Abstract
Proponents of the current war, as of past wars, against terrorism depict their struggle as a defense of the core values of civilization against an amoral barbarism in which it is impossible to be neutral.1 Terrorists, as stereotyped by counterinsurgent theorists, are “dedicated to violence and destruction” for its own sake; under terrorist brutalization, “headstrong youths can become so hooked on the life of terrorist murder that they perform their tasks in a kind of sacrificial ecstasy.”2 The limitations of the approaches of critics of wars against terrorism are perhaps more surprising. Specifically, such critics implicitly share with counterinsurgent writers a characterization of state violence as being less chaotic than that of resistance movements. The violence of the modern state may be more powerful, but in contrast, in the Foucauldian sense, it is “ordered.”3 States, especially first world states, claim their violence is legitimate and possess an ability to disguise their violence by applying it in ways that are of a lower intensity, such as military deployments, surveillance techniques, and legal or illegal detention.4 Where wars against terrorism are criticized in such analyses, it is to suggest that states of the first world, especially the United States, have helped to generate the conditions for the emergence of terrorism owing to the ruthless pursuit of their own interests.
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Notes
Times (UK), July 12, 1996, 19; Paul Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan, 1974), 16–17.
Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1986), 90, 67.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977).
David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1999); Raymond Murray, State Violence in Northern Ireland, 1969–1997 (Cork: Mercier, 1998).
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Ari Perliger and Leonard Weimberg, “Jewish Self-defence and Terrorist Groups Prior to the Establishment of the State of Israel: Roots and Traditions,” in Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism, ed. Leonard Weimberg and Ami Pedahzur (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 91–118.
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Ibid, 289; Also see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Europe as a Problem of Indian History,” Traces 1 (2001), 159–181; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
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For such admissions at nonofficial and official levels, see Robert Harris, “The Clare Short Doctrine: America is Always Wrong,” Daily Telegraph, September 25, 2001, and the commemorative magazine published in 2002, 9/11: One Year Later: A Nation Remembers.
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See “Islam in Action,” National Review 53, no.23 (December 3, 2001): 20–24.
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Peatling, G.K. (2008). The Savage Wars of Peace: Wars against Terrorism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and India. In: Land, I. (eds) Enemies of Humanity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612549_9
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