed into other languages in near-identical form (terrorisme, terrorism, Terrorismus). Terror, or what we have been calling terror, has wandered much more widely and in more mysterious ways.

For example, terror has been argued by Wolfgang Sofsky, with unimpeachable moral seriousness, to be both the organizing principle (as a practice) and the object (as an effect) of the concentration-extermination camp system developed in Hitler’s Europe.12 The arbitrary power over life and death exercised by camp administrations did indeed create what many would agree to call a pervasive culture of terror. Closer to the other, trivial end of the spectrum, as NASA’s Mars explorer was approaching its destination in the summer of 2012, the agency was sensing a lack of public interest in its big adventure. Accordingly, it released a video dramatizing the upcoming landing under the title Seven Minutes of Terror.13 The reference was to the final stages of the landing sequence in which especially critical conditions would decide the fate of the mission. Why terror? The Mars lander itself has no emotions, so the terror instead describes what those watching it are going to feel. But their personal safety is not threatened, nor is the machine open to personification as something that itself either generates or feels terror. What is at stake here is at most anxiety, concern about what happens to another or, in this case, to one’s long-cherished scientific hopes as embodied in a machine. This use of terror ought to make us think. And yet, at the same time, no one would have been perplexed had the machine failed and given rise to a comment that this was a terrible outcome. Since at least the eighteenth century, English speakers have used the word terrible as a simple emphatic, one that can describe both a terrible murder and a terrible meal. Terror, too, has been used in this way; I remember hearing any badly behaved boy described as “a little terror.” But this use now seems outdated; terror has now been delegated to more serious tasks.

Anyone immersed in the popular language of the anglophone world after 9/11 is used to hearing about the more portentous use of terror on an almost daily basis. The so-called war on terror (sometimes global war on terror, hence GWOT in the relevant literature) was everywhere in the media at the end of 2001, and it still has a lively career. Its devilish charisma has been well described by Njabulo Ndebele, who finds in it a “terse encapsulation that ironically strains towards the economy of poetry but, unlike poetry, yields not insight but cleverness of the kind that supremely admires itself.” It participates in the language of “a manipulative state in which the desire for violence overwhelms the public capacity to discern falsehood in argument.”14 Perhaps this is obvious to an alert black South African writer: it has been less so in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1  Weighing Our Words
• 2  What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Terror?
• 3  Putting Terror into the Fear of God
• 4  From Terror to the Terror
• 5  Terror against the State
• 6  Being in Terror, Being as Terror
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes