Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror

[Dave Monroe]

More from John Milbank, "Sovereignty, Empire, Capital,
and Terror," South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 2
(Spring 2002), pp. 305-24 ...

... However, one does have to ask why so universally
and immediately the attack was compared to Pearl
Harbor, when, after all, it was only a terrorist
attack, albeit of an unprecedented appalling kind. One
man destroying New York with a nuclear bomb would
still be a criminal and not a warrior, and one treats
all warriors with more respect than criminals. Usually
one avoids seeing terrorists as engaged in war,
because that is just how they want to be seen and
starting a war is generally their aim. In the annals
of terrorism, Al-Qaeda has now been uniquely
successful: the West has played their game at every
turn.  For as Baudrillard says, they aim to pose
against the regime of formal exchange and
technological war without losses, the symbolic capital
of death for a singular and substantive cause,
gambling on the likelihood that, pushed to the limit
of questioning, the West must still trade in the
capital of death if it is to legitimate itself, which
has indeed proved to be the case. Yet, as Baudrillard
further contends, the West tends to lose in this
exchange: the extermination of innocents with zero
loss of combatants on a somewhat arbitrarily chosen
stage (Afghanistan) cannot really outweigh the
suicidal targeting of a supremely significant site.
For this reason it must inevitably foster many more
potentially self-sacrificial terrorists in the future,
and in this way the West is itself sucked down a
suicidal path, and led away from formal equilibrium.
   Thus, while indeed in one respect "the war" is not
simply to do with September 11 and is commanded by the
West's pursuit of its own economic interests, in
another respect its specific mode has been dictated by
the need to react symbolically and cathartically in
the face of public outrage, and in this respect the
terrorists have truly dictated the pace and character
of recent events. A balanced analysis must do justice
to both the economic and the symbolic aspects, and try
to comprehend just how they interact.
   In neither aspect, however, is one really talking
about the tracking down of evildoers, as we have been
led to believe. Supposedly "the war" in Afghanistan
was pursued against bin Laden, and yet it doesn't seem
likely that if he were ever caught he would be treated
in accord with the Geneva Convention. If terrorism
were really the issue, then much the safer thing would
be to stick to the discourse of crime and the practice
of regular policing and due juridical process.
Anything else, as the bitter experience of the French
and British shows, only tends to increase the support
of terrorist groups and legitimate their operations.
The ethical evil of terrorism is that, more than
certain modes of conventional warfare, it directly
instrumentalizes human life. But as Kenneth Surin and
Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Wales, have
pointed out, this means that any response that tends
to do the same thing is uniquely ineffective: in
losing the ethical high ground, it also tends to lose
the strategic high ground.[3] This has already
happened to America, who has now bombed and killed
innocent villagers supposed to be "harboring"
terrorists (the results could not be seen on American
television); who, together with Britain, has bombed a
prisoner of war camp at Qala-i-Jhangi fortress from
the air; who has caused all the major aid agencies to
flee Afghanistan for the duration of the conflict, and
who has delayed the arrival of humanitarian aid even
after the fall of Kabul—thereby cumulatively causing
thousands of innocent deaths. Even were those who say
that only "massive force" stops terrorism correct (and
they are unlikely to be proved right in the long term
because of the delayed "blowback" phenomenon), the
implication would be that only a permanently
terroristic state can stop terrorism—once again wiping
out all moral distinctions between the respective
parties. Baudrillard rightly points out that this
leveling effect between crime and punishment is vastly
reinforced by the power of filmed images (when they
are available), which tend to convey violence and its
results rather than the reasons for violence. In this
way they assist the human propensity to sustain a
spiral of revenge.
   The use of cluster bombs, of heavy bombers where
there were no hard targets, and the attack on
unquestionably non-Taliban places like the village of
Gardez show that one is not even speaking about
"collateral damage" here. Most crucial of all has
been, not capturing bin Laden, nor even overthrowing
the Taliban, but rather exhibiting a show of terror
intended to cow the entire region for the foreseeable
future and bend it and parallel terrains to the
Western will. (pp. 319-20)

http://saq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/101/2/305

http://www.jesusradicals.com/library/mi
lbank/terror.html

Citing ...

Baudrillard, Jean.  "L'Esprit du Terrorisme."
   Trans. Donovan Hohn. Harper's (February 2002):
   13–18.

http://saq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/101/2/403

And recall as well ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0609&msg=106458

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0609&msg=106487
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism-french.html

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