With ricin-laced letters suddenly showing up in Washington D.C., I worry a little that I’m tempting fate by writing about the rarity of organized terrorism in early 21st century America. But hopefully one more post won’t hurt. So, picking up where my last one left off, here are three theories about why our culture seems to be producing relatively few people with the combination of ideological commitment, organizational competence and zeal that has sparked and sustained terrorist campaigns in other times and places:1) We’ve just gotten lucky. That’s the case Will Saletan made for Slate yesterday, after running through the F.B.I.’s list of cases involving explosives going back to the beginning of 2012. He found plenty of intercepted plots against soft targets (malls, synagogues, restaurants, etc.), several cases where only a last-minute break prevented the plot from going forward, and plenty of plotters canny enough to cobble together their devices out of ordinary household materials. ”When you look at the 20 cases,” Saletan writes, “you realize that Boston is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s surprising isn’t that the marathon bombing succeeded, but that so many other plots failed.” And given the combination of an expanded target list and the ongoing innovations of bombmakers, he suggests, we should expect more of them to succeed in the future.
2) We don’t have any nationalist movements inside our borders. Call this the Robert Pape theory, after the University of Chicago professor famous for arguing that suicide bombing is best understood as a rational strategy for nationalists seeking political liberation rather than a lunatic strategy for religious fanatics seeking martyrdom. The Pape thesis fits well enough with the suicide attacks that America has faced: We’ve endured sustained suicide campaigns inside countries that we’ve occupied (Iraq, Afghanistan), and the only major suicide attack within our borders was carried out mostly by citizens of a country (Saudi Arabia) where we have a controversial military presence. And from both a psychological and logistical perspective, it makes sense that suicide attacks against U.S. interests abroad would be more common than domestic attacks: You’re more likely to want to strike a blow against an occupier (whether real or perceived) if you actually live under their occupation, and it’s vastly easier to strike the occupier in your own country (and to sustain networks capable of repeated strikes) than to cross an ocean for the same purpose. If Iraq were just across the Rio Grande or Saudi Arabia across the Saint Lawrence, or if we were re-running Reconstruction somewhere in the 50 states, then you might expect more domestic suicide attacks. But not enough people inside our borders or in our immediate vicinity feel like victims of U.S. occupation, so suicide terror remains (mostly) far away.
3) It’s the End of History. This is an argument I’ve made myself: Namely, that with the collapse of grand ideological alternatives to liberal democracy one would expect terrorism to become mostly the province of madmen and nihilists and eccentric loners, rather than more purposeful movements and organizations. Call it the Christopher Nolan thesis, if you don’t care for Francis Fukuyama: In a world where the major ideological debates have either been resolved or set aside, terrorism becomes the province of people who, Joker-style, “just want to watch the world burn,” which means that we have lots of one-off horrors and senseless-seeming massacres but fewer agenda-driven terror campaigns.
I find all of these ideas persuasive, but they still feel a little bit incomplete. Like Saletan I fear that we’ll see more Boston-style atrocities in the near future, but even his examples of failed and foiled plots don’t add up to anything like the kind of sustained campaign that everyone feared we’d face, understandably, after 9/11. The Pape thesis explains why America would face more suicide attacks overseas than domestically, but in a nation with so many immigrant communities it’s easy to imagine the logic of suicide terrorism taking hold among groups with ties to Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Palestine in ways that happily haven’t actually happened.
And yes, the collapse of Communism as both a reality and an ideal has removed one of the most powerful drivers of revolutionary violence. But there are still plenty of issues that inspire deep, near-irreconcilable disagreements in ways that are directly linked to matters of life and death. The debates over American wars and foreign policy, abortion, and (at least from the vantage of some greens) environmentalism all fall into this category, and these issues have all inspired some sort of violent fringe either today or in the relatively recent past. Yet on all of them the center has mostly held of late: There was no Iraq-era equivalent of the Weathermen, the number of abortion-related murders spiked in the 1990s and then fell, and eco-terrorism remains a fairly minor phenomenon despite the recent political setbacks for mainstream environmentalism. Similarly, the Great Recession led to spasms of populism and protest … but no real organized violence, whether on the left or on the right.
This is all a blessing, obviously. Given human nature and human history, though, I still think it’s a bit of a surprise.
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