Drone terror: Welcome to the barbarism of ‘civilisation’
Mass murder is fine as long we are the ones doing the killing to stop other people killing us
Terrorists like to believe they are committing mass murder for a noble political cause.
Islamic State (IS) acolytes believe they are fighting against the evil “Crusader” states of the kuffar (disbelievers), to establish a global khilafah (caliphate).
“War on terror” proponents believe they are defending Western civilisation against barbaric terrorists hell-bent on destroying our “values” and “way of life”.
Both frames depict the enemy in sub-human terms, as barbarians outside the gate. Both justify colossal destruction of civilian life as necessary and inevitable to obtain noble political goals.
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, once again, people wondered, debated: how can people become so unfathomably evil that they deliberately commit mass violence against innocent civilians?
The answer is simple: dehumanisation. Killing is easier when those you are killing are categorised as existing somehow outside the frame of one’s own humanity, and thus, less than human, Other.
The brutal massacre of 130 people in Paris on a Friday night, in the heart of the city, when people were out with friends and family, illustrates how terror works: strike suddenly, to inflict fear and panic, to paralyse society. President Hollande rightly described the mass murders as an “act of war,” requiring a “pitiless” response.
Imagine, though, if attacks like that undertaken by IS in Paris were inflicted every other day on France and other Western countries. Imagine if a Charlie Hebdo-style massacre erupted every other week in the US, UK and France, killing a dozen or so victims at a time.
The outcry would be, rightly, deafening. Demands for retaliation would be self-evidently sensible. The need to take “all necessary measures” to crush the terrorists would be unanimously agreed on by Western leaders. Civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria might be dismissed as regrettable “collateral damage” in necessary self-defence.
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