Most of the world believes, today, that the Western use of the term, terrorism, is wilfully warped to advance a destructive political agenda. This same manipulative usage remains indispensably effective in the West, however. It fundamentally underpins, for example, the monstrous process lately identified by Stuart Rees as the “normalisation of atrocity.”
The most memorable Christmas card I ever received had a very jolly Father Christmas on the front with cheerful citizens looking up appreciatively. The card explained, as you picked it up, that: “The world is divided into those who believe in Santa Claus,” and, as you opened it: “COMMUNISTS!” This time the citizens were glaring fiercely.
The impact relied on the juxtaposition of a joyful wholesome Santa with sinister communists. The sharp humour drew on pre-set, fervently negative images of communism and its followers.
As you consider how this card worked, it becomes clear that the typical auto-pilot understanding of what is represented by these images in the Global West is underpinned by deeply entrenched discourse narratives stretching back into the last century and beyond.
The work of Terry Eagleton, arguably the most widely-read analyst of literary theory, explains and evaluates many contesting theories. One older reviewed theory drew attention to what is signified by a given verbal or written signifier. Thus, the signifying word apple primarily brings-to-mind an image of the (signified) fruit, which many enjoy.
Eagleton shows how this understanding had major limitations when it comes to literary interpretation, yet it could still be helpful when applied in a non-abstract, material way. Thus, it remains handy for comprehending how pivotal signifiers can be put to work in a Christmas card. More importantly, it explains how and why key, pre-tilted signifiers are continually used by the Mainstream Western Media (MWM) to advance particular causes.
“Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” is a seminal book first published in 1988 by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. It mounts a powerful, now widely recognized central argument that the American mass media: “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship and without overt coercion.”
Reliance by the MWM on enduring, consciously tilted – or twisted – pivotal signifiers is one key way in which mass-consent is manufactured. Numerous instances confirm this. One insidiously effective example is the use of the signifier “terrorism.”
In 2015, John V. Whitbeck, a respected American commentator on Middle East affairs and particularly those concerning Palestine and Israel, argued that:
“The word “terrorism” does not enhance understanding. It stifles rational thought and discussion and, all too often, is used and abused to excuse one’s own illegal and immoral behaviour”.
Whitbeck explained how, ten years earlier in 2005, the then-UN secretary general Kofi Annan proposed this fair and reasonable definition of terrorism:
“Any action intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a government or an international organisation to carry out or to abstain from any act.”
Whitbeck made clear why this sort of even-handed definition could never be accepted by Washington or London or their obedient allies. Moreover, such a definition was intolerable in Israel, the West’s paramount policy-setter on all matters pertaining to the Middle East. Terrorism had to remain framed as being motivated by “a hatred of our freedoms or some other form of blind, mindless malevolence or sick desire to kill innocent people for the sake of it.”
These Western leaders, he added, thoroughly rejected the view that terrorism was fundamentally political motivated, energized by a central focus on forcing those same leaders to change their multi-decade, intensely damaging, pro-Israel policies in the Middle East. Moreover, this new definition “would have applied not only to the low-technology violence of the weak but also to the high-technology violence of the strong, which has always been vastly more destructive and deadly.”
It was, thus, vital that the term terrorism be left unshackled by any attempts (arising from an unwelcome project) to define what this signifier rationally and specifically signified. This was a pre-twisted pivotal signifier which had to be confined to signifying (Western-identified) brutal, heedless behaviour that could only be explained in terms of an unhinged embrace of an horrific bloodlust by certain deranged “others”.
Thus, the 2005 London bombings and later horrific attacks in Spain and France, for example, could be labelled, at high volume, as terrorism. But flagrant Western intimidation relying on extreme violence directed at countless civilians was entirely excluded from being defined as terrorism – never mind that this savagery ranged from atom bombs dropped on Japan through to millions displaced, tormented and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan after 911.
Whitbeck said, applying the Kofi Annan definition, that: “In the 21st century, the American and Israeli governments would have been — and would still be — among the world’s leading practitioners of ‘terrorism’”.
Which brings us to the hellscape in Gaza, still being massively amplified as Israel pursues its decades long, violently depraved creation of Greater Israel. Unsurprisingly, this corrupted but durable pivotal signifier has been put to work around the clock by the MWM, on behalf of Israel and its complicit Western allies, since October 7, 2023.
The Hamas attack on Israel on that day was a terrorist action according to the Annan definition. But it was preceded by over 70 years of Israeli terrorism directed at millions of Palestinians followed by well over a year of unmatched levels of Israeli-American genocidal ethnic-cleansing. All of which is repeatedly disinfected in so much MWM reporting, not least by turning “language inside out” and excluding any use of the term terrorism in relation to Israel and it backers.
Most of the world today considers this sort of usage a wilfully perverted, Western signification of terrorism. This same manipulative usage remains indispensably effective in the Global West, however. It fundamentally underpins the monstrous process lately identified by Stuart Rees as the “normalisation of atrocity” . Leading to Alex de Waal’s recent acute summary, in the London Review of Books, of a central, contemporary, geopolitical obscenity: “Palestinians’ human rights vanish in the dust of Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorists”.
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
