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roachboy · 05-10-2007, 06:53 AM

are the tactics that get lumped under the category 'terrorism" justifiable? depends on the situation.
but in principle, sure.

let's allow this topic to become ugly and difficult, shall we?

if you frame the question in the direction that will and dlishguy do above and direct it at palestine, then hell yes they can be justified: they are caused by the conditions imposed via the occupation itself. you cannot pulverize a people and expect them to simply accept it forever. you do not recognize any rules at the level of occupation, you cannot expect there to be rules that shape the response. you want to "stop terrorism" then end the fucking occupation, dismantle the settlements and enable a viable palestine. you want to "stop terrorism" then grant the right of return. if you dont do it, then the problem lay with the occupation and the desperation and humiliation it generates, not with the responses to it.

but if you think about it, things are not so simple. the fact of occupation tends to simplify the politics of the responses to it, to erase them. so one's relation to such actions tends to be crunches into one's general attitude toward colonial occupation in general. which in a sense evacuates the central issue, which lay in the political motives in particular that shape a particular action, because if you say that an action that involves civilian deaths is justified, you need to be clear about why that is the case. one way of thinking about what a "terrorist" (god i hate that word) action is about is a conflict over historical narrative--over which information is included and which excluded in the construction of the history---because control over the past is control over the present in a sense, over the political logic that conditions actions in the present.

there are a host of appalling consequences of the israel/palestine conflict, and one of them is that the refusal to cover the situation in palestine in any complexity (particularly in the dominant american press) means that the positions of all palestinian political movements get collapsed into each other, made into one thing. so there is a sense in which the explanations for/narratives that enframe a given action do not ever surface. hamas is a particular organization; fatah is a particular organization--each has a particular vision of why they act, of the past they act on behalf of, of the future they aspire to. to justify such actions, you need to know the narrative. too often, we dont.

but all this is far away.
take the trade center attack.
i can imagine a narrative within which the attack made sense, but i do not KNOW what the narrative actually was (no more than anyone else does) and so find myself reluctant to enter the game of juxtaposing narratives because i have the sense that all that is really happening is a simple exercise in sign reversal. who were the people who died in the attacks? innocents or functionaries in an apparatus of oppression? both. neither. how do you decide? depends on the narrative you construct. the trade center was a self-evidently symbolic target. a symbol of what? american economic domination in the context of globalizing capitalism. what does that mean? well, one thing it means is that the entire reactionary narrative that has dominated the american mediaspace since 2001, which is now finally dissolving, is worthless. why? the premise of that narrative was that there is no economic domination, there is no oppression ongoing in the context of globalizing capitalism, that there is no association between american economic power and that oppression, so that the attacks were therefore unmotivated. and that is idiotic. on the other hand, does it follow that knowing the reactionary american internal narrative is worth nothing mean that its simple inversion must therefore be true? um...what do you think?

things of course get worse: does thinking that there are appalling conditions generated by the exportation of the worst features of capitalism mean that therefore all actions directed against these conditions--local or international--are therefore equivalent? that any such action is equally a blow against what for shorthand's sake we'll call american imperialism and is therefore justifiable? of course not. the dominant narrative attributes such actions entirely to this bizarre-o category of "islamic extremism"---what the fuck is that?---an abstraction, really: a convenient one-dimensional abstraction. does rejecting that abstraction mean that you somehow undercover the "real" motives behind the attacks in 9/2001? no. but this is obvious. ok so where does that leave you? nowhere, in a sense. you can see the effects of the notion of "terrorism" in this: it is a substitute for any account of the political motivations behind any given action. it replaces them with nothing. by replacing them with nothing, the category functions to give the impression that all political opposition that shifts into the level of direct action is equivalent to all others, and that all of them are irrational--what is more that there are and can be no rational grounds for opposing the existing order, there are and can be no rational grounds for actions directed against that order. "terrorism" evacuates the politics of opposition. "terrorism" is a category whose sole function is the legitimation of the existing order.

from this it follows that any simple statement about such actions functions to either repeat or invert the logic which follows from this category "terrorist"--and this is the point of it, i think. it puts you in an untenable position. the category is horseshit, nothing more, nothing less. considering such actions in terms shaped AT ALL by this category results in more horseshit, nothing more, nothing less.

one of the most basic aspects of revolutionary politics is that the narrative which shapes an action IS in a sense the action because in that narrative is the political and historical logic which is embodied in the action. so revolutionary politics is not about blowing shit up--it is about conflict over history and via conflict over history, it is conflict over the politics of history, and via conflict over the politics of the past, it is about conflict over the future, a future which plays out across control of the parameters that shape the present. NOT ALL NARRATIVES ARE EQUIVALENT--to make anything like a serious judgment concerning the "legitimacy" of a particular action, you need to know the narrative and on that basis take the risk--the ethical risk, the personal risk--of making an actual judgment. exercises in a simplistic sign reversal are not judgements, not really: they are reflexes. they are not even political because they do not take the requirements of political action seriously. in other words, it is not enough--not enough at all--to arrive at the general conclusion that colonialism or neo-colonialism is bad--this is not rocket science, it demands nothing of you.

these are fucked up times. it is like the late hapsburg period in austria--the illusion that things are ok is repeated endlessly through everyday routines--the politics of opposition are erased behind it, such that people imagine only this is possible--there is only one logic and we are it---this even as the space within which that logic circulates itself becomes increasingly dysfunctional, increasingly pathological. but it doesnt matter: we are asleep. we dream in patterns. in our dreams, we cling to these patterns. we think there is nothing else. and perhaps, for us, that is true for now. the elimination of the space of opposition assures one thing: that the self-blinding characteristics of the rationality within which we live become total. maybe we wont even notice that our world is crashing down around us as it crashes down around us. we are asleep and we dream in patterns. they are pretty patterns. they have a nice soundtrack. they are soft and plush and always available and imply no risk. why leave them?

this is already way too long and i have things to do.

05-10-2007, 06:53 AM	#9 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	are the tactics that get lumped under the category 'terrorism" justifiable? depends on the situation. but in principle, sure. let's allow this topic to become ugly and difficult, shall we? if you frame the question in the direction that will and dlishguy do above and direct it at palestine, then hell yes they can be justified: they are caused by the conditions imposed via the occupation itself. you cannot pulverize a people and expect them to simply accept it forever. you do not recognize any rules at the level of occupation, you cannot expect there to be rules that shape the response. you want to "stop terrorism" then end the fucking occupation, dismantle the settlements and enable a viable palestine. you want to "stop terrorism" then grant the right of return. if you dont do it, then the problem lay with the occupation and the desperation and humiliation it generates, not with the responses to it. but if you think about it, things are not so simple. the fact of occupation tends to simplify the politics of the responses to it, to erase them. so one's relation to such actions tends to be crunches into one's general attitude toward colonial occupation in general. which in a sense evacuates the central issue, which lay in the political motives in particular that shape a particular action, because if you say that an action that involves civilian deaths is justified, you need to be clear about why that is the case. one way of thinking about what a "terrorist" (god i hate that word) action is about is a conflict over historical narrative--over which information is included and which excluded in the construction of the history---because control over the past is control over the present in a sense, over the political logic that conditions actions in the present. there are a host of appalling consequences of the israel/palestine conflict, and one of them is that the refusal to cover the situation in palestine in any complexity (particularly in the dominant american press) means that the positions of all palestinian political movements get collapsed into each other, made into one thing. so there is a sense in which the explanations for/narratives that enframe a given action do not ever surface. hamas is a particular organization; fatah is a particular organization--each has a particular vision of why they act, of the past they act on behalf of, of the future they aspire to. to justify such actions, you need to know the narrative. too often, we dont. but all this is far away. take the trade center attack. i can imagine a narrative within which the attack made sense, but i do not KNOW what the narrative actually was (no more than anyone else does) and so find myself reluctant to enter the game of juxtaposing narratives because i have the sense that all that is really happening is a simple exercise in sign reversal. who were the people who died in the attacks? innocents or functionaries in an apparatus of oppression? both. neither. how do you decide? depends on the narrative you construct. the trade center was a self-evidently symbolic target. a symbol of what? american economic domination in the context of globalizing capitalism. what does that mean? well, one thing it means is that the entire reactionary narrative that has dominated the american mediaspace since 2001, which is now finally dissolving, is worthless. why? the premise of that narrative was that there is no economic domination, there is no oppression ongoing in the context of globalizing capitalism, that there is no association between american economic power and that oppression, so that the attacks were therefore unmotivated. and that is idiotic. on the other hand, does it follow that knowing the reactionary american internal narrative is worth nothing mean that its simple inversion must therefore be true? um...what do you think? things of course get worse: does thinking that there are appalling conditions generated by the exportation of the worst features of capitalism mean that therefore all actions directed against these conditions--local or international--are therefore equivalent? that any such action is equally a blow against what for shorthand's sake we'll call american imperialism and is therefore justifiable? of course not. the dominant narrative attributes such actions entirely to this bizarre-o category of "islamic extremism"---what the fuck is that?---an abstraction, really: a convenient one-dimensional abstraction. does rejecting that abstraction mean that you somehow undercover the "real" motives behind the attacks in 9/2001? no. but this is obvious. ok so where does that leave you? nowhere, in a sense. you can see the effects of the notion of "terrorism" in this: it is a substitute for any account of the political motivations behind any given action. it replaces them with nothing. by replacing them with nothing, the category functions to give the impression that all political opposition that shifts into the level of direct action is equivalent to all others, and that all of them are irrational--what is more that there are and can be no rational grounds for opposing the existing order, there are and can be no rational grounds for actions directed against that order. "terrorism" evacuates the politics of opposition. "terrorism" is a category whose sole function is the legitimation of the existing order. from this it follows that any simple statement about such actions functions to either repeat or invert the logic which follows from this category "terrorist"--and this is the point of it, i think. it puts you in an untenable position. the category is horseshit, nothing more, nothing less. considering such actions in terms shaped AT ALL by this category results in more horseshit, nothing more, nothing less. one of the most basic aspects of revolutionary politics is that the narrative which shapes an action IS in a sense the action because in that narrative is the political and historical logic which is embodied in the action. so revolutionary politics is not about blowing shit up--it is about conflict over history and via conflict over history, it is conflict over the politics of history, and via conflict over the politics of the past, it is about conflict over the future, a future which plays out across control of the parameters that shape the present. NOT ALL NARRATIVES ARE EQUIVALENT--to make anything like a serious judgment concerning the "legitimacy" of a particular action, you need to know the narrative and on that basis take the risk--the ethical risk, the personal risk--of making an actual judgment. exercises in a simplistic sign reversal are not judgements, not really: they are reflexes. they are not even political because they do not take the requirements of political action seriously. in other words, it is not enough--not enough at all--to arrive at the general conclusion that colonialism or neo-colonialism is bad--this is not rocket science, it demands nothing of you. these are fucked up times. it is like the late hapsburg period in austria--the illusion that things are ok is repeated endlessly through everyday routines--the politics of opposition are erased behind it, such that people imagine only this is possible--there is only one logic and we are it---this even as the space within which that logic circulates itself becomes increasingly dysfunctional, increasingly pathological. but it doesnt matter: we are asleep. we dream in patterns. in our dreams, we cling to these patterns. we think there is nothing else. and perhaps, for us, that is true for now. the elimination of the space of opposition assures one thing: that the self-blinding characteristics of the rationality within which we live become total. maybe we wont even notice that our world is crashing down around us as it crashes down around us. we are asleep and we dream in patterns. they are pretty patterns. they have a nice soundtrack. they are soft and plush and always available and imply no risk. why leave them? this is already way too long and i have things to do. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 05-10-2007 at 07:00 AM..