Terrorism and the Battle for Language

A consolation of getting older is that it comes with memory. Older people can remember events for which younger ones depend on what they read and what they are told. And what we read and what we are told is under the control of those who are doing the writing and the talking. Thus can reality be manipulated. That manipulation, which is a manipulation of values, attitudes and understanding, starts with the manipulation and control of language.

Which brings me to terrorism. But before that …

What follows here may appear to some to be far too subtle for its own good—too tangential to be relevant, perhaps disconnectedly academic, a conspiracy theorist’s thought-bubble, or even paranoid. Think not. None of this is novel. It has all been done before, only very few of us are old enough to have a personal memory of it.

Back to terrorism …

A victim who survives or witnesses an atrocity, in the face of the confusion of injustice and unreasonableness, searches for some form of meaning because, without meaning, the victim is left with existential nothingness. (By the way, to encourage spiritual nothingness in their doomed Jewish victims, concentration camp guards would routinely reply to their question “Why?” with the devastating answer “There is no ‘why’.”)

Meaning requires a notion of cause and consequence. The victim needs to know: “How did this happen?”, “Who did this to me?” or “Why did they do this to me?” Out of this needy, confused vulnerability may squirm any form of serpent from a Medusa’s head of reassuring beliefs: “They are evil” or “I deserved it”, “I made them do it” or “It’s divine punishment”, and so on. Any of these explanations, or perhaps some other, if reinforced by some convenient intellectual or emotional scaffolding, even if tenuous, will give the victim a handle to attach necessary meaning to existential confusion.

Such an insidious hissing serpent is the redirection of causality away from the perpetrator and onto the victim. Thus the victim looks at himself (or herself) as the problem, not at the real enemy. It’s an excellent strategy for the attacker. If you can hit someone and then convince that person it was really their fault, why, you have it made.

This essay appears in the October edition of Quadrant.
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The first battle for people’s values, attitudes and understanding is to capture the language. This is not too small a victory. The consequence for the victim is profound and treacherous. The spoils of war are the understanding of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. Thus, victory for the terrorist is role reversal. The terrorist becomes the victim and the victim deserves everything that is coming to him (or her).

Active voice is replaced by the passive. The terrorist is not bad, he or she is “radicalised”. “Radicalisation” is done to the terrorist—the terrorist is the victim of this “radicalisation”.

But how could this happen to such a hapless, vulnerable, “disaffected”, individual? ’Twas the victim that done it: the victim has made the terrorist unhappy, existentially lost, vulnerable to evil persuasion. The terrorist—now the victim—is a radicalised pawn who is not responsible for the suicide belt he or she carries onto the school bus. The terrorist has become the victim; the terrorist’s victim has become the problem.

That’s clever.

But this alone will not work because it is not enough. It is not convenient that, whenever the media report an attack by a terrorist, we see in our mind a masked, anonymous, heartless murderer. So do terrorists not make convenient victims because they are too nasty? Well, no worry, that can be fixed! Let’s just make the enemy not the terrorist but the terror we feel between attacks as we walk through the shopping mall, down to the underground, and onto the plane. Our emotion (within ourselves), not the terrorist, is what we must overcome, not the murderous assassin with the knife or the gun or the bomb. So now we, the victims, are the problem.

That’s not just clever. It is very clever.

The job is done. The enemy is within ourselves and the attacker is not responsible for what he or she is doing. We believe it and we preach it. It becomes part of political correctness. And it becomes part of ordinary, everyday language.

Game, set, match. And we did it to ourselves.