Jonathan Barker, Author of

The No-Nonsense Guide to Terrorism

In conversation with Jamie Swift, April, 2003

Jamie Swift: Your book says that after the attacks of Sept. 11 there was of course much mention of terrorism, but that many quickly reverted to their long-held positions and that fresh insights were infrequent. What fresh insights does your book offer?

Jonathan Barker: I had been thinking about popular politics, especially local politics. It struck me that not enough was being said about the way that both the response to terrorism and terrorism itself dampen down popular politics. The push to increase control and to restrict liberty came so quickly with the US Patriot Act and similar laws all across the world. Governments immediately increased their surveillance and their ability to arrest and detain. In many states powerful groups are always looking for ways to extend control. On the other side the activist groups became cowed. They were afraid to speak out. They thought they might be regarded as connected to terrorism. Or they were frightened by the danger to their country. There were many motives at play that threatened to chase popular politics off the streets.

JS: Has that changed? The American administration seems to have squandered a lot of international good will. Le Monde even had the headline "We Are All Americans Now." This is France, now vilified in the US. It only took the Bush administration a year and a half to blow the opportunity. Now those kinds of politics seem to have revived.

JB: I thing that's true. There are two big questions there. I came to the view that it would be much more desirable to treat terrorism as an international crime rather than a war. The war mentality feeds straight into the us-versus-them, good-versus-evil mentality that really negates politics. You have to revert to really powerful measures if you think in those terms. If it's a crime, then it needs to be acted against by police and by intelligence gathering in an international way. That would have given a basis for much more international co-operation. Now the question is whether the new anti-war politics can build strength and carry over onto other issues? It seems to gain momentum from the anti-globalization campaigns. I think there's a growing recognition that popular politics are at risk. The problem is that it draws people with this one issue when the world faces a multiplicity of issues. Whether that same energy can eventually be spread to those other issues is something that we'll have to see.

JS: Terrorism is a very promiscuous term. How do you define it?

JB: Terrorism is a political token, a flag you can raise. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wants to characterize Iraqis fighting out of uniform as terrorists. It's a way of saying they are evil and awful. But there is a way of defining terrorism that is useful, allowing you to discuss it as a specific thing. It is violence or the threat of violence against civilians for political purposes. This definition has the merit of being fairly objective. It's pretty clear what violence is. It's pretty clear, though there are some grey areas, about who civilians are. And when different groups carry out actions, you can usually tell what their intentions are. But it also includes the possibility of state terrorism. It seems crucial to me to have state terrorism and group terrorism together in one definition. They are closely related and have similar effects on people. So that's the starting point for an effort to look at terrorism through clear eyes.

JS: So state terrorism could also be considered a crime?

JB: Oh yes. And it is. We see that people in Chile are now being tried. There's been an effort to bring Pinochet to trial for crimes committed in office. That is the killing of civilians by the police and armed forces there. We see it in the International Court in The Hague in the case of officials from the former Yugoslavia. So there are important efforts to make it a crime and develop a way to go after state terrorists.

JS: Is there such a thing as a "terrorism industry?" After September 11 all manner of people emerged as experts and pundits.

JB: When I started to look at terrorism, it impressed and even astonished me how much of an industry there is. Much of it is pretty directly connected to government efforts to control what they call terrorism. Israel has several think tanks, as does the United States. They are often populated by former security personnel with very close government connections. Organizations like the Rand Corporation. There's a good book called The Terrorism Industry published about six years ago, well before September 11. Although they seem to come out of the woodwork, they have been operating consistently for many years on this issue. They talk a lot to each other and to think in military and security terms and not very much in political terms. What I have tried to do is to add a much thicker political layer to the thinking on this topic.

JS: You write of local politics in Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party seized power locally and engaged in informal terrorists acts. They also got hold of sports clubs and civic associations. It intersects with what is now called civil society. How does that relate to the way you speak so much of politics?

JB: That was a good case of the way that state terrorism percolates downwards. We know a lot about the Nazi atrocities. But this was different. In Thalburg there were no concentration camps. There wasn't much anti-Semitism. But there was a consistent movement by the National Socialist Party to take over each institution, to make Nazi control a patriotic necessity and to demobilize all other groups. There were many civic groups. Trade unions, clubs, a normal, active democratic society of the sort that we would recognize here in Canada. A society that current theory would regard as robustly democratic. Yet quite quickly every institution was taken over and everyone else was marginalized and discredited. People who mounted real opposition did disappear, but a climate of fear and powerlessness prevented any political reaction. It made me see that almost by stealth and quite imperceptibly there could be a move to something a lot like fascism that we might not recognize for awhile. In Thalburg people didn't see it and all of a sudden there it was, established. I worry about that in our own societies. I'm glad people are standing up and noticing the moves being made in legislation especially in the United States. I see it most clearly there.

JS: What are the relationships between war, terrorism and politics?

JB: A good way into that is to think about guerilla warfare and terrorism. To talk about it from the popular side. They often go together. Guerilla warfare or irregular troops are fighting a repressive apparatus, at war with an army or a government or a police force. Terrorism, as I indicated earlier, means attacks on civilians. Often the aim is to frighten them, to manipulate them through fear. Guerilla armies can be very careful to avoid terrorism. You remember Mao's idea of guerillas being fish in the sea. The peasants are the sea and the guerillas have to be careful not to alienate the sea. They have to live with them and live off them. They have rules about getting along with the people they are supposed to be defending, convincing them through their actions that they have the interests of the peasants at heart. That kind of ethic of guerilla warfare stands against terrorism. It's interesting that one terrorism think tank in Israel is interested in getting guerilla fighters to think in those terms and to avoid using terrorism, to not send suicide bombers because then you can think that the rules of war apply. There are Geneva Conventions and other rules by which fighters are supposed to protect civilians and not unnecessarily kill them and damage their economies. That's a legalistic connection. But of course, still thinking on the popular side, guerilla warriors are often tempted to use terrorism. The old term "propaganda of the deed" - "we can make the intensity of our feeling better known, we can frighten the enemy and then move our cause forward and it's worth it."

In the case of state terrorism the number of people killed far outpaces group terrorism. And one of the reasons I think is simply that states have the weapons. They have the organization. Ideally these are used by police and armies in legal way to identify and arrest criminals. They are not used against civilians. But it is not such a long step if you are in government and feel your country is in danger to set some of that apparatus free to go after people. One interesting thing about the US is that because of freedom of information laws we know quite a lot about places where they did set groups free to commit terrorism. In Central America, for example. In my view that is antithetical to politics. It takes issues away from politics and says that we are going to solve them through violence. Without talking, without negotiating. It tries to keep the action out of the public realm entirely.

JS: How does your analysis and understanding of terrorism differ from that of Noam Chomsky who basically points to the hypocrisy and injustice of state terrorism and states that use terrorism on the one hand and denounce it on the other? He is a springboard for the thinking of many people on the left.

JB: For me, the great strength of Chomsky's approach is his consistency. He is almost relentlessly consistent in trying to turn the same standards of moral behaviour that he finds in the Constitution of the United States and in the ideals of democracy on the actions of his government, not only on the actions of other governments. That's the strength of it. So if you define state terrorism in terms of killing civilians or using violence against them, he looks for places where the US has done that. He says that is terrorism too. And he's right. His use of data is good and he's good at putting it together. I differ a bit from his way of thinking in two places. I think it is important to see that the reaction of a group to being attacked or feeling attacked is as much emotional as intellectual. We saw this very clearly after September 11 when there was a real shock and feeling of vulnerability, especially in the US. Government officials felt it particularly strongly. "Somebody's after us, we've gotta do something." Chomsky's way of thinking neglects that reaction and appears unsympathetic. It is,I think, part of the reason that he is marginalized in the debate in the US. That sense of outrage, vulnerability, and a desire to do something about it needs to be in the picture.

There is another place I differ from Chomsky. He is very US-centric in his views. If the Chilean government engages in state terrorism and is pushed in that direction by the US, he is very fast to pin all the responsibility on the US. He has little interest in trying to understand the dynamic in Chile that allows them to ignore a long history of constitutional government and to use terrorism. To what extent are they using the US as an excuse to do things that come out of their own political dynamic? Chomsky does not provide a good roadmap to the local dynamics that may lead to state terrorism that the US may be involved in. There is always the question of what is the responsibility locally. So to me it's a bit patronizing towards the local realities.

JS: You're a longtime observer of local politics. To what extent is terrorism local?

JB: I even use that phrase in my book, with a tip of the hat to Tip O'Neil. "All terrorism is local." I get to that place by looking at the general ideas that are often trotted out. "Well, terrorism is about Islam and Christianity." Or "It's these states that don't know how to run their affairs so that they fall into disorder and that breeds terrorism." These sorts of ideas keep getting repeated as if they will explain all terrorism. But if you look at the array of examples from Europe with the Red Brigades in Italy and the ETA in Spain, or in Asia with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, they're all very different. They are all on the edge of real political processes. The solution is to push them back towards politics. There are real social forces at work in such places. How do you move them back to politics rather than violence? You're not going to do it by talking about tensions between Muslims and Christians or Muslims and the west. You have to look at local history, local groups.

JS: You talk a lot about politics. What do you mean?

JB: Politics is people arguing and conflicting and sometimes agreeing within a group about what it should and should not do together. Violence is always around at the edge because some people are always not going to be satisfied with talking and accepting eventual decisions. So there's always a threat or an edge of violence out there. And terrorism, if you look back through history, has always occurred at the edge, especially where politics is controlled and manipulated from above. Sometimes it's been called crime or gangs. If you look at the origins of words like "thug" or "zealot" and "assassin" you find they come out of ancient terrorist episodes. There is always an issue of how to drag these emotions and conflicts back into a place where people will do more by talking and pushing at each other and less picking up weapons.