A Qualified Defense of Terrorist Tactics

A Qualified Defense of Terrorist Tactics

Terrorism has been defined in several ways, but the general consensus is that terrorist tactics are violent acts performed either by or against non-combatants whose symbolic significance is greater than their death toll.

Terrorism is a modern bogey-man — a term that can be applied to any crime in order to make its consequences multiply (even beyond the realm where ‘civil liberties’ apply) without popular push-back — and we have even begun to see the term “terrorist states” applied unironically. But, even so, ‘terrorist’ is always a term that applies to the underdog in asymmetric warfare — to the side that, barring a miracle, is doomed to lose.

Terrorism is usually employed by non-state actors. This is pretty natural: by definition, things done by armies to other armies are not terrorism, and all forms of violence outside of that is (by convention) fair game. Of course, we tend to only apply the term to symbolic actions. A video-taped beheading is terrorism; so is the bombing of a “safe place” like a shopping mall, or the assassination of a popular leader like JFK. If a church is bombed, it is considered terrorism, even if the church is empty. This is also a natural fit for non-state actors. Conventional infantry warfare requires a lot of manpower and resources — manpower and resources that only a state can organize (particularly if the cannon-fodder is being mowed down rank by rank); bomber planes and directed missiles, while safer for those controlling them, are only available at scale to technically advanced states. A symbolic act is cheaper than conventional warfare, and will typically kill fewer people on both sides of the conflict, although those people will generally not be considered “combatants” under international law.

States are not equal in military power, nor are they often even comparable. In the current post-nuclear era, states with advanced militaries do not go to war with each other (or do not do so directly); instead, they only go to war with non-advanced states (perhaps as a proxy war with some other state) and so all war involving advanced states is asymmetric. Terrorism is an extreme form of guerrilla warfare, and in any asymmetric context, guerrilla tactics are the only possible winning tactics for the underdog. After all, even if one has infantry, one cannot effectively mount an infantry assault against an enemy from across the globe who has only sent bomber planes. Against an advanced adversary, a less advanced state can only effectively deploy tactics like espionage, sabotage, and symbolic violence.

There is a rationale to international military law that is based on a kind of sportsmanship. There is an idea of a combatant as someone who has voluntarily agreed to risk being killed by their participation in a state-captured war machine, and there is the idea that they can surrender and therefore be no longer subject to the threat of death at the hands of the enemy. There are certain types of weapons that are banned because they risk affecting non-combatants or do not give combatants an opportunity to surrender: chemical and biological weapons, for instance, because they have a tendency to spread and are therefore always deployed from far away. Other weapons that are only deployed from far away and do not give opportunities for surrender or for positive identification are not banned, because advanced states like to use them: missiles, aerial bombardment, drone strikes, remote detonations, shelling. There is an understanding that these are supposed to be used only against “military targets” — but when the rules of the game make it so that one side of every war is doomed to lose by those rules, there is no incentive to advertise the difference between military and civilian targets; rather than making the overdog/advanced side more cautious, it actually makes them less cautious, since the winner of any conflict always has greater opportunity to define who counts as “combatant” or “military targets”. There is the expectation that combatants from each side are killed or convinced to surrender until one side or the other throws in the towel — a grisly game of bluffs where the poker chips are human lives, but an ostensibly fair one — but when dealing with infantry, states with enormous conscriptable populations will always win, and when dealing with advanced states with remote warfare, the state able to do the greatest damage from the greatest distance (and therefore able to risk the fewest lives) will always win.

The symbolic acts we call terrorism are necessary for anything other than an advanced state to fight back against any advanced state. Terrorism, because it operates upon culture rather than upon a currency of human lives, is the only way a small impoverished group can win any violent conflict.

Of course, the united states and other advanced nations will say that their violence is just — that no group that an advanced state is in conflict with can possibly have a legitimate reason for fighting. Aren’t we “democracies”, bringing “freedom”? And sometimes, an advanced state will militarily side with “terrorists” against a less advanced state — usually by providing them with technically advanced weaponry — with the justification that these people, because their cause is just, are actually “freedom fighters”. We should be wary of this kind of rhetoric because it equates statehood with a moral good — and the special kind or moral repugnance applied to terrorist tactics by state propaganda demonstrates this clearly. The violence done by advanced states is necessarily greater in scale and in the cost to human lives than the violence done by terrorists, not because individual politicians have some inner essential evil (nor because states are scheming to demolish human lives for fun) but because the rules of the game are constructed for wars between roughly equally advanced states where non-states and less-advanced states don’t matter, and because rules designed to disincentivize war between advanced states has made asymmetric warfare more palatable; the violence done by terrorists is more shocking, not because terrorists have some inner essential evil (nor because terrorists take special pleasure in violence — though violence certainly has a cathartic element, to everyone who engages in it) but because great shock is affordable while great violence is not.

Some forms of human organization are incompatible with the logic of the state. These forms are not necessarily bad for the humans involved in them, nor are they necessarily bad for other people. Just as a neighbourhood co-op competes with a supermarket without damaging the livelihoods of customers of either, unregistered wilderness communes deprive the state of taxes and deprive the local capitalist economy of exchange without necessarily being bad for the people living in the commune or in nearby towns. Just as a supermarket will temporarily sell commodities below price, using the slack produced by the franchise structure and access to easy credit to undercut competition and thus drive it out of business, the state will often go after communes. On the other hand, some places that are nearly equally insulated from the state are left alone: if you are part of a locally-situated minority community (i.e., a de-facto ghetto), whether you are over-policed or under-policed is a matter of social, political, and economic pressures in the outside world, but some ghettos are de-facto communes that are mostly left alone indefinitely so long as they pay tithe to the government through taxes and other kinds of protection money.

Indeed, the state cannot and does not interfere in most kinds of human organization — unless there are internal or external pressures to the contrary. Contracts are enforced by the threat of state involvement (via the court system), but were all contracts actually state-mediated the court system could not handle the volume and this part of the state would effectively collapse. Most ostensible crime is not subject to active or passive enforcement, even in communities that don’t see themselves as outside or counter to the “law of the land” — majority-white upper-middle-class suburbs are havens of illegal drug use much more so than dense urban centers because drugs are expensive and these places have very little law enforcement, and because there is little law enforcement, drug-related crime here is less common. Similarly, driving is legally fraught, entangled with a host of complex and thorny interpersonal problems which have been worked out and set down in law, largely because errors on the road can be both dangerous and expensive, yet actual enforcement of the rules of the road are mostly done by convention between individuals (through extremely low-bandwidth communication channels like speed, indicator and headlights, distant hand gestures, and an occasional horn) with only very rare intrusions by police (themselves motivated by things like ticket quotas & a desire by small towns intersected by big roads to add to their budget by skimming fees from outsiders); when driving, most of us are breaking some law most of the time (as following the flow of traffic usually means speeding or driving well under the speed minimum, depending upon congestion levels, and the places with the greatest number of cars also have the smallest number of legal parking spaces). So, effectively, non-state or counter-state oases of lawlessness are necessary for the operation of the state. If you follow every rule of the road, you will inevitably be late for work and lose your job, which means less tax revenue for the state, so it’s in the state’s best interest to preserve your ability to break the law most of the time.

Sometimes, these oases are threatened by the state, of course. States are pretty short-sighted, so they will often threaten oases of lawlesness that they themselves depend upon. When an intentional community or affinity group is existentially threatened, they can either martyr themselves (itself essentially a terrorist tactic) or engage in asymmetric warfare against the surrounding state. After all, a ghetto, commune, co-op, union, church, or fan club has no standing army! Any attempt to become army-like and stand against a state threat as though on equal terms will be considered evidence that this group is radical, a danger to surrounding citizens, and of course sometimes that is true. Any attempt to engage in terrorist tactics will be seen in the same light — even martyrdom. Anything but dying quietly and secretly will be presented as a sin worthy of death at the hands of police.

The kinds of culture-jamming or dadaist tactics preferred by the yippies and situationists (and by their heirs in the modern protest movements) — costumes, putting flowers in the barrels of guns, or even sit-ins and occupations — will also be portrayed as “terrorist” tactics, no matter how nonviolent, provided there is the political will. After all, says the state, these unconventional tactics cannot possibly win against a militarized police force, so people engaging in them must be irrational: and if they are irrational, how can we possibly trust that they will not become violent! Well, they are in fact a threat to order, though a small one; they know they cannot win through direct violence, so symbolic violence is their only option, and doing a small symbolic violence is better than doing nothing at all. Nevertheless, their symbolic violence will be met with concrete violence if it is effective, and its effectiveness can be modulated by the state and its collaborators. There is no completely safe way to disagree with the state, and in order to live, we all must gamble with every choice we make that the state will not see our small transgression as an excuse to lock us up or kill us.

So, what does a “just war” look like to someone whose only option is terrorism?

Certainly, culture jamming and other kinds of pure media work are less ethically fraught. They have lower risk, in most environments, but it’s also difficult to organize real change. As Vonnegut notes about opposition to the Vietnam War, the laser focus of all of the greatest minds of the largest generation upon opposition to that conflict had the same scale of effect as a pie in the face. There is a greater upper limit on effect now, because of the gradual obviation of centralized media gatekeeping, but one cannot bet on being a winner! In fact, the old centralized system could in some cases be more effective, if you had an in with the establishment (for instance, popular attitudes about smoking and drunk driving changed very rapidly after a lobbying group convinced the government and popular sitcom writers to work together on a coordinated propaganda campaign), even though it would systematically remove, detourn, or defang threats to the state. Since the second world war, every advanced state has made psychological warfare (culture jamming and detournment by its establishment moniker) part of its arsenal, and no state is completely unwilling to deploy this arsenal against its own population during peacetime for the sake of manufacturing consent. So, we must be wary of culture jamming’s potential for friendly fire — and the potential for our own weapons to be turned against us.

So long as we live in hierarchical authoritarian societies — especially ones built on “representative democracy”, wherein members of the oligarchy cultivate a parasocial relationship with the masses that they represent as consent-to-be-governed — assassination is one of the most ethical of the violent tactics. The assassination of a single symbolically important figure, even if that figure does not actually make decisions, can impact the thoughts and behaviors of many people in a variety of ways. There is a lot of bang-for-the-buck here: conventional warfare involves thousands of casualties and trillions of dollars of equipment for the sake of fairly moderate political changes, but the public assassination of a leader (because it is a media event) does a whole lot despite involving a minimal risk taken by a handful of people with inexpensive equipment and only a single casualty in most cases. Of course, the state will lash out in response using methods of conventional warfare (or, in the case of a “lone gunman”, conventional police violence), and this can have knock-on effects for both better and worse (whether or not people consider the assassination justified will determine how their sympathies lie when it comes to a very clearly asymmetric response).

The destruction of landmarks, if done carefully, can produce similar effects with zero casualties. This is where protest tactics and terrorist tactics overlap, and arguably, protest tactics encompass all guerrilla actions that do not lead directly to casualties. The destruction of landmarks can easily lead to accidental casualties, of course, and these casualties can be claimed as intentional and used to distort the symbolic meaning of the act.

Obviously, spree shootings and the targeting of masses of undifferentiated civilians (say, via cars, poison, and bombs), even at relatively small scales, is a messy tactic that is unlikely to be effective at anything other than producing a very public retaliation — these are tactics of desperation, and I do not think they are often used outside of desperate situations, although a state may coordinate a protest, assassination, or other more targeted act in such a way as to turn it into an apparent mass undifferentiated attack. It’s hard to determine any appropriate response to a situation wherein a targeted attack intended primarily to send a symbolic message ends up affecting bystanders.

Rather than following the conventions presented by the state and its media and treating all terrorist tactics as equally abhorrent and universally more abhorrent than conventional warfare, we should think critically about the human cost of all forms of warfare and carefully consider whether individual actions are justified. Very often, terrorist tactics are simply more ethical than conventional warfare.