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| Taking Terrorists at Their Word |
| 2004-09-17 |
| Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings and Manuals of al-Qaeda, Hamas, and other Terrorists from around the World and throughout the Ages. Edited by Walter Laqueur. New York: Reed Press, 2004. 520 pp. $19.95. In her now classic study on The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt confronted the question of why it was that much of the West was for so long so reluctant to grasp the criminal nature of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Furthermore, why did so many fellow travelers and other apologists crop up to cover up and explain away the extraordinary atrocities committed under Hitler and Stalin? In the end, Arendt found the answers to her queries in the very nature of quotidian life in liberal democracies: because the democratic body politic is dependent upon certain assumptions about individuals, self-interest, rationality, and the rule of law, it has great difficulty in imagining the violence and terror that are part and parcel of life under totalitarian domination. Consequently, she lamented that "the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes." As the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington approaches, it is difficult not to observe that history has once more confirmed the veracity of the dictum that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Arendt's analysis of the West's failure to appreciate the totalitarian terror that threatened it half a century ago is eerily paradigmatic of its ongoing failure to grasp the nature of the phenomenon of transnational terrorism and political violence that challenges it today. The same historical forces are at work, not only trivializing accounts of the extraordinarily pernicious nature of very real threat, but also attempting to legitimize terrorists into political actors with rational grievances with whom one can treat on the basis of some elusive common ground. While sweeping generalizations are usually unhelpful in statecraft, as one surveys everything from the strategy—if it can be called that—of endlessly pursuing compromises with the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq to the almost shameless excuse-making for Islamist violence that goes on in American academia, one cannot help but wonder if the old cycle of wishful thinking, denial and appeasement is putting on an encore performance—or, as Yogi Berra, put it once, "it's dejàvu all over again." |
| Posted by:tipper |