The Three Faces of Terrorism

Our home-grown news media have--as far as I can tell--preserved absolute radio silence about an atrocity in Mexico midway through last week. I translate from an account published by "admin" at www.terrorismo.com on September 17:

In the first assault on civilians since the inauguration of a campaign against the violence of organized crime in Mexico, two explosions left eight people dead and more than 100 injured last evening in Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacan, during the celebration of the 198th anniversary of Mexican independence.
Although no one up to this moment has claimed responsibility for the attack, Leonel Godoy, governor of Michoacan, said that initial indications point to a "terrorist assault" by organized crime. "We are appalled, since the dead and wounded are ordinary people of the humblest social class. Among the wounded are women and children," he added.

Apparently, two grenade-like bombs exploded in packages of shrapnel. Six of the eight dead were in fact women: none was a policeman or a soldier.

This is one face of terrorism--a face that our government and its internationalist, open-boarders opinion-handlers in the "free press" particularly do not want us to see: gangs holding the public in servile submission with random acts of mayhem. Russia is also familiar with mob activities of this category. Mexico has made their close acquaintance during the Bush years, which have seen the opening of our southern border draw drug-smugglers up from Colombia the way honey attracts bees. Of course, the Bush crusade against terrorism halfway around the world is wholly, irredeemably undermined if its domestic policies turn out to have invited terrorism into our neighbors' states and thence through our own back door. Hence the need to suppress stories like the slaughter in Morelia's streets.

The second face of terrorism, to be sure, is the one made famous since 9/11 by Hollywood productions like 24: fanatical ideology targeting every aspect of its adversary's economic and cultural life with kamikaze-like dedication. Al Qaeda's operatives do not park TNT-laden vans and then detonate them to demoralize a public hungry for a safe, just, orderly environment: they do so to draw public support away from Western institutions and policies. A mobster can infuse his money into any party's apparatus: a homicidal ideologue has nothing less than a certain party's downfall as his desired outcome.

The glower of this second face is truly almost unknown to us in the West except through our electronic fantasies. Yet we are quick to thrust its special-effects-enhanced mask upon the third face of terrorism, which we do not wish to see under any circumstances. I speak of the truly arbitrary devastation of "system malfunction" in the era of high-tech. I would indeed argue (and have often argued) that the events of 9/11 were themselves more high-tech malfunction than fiendish guerilla assault. A jetliner could have slammed into the World Trade Center, with a little bad luck, on any foggy morning of the year. We progressive Westerners are constantly thrusting our daily existence beyond a sensible margin of error. Our buildings must go higher still, our conveyances faster and faster. When a commuter train slammed head-on into a freight train in southern California this week (just before the slaughter in Morelia), the catastrophe could very plausibly have been ascribed to a terrorist's short-circuiting the red light run by the former train's engineer... but it turns out, instead, that this unhappy man was "texting" on his cell phone! Now we hear calls for more systematic supervision, recriminations against government for not supplying that supervision when it was demanded earlier. The fault lies not in our insatiable drive to tax all systems to the point of overload, but in the negligence or corruption of those who are elected to keep us always perfectly safe--or in the diabolical malice of those who snip a wire here and loosen a screw there.

If you were walking across a room with boxes piled so high in your arms that you couldn't see in front of yourself, and if a toddler kept dancing around your feet despite several growled warnings, you would probably end up dropping your load. Then you would spank the toddler a lot harder than you should have or meant to, because something in you knew all along that your undertaking lacked good sense.

Our high-tech debauchery is not yielding to sobriety, so we will continue to be terrified of shifty-eyed boys with tool chests. Likewise, the lust of our mega-businesses for slave labor and the global market will continue to fuel turf wars and shootouts. Our problem isn't simply terror: to an even greater extent, it is our refusal to look terror in the face--to look hard at its three faces. As long as we keep ignoring this face or disguising that one as another, we will be counter-punching at shadows.