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| Elevating the Political to Code-Red |
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If you are not with us, then…
It is easy to understand why the raw emotions that political violence produces never seem to lose their pull or sense of violation. Indeed it is hard to avoid such traumatic episodes in the age of mass communication, as the images of the loss of life are continually presented to us through endless fetishistic though politically beneficial re-play. Only to be further amplified as another connectable event hits our screens and collective consciousness. For any subsequent media moment such as the Bali bombings, the Madrid bombings, the Beslan school massacre, the insurgencies in Iraq and so on becomes more than a singular emotional affect. In terms of visualising the terror and perpetuating the fear they become another image-frame to be connected and associated. The spectacle of terror has become networked. And as such, the visualisation of these non-visualised forms and the future terror they could bring becomes the combined images of all their affects - real or conceived.
Whilst it would be hard to find apologies for the suffering and the innocent loss of life of any of the events mentioned above, and this article is certainly not going to offer any such suggestion, it nonetheless becomes quite clear how the emotions and fears these episodes generate can be manipulated for political ends. This has been particularly evident since September 11th. In that the agencies of the Liberal project can not only present a model for understanding al-Qaeda based upon its ideological anti-modern and organisationally modern characteristics as if it were the written word, but that they can award this model far wider application. To quote President George Bush from a speech made before a Joint Session of Congress as early as September 20th 2001, while the ‘war on terror begins with al-Qaeda… it does not end there’. An approach fully endorsed by Brian Jenkins (2004) a senor adviser for the Rand Corporation who suggests that ‘it is time for us to take a deliberately unconventional, broad, and inclusive approach’.
This broad and inclusive approach in its first stages finds clear application when the olitical is merged with the Islamic. Taking advantage of the political opportunities the events of September 11th presented, there
has been, throughout the Western world, a clear becoming-dangerous of these Islamic alternatives. For instance, almost immediately and without any surprise following these events, Ariel Sharon was ready to declare his own War on the politics of Islamic Terror.To be quickly followed by a whole swathe of ‘Clash of Civilisations’ questioning that spread throughout Europe, South East Asia and Russia in particular.The extent of this globally becoming-dangerous of political Islam is clearly given official sanction. For instance, out of the twenty-five terrorist organizations listed by the British Home Office, eighteen are Islamic, and out of the thirty-six terrorist organisations listed by the US State Department the figure reaches twenty-two. In both the usual suspects read the same, as these trans-border and adaptive autonomous political forms are seen not only as a challenge to the sanctity of the Nation-State, but whose elements invoke the usual description, ‘believed to have connections with al-Qaeda’.
Whilst this grouping is troubling for those of us who respect political differences and are seeking to find new political solutions beyond the failed state system, it is amplified when we begin to realise that this ‘broad and inclusive’ sweep that could encompass any political challenge to the Liberal model is not the product of post-September 11th reactionary thinking. For instance, such calls for the rounding up of all the autonomous networks were being pioneered by the RAND Corporation during the early 1990s. This approach would suggest that the Liberal model for assessment should expand to include not only radical Islamic groups, but to incorporate computer hackers, indigenous resistance movements in Mexico, the antiglobalisation set up, and even to single issue protesters. For this school of thought, these new components of cybernetic and informational-based warfare find commonality largely in terms of their complimentary organisational designs. Perhaps it is just somewhat convenient that these autonomous forms that the Liberal project is seeking to draw together just happen to also represent a political alternative to the Liberal way. Could it not be the political of each of these forms that serves to draw association?
This is no doubt a contentious claim. For whilst it is somewhat easier to invoke through association a ‘becoming-al-Qaeda’ to organisations such as Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad and Jama’ah Islamiyah, the situation becomes more complex when such political forms are bereft of the eschatological. However I would suggest that when these non-Islamic forms are confronted, such securitisation and subsequent narrowing of the political is no less penetrative, but is more revealing of its subtle and hidden qualities. For example, if we take the regular anti-globalisation summits as our test cases, whilst the host States inevitably laud their democratic credentials through their willingness to allow ‘peaceful emonstrations’, the approach adopted by all host locales to these gatherings operates to some rather warped conceptions of freedom. Quite simply, in application they equate the potentiality of the protests with the potentiality of violence, destruction and indeed terrorism, and therefore deal with them as such.
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